80 - Everybody Wins in a Revenue-Sharing Business Model with Wildfire Systems' Jordan Glazier

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Jordan Malaysia, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the founder and CEO of Wildfire Systems, and that can be found at wildfire-corp.com. Thanks for joining me.

It's nice to see you, Doug.

I was just— we were just talking a second ago, and you're one of those breed of people that I've been meeting and interviewing on this show that love doing serial startups. Tell us a little bit about your backstory.

Sure. You know, I, I, uh, I started my career in consulting with Boston Consulting Group, which is a spectacular way to get started.

You know, I would say start at the top, right?

Yeah, you, you, uh, um, you're right in the C-suite, dealing with strategy and, you know, critical decision-making that steers the direction of some of the largest companies on the planet. And then, you know, to be perfectly honest, you know, when you're in consulting, your output is PowerPoint. And at some point, you know, like many of my colleagues, at some point you want to build something besides a PowerPoint. And so I wanted to build stuff. So from there, I went— I had a couple stops along the way where I was— one was running for a Fortune 100 company called GATX, which is like the largest lessor of transportation and logistics equipment and things like that, which is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum. Yeah, you're stuck with this limon.

Train cars and containers.

Exactly. Rail cars, ships, aircraft. And that's up through '99 and the internet was happening and I wanted to be part of it. I had foresight at least to say, I thought at the time I wasn't married and I didn't have kids, but I knew one day my grandkids would say, "Grandpa, where were you when the internet started?" And I didn't want the answer to be, "I was leasing rail cars in Brazil." So I started looking around. I got a call from eBay and started there as an exec. Pretty early days there. There were a few hundred people when I got there. Fast forward a few years, there were about 12,000 when I left. So I was there for a rapid growth period. And, you know, that was, I think, formative in terms, for me, in terms of my desire to be in startups because eBay, you know, eBay was a few hundred people, still felt like a startup in the sense that, you know, you're asking forgiveness instead of permission.

Right. And you survived the dot-com crash of 2000.

Yes, we survived a few of those, right? So, but you know, as businesses grow and get larger, they become more bureaucratic and then you're, you know, you spend most of your time in bigger companies asking for permission rather than forgiveness. And I like it the other way around. So I'm now on my third startup down here in San Diego. You know, San Diego's a spectacular market. It's a great place to live. But from a technology perspective, you still have to kill what you eat a little bit. You know, I like that, but it's not just that. I like building businesses from scratch. The, that formative period where you're figuring out the strategy, building the team, testing out product market fit, you know, kind of calls on all of the fun strengths. You know, it's not just strengths, but like the things I like to do and that challenge me. I went— by the time it's on, on rails, and it's more of an operational sort of growth mode, I'm good at that. But I prefer the earlier stage. You're ready to move on.

So Wildfire, what does Wildfire do?

So we provide an enterprise platform for rewards and loyalty programs. So you may be familiar with companies like Rakuten or Honey, or Capital One Shopping or others that provide shopping rewards for consumers.

I didn't know that.

Yeah. So you can go shop and you can earn cash back or use coupons when you shop online. Those entities are kind of wholly owned walled gardens. Capital One owns Capital One Shopping. PayPal bought Honey. Rakuten actually acquired a company called Ebates. What we're finding is that many other enterprises, particularly financial institutions and others, anyone who's frankly in this, you know, I call it the chain of custody of a consumer's transaction. If you have an audience and you want to drive retention and create new revenue streams, offering them shopping rewards is a great way to do it. So we have a platform that enables consumer— our partners like banks, card issuers, and others to deploy rewards programs to their users. And we build those out for them, we manage those programs for them. And that way, you know, their consumers are saving hundreds of dollars a year. Our partners are making hundreds of dollars, you know, millions of dollars a year, many millions. And we build those programs out for them.

Where do you get the idea for this? It's a unique idea.

You know, it's the underlying platform is really a commerce platform. That monetizes transactions that we refer to merchants. And, you know, in my prior business, which was a company called Eventful, we— a large part of our business was referring purchasers into the ticket purchase funnel. Eventful was a, like, a local— a global guide for local events, you know, hey honey, what do you want to do this weekend?, right? And then people would click from the, you know, 25 million people a month would use that service, click from there over to, you know, Ticketmaster, StubHub, et cetera, to buy tickets. And we earned a scrape from those, from those referrals.

Oh, okay.

And it's a nice revenue stream because you can do it in your sleep, right? Set that, it's set it and forget it from a business perspective. It's not fielding a massive sales force or anything like that. And so, you know, I like high leveraged models, you know, eBay was a really good high leverage model. We didn't have inventory. We had, We are a marketplace that helps supply meet demand, right? This business is, you know, Mark has a lot of those marketplace characteristics as well. On the supply side, we work with about approaching 60,000 merchants who pay us a share of transactions that we refer into them. And on the demand side, finding consumers, we don't go directly to consumers. We power these rewards programs for banks and others.

So the consumers, consumers are their clients, their clients are their customers.

Yes, exactly.

And, and to the end, to the, on the customer side, the client side, are they, are the banks or people that are using your platform, are they paying you a fee too?

Um, in some cases, yeah, yeah. But it's, it's, you know, for the most part, we'd like to align our incentives and really, uh, do it like, you know, build the business on a rev share, right?

Well, that makes perfect sense because If you're successful and they're successful, everybody grows.

Everyone wins. This is one of those rare businesses, Doug, that I've been involved in where everyone in the ecosystem wins when we are successful.

Yeah, and you just gotta remind, you know, pigs get big, hogs get slaughtered, so you can't be greedy.

Yeah, and then one of these days someone's gonna explain that expression to me 'cause I'm not really sure what the difference between a hog and a pig and why one gets big and the other gets slaughtered. I was trying to look that up the other day, as a matter of fact.

Little pigs grow. The dogs are fully grown out there ready for this slaughterhouse.

I see. Okay, got it.

Well, what is it that gets you really excited in the morning when you get up?

You know, I think it's the first thing that we do. It's my team, frankly. You know, the first thing that we do every day is our daily standups. Everyone's butt in seat with a cup of coffee, you know, between 8:30 and 9:00. And that's how we get our day started is kind of talking through what happened yesterday and what we're working on today. And that's a great way to stay grounded. And connect with people, especially in a fully remote environment that we've, that we've got.

You're fully remote?

Fully remote, yep.

How many employees?

We're approaching 60.

That's a lot of people. Well, that's, that's a pretty good-sized group. And how do you, how are you managing the remoteness? Everybody, does everybody, all 60 come together in the morning, or are you breaking into groups or teams?

You know, when, when it was like 10 or 12, we were all together in the same group, and as it grew, some— somewhere in the kind of '20 range is when we kind of split it up by topic. And then I think it's been split a couple more times. So there's, you know, the BD team does a standup, the marketing team does a standup. I think there's 2 or 3 now different standups for our engineering and product teams where they collaborate every morning. And, you know, frankly, I was Pre-pandemic, my team was already pushing for, even when we were a small team, they wanted more of a remote setup. And I was pretty old school. I was resistant to it. I thought, you know, we need to be in the same room, you know, same building to collaborate and share ideas. And, you know, the pandemic forced— we had one employee who was a co-founder, critical employee who moved to Texas. And, you know, again, I'm the old— I'm like the old school guy on the team. He set up an iPad on a stand at the, like, the main conference room table, and it was permanently on in a Zoom room, and it was just a green button. And whenever he's like, Jordan, if you ever want— if you ever need me, just push that button. And I'd push the button and he was there because he had the whole Zoom setup perpetually. Wow. And so we got used to that for about a year before the pandemic. So by the time pandemic rolled around, we rolled right into all being very comfortable. What I found though was interesting, you know, when you were in the same building, you know, like my CTO would sometimes roll in, he'd put his headphones on and he'd get to work and we wouldn't necessarily have a chat every day. You know, we, maybe grab lunch or whatever, but the day would be well underway before you even said hello sometimes. In the new environment, we're cycling every day, 10-20 minutes every morning, better communicate. We have better communication now than we were in the same—

very intentional across the team, right? I mean, my practice is radically shifted as a result of this.

To my—

I love it. I mean, I live where I live, like you live where you live, and I can do this. I had a mediation a couple of weeks ago where I had a lawyer in Paris, another lawyer in Florida, a client in Toronto, and another client in Temecula. And we were— they were arguing over avocados, Peruvian avocados, uh, and we got the whole case settled in 4 hours. But it would have been impossible.

Can you imagine all the jet fuel that would have taken to get everyone in the same room?

Yeah. And it was— and the amount of money in controversy was relatively small. So, I mean, it's a huge savings for the clients, and the lawyers were thrilled that we could get it done. And they have a mediator in Central California.

Did you get any avocados out of it?

No, uh, they were Peruvian avocados. There was a problem with Peruvian avocados. Peruvian avocados that went to Philadelphia during the pandemic, and there was a huge market glut, and So big argument over whether or not the commission broker was at fault or was it market at fault.

Gotcha.

There's a little bit of everything. So they settled, which was good. But yeah, I agree. And I know there are a lot of people calling for return from remote work, but there are a lot of jobs and a lot of tasks that can be done remotely. And there are a lot of people that don't want to get back in the car and do the commute again.

Well, my kids are— I don't know if they know. I have grateful kids in general, but I think they're— I don't know if they know how lucky we all are now. You know, I can drive them to school, I can pick them up, I'm at sports, I'm here for, you know, the parent-teacher meetings, you know, in a way, in ways that I never could have been before in the old way of doing things.

Yeah. What is it What is it you think that's unique about yourself that you bring to the table that makes everything work so well?

I'm, yeah, I think first and foremost, you gotta surround yourself with a great team. You've gotta make sure that there's alignment of kind of vision. And then I think you have to step back. And let it happen.

Let people do their thing.

Let them do their thing. You know, I, I, um, I can— I've— from time to time I get accused of being a micromanager, but not very often. And it's usually just when it's someone— when I'm concerned about how something's tracking, or someone new and I'm just getting them up to speed. For the most part, I'm very laissez-faire. I'm very hands-off with my team. And I mean, I'm fully involved and familiar with the details, but, you know, it's really important to let people run their own areas.

I agree. And I think that too many people feel like when you're a leader, you've got to be doing stuff. But when it's exactly the opposite, when you're leading, you're not doing stuff.

Right. You've got to schedule stuff. We do good, you know, like many people, we do shared calendars and I'm able to look at what, you know, all the stuff that my team's working on. And sometimes I'll have like, you know, an hour of downtime, meeting gets canceled, whatever. And I look around at whatever everyone else is doing. And of course I could dive in and be part of it, but it's better to, you know, that doesn't scale.

Right. There's only one of you. And if you want your company to grow.

So, so I think there's a, but there's a different answer to that question, which is, you know, I, I have, I, I have a very strategic mindset. But I'm also very, but I also love execution. I like partnerships and BD. I'm not an attorney, but I play one at work, you know, so I like to roll up my sleeves on particularly on the BD side of it. I'm, you know, last few businesses I've built are all, you know, technology businesses, but at the same time, I'm not a technical, you know, I'm a layman. So I've got great engineering leadership that I trust completely. So, you know, when I look at sort of that, the first chapter of my career was at BCG, which was all strategy, like we talked about. And when, as I stepped away from that, the epiphany that I had, you know, it's obvious, you know, in hindsight, is that strategy in that role, strategy was 100%. But in a successful business, strategy 5%. Execution is the other 95%.

That's right.

And so I think I balance that really well. I, and I'm intentional about it, making sure that we are visiting and revisiting strategy in the right proportion, but really focusing on execution.

You've got a really impressive list of investors, and I saw on your website that you closed a pretty big Series A. What's the plan? What's the exit strategy? What are your investors expecting?

You know, I think that with venture capital, you know, obviously there's expectation of liquidity at some point, right? No one's in a hurry. The business we're building is growing rapidly. I think it has the opportunity to be a massive business. So I never get any pressure from a timing perspective.

That's good.

I think the expectation is that this is, and I think it's borne out by just the trajectory that we're on, that, you know, this business is, it's got a foundation and momentum that, you know, is looking really promising. And so I'm incredibly inspired and enthusiastic by it. It's the best thing that I've ever worked on. It has the—

That's saying a lot 'cause you worked on some pretty big deals.

Yeah, no, this is my, you know, I love all my children the same, but this is my favorite business that I've ever worked on. So from an outcome perspective right now, you know, I could certainly get pulled into that conversation, Doug, but in reality, I and my team don't let ourselves get distracted by that.

But that's good. That's, that's an answer I like to hear.

Yeah. If in general, you know, you build something great and good things happen.

That's exactly right.

So instead of, you know, so I look at this from the perspective of, you know, building a business that's built to last, right? With systems and processes that can truly scale with documentation and onboarding. And, uh, you know, for even when we were not now we're approaching 60 people, but when we were about 25 or 30 people, we implemented, you know, performance management processes and things like that, which are as sophisticated as I saw when I was in a business of 10,000 people. Wow. And we do that because it's, we right-size it. I don't want that to, you know, the task fills to, you know, the task expands to fill the time allotted. So we, you know, we keep pretty short fuses on stuff like that. But at the same time, it's really important to build a foundation that can scale and put the systems and processes in place. So we're doing that and building trusting, building a great team, building trusting relationships with our partners. So, you know, doing, I think doing all the right things, that's building a ton of institutional enterprise value.

It sounds like you're really doing everything right.

Oh.

Which is nice because—

That's 'cause you're, you know, I'm the guy answering the question.

Yeah. No, no, I mean, I interview a lot of guys like you and I rarely hear the kind of thoughtfulness that, I mean, I hear a lot of what you're talking about, people talk about, but the fact that, for example, when the company's still small, you're thinking about, well, what's our company gonna look like at 5,000 employees? What systems can we put in place today that will scale to 5,000 so that we don't have to panic at 1,000 and say, wait a minute, we need to completely redesign the ship. And I think that's what you're talking about.

Yeah. Yeah. Although what I, one of the things I love about this business is that so it's so capital efficient, you know, and this, and, and so I don't see 5,000, maybe 500, but this, but, but this, this can be a massive, like a, a massive business, a massive moneymaker with a very small footprint. Exactly.

That's pretty good.

I like that.

I, I would too. So tell me about the importance of listening in your business and what you do.

I'm letting you finish your sentence.

Oh, listening. Yeah, um, good leaders, and I'm all about listening. I teach listening, so I'm really interested in people's perspectives on this.

As I was thinking about that and I saw the title of your— I've looked at some of your work about listening. I think we have sort of two modes. One is a very, I would say, methodical, polite process of people taking their turns and listening and waiting till people finish their sentences. Letting, you know, before you hand, you know, letting them finish their thought before they hand the conch around. On the other hand, you know what I mean by the conch shell?

Yeah.

Right. Talking stick. But yeah.

Yeah. The talking stick, the conch shell, whatever. You know, that, that's one mode. And I'd say that's, that's most of our interactions are like that. I think being, we're talking on screens in particular. Breeds that. You have to when you've got 10, 20 people in a meeting and they're all just little tiles on your screen. You can't be talking all over each other. It'd be a mess. As a— and then the other mode is, you know, particularly, you know, in smaller groups, my exec team meetings, sometimes it's like, you know, a bloody death match of getting your opinion out, but that's okay. That's okay. You know, like it's in, but it's, We know when we're doing it and we know when we're not. Ultimately, you know, I know the buck stops with me on critical decisions. And so I'm still learning on this topic of being a listener. I think that's kind of a lifelong learning process. But what I've learned up to this point is to be one of the last to speak, not the first. As a decision maker, I want to get all the opinions out here, all the pros and cons, ask clarifying questions, and then basically come to a conclusion and express how I got there from the input from my team. I don't have a lot of pride of authorship about my decisions. You know, ask me an opinion and I'll have one. But I I would easily— swayed is the wrong way to say it. I respect the opinions of the team around me and that informs the ultimate decision.

How do you manage disagreement?

Through consensus usually. I mean, of course, I think consensus and You mean, well, ask the question differently.

When you say disagreement, I mean, have you ever faced a situation where you've got people on your team who are just, they're just in total disagreement and they're getting a little heated about it?

Not so much with this team. In my last business, I had, I think that comes down to like personalities and a culture of respect. I've been in businesses where people didn't respect, you know, my last business, there were people who would say, you know, I'm never gonna work with him again. You know, storming out of meetings, that kind of stuff. We don't have any of that here. I think that's part of building a culture and building the right team.

Well, that's, that's you selecting the right people and making sure that people fit, fit well together.

Yeah. So, um, we— I, I literally, I can't, uh, remember a time of heated conflict within the last couple years.

That's great.

We— and that— but believe me, we have we're surrounded by strong-minded Type A personalities.

I get that.

They are, but they're seasoned and they get it. Like, this is— we're all— we're— I think it's because we have, uh, goal alignment.

Yeah, that, that, that makes a, a big, uh, big difference. When you talk about consensus, I have a specific idea of what consensus is as a peacemaker. I'm curious as to when you think about consensus, what is that's a, it's a form of decision making. What do you, how do you see it?

Um, I think that it kind of relates back to what I was saying before, which is when we're, when there's a decision to be made, uh, resource allocation or prioritization or hiring or firing or whatnot, um, letting all of the stakeholders that matter express an opinion, feel heard, and taking their opinions into consideration. And to the extent that the decision varies from what someone at the table wanted, making sure that they understand the rationale, making sure they heard that these aren't back channel, back office deals. That's straight— it's transparency and understanding. It might not be what they recommended or what they hoped for, but they at least understand how the decision was made and why the— what priority drove the decision.

And they can accept it.

Yeah.

And get behind it.

Yes.

Yeah, good. In group consensus-making decision, the first part you talked about is critical. That is, everybody's had a chance to talk about the decision. And then the second criteria in group— if this is using consensus as a group decision-making— is nobody has a Nobody can raise a principal objection to the decision.

So you say, I'm not even sure what you mean by that.

So it does, the decision does not violate either an individual value or a value of the group. That's a principal objection would be the reason we, I'm objecting to this is because it violates one of our fundamental premises of our business and here's why.

Yeah.

And then everybody has to step back and say, oh, you're right, we gotta rethink this. But supposing you're going to paint the conference room walls back in the days when we had offices purple.

Yeah.

Somebody says, I hate purple. Well, that's not a principal objection. That's an aesthetic.

So we, you know, as recently as last week, there was, I remember a debate where we had a, you know, there was a principal objection about, you know, we were deciding whether to go take a, you know, make a business decision. And it was out of line with what we are. A lot of it has to do with focus, Doug. You know, it's not about— this is not— these are not moral. This is not about ethics and morals so much as like, especially when you've got a small high-performance team, so I like to call it small but mighty. I come from an attitude of being a little bit opportunistic. Now, I'd like to have a few irons in the fire, make sure that we're flanking ourselves from an opportunity perspective so that others don't flank us. But at the same time, you can't do that too much because you can't stretch the team too far, right? So a lot of the decisions that we make as an executive team have to do with, um, potential— whether to pursue adjacent opportunities and whether those adjacent opportunities are consistent with what our strengths are and what our strategic direction is, or if they're too far afield. And we still debate those things and then we revisit those every quarter or more often. So once a decision's made, it doesn't mean that it can't be spoken of again. I, you know, I'm a Libra, so I am always happy to revisit, you know, to overthink things and then revisit decisions. But that doesn't stop me from being decisive in building a business.

Yeah. No. Yeah, I like that because Too many companies fail because they chase the bright shiny object. And if you say, this is what our focus is, nope, this is too far away from our focus. Or no, this is an opportunity, it's a little bit of a stretch, but boy, if we pull it off, it strengthens the core.

Yeah, and we do both. And the question is how elastic, you know, how much to stretch it. And even in an environment with infinite resources, there's— I guess there's no such thing, because ultimately there's, um, an organization and a culture and a management, you know, team that needs to be fully informed. And, you know, there's only so much that you can fit in, right?

Right. But to your point of staying focused, I think it's really important.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

All right, one more question. I'll let you go. What's one thing about you that we wouldn't know about unless you revealed it to us?

Um, I, uh, there's a lot of things. Where do I start? No, um, uh, you know, I think my biggest passion is travel. Um, I've been to, I think, 85 countries now.

Wow.

Which is almost half of the countries on the list. Um, uh, that's been in fits and starts. I think, you know, uh, career, particularly earlier in my life and in my career, you know, every, every, every so often you find yourself, uh, in between, whether it's in between school before the next school or a job before going back to school or finishing school and going back to work or switching jobs, whatever it is. And I've generally made a habit of taking advantages of those interim periods to go explore the world.

Oh, good for you.

Yeah, and, and for me, the, the most fun is getting as far off the grid as possible, you know, into the jungles of Indonesia or the, you know, the, the, the deep in the Amazon rainforest, etc.

Wow, I bet you have some stories to tell. Yeah, thank you so much for your time, Jordan. It's been a real pleasure talking with you.

Likewise, thank you very much.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team.

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