Jonathan Gass
Jonathan Gass (Founder & CEO at Nomad Financial)
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Welcome
Today's interview is with Jonathan Gass - CEO at Nomad Financial
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Name: Jonathan Gass
Current role: CEO at Nomad Financial
Education: Washington University in St. Louis (BSBA)
Major(s): Finance, International Business, and Managerial Economics and Strategy (Triple Major!)
Can you please discuss Nomad Financial and your role there?
I founded Nomad just over five years ago. Nomad actually just found out [over the summer] that we made the Inc 5000 list of fastest growing companies in the US. (Check it out here: https://www.inc.com/profile/nomad-financial). I have been the CEO of Nomad since day one. Our focus [at Nomad] is to support founders through the early to growth-stage of their businesses. We do this in three main ways:
Provide accounting and book keeping: core back office function that is necessary for all businesses
Tax and tax advisory: standard filings, whether it’s for your annual filings or sales tax filings, all the way through advisory
One area of focus: How to minimize tax liabilities as companies grow to new states and as they look to grow internationally
Tailored Finance Group: Consulting practice that goes in and functions as a company’s CFO, VP Finance, controller. This area is much more project based in order to help companies that have raised additional money revamp, reorganize, or build out, for the first time, a very scalable finance operations team
Has Nomad received any VC funding?
We really bootstrapped Nomad around profitability without getting any funding from venture capitalists. When you are deciding what path to take, it’s important to understand the types of returns investors expect and if you have the right business for that. VCs typically are looking for exits with large multiples that operate at a loss for years. As a services company, we didn’t think going to investors made sense as we were going to target profitably from Day 1.
Did you have any jobs/roles prior to starting Nomad Financial?
I started my career as an Associate Consultant at Bain & Company. I was working in the Chicago office. I split my time between a couple of very large companies, as well as a private equity practice. I left because I knew that was not the area I really wanted to focus my effort on. I really wanted to join the early-stage startup world. So, I moved to New York after two years, and joined a startup. It was a mobile virtual network operator called BlueMobile. We had a founding team and investors [at BlueMobile] that did not see eye to eye, kind of what a bad marriage could look like, and we ended up shutting down right before launch.
After consulting on my own, I spent the next few years at IAC, a Fortune 500 company that owned Ticketmaster, Ask.com, and Match.com. At first, I was doing corporate finance and M&A work, then moved over to Vimeo and became their first head of Finance and Develop. There were probably about ten employees at Vimeo when I joined (Vimeo now has over 500 employees!). I helped build Vimeo through the first two functioning operational years. It was a rocket ship growing to hundreds of employees and hundreds of millions of people viewing our player every month. But, once it got really large, I decided I wanted to get back into the early-stage startup scene. I started looking at consulting on my own, which led me to launching Nomad.
Do you have any broad advice for college students in today’s world?
I think when you’re first out of college, nobody tells you that you are going to spend the rest of your life growing and learning, which is a real asset of who you really want to be and how you want to improve. At least, I didn’t receive this advice. The other aspect is: How are you investing in yourself early on and what skills are you developing. You have the traditional routes, you know the larger firms that are very good at training people such as Investment Banking, Consulting, and Accounting. I did consulting, but we hire a lot of people out of accounting firms to join our team [at Nomad].
One avenue that I think is becoming much more available to college students today is joining high growth early-stage companies in really cool dynamic roles. If you join an early-stage startup that has a healthy amount of funding, you can learn a lot with a hands-on-role, get your hands dirty, and really commit yourself to the cause. And, a lot of times that also forms possibilities to move into different roles as the company scales and needs new roles. I think that working for an early-stage startup is another avenue that has its benefits. At a startup, you can come in and really drive the work flow that you are looking to take on in a high growth company. No matter what you do, being able to signal to the market what you are capable of “doing” is very important.
Are there any valuable skills or lessons that you know now that you wish you had developed in college?
So many! What’s interesting is that in college you are given a lot of opportunities to take on leadership roles, between the clubs and organizations on campus. One skill that you really have to develop, particularly if you want to build something and be a creator in this world, is having the ability to get people to buy into your vision. Both from a sales perspective, signing people to purchase your product, and from an organizational perspective, getting people to join your team, getting others to buy into your vision is critical. People are going to join the team or hop on board the product based off their belief in the vision you are providing them and, also, on their belief in you as an individual. These kinds of things [such as getting other people to follow your vision] are not taught in school. And, while some jobs provide a path to teach you peripheral skills that can help, a lot of it is self-directed. There are, however, places you can go to develop these skills. There are things you can do, like travelling, getting out of your comfort zone, and going to conferences where there are a lot of likeminded people going that can really help you grow in this respect.
Do you have any other advice or insights you would like to offer?
The first piece of advice I’ll offer here is that as a college student, by the time you graduate, there are really no restrictions on what to do with your life. And, in that stage, it becomes really hard to not listen to outside voices, to not listen to your parents for advice, your peers, or your professors. Really, all the people whose guidance you want to trust. Ultimately, you have to live your life by your highest values and make decisions in terms of your career, your passion, and your purpose, which comes from your inner voice, not the voice of those around you. There’s a phenomenal Steve Jobs quote about this, which basically says that you can only find happiness by living up to your highest values, not your parents’ or friends’. After graduating, you are no longer friends with people because you go to school together or you live close to one another. You have a lot more self-selection going forward. Because of that, who you surround yourself with is important. You have to listen to your own inner voice. Listening to your inner voice, finding out what you really want to do with your life, is not only a measure of happiness but also of performance.
When you’re unhappy, it’s really hard to be on the top. When you’re aligned with what you’re doing work-wise, the alignment between what you’re doing career wise and what your passions are will impact what kind of life you are creating for yourself. Ask yourself: Are you taking a job because it gives you good money or because it sounds good to the outside world – it’s good signaling. As a college student, coming into your career, it is important to know whether you are taking a job because it is what you really want to do or because it is what those around you are telling you to do.
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