According to Inc, 69-year-old serial entrepreneur Bill Harris, the former CEO of Intuit and founding CEO of PayPal for five months, now runs his latest venture, Evergreen Wealth. It’s a self-funded IRA investment advisory that uses an AI-driven advice engine. After PayPal, he spent 15 years in fintech, with seven successful startups and two failures. He lives a starkly simple personal life in a 1,200-square-foot Miami Beach cottage and gets around primarily by bicycle, a setup he says channels all his energy into his business.
The Anti-Lifestyle Hack
Here’s the thing about most “biohacking” or energy tips from founders: they’re complicated and expensive. Bill Harris’s approach is basically the opposite. Live small, own little, and ditch the car. It’s almost embarrassingly simple, which is probably why it works. He’s removed the massive cognitive and financial overhead that comes with managing luxury assets. So all that mental bandwidth? It gets funneled straight into the business. It’s a stark reminder that sometimes the best productivity tool isn’t another app—it’s subtraction.
Evergreen’s AI Ambition
Now, his current project, Evergreen Wealth, is interesting. It’s a self-funded IRA advisory, which means he’s bootstrapping it and likely targeting a specific, perhaps underserved, niche within retirement investing. The key differentiator is the “AI-driven advice engine.” In a crowded fintech space, that’s the hook. But I think the real test will be whether that AI can deliver genuinely personalized, valuable guidance that feels different from the robo-advisors that already exist. Can it justify its place? That’s the billion-dollar question.
The PayPal Takeaway
His biggest lesson from his brief, five-month stint as PayPal’s founding CEO? “Not to be scared of uncertainty.” That’s a powerful bit of reframing. For most people, a short, tumultuous tenure at a famous company might be seen as a failure or a blot on the resume. Harris spun it into a core entrepreneurial principle. It suggests his focus is less on any single outcome and more on the continuous process of building and adapting. And look, after 15 years in the fintech trenches, he’s clearly internalized that. Some ventures work, some don’t. You just keep pedaling forward. Literally, in his case.
