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# A 26-Year-Old Budget Commissioner Argued the City Needed More Founders, and Now He Is One
- URL: https://www.raincrossgazette.com/a-26-year-old-budget-commissioner-argued-the-city-needed-more-founders-now-he-is-one/
- Published: 2026-10-20T00:15:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-20T00:14:59.000Z
- Description: It started with a spreadsheet Miles Ward wouldn't use. Eighteen months later, he and Blake Skrable have the startup he asked for.
- Author: Justin Pardee
- Tags: business, small-business, #herald-3c6ef165-d2ee-8041-a338-feb5bb4abd68

On an afternoon in late August, Miles Ward sat at the bar at Arcade Downtown across from City Hall with a draft latte and his laptop, working on the investing app he and a friend have been building.

In May 2024, more than a year before any of that code existed, this paper published a letter from Ward arguing that Riverside needed to foster a startup culture of its own.

It started with a spreadsheet he opened exactly once.

The spreadsheet came from Blake Skrable, a friend he'd known since high school, with formulas for a stock's intrinsic value, profitability metrics and the figures an investor watches. Skrable had built it himself over several years. He sent it in early 2023.

"I thought it was just overly complicated," Ward said. "It had just a bunch of information."

Ward, who is 26, had reason to want it. He'd finished a marketing degree at Riverside's California Baptist University that December, after an internship in Washington, D.C., and two stints in the mayor's office. He had just started as a consulting analyst at a national firm, his first job with a salary and a 401(k) attached to it. He had been buying individual stocks on Robinhood. "I didn't really know what I was doing," he said.

So he asked Skrable to teach him. Skrable explained his process: no news, no market commentary, nothing but 10-K filings and earnings calls. He estimated he spent 15 to 20 hours a week on it.

"I can't do this. I don't want to do this," Ward said. "I don't want to look at 10-Ks. I don't want to look at earnings calls."

Asked whether he ever actually tried the spreadsheet, Ward said: "I want to say that I tried, but knowing myself, I probably didn't." His condition for using anything: "If it's not something automated right away, like an app, like a budgeting app, then I'm not going to try to finagle with it."

Three years later, that refusal is a company.

## "A microcosm of life"

The friendship ran through an Xbox party chat.

Over months the party grew. They rarely played the same games, but they talked constantly, through high school and college and into their working lives.

"It's a microcosm of life," Ward said.

When the group hit their twenties and started earning, the conversation followed. One friend went all-in on Tesla and bought the car to match. Another bought Berkshire Hathaway. And Skrable, who everyone knew as the frugal one, kept saying the same thing: invest for the long term, and don't put every egg in one basket.

"I just want someone to tell me what to do," Ward said. "I just want you to tell me exactly what to invest in and when to invest in it."

What Ward didn't know was that the spreadsheet wasn't working for its author either.

Skrable opened a brokerage account in April 2020, pulled in by a Robinhood free-share promotion. He put in about $1,000\. His first two buys were five shares of Microsoft and seven shares of Norwegian Cruise Line.

He also started a photo album on his phone, screenshotting his portfolio from the first week, figuring he'd want the record. He still has it.

Answering questions in writing, Skrable was blunt about what he'd done. "I bought the first thing I saw, rather than do the research and understand what I was buying," he said. "Going in blind was a great lesson, because I learned the hard way what happens when you don't understand your assets."

His verdict: "This was the worst possible decision at the time, but in hindsight, actually the best decision I could have made." He ran up about 35% in the first months. Then he lost all of it and more. By January 2021 he was up roughly 45%. Then a long slide — down about 10% while the market, by his accounting, rallied another 25% through the end of that year, bottoming at about 20% below where he started by late 2022\. Over the same stretch, he counts the market up about 35%.

He had been trading options, swing trading, and, by his own diagnosis, buying on price rather than fundamentals.

He read his way out of it, largely on Warren Buffett and the Canadian investor François Rochon of Giverny Capital, and built the manual system he later sent to Ward: an Excel file and the notes app on his iPhone, holding his research and reasoning for every position.

It worked better than what came before. It still didn't hold.

"Ideas were scattered, my thoughts lacked structure, and conviction was weaker," Skrable wrote. He still decided in the moment, with no framework governing what he bought and when.

Two people, opposite ends of the experience curve, both defeated by the same spreadsheet.

Skrable, who holds a master's in molecular biology from UC San Diego and has spent five years in genomics and molecular diagnostics, was headed for a career in the lab.

![Miles Ward and Blake Skrable smiling while leaning against a wall beside tiled outdoor stairs](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b3/b2/b3b29e3b-298e-485f-86ca-3034c21e3784/content/images/2026/10/a-26-year-old-budget-commissioner-argued-the-city-needed.jpg)

Vassant co-founders Miles Ward, left, and Blake Skrable. The two met in high school and built the app after hours while working full-time jobs. |Courtesy Vassant

## "Too much of an uplift"

The company they first designed is not the company that exists.

The original Vassant was a recommendation engine. It would track the gap between a stock's intrinsic value and its market price, and alert users when a company's shares dropped on news that didn't change the underlying business fundamentals. It was Skrable's philosophy, automated: don't panic sell, because the intrinsic value outlasts the shock.

Researching the market, they found a Dutch startup doing something close to it. They messaged the company on Instagram and talked at length with one of its co-founders.

The idea ran into a regulatory wall. Telling users which stocks to buy and when is financial advice, which puts a company under the reach of the Securities and Exchange Commission or state securities regulators. "There's too much of an uplift in that way," Ward said.

So they rebuilt it as the opposite kind of product — one that refuses to tell you what to do.

In practice it works something like a research notebook with rules. A user researching a company opens what Vassant calls the Vault and builds pages inside it — a section page for what the business does and how it makes money, a checklist page scoring the company against whatever criteria they choose, a blank page for their own conclusion. The whole thing resolves into a conviction score out of 10, a target allocation for the position, and a purchase price. When the stock reaches that price, the app says so.

The rest of the platform supports that loop. A budgeting feature identifies what the company calls investable cash flow — what's left after expenses. A Discover section runs educational modules, profiles of real public companies and a guide to account types and tax treatment. A Plaid integration pulls in existing portfolios so users don't enter positions by hand; the company says the app never receives users' raw bank credentials.

The name is a chess move of Ward's: the V for value, the rest from en passant, the capture a pawn can make in passing.

They left things out on purpose. No news feed. No stock charts. No earnings announcements or company updates.

Skrable's reasoning is about the era. Company filings are a click away, macroeconomic news travels instantly, and a portfolio can be checked in three taps. He argues that has made investors trade more often and more emotionally, at a cost to their returns.

## Vassant

Investing research app for individual long-term investors

**Launched:** October 2026: [App Store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vassant-investment-strategy/id6761031368?ref=raincrossgazette.com) and [Google Play](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vassant.app&hl=en%5FUS&ref=raincrossgazette.com)

**Cost:** Free to download

## "Everyone's a genius"

Over the 30 years ending in December 2021, the average person invested in stock mutual funds earned about 7% a year. The S&P 500 returned about 10.7%, according to an [annual study](https://www.investmentexecutive.com/news/markets/investment-return-gap-widened-for-equity-investors-in-2021/?ref=raincrossgazette.com) by the research firm Dalbar. Compounded over three decades, that gap is the difference between turning $100,000 into roughly $790,000 and turning it into about $2.1 million. The finding is not new. A [2000 study](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0022-1082.00226?ref=raincrossgazette.com) of 66,465 households at a discount brokerage between 1991 and 1996 found the most active traders earned 11.4% annually while the market returned 17.9%.

The underlying idea is not theirs alone. A small cluster of tools has appeared in the past few years built on the same premise — that an investor should write down why they hold something and be able to check that reasoning later. What distinguishes Vassant, by the founders' account, is the combination: the research vault, the budgeting layer, and the educational material in one place, aimed at someone who isn't going to spend 20 hours a week on it.

Skrable's argument for the friction is that borrowed ideas come with borrowed conviction: take a tip without doing the work, and you have nothing to hold onto when the price drops.

Skrable is careful about how far he'll push that. Asked about his own turnaround since 2023, he listed the caveats: that long-term outperformance takes five to 10 years to prove out, that his portfolio isn't composed like the index he's measuring against, and that "it is easy to say that you've outperformed in a bull market, where everyone's a genius."

## "For a layman like myself"

Vassant ran a closed beta from May to late June of this year. One of the people in it was Payton Jensen, a 26-year-old who works in biotech in Carlsbad and who met Skrable during their second year at UC San Diego and has been a close friend since.

Jensen had been investing casually since he was about 19, cycling through Robinhood, Public and Fidelity.

"I found myself overwhelmed and paralyzed with all of the information out there," he wrote, "so I ended up relying on buying index funds because it was easy."

In the beta, Jensen worked mostly through the learning modules, then applied them to Grail, a biotech company he'd heard about through work. He used the notes function to write down his reasoning and set a price at which he'd buy.

Asked the question that matters — whether it changed a decision, not whether he enjoyed it — he said it did. It helped him decide what to buy and when, and "funnel the noise out of the typical news cycle," he wrote. "I feel like I've regained agency in my investment decisions."

His complaints were mostly beta complaints: cosmetic bugs, tabs that didn't open right, typos in the learning material. The substantive one was that the founders had left logic gaps "for a layman like myself," which he told Skrable, who he says wrote it down immediately.

Ward has put roughly $4,000 of his own money into Vassant and gives it 10 to 15 hours a week on top of a full-time consulting job. Skrable has put in several thousand of his own and gives it about 15 hours a week on top of his. Neither draws anything from it. A developer and two designers round out the team.

Skrable describes the schedule: the two of them up past midnight on many weeknights and late on weekends, going over strategy, posts and what ships next.

They began talking about the idea in 2023, committed to building it in early 2025, wrote the first code that spring, ran the beta, and released the app publicly on Oct. 14, on the [App Store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vassant-investment-strategy/id6761031368?ref=raincrossgazette.com) and [Google Play](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vassant.app&hl=en%5FUS&ref=raincrossgazette.com). It is free to download. The company operates from a Jefferson Street address in Riverside. It is not a registered investment adviser or broker-dealer, does not execute trades, and does not move money — facts it states in its own terms of service. The company also says it earns nothing when users trade more. Everything in the app is framed as reference rather than advice.

## "A unique startup culture"

The letter ran May 7, 2024 — two weeks after the City Council seated him on the Budget Engagement Commission — under the headline ["Rethinking Riverside's Economic Development."](https://www.raincrossgazette.com/rethinking-riversides-economic-development/)

It was a data argument. He compared Riverside against Anaheim, Irvine, Rancho Cucamonga, Redlands and Temecula on income and educational attainment, and landed on the comparison he still uses: technology accounted for 4.3% of Riverside's economy, against 16.6% in Irvine, citing federal data. He praised ExCITE Riverside, the UC Riverside-affiliated incubator, noting it had [supported more than 30 startups and created over 180 high-paying jobs](https://riversideca.gov/press/startups-flourish-excite-riverside-incubator%E2%80%99s-bigger-better-home?ref=raincrossgazette.com) in the region since 2015.

The full sentence: "We must also be hyper-strategic in how we approach economic development, from the businesses (small or large) we target to fostering a unique startup culture."

[Transportation and warehousing employment](https://www.raincrossgazette.com/no-more-warehouses-ward-2-4-and-6-candidates-debate-riversides-economic-path/) in Riverside County fell by roughly 6,439 jobs, or 8.3%, between the first quarter of 2022 and the second quarter of 2024, the most recent period the county has analyzed, according to state employment data cited by the county's economic development agency. The decline has continued: the Inland Empire, which pairs Riverside County with San Bernardino, shed 9,300 transportation and warehousing jobs in January 2026 alone, according to the [state Employment Development Department](https://labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/geography/riverside-county.html?ref=raincrossgazette.com).

He works remotely for a Fortune 500 consulting firm whose nearest office is in Los Angeles, and no firm of that kind keeps an office in Riverside.

"You look around Riverside and you don't see the Googles of the world," he said. "You don't see Deloitte or McKinsey. I can go on and on. You don't see these corporate offices that line the skyline of some of these other cities."

In a message after the interview, he laid out his usual case, and it turns on Irvine — a city he is careful to say he does not want Riverside to become. "No offense to Irvine," he wrote, "I don't think that city has the kind of charm and character Riverside has." What Irvine has instead, he argues, is a similarly sized population with no sports team or major attraction, and an industry base deep enough to carry everything else: tech firms, corporate offices, banks, law firms, startups.

The part that matters to him is what grows in their shadow. Restaurants, shops and entertainment venues get a financial floor under them when high-wage employers cluster nearby. And when those businesses are solid, he wrote, "the quality of life improves for everyone." Third spaces get more robust, he added, neighborhoods more walkable, food options healthier — and people develop "a sense of pride, confidence and ownership in their community's well-being."

## "Without fanfare"

Nicholas Adcock, president and chief executive of the Greater Riverside Chambers of Commerce — and an early sounding board for the founders on Vassant — sees it differently.

Asked whether Ward's numbers match what he observes, Adcock said the technology sector here is bigger than its reputation. "I think we have more technology-oriented businesses than many people realize," he said, adding that he hears often about successful local companies that have operated for years "without fanfare."

"Rather than trying to recreate or compete against another city like Irvine," Adcock said, "Riverside has focused on building on its own strengths and supporting innovation in the industries that already make our community unique." He is not disputing that Riverside has ground to make up.

Ward had come at the retention problem from the city's side first. In the mayor's office he worked on Campus Riverside, an initiative aimed at getting college students to stay in the city after graduation, and researched what it would take to draw new industries here.

Ward is not a bystander to city government. He holds a resident seat for Ward 5 on the Budget Engagement Commission through a term that runs to March 2027, and he sits on the board of the Arlington Business Partnership. "I'm more of a pie in the sky kind of guy," he said. "More of big ideas."

He grew up watching his parents run a medical billing business for more than 20 years, and says he always knew he wanted to try something of his own in his twenties. He didn't know what it would be.

Adcock, asked what the hardest part is for a young Riverside company once it starts to grow, pointed to money. "I think the biggest opportunity is expanding access to growth capital," he said. Riverside has the talent and the universities, in his account; what it lacks is the money that comes after.

The money he is describing exists here on paper. UC Riverside, whose programs back most of the city's startups, [set out in 2021 to build a local investor network](https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2021/09/17/inaugural-riverside-angel-summit-brings-region-together-invest-its-own-startups?ref=raincrossgazette.com), noting that its own startups had raised more than $70 million "with the majority of investment coming from outside the region." The network [made two $42,000 awards](https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2022/02/16/agricultural-pest-control-and-energy-storage-startups-win-riverside-angel?ref=raincrossgazette.com) in January 2022\. No second round has been announced.

Vassant hasn't reached that test yet. There are no outside investors. What exists was paid for out of two salaries and built after hours, then handed to a beta group whose complaints — typos, layout problems, logic gaps — set the order of the next round of work.

Ward lists the odds himself. Fintech is crowded. Artificial intelligence threatens anything new. Most startups fail.

Asked what he'd say to the 26-year-old somewhere in Riverside with a full-time job and an idea, he said to take the leap. "I like to talk to people, and I like to try to see how I can provide value in some way."

When he was done at the bar he closed the laptop, paid, and walked across Main Street to City Hall for a Budget Engagement Commission meeting. He has been doing the civic half of this for years. The other half has not been tested yet.