Let’s start with a brief intro about you:

I’ve worked in the payments, fintech and gift card industries for over 25 years.  I started my career as a website programmer with Billing Concepts.  I was fortunate enough to have my father, a technology executive at USAA, introduce me to the CIO of Billing Concepts, Michael Long, who took a chance on me as a young, unexperienced, and not formally trained, ambitious young man.  I was, however, creative, hardworking, and entrepreneurial.  Within six months of starting at Billing Concepts, I donated $65 to a United Way fundraiser we were hosting at the company for a “lunch with Butch Holmes,” the CEO at the time.  While Butch assumed I wanted some facetime and a ride in his Ferrari, I had different plans…I had come up with an idea to thrust Billing Concepts into the digital age by providing electronic bill presentment and payment services to the large base of telecom clients the company enjoyed.  After making my presentation over lunch, the open-minded CEO recognized the spark in my eye and merit in my idea; one week later I presented the plan to the board of Billing Concepts and another week later, I was taking off in the company’s private plane to visit Princeton eComm, a small but leading innovator in the industry to hold meetings and conduct due diligence, which led to a multi-million-dollar investment.  When we returned, I was granted some stock options, a pat on the back and sent back to my programming role, but…now I had the bug, and my life would change forever.
A few months later, I joined forces with both Michael Long, who was now working for Anderson Consulting and Louis Hoch, who had been the director of my technology group, but had also moved to Anderson Consulting, and together we devised a plan to start Billserv, literally on the back of a napkin…  This was the late 1990s and venture capital was pouring into anything with a “dot com” in the name and a new perspective on traditional ways of conducting business.  We raised capital quickly and within two years, had signed 60% of the providers who sent utility, telecom, insurance, and loans bills to consumers.  Shortly after, as the newly established leader in our niche, we went public on NASDQ under the symbol “BLLS” and achieved a $750M market cap.  So now I didn’t just have the bug, I was a full-fledged “dot com entrepreneur” with over $70M in “paper wealth” at the age of 26. The experience was a great lesson for me, both resulting from success and failures.  I learned a great deal about getting a startup off the ground and operating a public company but also about the depressing realities of the margin calls I used to finance my lavish lifestyle.