At the Harvard Business School reunion in October 2022, they decided to showcase Rebalance’s Managing Directors and 1982 Harvard Business School Graduates Scott Puritz and Mitch Tuchman. Watch Scott & Mitch as they reminisce about their friendship in this short video “How It Started and How It’s Going”.
At the Harvard Business School reunion in October 2022, they decided to showcase Rebalance’s Managing Directors and 1982 Harvard Business School Graduates Scott Puritz and Mitch Tuchman. Watch Scott & Mitch as they reminisce about their friendship in this short video “How It Started and How It’s Going”. It’s chock full of flashback photos and interviews that illustrate Scott and Mitch’s entrepreneurial passions. Take a quick look, hope you enjoy it!
Transcript
Scott Puritz: We literally met the very first day of business school and became immediate best friends. We had a lot of common interests both our dads around entrepreneurs and both he and I had a really strong passion being immediate best friends. We had a lot of common interests both our dads around entrepreneurs and both he and I had a really strong passion around entrepreneurship. So it was a friendship at first sight.
Mitch Tuchman: We stayed in touch after business school and there wasn’t social media. There wasn’t an email. The aol was just coming out. So but we made it effort together quite a bit mostly because we we really liked each other but also our careers were unique. I can probably named you all of Scott’s wacko ventures as well as mine.
Scott Puritz: The very unique pedagogy. It’s really unique educational experience. And it’s it’s Hands-On. It’s experiential. You can’t just sit back and read a book and and show for the final exam every day. It’s you know, reviewing cases interacting with classmates interacting with this amazing professors. So I think that’s a great way to learn and it’s also a very social way to learn so you get to get to know your classmates, professors really well. It’s really unique I think as an educational institution.
Mitch Tuchman: One of the key elements of maintaining a friendship, over all these years, is really about vulnerability. Life deals you body blows. You get out of HBS full of optimism and excitement, and then you step into the real world. If you’re taking risks, you’re going to get hit. Things are going to fail. Part of the key is having a friend you can tell everything to — the things you might not want to say to other people. You have to be able to say, “Hey, this isn’t going the way I thought it would. Here’s what I’m facing.”
Scott Puritz: We’ve used each other as sounding boards for different business ventures, and that naturally turned into a lot of conversations. Over time, we got to know each other’s spouses and kids. We travel back and forth across the country to see each other. I don’t think we’ve ever gone more than seven or eight months in the last four years without seeing each other in person.
Mitch Tuchman: I remember sitting at our reunion about 15 years ago thinking, “This financial services industry is the most legalized wealth-fleecing machine on the planet. There has to be an entrepreneurial way to get in there and do better for clients.” That’s when I started talking to Scott about some ideas I’d been working on, and that’s how we started Rebalance.
Scott Puritz: I’ve always been drawn to ventures where there are large incumbents who’ve grown fat and comfortable in an industry that needs to be shaken up. We found an industry that was ready to be transformed, and we wanted to be part of that front-end revolution — making it more pro-consumer, dramatically lowering fee structures, and being completely transparent about everything we do. We still share that passion for putting the client first.
