Podcast: One on one with Wildfire CEO Jordan Glazier

In this episode of Fintech Thought Leaders, QED's Head of Early Stage Investments Bill Cilluffo speaks with Wildfire CEO Jordan Glazier.

Show Notes

Bios

Bill Cilluffo joined QED as a Special Advisor in the fall of 2014 and became a Partner in 2015. He is currently Head of Early Stage Investments after six years as Head of International, leading QED’s Investment teams in Latin America, Europe and Asia.

Prior to joining QED, Bill spent nearly 20 years at Capital One, spanning several roles and leading several businesses. He spent the first 6 years of his career leading Marketing, product development and credit policy for Capital One’s subprime credit card business; ultimately having overall P&L responsibility, and growing the business to become the most significant player in the market. He moved on to spend 2 years in various new business development roles, spanning the telecom, medical finance and small business finance industries. Bill spent 3 years as Deputy Chief Credit Officer for the bank, playing nearly every role there was to play in the central credit function, after helping build the department from scratch in 2002.

Bill then pivoted his career to general management, leading Capital One’s Canadian, and ultimately International businesses, over the course of 6 years. Profitability of the business grew significantly under Bill’s leadership, through new product and channel introductions, acquisitions, and significant cost take out. During Bill’s last 3 years at Capital One, he led its Co-Brand and Private Label credit card business, building the business nearly from scratch to one of the top few players in the US market, through a series of acquisitions, most notably including leading the acquisition and post-merger integration of HSBC’s US credit card business, which closed in May 2012.

Bill graduated with a BA in economics from the University of Michigan, and competed the SEP program at Stanford GSB.

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Jordan Glazier is the founder and CEO of Wildfire Systems, the leading enterprise platform for white label rewards programs. Wildfire enables its financial service, telecom, and technology clients to drive retention, revenue, and customer acquisition via online shopping companions that deliver cashback rewards, digital coupons and other benefits throughout a user’s shopping journey.

He began his career as a consultant with the Boston Consulting Group, after which he joined GATX Corporation where he ran international business development and built a new multinational BU which provides multi-modal transportation and logistics services. Then, Jordan was an early executive at eBay, where he built several of eBay’s largest business units from the ground up, including marketplaces for consumer electronics, computers and industrial equipment. After eBay, Jordan turned his focus to building early stage startups. He was COO of Client Shop, a marketing services platform for the financial services industry (acquired by Internet Brands). Jordan then joined Eventful, Inc., which he built into the world’s largest discovery platform for local events & entertainment (acquired by CBS).
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About Wildfire Systems, Inc.
Wildfire Systems provides an enterprise platform which enables clients to embed social commerce, cashback rewards, digital coupons, and shopping companions within their existing services. Wildfire's patented suite of technologies rewards online shopping and harnesses digital word-of-mouth, delivering enhanced user experiences, consumer loyalty, and new revenue streams for clients. Wildfire drives incremental revenue for over 50,000 online merchant programs in over 50 countries. The company is based in San Diego and was founded in 2017. For more information, visit wildfire-corp.com.  

Full Transcript

Bill Cilluffo:

You're listening to the Fintech Thought Leaders podcast from QED Investors, your deep dive into the world of venture capital and financial services with today's digital disruptors. QED is a global venture capital firm focused on investing in fintech companies all the way from pre-seed to IPO. Fintech Thought Leaders brings together the most talented entrepreneurs tackling today's biggest problems. If you're looking to learn more about what motivates our founders and team members to succeed, you're in the right place.

Hello and welcome to the Fintech Thought Leaders podcast. I'm Bill Cilluffo, the head of Early Stage Investments at QED Investors. Today on the podcast, I'm excited to be joined by Wildfire CEO, Jordan Glazier. Jordan, welcome to the podcast.

Jordan Glazier:

Thank you, Bill. Looking forward to chatting with you.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah, it's great to have you. Look, there's a lot of different threads I'd love to pull on today and a lot of different things I'd love to discuss, but before we get started, I wonder if you can just give listeners kind of the elevator pitch on Wildfire and what it is that you guys do.

Jordan Glazier:

Sure. We're based in San Diego. About five years old. We are a white label rewards and loyalty platform. So if you think Honey or Capital One Shopping or Rakuten, the services that provide consumers with shopping rewards for online shopping, we do that as a white label for other partners who want to deploy the same services for their users.

Bill Cilluffo:

That's awesome. That's awesome. And roughly how many clients do you guys have up and running?

Jordan Glazier:

Several dozens at this point.

Bill Cilluffo:

That's awesome. That's awesome. It's a great feature. I know my wife is completely addicted. So it's definitely an awesome feature for consumers to save a bunch of money without having to do a whole lot of new effort, so it's a great service.

Jordan Glazier:

Well, send her my thanks.

Bill Cilluffo:

I will do that. I will do that. So look, the thread I'd love to start with, and pun was intended there, is about your parents and grandparents who I understand are longtime successful entrepreneurs. I wonder if you can tell a little bit of that story with them being in the clothing wholesaler business, dating all the way back to the early 1900s.

Jordan Glazier:

Yeah, I mean, I grew up in an entrepreneurial family. Didn't know anything other than that. My grandfather was actually... This is my father's father, was a baseball player. He played for the White Sox farm team, and we're talking the 1900s.

Bill Cilluffo:

That's awesome.

Jordan Glazier:

When he proposed to my grandmother, Lottie, she said, "I'll marry you, but I won't marry a baseball player." So he left baseball and they started a women's clothing manufacturing business, and we're talking in the early 1900s, that ended up thriving, employing the entire extended family throughout the Depression, and being carried on by my father and his two brothers all the way into the mid to late '80s.

Bill Cilluffo:

That's awesome. Did you ever spend any time working for the family business when you were younger?

Jordan Glazier:

Yeah, that was my first paycheck. I mean, I would clock in on weekends and school holidays even in middle school. I think that child labor laws were ignored back then. Whether it was stock boy or learning the ropes or taking inventory, they had a whole city block in the West Loop in Chicago.

Bill Cilluffo:

Wow.

Jordan Glazier:

A city block, six story. One of those buildings that's now fancy loft apartments, but back in the day, it was the Glazier Corporation headquarters. It was kind of cool as a kid running around this massive building, 600, 700 employees, entire floors full of fabric cutting tables. Kind of knowing that this is the family business, there was a lot of pride and entrepreneurship that I didn't even realize was happening at the time. For me, it was really cool that this was my dad's.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah, no doubt. What was the most memorable job that you wound up doing for the business?

Jordan Glazier:

Well, I loved being the elevator operator. Yeah. They had the freight elevators with the pull up and down doors and things like that, and with the handle that you cranked back and forth. It was really fun just riding up and down that at an age that was way too young to be playing with heavy machinery.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah, that's awesome. My mom started a Christmas ornament business. Probably ran it for seven or eight years and then sold it to my aunt. She tried to buy a Christmas present for my dad for college and couldn't find one and decided to start one. And then I think toward the end, licensing became a thing and there was a bunch more. But I remember sitting there for hours on a shrink wrap machine, shrink wrapping these plastic things over Christmas bulbs and kind of working with my cousins and child labor laws. Maybe they don't even apply when you're working for family, but-

Jordan Glazier:

Right. Well, I'll tell you though, it was really interesting seeing the... It's almost like one of those movies where you see time pass, but through little vignettes. I'm older than I care to admit at this point, but seeing through the '70s and '80s, the different evolutions of the business. I remember when they got their first computer and they had the computer room. It looked like the WOPR from WarGames. I mean, it was the size of a room and a separate air-conditioned room just to have a computer to handle whatever they were using a computer. And they had to hire a guy who knew how to use a computer to do the computer stuff. I remember when... This will predate all of us. They got WATS lines.

Bill Cilluffo:

I don't even know that I know what that is.

Jordan Glazier:

A WATS line was a dedicated long distance phone line. So sitting in Chicago, you had a WATS line to go to each major city, because they were doing telephone sales to all the retailers that they were working with. So they had a team of dozens of salespeople. They had WATS lines.

And then later on, watching when imports started to kick into the business, I remember my dad starting to take his trips over to Hong Kong and the Far East to start buying goods rather than manufacturing them in Chicago and in the States. It was just watching the sort of evolutions that ultimately were the end of the business, but by the mid to late '80s, imports, you weren't cutting and making polyester bathrobes in Chicago anymore.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah, that makes sense. Was there much debate about sort of completely retooling and pivoting? Or did all the family decide it was just kind of time to move on and do the next thing?

Jordan Glazier:

I remember the day that my dad sat me down, my brother and I, and said, "Hey, if you're interested in this business, I'll keep it going for you. But otherwise, I'm..." We were in high school and college at the time, and I was like, "I don't think so." I said it in a much nicer way than that, but... On the day that he sold that building, I remember my dad coming home and sitting me down, saying, "I made more today selling the building than the last 10 years of working six and a half days a week in that building."

Bill Cilluffo:

So they'd owned that building for decades, yeah?

Jordan Glazier:

Yeah, so then he went into real estate and then spent the remainder of his life in commercial real estate.

Bill Cilluffo:

That's wild. That's wild. I mean, it's a bummer of a story and that the core business had evolved so much, but really cool to kind of find the spinoff to it.

Jordan Glazier:

Well, I still go from time to time onto eBay and if you search for Glazier vintage robe or dress, the brand was Rhapsody, you'll find hundreds of listings and it's all paisley and it's very '70s kind of loungewear, polyester activewear. Pretty fun to see that stuff.

Bill Cilluffo:

Now have you coded a special code into the Wildfire algorithm to give an extra discount for Rhapsody brand?

Jordan Glazier:

We should. Or have that pop up as the background.

Bill Cilluffo:

Definitely. That'd be cool. So look, interesting stories about your work experience in Chicago early on. I mean, any other kind of time standing out? I mean, I love Chicago as a city. I grew up in Detroit, so not too far away. What else stands out from growing up in Chicago?

Jordan Glazier:

It truly is a city of big shoulders, which is hardworking, very dedicated business-minded population. I came out of college, I was with Boston Consulting Group out of Michigan. I see your shirt. Which was a spectacular way to start my career. Ended up spending seven years with BCG. But out of Chicago, that meant a lot of industrial projects and some financial services as well, insurance and banking. But the going down to the Loop every day in a suit. Do you remember the days when we used to wear nice shoes, and if it was raining, you had the black plastic rubbers that you'd pull over your shoe to take the train when you're taking the train and walking the last few blocks?

Bill Cilluffo:

My dad still wears those.

Jordan Glazier:

Yeah, there you go. So that was my early career was in a suit and tie in Downtown Chicago in consulting.

Bill Cilluffo:

That's cool. So you've got to have a favorite pizza place.

Jordan Glazier:

I was a Renaldi's fan, personally, partly because I lived in... My bachelor pad was above Renaldi's in Lincoln Park. So that was always fun.

Bill Cilluffo:

Nice. I'm partial to Gino's. The whole disc of sausage that you get on top of the pizza, I'm a little bit biased to that one. My wife thinks it's disgusting, so she never lets us go and we always wind up at Giordano's. But-

Jordan Glazier:

There you go.

Bill Cilluffo:

... everyone's got their favorite pizza place. So that's cool. So you mentioned earlier that you had a chance to go to the greatest university on the planet. How did you come to decide to go to Ann Arbor?

Jordan Glazier:

I followed my brother's footsteps there. He was five years older than me, so I visited while I was going through high school. It was a natural. It was far enough away, but close enough. Fantastic school, the exact right size. I hope none of my high school teachers are listening to this. Probably not. But I literally don't remember ever studying or working very hard in high school, and I had an intellectual awakening at Michigan. I closed the library five nights a week for like three years there.

Bill Cilluffo:

Wow, that's impressive.

Jordan Glazier:

I just loved it. I loved learning. The teachers were great. I still had a ton of fun. But however they were doing it, they were doing it right, because I had a love for learning by the time I got there.

Bill Cilluffo:

That's awesome. Yeah, I was probably in a similar camp in high school, and I also was in a similar camp freshman year in college, and that's when I learned that studying and work ethic were important, because it didn't go so well. It got a lot better after that. But what's kind of a fun story from your time in Ann Arbor?

Jordan Glazier:

It would be hard to pick. I was a big Steve's Lunch fan. Remember the Korean diner? I was in a fraternity. It was Sammy, which I don't think is on campus anymore for having too much of the wrong kind of fun. I spent a semester in London at London School of Economics while I was there, which was a real highlight. I know that's not an Ann Arbor story, but that was part of that era of my education. I loved Michigan.

Bill Cilluffo:

Did you storm South U when they won the national title in hoops?

Jordan Glazier:

I was in Venice-

Bill Cilluffo:

Wow.

Jordan Glazier:

... while I was studying abroad. So I was in Venice listening on... I don't know if it was a transistor radio or something like that. I literally was up in the middle of the night, listening, and literally started running through the empty nighttime streets of Venice when that happened.

Bill Cilluffo:

So you stormed the streets of Venice. I love it.

Jordan Glazier:

I stormed the streets of Venice when we won the NCAA basketball championship.

Bill Cilluffo:

That's awesome. Well, I was a couple years behind you, so I was in the class of the Fab Five. So hoops was also a big deal for us. But sadly, I was in person to watch Chris Webber call timeout and not quite win the national title. I was a big fan my whole life, so I was already rooting for him even though it was a year or two before my time. But it was great.

So hey, moving back to your folks' business, I mean, having grown up in it, having worked in it, having seen it, was it inevitable that you were going to become an entrepreneur? I know you started at BCG, but was that always kind of what you thought you'd want to do, or is that not really part of the plan, you just kind of came upon it later?

Jordan Glazier:

I think it was inevitable, and I took a path of... It's easy to describe these things in hindsight, Bill, but I actually laid it out ahead of... Which is I wanted to, frankly, learn on other people's dime. So going into consulting, what a great way to learn business. After that, I ran international for a company called GATX, also out of Chicago. After that, I was at eBay for four or five years. Again, learning digital.

Tucked in the back of my mind all along was that ultimately, I wanted to own and run my own business. That was bred into me from my early childhood was being your own boss. Building something that doesn't exist, that's what I find the most enjoyment out of.

Bill Cilluffo:

No, that's really cool. You've had the chance to be at some really interesting places. I mean, BCG, you talked about GATX, I mean, some time sort of with eBay. Is it a thing where you can look back now and say, hey, each one of those jobs, you took something in particular away? Or is it more just kind of the blended experience, that it's a little hard to point to individual things? I mean, I get some pretty different answers from people on that of how crystal clear kind of those lessons wind up being. I'd love your take.

Jordan Glazier:

I think I'm in the former camp. I look at each one of those experiences and I can point to very specific styles, styles of communication, styles of management, styles of leadership, that I learned to either want to follow or not follow at each of those steps along the way. BCG really gives you the muscle memory from a strategic perspective of in the consulting environment, you're stepping into a new industry or company or situation and having to learn it fast enough to within a short period of time, become expert enough to figure out a strategy and next steps. That muscle memory is fantastic. But what I took away from that was in a consulting environment, strategy is a hundred percent of what you're doing, and in building a business, it's much more, I think, at like 95, 5, where 5% is strategy and 95% is execution.

So I really honed that 5% in my time at BCG. And the GATX experience was really interesting. I had a fantastic mentor. My boss was the general counsel. Fantastic guy still. I watched how he navigated the room and meetings. BCG was very sterile in a lot of ways. It was very just the facts man, and he really showed me the art of building relationships and building trust among the people that you're working with. I just loved the way he ran a meeting, frankly. I still think about it. When I'm doing it today, I'm meeting people for the first time, I'm having an out of body experience sometimes, like flashback, remembering how he did it. It was pretty interesting.

eBay was just a spectacular experience all around. It was learning digital, learning eCommerce. I moved from Chicago to Northern Cal for eBay, and was surrounded by the best and brightest young digital minds at the time. It was a time when eBay was at the top of the heap in terms of everything digital. This was 2000 through 2004, when a lot of other companies were struggling, eBay was thriving. It was a real standout in a good way. So it was a great place to learn about marketplaces and eCommerce and digital and all the things that matter for my business today.

Bill Cilluffo:

No, that's great. We're going to jump in a minute into Wildfire, but all of those stops, you painted to something that you're able to take away from it that helped prepare you for what you're doing. Looking back on your time at Wildfire, what's one thing you were totally unprepared for that you've kind of had to learn the hard way on the job?

Jordan Glazier:

The industries that are our largest partners and opportunity are telecom and financial services, which were industries that I did not know. I was coming in cold. And the business before this was a company called Eventful, which I was CEO of for about eight years, and was acquired by CBS.

Stepped into that business, I was hired in as CEO and before I knew it, realized I was in the music and film industry, which were industries I didn't know. And five, six, seven years into it, I would still describe myself as an outsider looking in until a close friend of mine, Dean, basically said, "No, dude, you are as much of an insider to this industry as we are." It just takes time. There's sort of that imposter syndrome going on of stepping into a new industry and feeling like you don't know what you're doing. So I think that with Wildfire, I would not have foreseen five years ago that we would be as involved in particularly the financial services industry and banking and card issuers in particular as we are.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah, that makes sense, especially with your big competitors basically being Capital One and PayPal, right?

Jordan Glazier:

Yes, exactly.

Bill Cilluffo:

At some level. So I'd love to go to the starting point of Wildfire. I'm always fascinated by hearing the inception story. Why did you start this business? What was the kind of catalyst for causing you to think about it?

Jordan Glazier:

Sure. It's going to sound like a BCG treatise. You'll see how my brain works. Sorry for that.

Every business can be looked at from a supply and demand perspective, even yours. And in our case, Wildfire is, for me, sort of the culmination of all the pattern recognition I've had throughout my career.

When you think about it from a supply perspective, when I was at Eventful, we had a patchwork quilt of revenue streams, which added up to a nice business. But my favorite among them was affiliate, because we had direct partnerships with the ticketing companies, like Ticketmaster and StubHub and others. We had tens of millions of users who would come to Eventful every month to answer the question, "Honey, what do you want to do this weekend?" and then they would click through to the ticketers. And every month, we were sending millions of people into the ticket purchase flow, and every month, we were getting massive checks from the ticketing companies while we were sleeping. It was once you had it set up and you ran it through affiliate, it was a fully automatic, highly scalable revenue stream on the supply side. So as I stepped away from Eventful, I thought, "What business can I build that efficiently taps into the affiliate industry, but not just for ticking, for everything?"

And another thread, particularly the origin story around Wildfire, is building an audience and driving demand is incredibly hard. So one of the most scalable ways to do that is by tapping into word of mouth. So the very first incarnation of Wildfire was around tapping into word of mouth recommendations and then pumping that through the affiliate to monetize. When Bill says, "Hey Jordan, I'm coming to San Diego to visit you. Where should I stay?" and I said, "You should stay at the L'Auberge Del Mar. You'll love it." We've built a suite of technologies. We actually have seven patents around technologies that are able to detect product mentions and purchase intent within messages and other ways and shared links and things like that, and then turn those into trackable referral links through affiliate to monetize, whether you're typing... Embedded within your digital keyboard or embedded within your messaging apps. Really interesting suite of technologies all around monetizing word of mouth recommendations.

Bill Cilluffo:

So do you also have kind of the voice? I know when I'm having a conversation with my buddies, all of a sudden it's the next Instagram ad that I see on my phone is what we were talking about. Does that that play a role too?

Jordan Glazier:

The sort of farther out product roadmap, which we ended up getting patents around but didn't end up fully building out, were things like voice, like what you just said. And also when people post photos, we have technology that's able to discern whether there's a product within that photo and then turn that into a clickable link to commerce and earn a share of any resulting purchases. So yeah, we were thinking about all the different ways to monetize these peer-to-peer recommendations. And at the same time, while we were on that journey, that's when Honey rose to the surface and when Capital One started kind of launched Capital One Shopping. What we found is that the platform that we built for word of mouth recommendations was perfectly suited for powering rewards programs.

One of the things I think is most essential for an entrepreneur, and because you see it a lot more than I do, frankly, there's the ones that succeed and the ones that don't. I think if you draw a line through the ones that succeed, it's the ones who can evolve the business to actually meet the needs to the best product-market fit, as opposed to being dogmatic about, "This is the business I built. I'm going to keep building it until it hits a brick wall." We evolved multiple times, and that ultimate evolution that we saw was powering rewards and loyalty programs. That turn on the evolution happened three, four years ago, and we've really been focused on that ever since.

Bill Cilluffo:

That's fantastic. So in that process of both building the initial idea, and pivot might be overstated, but finding a different use case for what you had built, I would imagine going back, there was a number of fork in the roads, like 50-50 decisions you weren't sure of and it turns out you made the right decision that got you in the right place. There's probably some that you made the wrong decision too and had to backtrack. But can you talk to the listeners a little bit about were there any major sort of these forks in the road that were really challenging decisions? You look back, you got it right, it kind of set you on the right path, but was nowhere near obvious at the time.

Jordan Glazier:

I don't actually see them as difficult decisions. Maybe it's because I'm opportunistic in that respect. And it's not just with this business. When I look at even eBay, when I started at eBay, it was like 99% collectibles. Actually, it was Pierre Omidyar had built it to supposedly help his wife trade Pez dispensers and Beanie Babies or whatever it was. My job at eBay was, "Hey Jordan, we think this might work for other stuff. Can you help see if we can build some businesses around that?" And four years later, I had built eBay's computers, consumer electronics, video games, business industrial categories that combined were driving billions of dollars in GMV and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

Bill Cilluffo:

Hopefully vintage clothing was part of that.

Jordan Glazier:

No, that was a different group. But I was kind of driving what we called consumer practicals. But none of that existed. It was all these businesses, whether it was selling cars or metalworking machinery, were built on the same platform that Pierre built to sell Pez dispensers.

And then fast forward a couple stops to Eventful, again we had an event directory of here's everything that's happening near you. We weren't sure what would take. It could have been book signings and community theater. It was and it ended up being the concert and film industries that glommed onto it. Again, same platform, but just found the right use for it.

So coming back to your question, it wasn't a difficult or there was no moment where we had to let go of anything. We built a great platform and then found its highest use.

Bill Cilluffo:

That's great. As you started to go down this path, I mean, you're very much in the enterprise sales business, which is not always very easy, right? Especially getting the first person to jump or the first couple people to jump. So a lot of times the first few clients wind up feeling very different than once you've started to get... Can you talk us through those days of how were you able to land one of your first couple clients or how difficult was that? I know that getting that flywheel going is oftentimes the hardest part.

Jordan Glazier:

It relies on having the right team that has experience, particularly in enterprise sales, and, frankly, the right investors around the table that have a patience for that. Because some of our biggest partners that we have today, some of them that have launched, and ones that are about to launch, from the first conversation to the first penny that you make can be two or three years. So what that takes is not just patience, or insanity, but perseverance.

Bill Cilluffo:

All of this requires a little bit of insanity.

Jordan Glazier:

Yeah, patience and insanity. But also optimism and perseverance and a portfolio approach to making sure that you've got a bunch of those. And when I say portfolio approach, we work with some of the largest companies on the planet, and we also have dozens of itty-bitty startups that are seed funded venture businesses that we're powering as well, and everything in between. And each of those move at different paces in terms of launch. Each of them, we have a different set of expectations around what their growth opportunity is and what the pace will be.

So I think it's about having the right team, which we do. We've got the best team I've ever worked with. Spectacular group of people. I owe all of our success to our team. And then having that portfolio approach and the determination to keep going.

We work with banks a lot. They work at what they call bank speed. It's a real thing. And I don't say that negatively. They're in highly regulated industries. They have their own checks and balances, and that's a good thing in the end. So we take it in stride and make sure that we're working at their speed. We help speed them along. Don't get me wrong. Our project managers end up oftentimes driving the agenda, driving the pace. The right partners for us are the ones that appreciate us pulling them through that process.

Bill Cilluffo:

That makes sense. Was there a moment when you kind of knew that this was going to work? I mean, it sounds like you had a fair amount of conviction going in. You had a lot of experience in a somewhat similar space. But you just never really know until it actually works. Was there kind of an obvious moment when you said, "Yes, this thing works."?

Jordan Glazier:

Sorry to keep going back to my eBay days, but my staff meetings at eBay, I had about too many direct reports. There were like 15 or 20 direct reports. We'd get around... We had a massive conference room right behind my desk. Our weekly meeting was pulling out the numbers and just looking at the data warehouse data on the business. While we were off kind of building for the longer haul, the business was just organically growing right before our very eyes. A hundred X month-over-month growth. You just saw these massive growth numbers, and I'm a bit of a data junkie, so we dig into figure out what's working, what's not, and where we need to put more wood behind the arrow and things like that.

But fast forward a bunch of years, a couple years ago is when I started seeing just the numbers. I checked my daily dashboard. I've got the dashboard on my other screen. Real-time data of all of our transactions across all of our partners, across all the merchants that we work with were very data heavy. And when I saw that thing sort of start taking a life of its own, I knew that we had made it. We had crossed the chasm from... We've made it to the gauntlet to the other side and now this is just a matter of not if, but how big.

Bill Cilluffo:

That's awesome. I assume... Again, I'm not intimately familiar with all the details of Wildfire. Sometimes these big clients take years to sign. Obviously, you've got some smaller ones that are probably quicker. I assume they also have the characteristic of once you sign, there's a launch period. Once you launch, there's probably a pretty long ramp up in terms of usage. So you've probably got a same source sales concept that continues to grow over time, which can be frustrating in the early days because it takes a long time for revenue to show up. It's wonderful once you've gotten there, because your new sales are going to drive things, but existing sales also drive a fair amount of growth, I would assume in the characteristic of your business. And at some level, it's B2B2C, right? You ultimately need consumers to do things, and so any of your partners, it probably takes them a while to figure out the right programs to get it launched to reach these consumers.

So while it takes a while for revenue and the use of the program to ramp, it's also got the characteristic that once you have these clients, you get an ongoing kind of revenue ramp up. I would speculate you're in a really nice part of the cycle where all of that hard work for getting these clients not just pays off because you get a new contract, but you get continued growth once you really get these programs launched.

Jordan Glazier:

Yeah, you're dead on. Partnerships take on a life of their own. Consumers love the offering. It's very sticky. The engagement levels are through the roof. Nothing says I love you like free money. So when you are a bank and you're able to give your customers an extra $50, $100, $200, $500 a year in cash just for using this free service that they've extended to you, people don't turn that off. So it really becomes an annuity-like revenue stream for the consumer. Annuity-like benefit for the consumer. They just keep using it. That drives an annuity-like revenue stream for our partners and our white label clients. And then for us, it's an annuity-like revenue stream for us as well. We build those relationships, we've deployed these programs for them. We've never had a partner choose to leave. They continue, to the contrary, expand us out to larger and larger sets of their audiences across additional surfaces through which they touch them.

Bill Cilluffo:

Wonderful. So what's next? If you pick out sort of one or two of the big initiatives that you and your team are chasing, what comes next for Wildfire?

Jordan Glazier:

We're seeing a lot of international growth right now, both in terms of existing partners who are pulling us into international markets, as well as new partners in international markets who want to deploy our services. So we've now got feet on the ground in a couple countries outside the U.S., and I'd say, a dozen partners that are likely to light up between now and the end of the year in international markets.

So I and the team have been having a lot of fun making sure that we're properly situated from an FX fee and fluctuation perspective. That's important because these are... Well, it's a very simple offering. The funds flows can be complex from a timing perspective, and we want to make sure that we're getting that right.

Frankly, a lot of the points that we have on the board right now are from same store sales of existing partners that the new partners that we have been inking over the last year, year and a half are just getting ready to launch. We're expecting another inflection point in the growth of the business as those hit the airwaves.

I believe in a small team. We've got a small mighty team. I'd rather have a tighter team that's a high performance team rather than just throwing bodies at issues. So we're just about 50 people right now, but we punch above our weight in terms of the partners that we work with and the services we deliver. That said, everyone's working really hard right now, so we're going to continue to hire and make sure that we've got the right size team to support our partners and make sure that our team has a semblance of work-life balance.

Bill Cilluffo:

So speaking of the team, I'd love to pivot our conversation a little bit to kind of team and leadership. I mean, obviously, the team means a tremendous amount to you and it's clear you put a ton of effort into it. We had the good fortune of speaking to a couple of the members of your team, and so I'd love to dive into a little bit of kind of culture and leadership and how you think about that pretty broadly applicable regardless of business.

We had a chance to speak to Erica, your senior director of marketing, and she talked a little bit about Wildfire's four core principles. Kind of your values statement, being flexible, being creative, collaborative taking initiative. Many good companies kind of lay out their values. They're all different, but they can all work for the individual company. I mean, how did you come up with yours? Why do you think that works for you? And any kind of generalizable lessons to companies that are really thinking about clarifying their values or culture statements.

Jordan Glazier:

When I say we're punching above our weight, we're building a business that's built to last. So we very intentionally don't want to... We're fast and agile. We think in days and weeks. But at the same time, we're building a business, the systems and processes. Part of that is performance management, which is important. And when we started to get serious about performance management, about let's say a year, year and a half ago, you've got different teams. You've got product team, you've got an engineering team, you've got marketing, you've got BD. Everyone has different KPIs, or whatever template you use.

What forced us to articulate our value system was frankly, making sure that we could create a common denominator across all the different teams on which to measure performance and motivate the team. So it wasn't, "Did you do these 10, 15, 30 things that you needed to do this week?" it ended up being, "What are the characteristics that you need to be exhibiting?" So when you think about it, you have to be flexible. In any environment, you need to be flexible, but particularly in a startup environment. It's another word for saying perseverance and grit. You need to come to a situation with an open mind to find the right answer, not a dogma around how it should be done.

When you think about taking initiative, I never want to have to push someone forward. If I'm having to push someone forward, it's the wrong hire for me and my leadership style. I would much rather have to hold someone back. So that means self-driven, autonomous, people who love to fill vacuums. If they see a problem, they'll solve it until they'll tell otherwise.

Creativity is a third one. Which is if you're having fun in work, it means you're building stuff that's never been done before. That takes a creative mind and spirit.

And ultimately, collaborative is our fourth one, which is no tools allowed. To have a high performance organization, this is people who love working together. We never blame. A no blame environment. You always make new mistakes. We do debriefs, readouts on anytime something messes up, which it does, inevitably. We actually look at it very closely without blame to look at patterns to make sure that we learn from it. There's a pretty formal process around... And not for every little itty-bitty thing, but anything of consequence, we do a formal readout, debrief on, so that we don't repeat the same issues and we make sure that our systems and processes are optimized.

So anyway, that was a long answer, but that's an important part of the business is being flexible, creative, taking initiative and working collaboratively. And if you keep that as the true north of how you hire and manage people, then good things happen.

Bill Cilluffo:

So it sounds like quite a comprehensive framework, and you could tell your passion for those elements. Was there a fifth element that you debated that you said, "Nope, these things encompass what we need."? I mean, there's always a trade-off between comprehensiveness and simplicity and really honing in. Was it hard to kind of limit it to four, or did it come pretty naturally?

Jordan Glazier:

We had six. And then when we took it through the performance management process the first time around, managers were finding a little too much overlap between some of them to... They weren't really clear on how to grade amongst them, so we condensed it down to those four. And each one of them has a couple of very descriptive sentences beneath them that describe what we mean by it, and so we were able to condense it to four. Less is more in that respect.

Bill Cilluffo:

I like the learning and evolving. I mean, sometimes people do fear that, hey, these have to be perfect because they have to be enduring. 20 years from now, it needs to be the same thing. I think if every five months you change the list, it doesn't work. But things change, things evolve, people learn. These things probably aren't great to be static, because probably whatever's going to be best 15 years from now may not be the perfect thing now. So I like that you're willing to kind of do some testing and learning along the way.

Jordan Glazier:

Right. Well, and frankly, we don't have a mercenary culture, but we definitely want to make sure that we have all the right people in the right jobs at the right time. So when I look at these four things, flexibility, initiative, creativity, and collaboration, they're kind of all four must-haves. And someone who has three of those four isn't the right fit. If you have flexibility and initiative and creativity, but you're not collaborative, you're in the wrong place. Missing any one of those means that you're not in the right place.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah. So if you can get that down to where everyone is truly essential, I think that's a great place to be.

So we also had a conversation with Sean, your CRO, who talked a little bit about the element that many of you have worked together, either continuously or in past lives or whatever, and talked about some of the value of really these enduring relationships. I think he used the analogy of being able to throw a no look pass in basketball, which never works. If you're brand new to working with someone, you need hours and hours of reps and need to know each other. I mean, how do you think about that and kind of recruiting folks that you've all loved working together in past lives and bringing people together in a new context? Presumably also with some new people that y'all worked together with. Can you talk about that aspect? And I assume that was a pretty conscious choice as you built the company.

Jordan Glazier:

That was a very conscious choice, and Sean's exactly right. He continues to be a spectacular partner in growing the business. We get along perfectly, but we're very different people and we challenge each other, and I love that about him and the whole team.

When I was first envisioning this business, I made two phone calls. It was to the guy who's now our CTO and the guy who has our head of product. This was really, from the start, getting the band back together moment, and I had them at hello. They were excited to come. They had both gone off to do fascinating things. Danny was CTO at a healthcare business here in town. Ian was running product for GoPro San Diego office. Really, they had gone to do interesting things, but they were willing to roll the dice and come back into this business.

And then as we grew from three to four to five, it was all through people we knew. We brought in Tristan, who was our CMO. When I said, "Who's the best enterprise marketing people we know in town?" they're like, "Don't you know Tristan?" And I'm like, "No." And they had all worked together at MP3.com. San Diego does not have a huge tech repository, and MP3 was one of the early tech companies here, so a lot of the great people started their tech careers there.

And then when it was time to do enterprise sales, and I said, "Who do we know in town who knows telecom enterprise sales?" they said, "Don't you know Sean?" Because they had all worked together. And then as we've hired beyond that, now we're at 50, we always start by looking at who are the best people we know and trust.

Now, you can't always hire people that you know. That runs out of steam quickly, especially if you want to keep a really high bar, which we do. Therein lies the challenge of bringing new people in to a very highly integrated, very trusting, high performance, fast-paced, collaborative environment. And we've been able to do that completely remote. I know it sounds like an impossible combination, but we've built a highly successful remote environment with sort of a nucleus of people that we've all worked with in the past, and as we add people, make a very concerted effort to embrace them into the company culture.

Bill Cilluffo:

Were you always remote, or did you change during COVID?

Jordan Glazier:

The latter. We actually were in an office, but we were switching offices mid-March. March 15th, 2020, our old sublease ended and a new one was going to start. So we were all boxed up, literally, and then locked down. That building got locked down, so we just grabbed our boxes and then we just never moved into the new building, and so we were without no rent payments from there on out.

Bill Cilluffo:

So that timing worked out quite-

Jordan Glazier:

Perfect timing.

Bill Cilluffo:

... in your favor.

Jordan Glazier:

Yeah, yeah, it sure did. Perfect timing.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah. But I can absolutely relate to this concept of you've got a bunch of people that have worked together for years, but it's also important to integrate new folks. I mean, this is something that QED thinks about all the time. Heavy roots in Capital One, and a number of us spent a long time there and working together in a common culture. But I also believe that some of the strength that we have is bringing in new people with different experiences and different ideas and different backgrounds. And the core of the commonality is super helpful, but sometimes that leads to being really hard to bring new people in. I think the ability to do both is really important. And I can't promise that we've got it perfect, but we certainly spend a lot of time thinking about that very topic.

Jordan Glazier:

When we bring in new people, depending on their role and so forth and timing, we try to get them out to San Diego. The other person on our exec staff is a woman named Michelle. Her first week of work was an exec offsite that had already been scheduled. The timing was... We intentionally said, "Let that be your first week so you can come out and meet the team."

The management team, we get together in person every five or six weeks for a full day. The day after that is an in-person here in San Diego for anyone who either cares to fly in or is in driving distance, which reaches all the way up to LA.

And then we do... Our engineering team just rented this massive... I don't even know how they found it. It was an Airbnb with like 20 bedrooms. It was like-

Bill Cilluffo:

Wow.

Jordan Glazier:

... an apartment complex that was on Airbnb. So they all did an offsite in Zion. At first when I heard about it, it was, "Wait, Danny, you're going to take the whole engineering team offline for a week just to hang out?" And he's like, "No, no, we're going to do a hackathon." First of all, a great bonding experience, but actually incredibly productive creative time outside of their normal work rhythms. We're about to do our second annual all-company offsite. We go to a dude ranch in Arizona.

Bill Cilluffo:

Nice, nice.

Jordan Glazier:

And there's no work performed, unless you call team penning and horseback riding and archery and karaoke... I mean, that's the work at hand.

Bill Cilluffo:

What's your specialty song in karaoke?

Jordan Glazier:

I always fall back on Neil Diamond.

Bill Cilluffo:

Sweet Caroline? Something else?

Jordan Glazier:

That's always a good one.

Bill Cilluffo:

I mean, you can't grow up in Chicago and be a Red Sox fan, can you?

Jordan Glazier:

No. No, you can't. But I actually, just the other day, was listening to some of my favorite playlists and thinking about mixing it up and doing perhaps a little Eddie Vedder or something like that. We'll see.

Bill Cilluffo:

My most memorable time was with a few friends at a bar singing We Are the World song, and-

Jordan Glazier:

I love that one.

Bill Cilluffo:

... we wound up getting free pitchers of beer from the bartender after. Which I remember as being so good. It kept the audience captivated. My wife remembers as their bribe to get us off stage, stop singing. So we'll leave it up to the imagination on which one was actually true.

Well, look, this has been an absolutely awesome time. I know we have a couple other topics that I would've loved to get into. We're running short on time. I would love to end though at... I kind of end most of these with the same thing. We've got a bunch of aspiring entrepreneurs hopefully will be listening to this. What's one piece of advice you would give to an aspiring young entrepreneur thinking of starting their first company?

Jordan Glazier:

I don't mean this as self-serving for QED. If you're thinking about doing a venture-backed business, pick really carefully, to the extent that you can, on who you allow at the table. What we were talking about earlier was how this business has evolved.

The right investors, in my mind, are those which are clear that they're investing in a team and not a specific business or idea, particularly early stage. I can't tell you how many seed investors would look at our PowerPoint and judge whether or not they liked the specific business. The ones who got it right, we've got great seed investors, Mucker and Bonfire included, who look not at the business, but at the team, and realized, "Okay, these guys are going to..." Failure's not an option. They sensed in us that failure is not an option. That we were going to move and groove and evolve until we found and built the right business, and didn't overly judge the specific incarnation of what we were pushing on at the time. So for new entrepreneurs who are thinking about raising money, you want to find investors who won't just have a tolerance for that, but actually embrace it and can help you navigate those waters.

Bill Cilluffo:

That's great advice. I mean, Nigel jokes that in QED's 15 years, I don't know, we've invested in 200 companies, something like that. There's maybe two ever that have been kind of a linear up to the right story, right? Almost then even some of the best ones found this thing didn't work and that door was there and this was working. Oh my God, I found some new thing that's even better than what I was doing. I mean, you talked about that exact path for you. So that's great advice. And again, some various investors all have various different ways of going about it. But we at QED are extremely thrilled to be partnering with you and thanks for all your great efforts so far. And I'm positive there is fantastic things to come for you and the team.

Jordan Glazier:

Thank you. Your team has been fantastic across the board. Laura, as you know, we work with, is just... She's one of my first phone calls whenever I have a question. That's always the best test is like, "Who are you calling when you've got a question?"

Bill Cilluffo:

And we are all very proud of her being a nice Princeton grad with Princeton making the Sweet 16.

Jordan Glazier:

Yeah, there you go.

Bill Cilluffo:

That was a really cool thing and almost got past that. But anyways, Jordan, thank you so much for spending the time today. It was really great getting to hear some of your stories, and really appreciate everything. And to all you listeners out there, we really appreciate your time as well. Until next time, take care.

Jordan Glazier:

Thank you, Bill.

Bill Cilluffo:

All right, thanks a lot, Jordan.

This has been the Fintech Thought Leaders podcast, your window into the world of venture capital and financial services with today's digital disruptors. QED is proud to provide the best fintech advice you can get. To learn more or to read the full show notes from today's episode, check out qedinvestors.com, and be sure to also follow QED on Twitter and LinkedIn, @QEDInvestors. Thanks for listening.

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