Generational wealth, tax free.
You did everything right. You spent months prepping for interviews, negotiated the offer, read the vesting schedule, all because you believed in yourself and what you were building. You are not careless with money.
But somewhere between the W-2 and the equity cliffs, between the withholding your employer picked and the quarterly payments nobody explained, a gap opened. Earning more made your money harder to understand, not easier.
I found that gap the expensive way. I sold five shares more than I should have.
Five shares. $10,000. I crossed a threshold I didn't know existed, let alone that I was standing next to. My payroll sat in one place, my brokerage in another, and nothing connected them. No tool told me I was close. I found out the following April, about a decision I had made more than a year earlier.
That is why Zero exists.
The gap
Once your pay gets complicated, three things become true. Nobody tells you any of them.
The system wasn't built for you. The tax code runs 4,000 pages. It was written for CPAs and tax attorneys to navigate on your behalf, never for you to read.
You are still the one who has to decide. When to exercise. What a bonus does to your withholding. What one sale does to your bracket. What moving states changes. Get them wrong and the cost is measured in millions.
Your data is fragmented. Payroll in one system. Equity in another. Brokerage in a third, crypto in wallets, prediction markets in Kalshi.
What matters is how they interact. Nothing connects them.
Your CPA sees a snapshot once a year. Carta shows the grant, not what exercising it costs. Your brokerage shows a gain, not what it does to your bracket. Payroll withholds against your salary, blind to the RSU vest that just moved your rate.
The timing is invisible. The information exists. It's just never in front of you when the decision is being made.
By the time you learn that early exercise would have saved you $500,000, the 409A has moved. By the time you notice you crossed the threshold that adds 3.8% to your investment income, you have already filed. By the time you work out what a tender offer does to your bill, the tender is closing.
Every one of these decisions carries a tax consequence, and the consequence lands months or years later. Exercising. Selling. Changing jobs. Moving states. Buying a home. Having a child.
By the time you see the bill, the decision is already made.
Before the decision
The exercise. You hold 30,000 incentive stock options at a strike far below what the shares are worth today. Exercise all of them at once and that spread costs you about $132,000 in alternative minimum tax, due the following April, on shares you can't sell to pay it.
Zero runs it before you place the order. 11,500 shares is where the line sits, and under it the bill is zero.
The timing. That line resets every January. A different grant, $84,000 of AMT in a single exercise, drops to $31,000 split across two tax years.
The tender offer. You sell $235,000 of non-qualified options. Withholding comes out at 22%, the flat rate payroll uses for anything that isn't salary, and your real rate is nowhere near that. You end the day $30,000 short and nothing tells you.
That $30,000 is the cheap part. The IRS wants tax paid as you earn it, so it adds a penalty and interest back to the quarter you missed. And covering it means selling more shares, which is taxable too.
Nothing about the sale looks wrong. You'd find out at filing, a year later, when there is nothing left to do about it. Zero catches it while a quarterly payment still fixes it for free.
Exercising and selling are the loud windows. They aren't the only ones.
- A job offer. What the equity is actually worth after strike, vesting, exercise cost, and tax, so you negotiate against a real number instead of the headline grant.
- A move. New York to Ohio, timed so the portfolio sales paying for the down payment and the two cars land on the right side of the state line.
- Liquidity. You need $450,000 out of your portfolio. There's a path that pulls it at zero capital gains tax, and Zero finds it.
- Marriage. Two incomes stack. Filing status changes which thresholds you're near and which deductions survive. You see the year before you live it.
None of these are tax decisions. They're life decisions with a tax bill attached, and the bill is set long before it arrives.
How it works
You connect your accounts. Payroll, equity, brokerage, loans, real estate, prediction markets. Ten minutes. Zero reads all of it and builds a model of you and your money.
Zero simulates continuously. Not once a year. Not when you ask. Every day, Zero runs 300+ simulations across federal, state, AMT, capital gains, property, and payroll taxes, looking for the moves that leave you with the most. When something moves, you hear about it, along with the specific thing to do.
- "You're about to buy back the position you just harvested a loss on. Do it this week and the $12,000 loss is disallowed."
- "Your employer auto-enrolled you in a 401(k) you never picked. That's $22,000 a year going somewhere you didn't choose, and you have options to exercise."
- "$2,000,000 has been sitting in cash in your brokerage. At T-bill rates that's $80,000 a year you aren't earning."
- "Your Robinhood auto-invest keeps buying back in, and it's blocking $1,600 of harvestable losses."
- "You're paying for surgery out of your HSA. Leave the $6,000 in and it compounds tax free."
Zero acts on your behalf. Knowing the move is half of it. Zero makes it. It picks which shares to sell so the sale costs you the least. It times exercises and contributions to stay on the right side of the thresholds. It moves your money into the right shelters so you aren't left navigating a massive tax bill down the line.
Then it files. Same model, same numbers, nothing rebuilt from scratch in April. Exercise ISOs four times in one year and what comes out the other side is a return no consumer tax software will produce.
A vest, a bonus, a sale, a move. Anything that changes, Zero recalculates around it and tells you what to do while you can still do it.
Tax is where Zero starts. It is not where Zero stops.
Who this is for
You work at an early stage startup, or at a public company where the RSU vests quietly became most of your pay. You have equity, investments, and a payroll doing things you never asked it to do. And you've started to notice that no single tool can see all of it.
Maybe you like this stuff. You've built the spreadsheet, read the actual code sections, and you want something as rigorous as you are. Something that shows its math and doesn't round.
Or maybe you want nothing to do with it. You're good at your job, you know the money matters, and you want someone to tell you what to do and when. You don't want to become a tax expert. You want to know you aren't making a $250,000 mistake.
Either way, you've looked at the alternatives.
A CPA charges $2,000 for a complex return and looks backward once a year, after every decision is already made. And backward isn't the same as right.
A financial advisor gives you broad guidance and no idea how your equity, your portfolio, and your withholding interact. Carta shows the grant, not the cost of exercising it. Your brokerage shows returns, not what they do to your bill. Reddit has threads, and you can't tell which half is wrong until it's too late.
Filing is the easy part. What you need is something watching all of it, all the time, telling you what to do before it matters. And being right.
The decisions that cost the most are the ones you don't know you're making. An exercise window that closes quietly. A holding period that resets. A threshold you cross by five shares. These aren't mistakes. They're invisible defaults that compound against you while you're shipping code and living your life.
Zero starts with tax because that's where the gap is widest and guessing costs the most. But the engine sees everything, and as your life gets more complicated, so does what Zero can do about it.
Because for you, the margin between right & wrong can't be a percentage. It needs to be zero.
By invitation only