Harvard Dropout Steven Wang Runs $2B Copy-Trading Platform Dub

Steven Wang's copy-trading platform Dub has powered $2 billion in trades — and its founder built it after dropping out of Harvard, with a Series A of more than $30 million behind him.

Wang, founder and CEO of Dub, laid out the numbers himself. Dub lets everyday investors follow verified Wall Street professionals and wealth managers and automatically mirror their strategies. "We did our Series A last year, more than $30 million," Wang said. "As we've grown, the money's been more a function of validation of the business and less that original vision and pitch, because we're just a much larger and scaled company now."

Wang's résumé reads like an accelerated founder timeline. He left high school to build, fund and sell a virtual reality startup called Realism. At 18, Apple hired him as an engineering product manager — the youngest person on his team, he says. He started at Harvard in the fall of 2020, then dropped out to work on Dub full-time in New York City, five years ago.

How does the platform actually work?

Wang compares Dub to eBay or Airbnb. Anyone can open an account, publish a portfolio — a basket of stocks they trade in and out — and any user can copy it. "Whenever that portfolio trades, it automatically mirrors those trades in any customer account," he explained. Dub now hosts 400 to 500 of these published portfolios, with a $10,000 minimum the creator must invest in their own portfolio to launch one.

The platform also maintains 20 premium creators, a tier with a high bar:

• an extended track record and minimum time on platform
• demonstrated performance that beats the market
• a series of interviews with Dub's investments team, "so that we know they are real investors worth following and also not just lucky"

Only premium creators earn a cut — they can charge a percentage-of-assets management fee, similar to ETFs or mutual funds. Dub makes money two ways: a $89.99-per-year subscription and a share of those premium management fees.

The regulatory path was the hard part. "It took about two and a half years to build Dub into a product people could use," Wang said. As a brokerage, Dub needed FINRA and SEC approval, and no one had done copy trading at this scale in the U.S. before. "That gave us a moat because we're the first ones to do something that no one had really tried before."

Why did a Harvard dropout build a brokerage?

Wang's origin story starts early. His parents immigrated from China, money was tight, and he sold Pokémon cards on the playground. He read early books by Ben Graham and Warren Buffett, then asked his parents for a custodial trading account — in second grade. They loaned him $200. He lost a lot of it, paying $7 per trade in the pre-Robinhood era, but kept investing.

At Harvard, pandemic-era Zoom classes collided with frothy markets: crypto, SPACs, the GameStop squeeze. "People believed in one guy with a random username so much that they really changed the financial industry as we knew it," Wang said. That inspired the core question behind Dub: how do you make it simple to follow someone's investments automatically?

Fundraising came easier than it does for most first-time founders. Backers from his first company backed Dub without knowing the details, and Dub attracted investors Wang says he idolized — the CEOs and founders of Uber, Airbnb, Robinhood and Kalshi, who remain his closest mentors.

What does the AI assistant Arlo change?

Dub just launched Arlo, one of the industry's first AI investing assistants, using algorithms to mirror how financial advisors make decisions. Wang frames it as a democratization moment. Hiring an advisor at Goldman Sachs typically requires millions in net worth, he notes. With AI, "probably 90% to 95% of the advice that you get from a real-life investment advisor can now be provided by AI."

The build took about a year and is harder than it looks, Wang said: accurate, regulated advice, no hallucination, correct math, and consistent responses every time. Arlo automatically builds users a portfolio — which five creators to copy and what percentage to allocate to each, matched to the user's risk tolerance.

Wang's bet: five to ten years from now, anyone with a phone will manage money far better and stop investing blind — and Arlo is how Dub plans to be the one holding that door open.