During the go-go bust of the early 1970s, the Wellington Fund's assets collapsed from $2 billion at the time of the Ivest merger down to $483 million — a loss of over three-quarters of assets.
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At 48:29 · chapter starts 46:04
Determined to compete with Fidelity's go-go style, Bogle set about finding a partner to transform Wellington. Unable to hire star managers as employees, he found a small Boston firm of four young partners — Thorndike, Doran, Payne, and Lewis — who had worked with Jerry Tsai and raised a go-go fund called Ivest. Despite Wellington's $2 billion in AUM dwarfing Ivest's $17 million, Bogle offered the four partners 40% of Wellington Management Company — described at the time as a stunning price. Institutional Investor ran a cover story titled 'The Whiz Kids Take Over at Wellington.' Then the go-go era collapsed. The oil crises of 1972–74, stagflation, and a 50% market decline destroyed everything. The Ivest fund cratered 65% in a single year and was shut down entirely. Wellington Fund assets plummeted from $2 billion to $483 million — over three-quarters of assets gone. With four new partners drawing on 40% of the management company's collapsing revenues, the crisis was existential. Bogle began to question aloud whether it was ethical to continue charging fees from clients while incinerating their capital. This was, as the hosts put it, his 'Jerry Maguire moment.'
In 1974, as Wellington's assets collapsed and clients fled, Bogle gave a speech proposing the unthinkable: dissolve the management company, mutualize the funds, eliminate all fees above cost, and hand the profits back to investors. Nobody had asked for this. No regulator required it. It existed solely in Jack's head — and it got him fired.
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More than 1 million people have visited SiteGPT's website since launch in March 2023, all through organic channels.
Approximately 90% of SiteGPT's Google search traffic comes from the free tools Bhanu built, not the main product pages.
Bhanu sold his first SaaS product, Feather, for $250,000 so he could focus fully on the faster-growing SiteGPT.
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Despite strong download numbers, PropGPT could not push past $1,000–$2,000 MRR due to poor product retention.
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