In Invested, Charles Schwab, founder of The Charles Schwab Corporation, recounts the obstacles he encountered starting his fledgling company in the 1970s, its astonishing growth, and the ups and downs it weathered as he made stock investing, once the expensive and clubby reserve of the few, accessible to ordinary Americans.
A deeply personal memoir, Schwab describes his passion to have Main Street participate in the growing economy, as investors and owners, not only earners. Schwab opens up about his dyslexia, how he worked around and ultimately embraced it, and the challenges he faced when, a year into his grand experiment in discounted stock trading, living in a small apartment in Sausalito with his wife Helen and new baby, he carried a six-figure debt and pocketsful of personal loans. As it turned out, customers flocked to Schwab, his small team scrambling with scarce resources and no roadmap to manage the company’s growth. He recounts Schwab’s game-changing sale to Bank of America – and how, in the end, the merger almost doomed his organization. We learn about the clever and timely leveraged buyout he crafted to regain independence; the crushing stock market collapse of 1987 just weeks after the company had gone public; the dot-com meltdown of 2000 and its reverberating aftermath of economic stagnation, layoffs and the company’s eventual reinvention; and how the company’s focus on managing risk protected it and its clients during the financial crisis in 2008, propelling its growth.
A remarkable story of a company succeeding by challenging norms and conventions through decades of change, Invested also offers unique insights and lifelong principles Schwab for readers – the values that he has lived and worked by and have made him one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time. Today, his eponymous company is one of the leading financial services firms in the world, with over 3 trillion dollars in client assets.
