# S01E07 · Izel Ersoy — CPO & Co-Founder of WealthAi <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB9wfsOGtLg" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img class="uv-poster" src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/fB9wfsOGtLg/maxresdefault.jpg" alt="Izel Ersoy on The Useful Podcast Episode 7" loading="lazy" /></a> Izel "Izzy" Ersoy is the Chief Product Officer and co-founder of [WealthAi](https://wealthai.tech), an AI operating system for wealth managers, family offices, and private banks — an industry that largely skipped the SaaS era and jumped straight from spreadsheets to AI. A trained musician and musical-theater kid with over four million streams, she taught herself UX/UI design, found her way into startups through Reddit growth marketing, and now runs product and sales for one of the fastest-moving companies in wealthtech. In this founder-to-founder conversation, Gokul and Izzy get into her rule for choosing problems — always go after the least attractive one in the room, because that's where the competition isn't — how she cracked wealth management's compliance bottleneck by teaching instead of selling, how that education turned into a community and the community turned into customers, her mental model for treating a new AI agent like an intern fresh out of college, and why she still makes music and has strong opinions about Suno and the "creative war" with AI. ## Listen <ul class="uv-linkrow"> <li><span class="uv-label">Watch</span><a class="uv-ico uv-yt" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB9wfsOGtLg" target="_blank" rel="noopener">YouTube</a></li> <li><span class="uv-label">Show</span><a class="uv-ico uv-sp" href="https://open.spotify.com/show/033DRed1adLXd1bg8honOl" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Useful Podcast on Spotify</a> · <a class="uv-ico uv-x" href="https://x.com/theusefulpod" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@theusefulpod on X</a></li> </ul> <a class="uv-btn" href="https://useful.ventures/podcast/izel-ersoy-wealthai/transcript">Read the full transcript</a> ## Key facts <ul class="uv-facts"> <li><span class="uv-k">Episode</span>The Useful Podcast, Season 1, Episode 7</li> <li><span class="uv-k">Guest</span>Izel "Izzy" Ersoy, Chief Product Officer and co-founder of WealthAi</li> <li><span class="uv-k">Host</span>Gokul Bala, co-founder of Useful Ventures</li> <li><span class="uv-k">Company</span><a href="https://wealthai.tech" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WealthAi</a>, an AI operating system for wealth managers, family offices, and private banks</li> <li><span class="uv-k">Topics</span>Choosing unglamorous problems, selling through education, compliance in AI, agents as interns, music and AI-generated songs</li> <li><span class="uv-k">Length</span>About 54 minutes · Published August 2026</li> </ul> ## Guest <ul class="uv-linkrow"> <li><span class="uv-label">Izzy</span><a class="uv-ico uv-li" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/izel-ersoy-641514131/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">LinkedIn</a> · <a class="uv-ico uv-ig" href="https://www.instagram.com/izel.ersoy/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Instagram (@izel.ersoy)</a></li> <li><span class="uv-label">WealthAi</span><a class="uv-ico uv-play" href="https://wealthai.tech" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wealthai.tech</a></li> <li><span class="uv-label">Host</span><a class="uv-ico uv-x" href="https://x.com/GokulsVision" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Gokul Bala on X (@GokulsVision)</a> · <a class="uv-ico uv-ig" href="https://www.instagram.com/gokuls.vision/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Instagram (@gokuls.vision)</a></li> </ul> ## Key insights **Chase the least attractive problem in the room.** Izzy's rule for picking what to build: go after the boring problem, because that's where competition is thinnest. She and her co-founders went straight at compliance in wealth management after their first fifteen customer calls turned up a compliance officer with real budget and no tooling to speak of. **Education beats a pitch when the buyer doesn't understand the category.** Wealth management largely skipped SaaS and jumped straight to AI, so the real blocker wasn't price or features — compliance officers simply didn't understand what AI could safely do. Izzy's team started running "client launch group" events with no sales pitch, just education, and that turned into a community, then word-of-mouth, then customers who now treat WealthAi as their knowledge partner. **Treat your first agent like an intern, not software.** Izzy's mental model for agent adoption: think of a new AI agent as an intern straight out of college. You train it and turn it into your employee, rather than expecting it to already know your business — an analogy she now uses to explain AI to an industry that had almost no exposure to it. **A decade of writing Reddit posts taught her to write from the user's pain, not the pitch.** Early in her career, growing businesses through Reddit content during a period when Google was boosting Reddit posts in search, Izzy learned she had to write as the user, not the business — a discipline that trained her to spot real pain points across dozens of industries and shaped how she builds product today. **Ten to fifteen phone calls before building anything.** Izzy's product process, copied into every new venture: call fifteen potential users, ask what's blocking them from scaling, and look for the pattern in their answers. If there's a real problem and people have the money to solve it, that's the signal to go all in. **The industry is being reshaped from the bottom up, not the top down.** Izzy expects AI to replace the more technical, data-aggregation-heavy roles in wealth management first, while relationship-driven work — the advisor a high-net-worth client wants to be "wined and dined" by — stays human, alongside a broader shift toward smaller, single-family offices managing wealth privately outside traditional banks. ## About WealthAi [WealthAi](https://wealthai.tech) is an AI operating system built for wealth managers, family offices, private banks, and asset managers. It combines the point solutions and integrations these firms already use — banking data, client CRM, KYC, note-taking — into a single platform with an AI assistant that can answer questions across the full client lifecycle, from first discovery call to onboarding. WealthAi was founded by Jason Nabi, with Izel "Izzy" Ersoy as Chief Product Officer and co-founder, and is based in the UK. Learn more at [wealthai.tech](https://wealthai.tech). ## FAQ <div class="uv-faq"> ### Who is Izel "Izzy" Ersoy? Izel Ersoy, known as Izzy, is the Chief Product Officer and co-founder of WealthAi. She trained in music and musical theater as a kid, studied marketing and communications, taught herself UX/UI design, and worked in growth marketing before moving into product at wealthtech startups. She is also a recording musician with more than four million streams. She is based between London and Munich. ### What is WealthAi? WealthAi is an AI operating system for wealth managers, family offices, private banks, and asset managers. It aggregates the many point solutions these firms rely on — CRM, banking data, KYC, note-taking — into a single platform with a chat-based AI assistant that can answer questions about a client or a firm's business using data connected from across the tech stack. ### Why does WealthAi focus on compliance officers? Izzy says compliance was the most unattractive, least competitive problem she found when calling early prospective customers — and compliance teams have real budget because they're the ones most exposed if sensitive client data leaks into a public AI tool or a firm falls behind regulators who are themselves adopting AI to catch fraud and money laundering faster than firms can catch their own mistakes. ### How did WealthAi get its first customers without a traditional sales process? Instead of pitching, Izzy's team ran in-person "client launch group" events that simply educated compliance officers and wealth managers about what AI could and couldn't safely do. That education built a community and natural word-of-mouth, which turned into a sales pipeline built on trust rather than a cold sales motion. ### How does Izel Ersoy think about AI agents? She describes a new AI agent as an intern fresh out of college: you have to train it and turn it into an employee rather than expect it to perform like one from day one. She uses this analogy specifically to explain AI adoption to compliance officers and wealth managers who have little prior exposure to the technology. ### What is The Useful Podcast? The Useful Podcast is a series of founder-to-founder conversations from Useful Ventures, hosted by Gokul Bala. Each episode digs past the highlight reel into the actual work of building a company. This is Season 1, Episode 7. </div> ## Related * [[podcast]] is the full Useful Podcast index. * [[manifesto]] is how we see the world and how we work. * [[notes]] is where we write about the world we see coming. * [WealthAi](https://wealthai.tech) · [The Useful Podcast on Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/033DRed1adLXd1bg8honOl) · [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@TheUsefulPodcast) · [@theusefulpod on X](https://x.com/theusefulpod) Back to [[podcast]].