Business Insider: Meet NerdWallet's other co-founder, who left the company in 2014 to focus on being a dad. He's now an investor and has his own VC firm.
Gibson co-founded NerdWallet with Tim Chen in 2009 and was the company's COO until he left in 2014.
He shifted gears after NerdWallet and became an angel investor and advised startup founders.
Gibson went on to start the VC firm Better Tomorrow Ventures with seed investor, Sheel Mohnot.
Jacob "Jake" Gibson, now the founding partner of the fintech-focused venture capital firm, Better Tomorrow Ventures, co-founded NerdWallet with Tim Chen in 2009 and was the company's COO from 2010 to 2014.
The company is about to become public, and it could be worth over $1 billion.
Before starting NerdWallet, Gibson was a Wall Street regular, and he worked at JPMorgan Chase as vice president of its North America interest rate trading division.
Chen reconnected with Gibson in 2009, after he left his hedge fund job during the fallout of the Great Recession in 2008. He had been giving his sister, also a startup founder, financial advice and put together spreadsheets of credit card facts to help her decide which ones to use for her business.
At the time, documents Chen found about different credit cards were overly technical, full of advertising jargon, and hard to decipher. Both Chen and Gibson couldn't believe why it was "so damn hard to find information about credit cards online," Gibson told Insider.
As the two compiled more and more files to share with family and friends, it became clear there was a huge need for something like NerdWallet. Gibson then moved out to California to work on the company full time.
He came on as co-founder and COO in 2009, right as NerdWallet was rapidly growing. Throughout his time there, the company was strictly bootstrapped, and the two co-founders had to deal with major learning curves since they were now managers.
By 2013, the company's rapid growth had led to some instability, and the two had to lay off 20% of the company's employees. After that, Gibson said he and Chen decided to hire more experienced executive leadership to assist during this period, which lined up with the timing of his paternity leave.
"I wanted to be a present father and support my kids, so I decided to make it a permanent paternity leave," said Gibson. He emphasized that the decision was amicable and that he left "a lot" of his equity on the table.
According to NerdWallet's IPO filing, $29.3 million of the offering's net proceeds are going to repay notes held by a family trust owned by Gibson.
After NerdWallet, Gibson focused on angel investing and advising startup founders for around six years before joining the VC world. As an angel investor, Gibson has invested in over 90 companies, including Resi, Triplebyte, and Hippo.
He started Better Tomorrow Ventures in 2020 with Sheel Mohnot, who he met through 500 Global, the venture firm and startup accelerator. The firm is geared toward investing in fintech startups at the pre-seed and seed stage, and it has led funding rounds for Coast, Unit, and Selfbook, among others.
