Meet The Disruptors: Jordan Glazier Of Wildfire On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
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As we become ubiquitous, rewards are shifting from a differentiator to becoming table stakes for every relevant online service.
Jordan Glazier is the founder and CEO of Wildfire Systems, which provides an enterprise platform that enables partners to embed social commerce, rewards, and cashback offerings within their existing services. A veteran technology executive and serial entrepreneur, Glazier was an early executive at eBay, where he was responsible for building several of the company’s largest business units from the ground up. Prior to founding Wildfire, he was the CEO of Eventful, Inc., which he built into the world’s largest discovery platform for local events & entertainment before it was acquired by CBS.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs and builders, and that shaped my career perspective and goals from an early age. My grandparents built one of Chicago’s largest women’s clothing manufacturing businesses (now long gone) and my father was a commercial real estate developer. In a nutshell, I like building new businesses. At GATX Corporation, I built a new division for a 100-year-old publicly traded company. At eBay, I built three of the company’s largest business units, and then I turned my attention to building startups from the ground up. Wildfire is my third, and it’s the largest and most exciting opportunity I’ve ever sunk my teeth into.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
Consumers are coming to expect rewards and savings as part of their online shopping experience, thanks in part to the success of services like eBates (owned by Rakuten), Honey (owned by PayPal) and Capital One Shopping. However, all three of those services are proprietary to those companies’ audiences. Wildfire is democratizing the loyalty and rewards space by providing a unique, white-label platform that enables any online service to…