1994: Money Meets the Browser.

It is hard to convey now how strange the early web felt. Today you can see the price of anything, anywhere, instantly. In 1994, financial information was a privilege. It flowed through gatekeepers. If you were an ordinary investor, you got it late, you got it partial, and you often paid someone to give it to you.

That was the problem that pulled me. In 1994, while I was still a naval officer at Carnegie Mellon, Joel Maske and I co-founded Galt Technologies. Our service was NETworth. The goal was a world where an individual investor could see what a professional could see, at the same moment.

Building the rules as we learned them

I went to New York to visit S&P, which had a quote service called ComStock. I wanted one of its boxes, and I wanted the right to put its data on the internet. “What’s the internet?” they asked. They approved a distribution contract. A month or two after we launched, S&P called to tell us the quotes had to be delayed. We had not known. We wrote more code.

The law was not ready either. Mutual fund companies had to deliver a prospectus to investors, and the SEC did not allow a prospectus to be delivered electronically. Together with Vanguard and Fidelity, our little company went to the SEC for no-action relief. By October 1995, the SEC had issued formal guidance recognizing electronic delivery. It became legal.

Two reactions

When we showed NETworth to people who understood markets, they reacted in one of two ways. Some said serious investors would never trust a browser. Others went quiet, because they saw the implication. Everything built on the scarcity of information was going to change. About a hundred financial institutions came to use NETworth, including Schwab, Vanguard and 20th Century, now American Century. In late 1995 we agreed to sell Galt to Intuit, and NETworth became the core of the Quicken Financial Network.

Rachel Botsman, a trust expert who lectures at Oxford University, puts the pattern simply. Any time we ask someone to do something new, we are asking them to make a trust leap. Money met the browser one trust leap at a time. The same leap is starting again, as AI agents learn to search, negotiate and pay on our behalf.

Lessons for the next shift

1. Go where the field is emptyWhen the tools are crude, the people willing to wrestle with them get there first.
2. Build the rules with the incumbentsGalt went to the SEC alongside Vanguard and Fidelity. A small company can move the rules when it brings the right partners.
3. Watch for the quiet reactionWhen a smart person goes quiet in front of something new, they are reorienting. That moment is worth more than any market research report.
4. Make the trust leap smallEvery new way to handle money starts with fear. Answer each fear seriously, and the leap gets shorter.