Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Stone, CEO of CashStar (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: This has been an interesting conversation. Do you want to give me a range of how large a company you’ve built with CashStar and probing into the unmet needs of the gift card industry?

David Stone: We raised $28 million to date, which in the state of Maine is incredible. Most of the time when I’ve been out in Silicon Valley pitching for money over the years, they said, “You’re in Maine. Great idea. We don’t invest in Maine.” But we’re able to prove them wrong.

SM: But you can get money in Boston, yes?

DS: We actually have California investors now, and Silicon Valley investors, so that’s all good. We’re about 70 people. That’s twice as large as we were the year before. And we’re planning to hire about 30 more people this year. We also launched our first clients in Canada at the end of last year. So, we’re bringing this international. We’re growing at the speed of light.

SM: Why are you in Maine? You said you started out in Boston. How did you decide to go to Maine?

DS: I ended up coming up here to take a job in the late 1990s and fell in love with it. The quality of life is really good, and the people are also really good, down to earth. Part of the reason we’ve been so successful is our retailers like us, our values, that we’re straight. They trust us. Our brand, even though it’s extremely cutting edge, we’re authentic. We’re real.

SM: Is it relatively easy to find a certain level of technical talent in Maine?

DS: That’s a great question. We have a good amount of what I call payments engineering people here, because there are a couple other big payments companies. We also have a pretty strong user experience and Web design community up here. We have a lot of artists in the state. It’s kind of like a little Seattle. People like to come here because life is simple, rich, not much traffic. The quality of life is really rich. We have two women senators here, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, and you can run into them in the grocery store in their jeans, and they will talk to you. It’s a pleasure. It’s refreshing.

SM: Are the people you’re hiring local or are they moving up from elsewhere, or are you moving them in from elsewhere because of the quality of life?

DS: It’s mix. Probably 85% are locals. We’ve brought people in from Texas, Michigan, and Florida. We are going to be opening a California office, though, in the near term. We’ve been fortunate. It’s not a big state, but we are one of the hottest companies in the state, so we’re able to attract talent, and we are bringing talent here. Our goal is to create a small digital economy up here in Maine to help create jobs in the state.

SM: That’s interesting. You know, Greg Gianforte did that in Montana. When he started in 1999 with a company called RightNow that Oracle recently acquired for $1.3 billion, Silicon Valley investors were looking at him like, What are you talking about? Why the hell do you want to go to Montana? And they have become one of the largest employers in Montana, one of the great success stories of building a company somewhere “off center.”

DS: We hope that will happen to us. We have a long way to go, but I believe we will get there. If we can create a liquidity in the state, then all of these young kids who are working for us will have a chance to start new companies and create the next generation of digital commerce people in Maine, which would be fantastic. Obviously, what people in Silicon Valley and New York and Seattle are doing is fantastic, but as you probably know, our economy has become increasingly two-tiered. Most of the jobs are in the digital world, in Silicon Valley and Seattle and New York City and a few other places. And then you’ve got the rest of the country, which is struggling. It’s the job of entrepreneurs like me, and the venture capitalists and private equity firms that fund us to find the next generation, next states, next areas.

SM: As long as the skill set is available and can be created, you can do these companies anywhere in the world. As long as you have the digital skill set, you can build companies in Maine or New Mexico or Mississippi or wherever you want.

DS: Or Sri Lanka, Uganda or Vietnam. Anywhere, this is it.

SM: Yes. And there will be five billion people on the Internet by 2020, so this is the decade to ramp up entrepreneurial ventures all over the world, which is why we’re doing One Million by One Million.

DS: I hope it will soon be 10 Million by 10 Million.

SM: One step at a time. It’s been a pleasure talking to you, David.

DS: It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Stone, CEO of CashStar
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