Growing up, I was a terrible student — and I think it’s because I didn’t have room to play, to make mistakes. More on that later.
After college, I cut my teeth at Plug and Play Tech Center, pitching corporate innovation services to CEOs and executives at Fortune 500 companies and convincing them to come to Silicon Valley and invest in startups.
In just a few years, I was promoted to Director of Brand and Retail, where I managed a whole team focused on CPGs. Working closely with leaders at those organizations pulled me to the enterprise, and I jumped head-first into the corporate world at Rakuten.
They’d just founded a startup partnerships division, which perfectly merged my experience and interests. While the role was exciting, talking to founders day in and day out convinced me to make the move to startups. And I loved it.
The chaos, the wearing of multiple hats, the teamwork — it was my cup of tea. The problem? I didn’t know what I wanted to do.
I experimented with market research and supply chain management. But neither was up my alley. I wanted to work in an industry I truly cared about.
One day, I got an inbound message that caught my eye. It was from Ben MacKinnon on AngelList. He was looking for his first sales hire at Kard. Three and a half years later, I’m still on the sales team, and I’m still enjoying the wild ride. Here’s how it’s all gone down.
A startup with a purpose
I hadn’t tried fintech yet, but Kard seemed to be that golden nugget: a really interesting product that was actually doing something good — putting more cash into consumers’ pockets.
Though I’d be taking a huge pay cut at a startup that small, I felt it was worth it to come on board. As one of the first 10 employees, the career equity I’d get working directly with Ben and other leadership was priceless.
Most importantly, Kard seemed to have an outstanding culture, and that mattered to me a great deal.
My last organization wouldn’t let us have virtual backgrounds because they wanted to confirm we were working at our designated WeWork stations. They had absolutely no trust in their employees. Kard touted itself as the opposite. Now, I know it’s 100% true.
At Kard, your boss encourages you to take risks. To do what they know you can do. Turns out, I thrive in a hands-off environment. If I do a great job, it’s because of me and my strategy. If I fail, it’s my responsibility. To me, that’s liberating.
The room to be myself
In previous roles, I had to jump through a lot of hoops and prove myself before leadership was bought into my strategy. At Kard, I was given the trust and space to make things happen pretty early on. I needed that validation, and he gave it to me on day one.
Being myself, I was able to have deep conversations with issuers about their customers, their tech stack, and the processing happening behind the scenes. And that opened my eyes to the major opportunity Kard is sitting on.
See, when you think of banks, you think of these monolithic structures that seem infallible — or at least I did.
But over time, I’ve realized that banks don’t know everything, and they’re always looking for new ways to enhance the customer experience. Much of that is dependent on rewards and data, precisely what Kard offers. If I could talk to them long enough to figure out what they needed to boost loyalty, I knew I could win them over.
Winning with consistency and effort
Most people think the key to success at a startup is obsessing over hiring the perfect people and building the perfect process. But that approach wastes so much time.
So instead of focusing on the “perfect plan” or the “perfect pitch,” I over-indexed on doing my own thing. Doing that over and over revealed where I could fine-tune my angle, my word choice, and my follow-up.
Honing my own approach to partnerships opened many doors — most importantly, to the partners who made Kard’s jump from Seed to Series A possible.
And it’s because Kard’s pushed me to take calculated risks. To be better every day. To do what they know I can do.
Want to feed off of that kind of energy? We’ve got several open roles you might be a fit for. Get after it!
Bonus round: Rituals and obsessions
A Kard ritual I enjoy
The thing about working at a startup is that it’s tough to see the forest through the trees.
Because you’re growing so quickly, it feels like all you’re doing all day is putting out fires — sometimes fires you’ve created. That can be disheartening, but it’s really your job to break stuff, to disrupt.
At Kard, we help pull each other out of that loop with our quarterly offsites. These gatherings give us a chance to come up for air, connect in person, and measure everyone’s success. It’s staggering to see how much we’ve accomplished without even really noticing.
What I’m obsessed with
Biohacking. I love my Whoop strap. For the past five years, I’ve documented every workout and recovery and tracked how my diet has had an impact. Seeing all that data plotted out is super interesting, especially when you work at an API company where data is central to your day to day.
I also love to laugh and love to make people laugh, so standup comedy shows are a blast. I’d go so far as to say that standup is the last true art form. Comedians really have the freedom to say whatever they want to.
