Career Reinvention, Early Amazon Days, and Snowboarding
Johnny Sandquist
Founder, Three Crowns Copywriting & Marketing
Eric Franklin’s résumé doesn’t start with finance. It starts at Amazon in 1998, when the company sold books and music and was a couple months out from launching DVDs. Somewhere between that job, a homegrown investment club, and a snowboard sales gig that ended in bankruptcy, Franklin built the instincts that now drive Prospero Wealth, the RIA he founded in 2021.
At Wealth Management EDGE 2026, he joined Torie Happe and me for the Money Chronicles podcast to talk through how a career with no straight lines led to a firm with a very specific hiring philosophy.
Watch the full episode below.
Who Is Eric Franklin?
Eric Franklin is the managing principal and founder of Prospero Wealth, a virtual advisory firm he took full-time in 2021. His path into finance wasn’t direct. He spent years at Amazon in its earliest form, then built an investing habit informally with a coworker before ever working in financial services. Today, Prospero Wealth is built around a specific idea: every advisor on his team came out of a twenty-to-thirty-year tech career before switching into finance.
From Amazon’s Books-and-Music Days to a Homegrown Investment Club
Franklin joined Amazon in 1998 when it was still primarily a books-and-music retailer working toward its DVD launch. He was there while Jeff Bezos was internally floating the idea of the “everything store,” years before that vision became obvious to the rest of the world.
It was Franklin’s first job with real benefits and equity compensation, and it introduced him to a group of Amazon colleagues who were reading the Motley Fool and picking stocks together for fun.
That informal habit turned into something more structured. Franklin and another Amazon employee started an investment club that ran for six or seven years, meeting monthly to research companies, read earnings reports, and pitch each other on what to buy. He’s quick to point out it wasn’t sentiment-driven the way a lot of retail investing communities are today.
It was closer to an unofficial finance education, built by people with day jobs who wanted to understand what they were doing with their money.
The Snowboard Business That Went Bankrupt
Franklin’s biggest money mistake didn’t happen at Amazon. It happened in college, when he became a snowboard sales rep, traveling across Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and Montana pitching boards to shops.
He was good at it, but the company he worked for went bankrupt and never shipped a single order, leaving him to cover an entire season’s worth of travel expenses with nothing to show for it.
He didn’t carry student debt into his twenties, but he carried that. Ultimately, a big part of Franklin’s understanding of financial risk came from getting burned by someone else’s failure while doing everything right on his end.
Why Franklin’s Path Matters for RIAs Building Their Own Identity
Franklin built Prospero Wealth around a premise most firms don’t focus on: every advisor he hires spent decades in a tech career before switching into finance. His clients are largely people who came from the same world his advisors did, and that shared experience does work that credentials alone can’t.
Watch the full conversation with Eric Franklin on the Three Crowns YouTube channel.