What were you doing previously and what inspired you to launch your company?

I’ve been in the enterprise cybersecurity and compliance world for almost 20 years. I spent 15 years in corporate, then decided to set up my own successful firm. I realized the hard way that people don’t like paying for consulting but that an assessment was critical to becoming compliant and secure! My (personal) mission is to secure cyberspace one human at a time, so what better way than to simplify compliance assessments — making them super scalable and so easy my mother-in-law could do it! (sorry Mom!) Also, growing a business around my family inspires me every day!

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

Regulated enterprises are required to perform and respond to risk assessments internally and assess the risk of their 3rd parties. The smaller guys, i.e. startups, may not focus on compliance until it impacts a sale. The average assessment takes 6 weeks, it is expensive for both parties and highly ineffective. JustProtect facilitates enterprise assessments in less than 2 days and we give startups all the tools necessary to accelerate assessment response for free. Getting thanks from our customers and knowing we’re challenging the status quo is very exciting!

Name the biggest challenge you faced in the process of launching the company. How did you overcome it?

Personally, JustProtect was a product of a failed business. Convincing Jen, my wife, to let me try the business again was very hard. Ultimately, belief in the vision and constantly communicating incremental wins bought me more time! From a business perspective bootstrapping and not being able to raise has presented some real challenges. That being said, if you have belief in what you’re doing, and can be resourceful anything is possible.

Where do you see your company headed next?

We are micro-focused on scaling so gathering ROI data, customer references and accelerating marketing and sales efforts will put us on track for a raise as well as position us for growth mode. On a personal note, I'm headed from NYC to Tampa next so we couldn’t be more excited about the move!

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you'd share with another founder just starting out.

1. Talk to as many people with the pain as possible to identify their pain point and the value you can bring. Quantifying this is huge!
2. Build later. although it's a double edge sword building too early means carrying too much tech debt
3. Don’t underestimate the power of the network...use us!

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What were you doing previously and what inspired you to launch your company?
I was in grad school when I started working on Peerfit. With my academic pursuits being on the healthcare policy and health behavior side, and my practical experience being worksite wellness and fitness,  it was a natural blend having them all come together. Getting to hear from people in the industry on market policy implications and what larger companies were trying to accomplish, it was a huge motivator for creating Peerfit.

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?
From a value prop perspective, there are big companies, health plans, and employers who want the best for their members and employees. While there is a growing trend to support those members and employees to live a healthier lifestyle and give them the best benefits, it’s been harder than anticipated.

Peerfit provides the ability for those employers and plans to build community and promote physical activity in their population that they wouldn't have been able to do before. Knowing we are able to help both the companies and their people as our overall mission is the thing that motivates everyone to get up out of bed every day.

Name the biggest challenge you faced in the process of launching the company. How did you overcome it?
There have been so many, it’s hard to narrow down which is the biggest. In the course of going from just the founders, to more than 100 people, we have encountered a lot. Everything from major accounts wanting to end their relationships, some of our largest vendors wanting to completely restructure how we do things, all the way to having funding pulled at the 11th hour that we had planned on, hired for and needed to make payroll. There isn’t one that truly sticks out, since the important thing is how the team has responded every time. Not, ‘oh the sky is falling’ but with “what’s wrong?” and “what’s the objective solution to this scenario?” We have always taken the approach of how can we fix this, or, how can we find the right people and resources to solve this problem. A lot of big problems end up having simple solutions if you are willing to evolve with how the situation has evolved. More often we are trying to force the situation back to what it was instead of working towards what it can be.

Where do you see your company headed next?
I don’t think it’s a secret, but we are expanding from just the under 65 population to also include over 65. This move into the Medicare space is certainly not one that has been taken lightly or was a knee jerk decision. It has taken more than a year of planning, strategizing and bringing in outside people, while internal people have simultaneously been picking up more work. This is where we see the largest opportunity - helping the millions of Americans who have  Medicare Advantage gain access to more than just big box gyms as their wellness solution.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you'd share with another founder just starting out.
The piece of advice I’ve been giving out to founders is more on managing your own emotions and communication style so you can help your team manage theirs. It seems like maybe a simplified cliche, but when you are at the top of an org chart, whether 5, 50 or 500 people, you have a butterfly effect with every decision you make or don’t make. From how you convey those decisions, to your facial expressions, it all has an impact. A lot of times founders are so focused on the product and forget to focus on their people and the dynamics between them and other people. It’s really important to know that you will also become a manager of communications and emotions.

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What were you doing previously and what inspired you to launch your company?

My experience spans across insurance, mortgages, and web application development.  Over the past 15 plus years, I have focused on socially responsible finance mostly as an entrepreneur.  During this time, I weathered the financial crisis with millions of Americans.  My personal and business life suffered as a result and I was able to analyze the self-inflicted wounds that caused it as a financial services insider.  I resolved that there has to be a better way and have dedicated the rest of my professional career to fostering social impact within financial services.

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

We are tackling the $1.5 plus Trillion student loan crisis that is impacting more than 45 Million Americans.  Solving a major problem through a solution that is responsible and scalable is what drives me to work hard every day.

Name the biggest challenge you faced in the process of launching the company. How did you overcome it?

Raising capital has always been the biggest challenge because our product is new and untested.  I am still overcoming this challenge by building strategic relationships, bootstrapping, and always remaining confident and committed to the mission.

Where do you see your company headed next?

Our next milestone is revenue generation followed by establishing product-market fit and developing repeatable and scalable processes.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you'd share with another founder just starting out.

Bootstrap for as long as possible!  It’ll be difficult and frustrating but it fuels innovation, creativity, and aids in recruiting a core team that believes in the values and mission of the company.  As a founder, you really find out who you are and acquire much self-confidence along the way.

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What were you doing previously and what inspired you to launch your company?

Before I started Grifin, I was attending the University of Florida studying pre-med and pre-dental. I liked working with children and wanted to follow the career path of my parents to either become a dentist or work in pediatric endocrinology. During this time, I did research at the biomedical science building and ended up working with paxgene cells and cleaning blood samples. I nearly fainted every day. In that time, I realized that the medical field wasn't for me. I decided to follow my passion where I could still help people and ended up working as a counselor at a youth camp for children with diabetes. I changed my major many times before graduating from pre-med, pre-dental, accounting, finance, and finally ending at economics just trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I stumbled across wealth management through speaking with a company at UF’s career fair. He described his work as the antithesis of Wall Street and that the goal was to help families feel more prepared for their future. That sparked my interest and I changed my focus in hopes to get an internship to learn more.

I landed a position shortly after at a large institution, where I got to learn an incredible amount from the principal advisor. I remember one instance particularly where a woman came in frantic and shaking with a pile of unorganized papers in her hands. She desperately asked the advisor to help her get her finances in place to take care of her family. He confidently assured her he would help, taking the papers from her and all, only to enter her information into a system the exact way he would for all of his other clients. This was then picked up by analysts in another city who would handle the investments. It made me feel that the industry was too ambiguous, impersonal and hard to understand. People never feel good about their finances or have the confidence to invest or understand the process in themselves. It shouldn’t be that way.

My senior year at UF, I decided to minor in entrepreneurship and took a course that required us to build a creative, unique business plan. They wanted the product to be revolutionary. I connected with Bo, one of the Grifin co-founders, who was already working on an app idea called MarketChamps. This provided an open marketplace for a community of people to trade with one another. When I heard the concept, I thought it was brilliant, but asked if I could play devil's advocate because I felt there was a stronger way to solve the problems for people in this industry.

We went back to the drawing board to better understand why young people weren’t investing and interviewed kids all over campus. Most answered that it was too expensive, complicated, and impersonal. We ended up going through a hundred ideas and nothing still felt right. It wasn't until I went to Starbucks with my sister that it hit us. We had ordered 2 cups of coffee that came out to $10. My sister laughed at the price and mentioned that she should really own stock considering how much she shopped there. The light-bulb went off. I realized then that this was the way to change the way people could start to invest, by connecting them to the things they cared about most. Something so simple and easy that it just integrates into their daily lives. A concept that could become a habit like brushing your teeth.

We fully developed the idea of Grifin in the last semester of our senior year, presented it as our final project for our course, and entered two state competitions. We placed first for one and made the semifinals for the other. We ended up changing our name from MarketChamps to Change, then Interest Investments, Interest, Beanstoc… and finally Grifin. That in itself is a whole story. As the school year came to a close, my co-founders and I had a long discussion if we were going to really do this full-time and after two more months of working on it every day, sleepless nights, and quitting our jobs, we took the leap and officially moved forward pursuing Grifin.

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

The average person starts investing at 31, but can start investing at 18. The difference between those who build wealth is when you decide to vs when you can. The finance industry usually enters our life under negative circumstances where we’ve already developed a poor relationship with our money. There are few places to learn how to manage personal finances. You aren't taught it at school, most don't learn at home and it's never approached as a fun or positive experience. Often times, people push further away from it as they become more uncertain. Our goal with Grifin is to make people feel excited and motivated in not only themselves and their capability to invest and save, but just to feel confident in their financial status in general.

What gets me excited everyday is seeing users test our product and genuinely light up because they fully understand the concept. They become energized and inevitably want to share it with other people. This let my team and I know that what we're creating is truly going to change people’s lives in a positive way. It's going to put them in a position to protect themselves financially at a young age. This is an industry that hasn’t been changed in the past 200 years. It’s time for something different. The most powerful part is that Grifin means something different for everyone who uses it based on their life, their habits and what's important to them. You don’t build a product for your own story, it should be to help shape someone else's.

Name the biggest challenge you faced in the process of launching the company. How did you overcome it?

The biggest challenge we're facing now is trying to create our product with limited capital in a space that is newer to the consumer side of the startup industry. We are extremely fortunate for all of the opportunities we’ve had so far and how much the city is changing. It is why we want to be a part of this growing startup culture and all of the amazing things that are happening here in Tampa. We want to do our part and help in every way we can to make the city grow enough to become the next startup capital of the world! Doing the right thing just takes time and patience. With that, the capital will come.

Plus, with development, it always takes longer than you would anticipate. We went in with a lot of ideas to create something ready to put in consumers’ hands, but truly doing it the right way takes a lot of work. We're lucky enough to have people help us reach out and provide the resources we need. Still, there's only so much you can do even when you want to do everything without overextending yourself. I have an amazing team where each individual is working on 10 different jobs at a time. Everyone in the startup industry knows how this feels! We have many sleepless nights and are constantly learning how to take care of ourselves while running a business. The most important thing is to keep looking forward, do the best we can, and learn to deal with the unexpected. As long as you can build a team that is open to adjusting accordingly where they need to, that remains strong enough to stand back up after they fall, you are on the right track.

Where do you see your company headed next?

Our biggest goal right now is raising money. We just opened our Seed round to have the funding necessary to help us put the product in people's hands. We've built the external infrastructure, have early adopters and have all the right relationships we need to bring Grifin to the market. Our main focus is to market the product and hire the right talent to share Grifin's story. We've worked to make it a company, now it's time to be a business.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you'd share with another founder just starting out.

Be okay with failure. Because usually after the lowest lows come the highest highs. We've had a lot of hard moments in this business where we honestly didn't know if it was going to work out. The key is to stay confident and continue to be positive as you move forward. Most companies fail not because their products aren't great, but because the people let failure overcome them rather than look at the success that failure could lead to. Every time we've “failed” something better has happened as a result. Be excited for your failure and then push forward. Always continue to innovate, execute, and look at a situation with every perspective possible. It's a long process to create change, but it's worth it. Anyone willing to be innovative has to be willing to be misunderstood.

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