Steven Wang’s Dub Says It Has Powered $1.6 Billion in Trades

Wang’s interest in investing began in childhood. His parents, who immigrated to the United States from China, lent him $200 for a custodial trading account when he was in second grade. He says he lost money early on, when trades cost $7, but was drawn to the idea of owning part of a company.

He later started a virtual-reality company during high school, sold it, and joined Apple as an engineering product manager at 18. Wang began at Harvard in fall 2020, as the pandemic shifted classes online and financial markets surged. He says the trading culture of 2021, shaped by social media and the GameStop episode, prompted him to build a service for following other investors. He left Harvard, moved to New York City and spent about two and a half years building Dub into a usable product.

Dub users can publish portfolios for others to copy, with trades mirrored automatically in followers’ accounts. Wang says 400 to 500 creators have launched portfolios, each requiring at least $10,000 of the creator’s own investment. The platform also has 20 premium creators, who must meet performance and experience standards and pass interviews with Dub’s investment team. They can charge management fees; Dub earns revenue from those fees and an $89.99 annual subscription.

Wang says Dub completed a Series A round of more than $30 million last year. He also says the company’s brokerage took time to build because it needed regulatory approvals from FINRA and the SEC. Arlo, launched recently, is designed to use algorithms to make investment decisions and build portfolios based on users’ preferences and risk tolerance. Wang says the system must deliver accurate, regulated advice consistently, and cautions that developing it is more complex than building a chatbot.