Neil Patel

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Jason Gardner is the founder and CEO of Marqeta which provides infrastructure and tools to help companies build and manage payment programs. The company has raised over $500 million from top tier investors which include Daintree, Granite Ventures, Coatue Management, Lone Pine Capital, Greyhound Capital, CommerzVentures, 83North, Geodesic Capital, Visa, Spark Capital, ICONIQ Capital, Vitruvian Partners, and Greylock to name a few. Prior to this, he founded Vertical Think, and PropertyBridge (acquired by MoneyGram).

In this episode you will learn:

  • How to integrate teams with different DNA
  • His top advice for new founders 
  • The key to creating a business that lasts decades
  • The power of refusing to accept no for an answer

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For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here) that I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash.

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Moreover, I also provided a commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400 million (see it here).

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About Jason Gardner:

Jason Gardner is the founder and chief executive officer of Marqeta, Inc. Under his leadership Marqeta has defined the global standard for modern card issuing, developing an industry-leading issuer processor platform that now powers the world’s most innovative companies.

Prior to Marqeta, Jason Gardner co-founded PropertyBridge, which became the leading rent and lease-related payment and transaction integration platform for multifamily real estate. PropertyBridge was acquired by MoneyGram International (MGI) in 2007.

Before PropertyBridge Jason Gardner founded Vertical Think, an IT management company that worked with start-ups and larger organizations. Jason grew up in New Jersey where he had numerous businesses that included making and selling tie-dyed T-shirts.

Jason Gardner was a G.O. at Club Med in Paradise Island, Bahamas and a constituent liaison for Senator John McCain in Arizona, primarily working as a contact between McCain’s constituents and the Armed Services and IRS.

After attending Arizona State University Jason Gardner made it to California where he began to pursue his passion for technology. Jason Gardner holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from Arizona State University.

Connect with Jason Gardner:

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FULL TRANSCRIPTION OF THE INTERVIEW:

Alejandro: Alrighty. Hello everyone, and welcome to the DealMakers show. Today we have an awesome founder. He’s done it multiple times, and with his last rodeo, what a ride! I think that we’re going to be learning quite a bit on building, scaling, and of course, exiting too. So without further ado, I’d like to welcome our guest today, Jason Gardner. Welcome to the show.

Jason Gardner: Alejandro, thank you for having me.

Alejandro: Originally born in Washington, D.C., but you grew up pretty much in New Jersey, so tell us about your life growing up.

Jason Gardner: I grew up in Fair Haven, New Jersey. It’s in Monmouth County for those folks from the tri-state area. I was pretty much a beach rat. I spent most of my time surfing, even during the winter. I had a great life. I think growing up in New Jersey, in a small town, is a lot of fun. I had some pretty interesting times. I grew up with my mother who has been married four times; my father has been married three times. I was growing up in Fair Haven with my mom and my stepdad, Chris. My mom was a court mediator in Freehold, New Jersey, and my stepfather was a stockbroker. I spent a lot of my time growing up like most kids, running around, and hanging out with your friends on a bike. I started working when I was 14 years old. My first job was at a store called Video on the Ritz doing VHS and Betamax if you remember Betamax back in the day. It was a lot of fun. It was a great place to grow up.

Alejandro: How did you get this love for doing business? Pretty much all over high school and college, you were the kind of kid thinking about how to create value and extract value, so how did you get that influence?

Jason Gardner: If I think about being an entrepreneur my first time when I was about five years old, I recognized that I could hustle people for money, whether it was picking your weeds or shoveling your driveway. I actually really enjoyed work, and I took pride in the fact that I could use my own skill to do a job and get paid directly for it. There’s something that I really enjoyed about that when I was a little kid. Then I had my job at Video on the Ritz when I was 14. By the time I reached high school, I was a busboy, waiter, and a cook in multiple restaurants. I also worked at a surf shop called Island Style Surf Shop for those of us who grew up in Monmouth County. My first business in high school was a tie-dye business in my junior-senior year. My sister was making tie-dyes as the time. She connected me with a company that sold the dyes, and I would make tie-dye shirts and sell them on New Jersey Transit heading to Madison Square Garden to see the Grateful Dead Shows. That turned into tie-dying school tee-shirts and all kinds of stuff. It was actually a nice business, which I brought to my first year of college.

Alejandro: That’s amazing. You always had this thing, as well, in you that there was something going on in California. Why did you want to move to California? 

Jason Gardner: When my parents got divorced, my dad moved to Manhattan. He lived in Manhattan for about ten years, and he was invited to open an office in San Francisco for the company that he was working with. I had been someone who had loved technology since I was a little kid. I think the first coding class I took was when I was nine years old. I had a Commodore 64. I had an Atari. I had the earliest Nintendo’s and SaGa’s. I was a gamer back when gamers weren’t really known. All I wanted to do was go visit California. When I did visit California, I asked my dad. I hadn’t traveled anywhere outside of the tri-state area. The place I had been to was Canada. As a little kid, I had been to Toronto but really hadn’t been anywhere else. I jumped on a plane with him and my two sisters. I was a middle child. I said, “I want to see Silicon Valley. I want to visit Apple, HP, and Intel.” He drove me down 280 and up 101, and we visited all these companies. This was when I was 13. All I wanted to do was move to California. After high school and college, I backpacked in Europe for four months, then packed up my car in Springbreak, New Jersey, where my mom was living and drove to California. That was in 1994.

Alejandro: That’s amazing, and there, you went from account executive to business development manager for different companies. Those are all nice segues that led you to build your first business, which was quite a humbling experience. 

Jason Gardner: Yeah. My first company was called Vertical Think. It was an early Elance (now Upwork) type of business where we were connecting web developers with smaller web development projects. I would consider it more a lifestyle business. We had talked to VCs about potentially funding us, but it was not something that was certainly fundable, at the time. It wasn’t technology-based. It was more professional services-based. I learned a lot. It was headquartered at 679 Bryant Street in San Francisco, south of Market. This was before any of the buildouts you see today were there. At the time, I think the ballpark was being built. It was a lot of fun. As someone who is young in their 20s, I was certainly more interested in having fun than actually building a business. So, it ultimately failed, but I learned an extraordinary amount about what it means to go build a successful business. I took what I learned in a failure and turned it into a success in my next endeavor, which I co-founded with four other folks.

Alejandro: And as they say, once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur. I’m sure that from this experience with Vertical Think, there was at least one lesson that you knew that if you were to start another business, you would definitely implement that lesson. What would that lesson be? 

Jason Gardner: Running a business is not for the faint of heart. It’s both mentally and physically taxing. I was more interested in having fun. I didn’t take the idea of building a successful business seriously. You have to enter it with this thought of; I am preparing myself to go and do this. I’m a professional, and I know the things that I need to. I need to hire the right people; I need to have the right vision; I need to have the right infrastructure; I need to have the right materials. There’s a lot of planning that goes into it. I was more enamored with being a CEO, at the time, and building a business and having fun than taking it seriously. When you want to go build a business, especially with other people’s money, the people you’re hiring are spending a lot of time with you. Today, I take that very seriously and take it very much to heart that they’re spending their time with me to help me and our company and our customers build their businesses. So, I didn’t have that level of maturity at the time. I learned a hard lesson in it to help me for what was next.

Alejandro: What was next was your next rodeo, and that was PropertyBridge. What were you guys doing a PropertyBridge? 

Jason Gardner: Yeah. Between Vertical Think and PropertyBridge, I took another sales job for a company in San Francisco. I needed to earn money. PropertyBridge got started – actually, interestingly enough, at the time, I was planning to move to Australia to start a Java Juice type chain called Crocodile Cooler with a friend of mine. I was at a kiddie concert at Sherith Israel, a temple in San Francisco. My wife and I were part of the congregation there, and so was my friend, Ryan Gilbert. We met him and his wife, Nicki Gilbert, at this kiddie concert. He was an entrepreneur and had a business before that wasn’t successful. He and I were getting together every Friday for what we called the Entrepreneurs’ Breakfast. He said to me, “I’m thinking about this idea of paying rent with a credit card.” I said, “How many people pay rent with a check? Probably everybody.” He said, “Yeah. Imagine paying rent with a credit card.” I was blown away by the business idea, so I dropped that Crocodile Coolers thing and joined Ryan and three other folks to go build out PropertyBridge, which would allow you to pay rent electronically through different means, whether it was ACH check, which we scanned through remote deposit capture devices and then acquired it – being able to accept credit cards at a property for rent-related payments. We started that in 2004, we sold that in 2007 to MoneyGram International for 28 million dollars. That was a big deal for all of us. I ended up staying under contract with MoneyGram for two years, and then after that, I founded Marqeta by myself.

Alejandro: And it was a big deal for investors, too, because they invested 2 million, and then you get this 28 million exit, so quite the 10x return that they go after. I think that for you, too, this was probably a great experience to see a company going through the full cycle of building, scaling, financing, and exiting. Did that give you the full picture of “This is how it works – this is actually possible” kind of thing?

Jason Gardner: Yeah. I learned a lot about scaling and hiring people and the impact of bad decisions, especially impacted by decisions around hiring people and what it meant to be focused. What it meant to be overeating or doing too much – having a grand vision, but wanting to execute on way too many things at the same time. We learned a lot. I, along with my co-founders, by the time we sold the company, we were ready to move on. Multi-family real estate, at the time, was only 19.8 million units in the U.S., and the rental of real estate is a global phenomenon. But it was very much focused in the U.S. We didn’t have the multi-billion-dollar company vision. It was something that was much smaller than that, but when I finished my run at PropertyBridge and then MoneyGram, what I wanted to do next was, I wanted to go with generational. That was hard to find an idea that I really wanted to do until the Marqeta idea found me.

Alejandro: How did the idea find you?

Jason Gardner: My friend Sukie Singh, who also had a company in a multi-family real estate space. He and I had become good friends through building a business. He sold his company about a year after I sold PropertyBridge. He was on contract with a company called Realpage. I was eating dinner with him in San Francisco at a sushi place. I had gotten together with him specifically, and I said, “I have all these ideas. I want to bounce these ideas off of you.” He said, “I have all these Groupons in my pocket. It’s silly that I have to walk around with all this paper. How about trying to put all of these Groupons onto a card? You’re a payment nerd.” I wanted to do a payment business, and it was very much like a shock to my system. It was something that really, I was speechless for about 30 seconds because my brain went into full overload, and I knew this was what I had to do. I said, “That is a really good idea. I want to go solve that problem.” So, literally, that night, I began searching to see how this would be done. I knew nothing about issuing and processing. I knew about the payment card industry, but specifically about acquiring, which is what you do every day, which is paying into an interface, whether online, inserting your card or tapping your phone, but I didn’t know how the cards worked themselves. So, I immersed myself in the technology, talked to a lot of people about the technology, and recognized that we had to build an issuing processing system from scratch and then began to map the architecture out and what that would look like. I worked with some really smart people from PropertyBridge, who joined me for Marqeta, and the rest is history.

Alejandro: So, it seems that you were, obviously, speaking with a lot of people and bouncing ideas with a lot of people, so why did you decide to go at it solo as a founder?

Jason Gardner: By the time I finished PropertyBridge, none of the co-founders got along or wanted to spend time with each other at all. In fact, I found that through the process of building PropertyBridge, we all had different ideas of the things that we wanted to do, and you felt that because you were a co-founder of that business that I have a say in the color and the size of things; I have the say in where we go and what we do. It was something that we probably should have done from the very beginning, which is, “You’re responsible for this. You’re responsible for that. You are solely responsible for these decisions.” I think this is one of the issues that co-founders make in the beginning is they believe that it’s equitable, so everybody has an equal share, and everybody has a say in what’s next. That is the wrong way to do it. That’s the way we did it at PropertyBridge. Yes, we were successful, but by the time PropertyBridge ended, I was exhausted and wanted to, in my next business, be able to call the shots and decide what we were going to build and what the colors were and what our values were and what our vision and mission was. I was really ready for that. I didn’t want to share that with anybody else as a sole founder in the beginning. Now, obviously, as you build a business, you build a business with people. When you work with a lot of really smart people, they bring you a lot of really good ideas, but ultimately, it’s up to you to parcel all this information coming at you and find a path forward. Then part of finding the path forward is convincing others to join you in that journey. I learned a lot from PropertyBridge and then being a sole founder of things that I had to get done. But I would never have done it any other way. 

Alejandro: So what ended up being the business model, Jason?

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Jason Gardner: When we got started, we solved the problem, which a lot of people told us we couldn’t do, which was how to figure out how to put a bunch of Groupons on a card. The first product we came out with was a consumer product called the Marqeta card, which allowed you to pay for groceries, and you would get a 5% to 7% return based on paying in advance for things such as groceries, food, clothing, and a number of things. It was moderately successful. In the earliest business plan, in the early days of 2010, I had a strong belief in open platforms. I thought that the engineers and developers, technical product managers, entrepreneurs, were going to want to build their own products on top of platforms using an API. They could choose how to interact with that API to build products that were very different from any other product that was being built. But as an issuer processor, you’ve got to prove the technology works. That was the first product. So, in 2012, Facebook called, and they said, “We want to build this thing called a Facebook card. It’s your birthday – 100 friends want to send you 100 gift cards from 100 different merchants, and we want them to live on one card. We’ve talked to all these issuers/processors, and they keep pushing us to you guys because this is something that you’ve solved.” Which we had. This was the how do you put a bunch of Groupons or how do you put a bunch of gift cards on a single card. So, we exposed our API to Facebook engineers, and we fell in love. We really loved working with other technically-capable people around wanting to build products. I found, through that process, I was having a lot more fun working with engineers and product people as infrastructure versus having my own product. So, eBay was the next company that came that wanted to build a product. We quickly shut down the Marqeta card and worked with several companies and exposed our infrastructure to them. It was still closed; it wasn’t open yet. At the end of 2014, we launched modern-card issuing, which was the ability to build card products. They can be physical plastic cards, tokenized cards, which at that time didn’t exist, but the future would be dropping those tokenized cards into Apple Pay, or Android Pay, or Google Pay, and Samsung Pay, or virtual cards, which could be either server to server virtual cards or server to consumer business virtual cards. That was a huge bet for the company because we didn’t know if we were going to find product/market fit for that. We just knew that we had a lot more fun working with engineers and other companies and bringing them this modern card issuing infrastructure. We found product/market fit, actually very quickly in 2015. What you see today is really the same business, but obviously, much more profound technology and profound business model than it was back in 2015. But today, we’re a 4.3-billion-dollar company. Again, we’re in that first chapter of what we believe is a generational story.

Alejandro: Very cool, and talking about the valuation that also leads me to ask you how much capital has the company raised to date?

Jason Gardner: We’ve raised 535 million dollars to date.

Alejandro: Wow! That’s a lot of zeros there, Jason. Anyone could get dizzy. I want to dive into one of the stories here in that journey, as well, of going from financing cycle to financing cycle because I understand that in 2015, you were literally weeks away from running out of money. What happened there?

Jason Gardner: We didn’t hit our milestones. We had launched the open API. We were in the very early days of product/market fit. We were struggling to manage the incoming business. You can create a very well-documented API – it’s not good enough, especially in an area like issuing and processing where people want to go build card products, but the lingo and the information around card issuing – we were drinking our own or eating our own food so much that we didn’t understand the educational part that people needed to go build products. So, we missed some very key milestones. We were weeks away from running out of money. We had a number of investors that wanted to write some more checks, but they wanted me to find some new investors. I did that within five days.

Alejandro: Wow.

Jason Gardner: I convinced the new investors around the vision and where we were going. The total addressable market or TAM for this business was significant and ended up raising what was our Series C. From there on, the company has performed extremely well.

Alejandro: So, that day that you probably signed the subscription agreement, and money was wired, I’m sure that maybe there was something that you promised yourself that maybe you were going to keep in mind as you were continuing in the journey of building this business. What was that?

Jason Gardner: Yeah. Those weeks before that round closed were some of the most depressing moments of my career with building Marqeta. It was very, very, very difficult. I couldn’t smile. I couldn’t sleep. I was horribly depressed because I had spent all this time, and all of these people and our customers were depending on me to get this money in. So, one thing that I learned was, not only manage your money a lot better but raise when you don’t need it. Start the fundraising process early; create milestones that you can reach that are important milestones in the company, not something that you’re creating a bar so high that you want to push yourself. It’s almost dangerous to do that in some ways, and I experienced that. One thing was, focus on doing a lot less, having milestones that maybe are smaller in nature but reachable, so it creates a goodness or positivity in regard to the milestones that you’re reaching. The board sees that. The new investors that you’re talking to over the growth of the company see that. Then when you decide you want to do your next round, it becomes more of a process in building the business versus an “Okay, I’ve got to go on a six-month journey to go raise money and spend all of this time and stress to go do this in the hope that I can raise.” If I don’t, then the business – and I thought very differently about fundraising after that experience. It was really hard. 

Alejandro: You, as well, you’ve been able to manage not only the professional side, but also the personal side because you had a very supportive family, too, and also a family that needed your attention as well. How did you go about juggling both fronts?

Jason Gardner: Yeah. Being an entrepreneur and being a father and a husband is difficult. I have a son who was born with special needs. He was born with a genetic disorder called 22q DiGeorge syndrome. He needed a lot of help as a young kid. He’s 18 today, and he’s doing great. My wife ended up going back to school and got her Master’s in social work, and now she’s a psychotherapist. She actually works with other parents of kids with special needs. She’s very good at what she does. Also, many times a psychotherapist today – I’ll have a tough day, and she’ll say, “Step into my office.” Also, two years ago, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she was battling breast cancer for a good year. It was very hard both personally and professionally because – you know this. You’ve dealt with this in your past, too.

Alejandro: Yeah.

Jason Gardner: Which is, you feel like you’re being torn apart. Your heart is with your family. I saw how my wife was suffering and how much she needed me, and I’m also incredibly loyal to my wife, but I’m also loyal to my investors and my employees and our customers in building the business. It takes an incredible balance. I think, for me, I’m lucky in that I’ve been married to my wife for about 20 years now. We’ve been together for 25. She’s tough! She’s a Jewish girl from the Bronx. She knows what it’s like to work with me. She went through all three companies with me, and she knew what was important to our family and what was important to me. Together, with Ethan and my daughter, Delia, just really balanced things out in a way where we could do it all, and we did it all. She’s cancer-free. She’s very healthy. Obviously, the business is doing great. Kids are doing great. I really couldn’t do this business without her. Having a great partner, whether it’s your wife, your husband, significant other, partner, boyfriend, girlfriend, family, that is really important. It helps you through the very hard times when you’re horribly depressed, and it helps you through the great times when you’re finding success in the things that you’re doing, but they’re keeping you very focused.

Alejandro: Absolutely. And honing in there on success, I heard you say that success is not something that you achieve, and that said, it’s something that you’re constantly going after. I’m sure that here, especially when we’re talking about Marqeta and the incredible business that you’ve built, you had to scale yourself too as a professional so that you were able to grow at the same speed as the company. So, how have you been able to do that?

Jason Gardner: Yeah. When you’re building a business, you have to grow both personally and professionally; you have to scale personally and professionally. There is a lot to building a business because you build a business with people. There are people, obviously, your employees – I refer to them as my business partners. There are your customers. They’re people too, and your investors are people. When you’re building, you have to have a global view on things. You have to be very focused on the people aspects of what you’re doing. Sometimes, I’ve failed at that. When people came to me five years ago and said, “I want to know what my career path is.” I really couldn’t wrap my head around that. I was like: there’s so much work to do, what’s a career path? These are the scaling things as a CEO. You really have to embrace about what is next in your professional career as a CEO. You also need to be a human being, and personally, you need to focus on, what do I need to be a better person and a better CEO, recognize the things that are going on in my company, have those personal connections so that you can build this business. I’ve said this before, especially about investors: sometimes, you look at investors as just suitcases full of cash, but VCs and investors make very few bets in their life – maybe 20 to 25 companies at max they’ll invest in. When times are tough, and when times are good, you want to be able to have a personal connection with them, so they’re there for you. I’ve done that with my investors. I’m close to all of them. It helps because having that personal connection helps you go build. I didn’t get that stuff in the beginning, and professionally, in building the business, I knew that we had something that was going to be big because I felt it because of the size of the addressable market, and this idea of open platforms. But as you build, you need a lot of help. Like, three years ago, I got a coach. She’s incredible and has helped me a lot to grow both personally and professionally, where today, we’re close to 450 people. We’re a 4.3-billion-dollar company. We’ve raised 535 million dollars, and we’re in what I believe to be the very early stages of engineering our vision. There’s so much more to do, and I couldn’t do it without having that personal and professional view on how the world works.

Alejandro: Absolutely. To expand on that, and especially for the folks that are listening, is there anything that you can tell us around the number of employees or anything that gives us an idea on how big Marqeta is today?

Jason Gardner: I can’t disclose too much. I can say that at the end of last year, we issued our 140 millionth card. What that means is, we’re easily in the top 25 issuers in North America. We are a global company now. We operate in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia. We started off with Australia, which is very much a card-center culture, and we’ll be in a number of companies in the coming year. Around that, I have offices here in Oakland, California. We just announced our second headquarters in Denver, Colorado, and we have two offices in the UK and have plans to be opening up more here in the coming months.

Alejandro: Where do you think that your space is heading as a whole?

Jason Gardner: Modern card issuing itself today is a 45-trillion-dollar market if you think about carded volume globally. By carded volume, I mean VISA, MasterCard, AMEX, Discovery, China UnionPay, NICE, Whole Accel Exchange, and there are hundreds of networks around the world that would fit into this carded volume. That’s moving to 80 trillion in the next ten years.

Alejandro: Wow.

Jason Gardner: That’s the biggest expansion of card processing we’ve ever seen. Ultimately, I’d like to issue a card on every single continent because we see that there’s FinTech’s being built from countries in Africa to Asia to new companies being built in North America, South America, Latin America, and all over the world. It’s been interesting to see how modern card issuing, a category that we invented has grown. There’s still an extraordinary amount to do because based on these companies. At the time, in 2010, many of our customers hadn’t even been invented yet. We still see where new businesses are being invented every day that we can power.

Alejandro: We’ve talked that you guys are still at chapter one, and I want to expand on that. Let’s say you go to sleep tonight, Jason, and you have an insane snooze, and you wake up in a world five years later, where the vision of Marqeta is fully realized. We’ve made a few jumps from that chapter one that you’re in today. When you wake up from that tremendous snooze, what does that world look like when that Marqeta vision is fully realized?

Jason Gardner: Part of the Marqeta vision, and I’m not going to go into the entire Marqeta vision five years out, but part of that Marqeta vision is issuing a card on every single continent. That card is going to be digital-first. We’ve definitely seen through this global pandemic where this thought of digital-first credentials or maybe three to four years out is happening right now. We’re going to see digital-first credentials in five years being not only a global phenomenon but, in many ways, you won’t be carrying plastic anymore. This is not new. Asia has been using phones to authorize transactions for years. But we’re going to see it certainly more globally. This acceptance of the ability to pay with a phone at the point of sale – Apple pays only in its early days. If they don’t have a significant amount of terminals globally enabled to accept that – Google Pay either. We need to build out this two-sided infrastructure and the ability to pay with phones at the point of sale, and the ability to create tokens. These tokens fit into Apple Pay or Google Pay easily. We did this back in ’16, and we’re the first company to do that. So, today, we see where this is beginning the global phenomenon. In five years, it’s going to be very commonplace where your phone is carrying all your credentials to make payments. You wouldn’t be carrying cards.

Alejandro: That’s amazing. One of the questions that I typically ask the guests that come on the show is – you’ve been at it now with Marqeta for a while. This is your third business, so you have your fair amount of lessons, experiences, successes, failures, and everything in that non-straight line, which is entrepreneurship. So, if you had the opportunity, Jason to go back in time, and have a chat with your younger self, with that Jason that is thinking about launching a business, and you were able to give that younger self one piece of business advice, what would that be knowing what you know now?

Jason Gardner: Have a vision around technology and what you want to go build. What I didn’t have back then, which I would talk to my younger self about is having a vision around people. So, how you want to hire people and how you want to support people. This is not just your employees; these are your investors as well. I think as the years have gone on, I’ve begun to realize that this is probably within the last 4.5 to 5 years is that companies are built with people. People need a lot of different things, and a lot of different people need a lot of different things. There’s the idea of success and building this great business and great technology and having great customers, but also be focused on the people and what they need, like the career goals that they’re going to go hit, what they need to hear from you from a weekly and monthly basis around communications – that’s a really important part that I would definitely talk to my younger self about. So, there’s the building the business and the technology, but there’s also like building the people and the human aspects of building a business. Today, I handled both in an equally important way. I’m a lot happier as a person in doing that, and I’ve seen a lot more success in focusing on both of those. So, that’s definitely a piece I would talk to my younger self about.

Alejandro: That’s amazing and very profound, Jason. For the folks that are listening, what is the best way for them to reach out and say hi?

Jason Gardner: They can always email me: [email protected].

Alejandro: Amazing. Well, Jason, thank you so much for being on the DealMakers show today.

Jason Gardner: Alejandro, thank you for having me.

 

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