Note from the Publisher:  We were REALLY interested to hear of this story.  The robo-advisor Wealthfront has added a new feature, Selling Plan, to enable employees of companies who've gone through an IPO to sell their shares and diversify their portfolios.  The announcement came on a blogpost on January 18th on the company website.  We ALWAYS love to see innovation, but we were particular interested in this story because we had come across some folks trying to sell their private shares of Twitter pre-IPO several years ago.  This isn't that type of offering, but still, we think it's a fantastic offering and congratulate Wealthfront on creating this great new feature.

"Today, we’re excited to announce that we have reintroduced our radically improved Selling Plan. Now everyone can sell and diversify their company stock as though they had their very own Private Wealth Manager, saving them time, commissions, taxes and stress. We began the expanded rollout of our Selling Plan earlier this month and have already seen a fantastic response from clients at Apple, Arista Networks, Box, Google, Square, Twilio, Yelp and Zillow in large part because this kind of service is typically only made available to executives.

The idea came from Twitter employees

We first learned of the need to help people sell their concentrated company stock positions when our earliest clients at Twitter brought it to our attention during their IPO. The executives of Twitter had plenty of good options because they qualified for services from Private Wealth Managers, but the rank and file were left out in the cold.

So we did what we do best: put our PhDs and engineers on the case to build a prototype that automated and improved the process of selling concentrated stock positions.

Shortly after launching our prototype to Twitter employees, we heard the same anxieties from our Facebook clients. From there, the demand grew and to date we have heard requests for our Selling Plan from employees at 300 public companies that represent such diverse industries as Energy, Healthcare, Financial Services, Oil & Gas, Software, and Telecommunications. We have now enhanced our Selling Plan from a prototype to a full-fledged and radically more convenient service that any shareholder can use to sell their shares over time and diversify their holdings."

Read Full Blogpost at blog.wealthfront.com