Gift cards for restaurants and big-box retailers are a fixture in grocery stores. Avi Lele’s startup, Stockpile, has added the stock market to that spinning rack. Stockpile makes it possible to buy a kid a piece of Disney, Nike, or other publicly traded companies when you stop for milk on your way home. Unlike traditional brokerages, which require a sizable investment to start, Stockpile offers fractional shares and charges 99 cents a trade.
“We’re making it easy for anyone to start building wealth for their future with as little as $5. The earlier you start, the better, to give your investments plenty of time to grow,” Lele says.
Nothing Lele did at MIT foretold a financial startup. “On Black Monday in 1987, I was taking an exam in 6.432, Stochastic Processes,” he recalls. “When I handed in my paper, the professor said, ‘Did you hear the Dow dropped 500 points?’ I shrugged my shoulders. It was irrelevant to me.” Instead, at MIT he sailed, learned to ride a unicycle, played Ultimate Frisbee, and showed one-dollar movies with the Lecture Series Committee.
Lele earned electrical engineering degrees at MIT and then a law degree at Harvard. He was a patent litigator for 16 years. His secret to court success: make technology understandable—and even interesting—to jurors. “We tried cases about everything from cell-phone technology to pharma,” he says. “I used lots of multimedia and animation to explain things, and jurors actually found it entertaining.”
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