The Dot Connection Revolution: How Seeds Hires for the Future of Work
In an industry notorious for putting advisors at the center of investment conversations, Zach Conway is flipping the script. As CEO and co-founder of Seeds, Conway has built a platform that transforms wealth management from an advisor-centric pitch into a client-centered experience, and he's hiring talent with a very specific superpower in mind.
In a recent conversation with Amit Matani, CEO of Wellfound, Conway shared insights from his journey building Seeds and revealed what he looks for when assembling his team. His approach offers valuable lessons for job seekers, recruiters, and founders navigating today's competitive talent landscape.
Watch the full conversation between Amit Matani and Zach Conway on YouTube here and on Spotify here.
How It All Started
Conway's insight didn't happen in a boardroom. It happened sitting across from frustrated prospective clients who were getting exactly the wrong kind of service.
"I was in that room. I was sitting at the table across from, in particular, next generation investor prospective clients and using kind of the old approach to that investment management story. And it was not really about you, it's about me. And here's how I think about the markets and here are the credentialed people on our team and our years of expertise."
The feedback was brutal:
"That experience just from a customer experience perspective was horrible. You basically just threw information at me for an entire meeting and didn't ask me questions that I kind of thought you'd ask."
This first-hand experience with a broken customer journey became the foundation for Seeds' approach to both product development and team building. Conway discovered a painful truth:
"Investment management is one of the most operationally burdensome things advisors have to do in running their business. And so it's really terrible on both sides of the coin. It's one of the worst parts of the customer experience and it's the most operationally burdensome thing we do."
The Philosophy: "The Future Belongs to Those Who Connect the Dots"
Seeds operates on what Conway calls "dot connection," a concept he credits to his head of strategy, Kelsey McKenna, who borrowed it from Adam Grant:
"Scarcity rewarded knowledge acquisition. Information abundance requires pattern recognition. So basically the future belongs to those who connect the dots."
This philosophy has become the North Star for everything at Seeds, from product development to hiring decisions. Rather than building another tool that simply digitizes existing processes, Seeds created a platform that connects assessment, portfolio construction, and ongoing client communication.
Conway explains the platform's mission:
"We are a platform for human financial advisors, so in the wealth management space. We're technology to help them drive a better experience around investment management to their customers."
The platform helps advisors understand what's most important to clients when investing—their values, goals, risk tolerance, and specific interests—then creates portfolios based on those insights.
For Job Seekers: Focus on Your Story, Not Just Skills
Conway's hiring philosophy reveals a crucial insight: technical competence is just table stakes. What really matters is your ability to see the bigger picture and communicate your journey effectively.
Conway emphasizes the power of narrative over credentials:
"I think storytelling is such a great framework. When people focus on sort of walking through the skills and just kind of the bulleted items of their skill set and their expertise versus framing it in a narrative way of sort of their career arc and their journey and what they've learned and how they've evolved and where they are now... [that narrative approach] is always more compelling than the sort of rigid box checking exercise."
For engineers, especially, Conway notes that resumes often become a checklist of technical skills without context. Instead, he's looking for candidates who can explain their "why":
"Tell me your story. Like, why are you here across the screen talking to me, trying to come work at Seeds? And how did your experience across time and these different companies inform that is always helpful for me to really see who they are as a person, how they would fit culturally, and better, really better understand what they've done and how they've done it."
The key insight: Don't just list what you've done. Explain why you did it, what you learned, and how it led you to this moment.
For Recruiters: Look for Curiosity, Not Just Competence
Conway's approach to evaluating candidates goes deeper than skills matching. He's screening for a specific mindset that aligns with his core belief: "The future belongs to those who connect the dots."
"Do they actually seek context? And are they good? ...it's an Adam Grant quote, if the future belongs to those who can connect the dots, their skillset is great, right? But it's table stakes. I need to know that [not only] you can do the function of the job. But are you somebody that can seek information, receive information, and tie the information together in a way that moves the business forward?"
In interviews, Conway looks for candidates who ask questions about different parts of the business, even at a surface level:
"If you're not asking me questions about a different part of the business, even at surface level, to understand the product, to understand the customer, that to me is a red flag."
This screening continues throughout the interview process, with each team member evaluating whether candidates demonstrate the curiosity and ability to connect dots across the organization.
Conway acknowledges the challenge:
"It's tough, you know, in fairness to engineers, they're going to, [and] should be putting in their resume, how they've been able to execute upon whatever sort of specific requirements."
The key is looking for evidence of leadership, collaboration, and thinking beyond their immediate role—qualities that primarily emerge through conversation rather than resume scanning.
The Engineering Work: Building Connected Systems
For technical candidates, Seeds offers the opportunity to work on complex, interconnected systems. Engineers aren't just building isolated features. They're creating a system where front-end assessment tools connect to portfolio construction logic, which connects to trading infrastructure, which feeds back into client-facing storytelling tools.
Conway explains how this philosophy shapes their work culture:
"The dot connection stuff is not just sort of the product thesis, it's the how we work thesis."
This interconnected approach means engineers need to understand not just their code, but how their work impacts the entire customer experience and business model. As Conway puts it, they're looking for people who can see how front-end changes affect trading infrastructure, which then feeds back into the customer-facing experience.
Building Culture Remotely
Seeds operates as a remote-first company, which Conway acknowledges creates unique challenges for maintaining the dot-connection culture he values. The solution? Intentional communication architecture that keeps everyone aligned.
Conway's approach is straightforward: bring together people who might not normally be in the same meetings. When he's gathering sales or customer feedback, he makes sure that information flows all the way through to the engineering team on a weekly basis, not just at quarterly all-hands meetings.
This approach reflects Conway's belief that good culture isn't about having "more pizza parties" but rather ensuring everyone is "on the same page about what we're building toward with the same amount of information."
The Founder's Background
Conway's credibility with both customers and potential employees stems from having lived the problem Seeds solves. As a former financial advisor, he experienced firsthand the frustrations his platform now addresses.
"I think what really resonates is that we're building a platform that I know well because I lived the pain point. Being a founder that actually is trying to build something for myself as a consumer resonates with candidates, it resonates with users of the platform."
This authentic understanding differentiates Seeds from typical tech founders who parachute into legacy industries without really understanding them. Conway didn't just identify a problem from the outside - he lived it every day.
"Polite Disruption"
One of Seeds' core values is "polite disruption," an approach that acknowledges the need for change while respecting existing expertise.
"A lot of times you see tech come up and it's gonna go disrupt an industry and it's very much a narrative of you've done it wrong and here we are to come solve the problem. But in a legacy industry like this one, it's an interesting dynamic where it's both a very sort of legacy in some ways old school industry, but also with the biggest opportunity from a business model standpoint."
Rather than telling advisors they've been doing everything wrong, Seeds positions itself as a tool to help them tell better stories and deliver more personalized experiences.
Lessons for Founders: Hiring Is Hard
As Seeds grows, Conway faces the challenge many founders encounter: maintaining culture and hiring standards while scaling rapidly. His honest assessment? Hiring is harder than you think.
Conway's honest assessment:
"The process is messy and imperfect because people are people. Like everything else, building a product, running the business in general, and hiring, it's iterative. We've only gotten better at it."
His advice centers on constantly refining job descriptions, screening processes, and interview stages while maintaining focus on the core qualities that drive success.
The Scaling Challenge
Conway is at what he calls "an exciting inflection point of growth," where the biggest challenge is getting the fundamentals right before rapid expansion:
"You can have a great idea, great product concept, even be a first mover. But if you don't get the right talent and you don't structure the talent the right way and maintain the right culture, none of it matters."
This includes not just product development, but organizational structure, hiring processes, and maintaining the culture of context-seeking and dot-connection.
Key Takeaways
Conway's approach to building Seeds offers lessons for today's talent market:
For job seekers:
- Frame your experience as a compelling narrative rather than just listing skills. Explain your career journey and how it led you to this specific opportunity.
- In interviews, ask questions about different parts of the business to demonstrate curiosity and context-seeking abilities.
For recruiters:
- Look beyond technical skills to find candidates who actively seek context and can connect dots across different areas of the business.
- The best candidates will ask thoughtful questions about the company, product, and customers during the interview process.
For founders:
- Build solutions from firsthand experience with the pain points you're solving. This provides credibility with both customers and potential employees.
- Focus on "polite disruption" in legacy industries—acknowledging existing expertise while introducing better approaches.
Seeds represents a new generation of fintech companies that prioritize human relationships while leveraging technology to create better experiences. For Conway, success isn't just about building great software. It's about assembling a team that can think holistically about problems and connect dots across the entire business ecosystem.
As the wealth management industry continues to evolve, companies like Seeds that can balance technological innovation with human insight will likely define the future of financial advice. Conway's hiring philosophy offers a blueprint for identifying and developing cross-functional thinking that will be essential in an increasingly connected business world.