Cloud computing as a product culture with Human Interest
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What
Human Interest is a San Francisco-based 401(k) provider looking to address the retirement crisis. It lets SMBs offer retirement benefits to their employees, especially through a 401(k) product that is technology-first and cheaper than that of traditional competitors. Founded in 2015, Human Interest has raised more than $330 million in funding, including a $200 million Series D in 2021, with investment from SoftBank, Uncork Capital, Susa Ventures, and others.
Why
According to Abhi Mishra, CTO at Human Interest, part of Human Interest’s work is to ensure that retirement benefits don’t distract SMBs from their core work, especially since these businesses are often overburdened to begin with.
“We want to build something that is high trust, easy to navigate, and not frustrating,” he said. “If it's frustrating, I think businesses, small businesses in particular, will shy away from it because they're already busy, and they're already strapped for time and resources.”
Mishra said Human Interest has chosen the building blocks for its product that will best help it scale. “We almost have no choice, because the problem we're going after and its scale is huge,” he said. “It's solving a problem for tens of millions, potentially even over 100 million Americans.”
How
Human Interest uses AWS for its cloud-computing needs. Mishra, who previously worked at AWS, said the company presents a unique set of benefits over other cloud-computing services, in part because of its innovative culture. Human Interest is also interested in building out its product strategy the way AWS would, Mishra said, solving for scalability, reliability, and price competitiveness.
“Whether it's scalability, reliability, security, or monitoring, alerting, or whatever other aspects of building large scale systems, there's a lot to learn from [AWS blogs and white papers],” he said. “Crucially, because we're using AWS ourselves, a lot of those learnings are very easy to import.”
Just as Human Interest builds its product so that clients can focus on their core work, AWS lets Human Interest dedicate engineering resources to its proprietary code and solutions. “We do build a lot of software in-house—a substantial portion of what the 401(k) product ultimately is,” Mishra said. “In-house technologies do everything from investments to record keeping.”
Human Interest also builds out product experience with its target SMB audience in mind. Mishra named UI and workflows as key to Human Interest’s competitive advantage over other 401(k) providers. The company has its own design language, as well as internal libraries for all the design components that make up its interface. “That allows us to provide a product that is consistent in the eyes of the customer and easy to make sense of,” Mishra said.
Consistent, modern interfaces and understandable workflows connote trust, Mishra added, though those components also need stringent security practices undergirding them. Ease of use then lets SMB clients approach Human Interest with a “fire and forget” mentality, focusing their time and resources on their own unique missions.
“There's some balance point where investing to a certain degree of polish actually has a high ROI,” Mishra said. “By collaborating well and having a good internal company culture, you can find that balance.”
