Meet SVB Boston’s Jesse Bardo
Discover more Boston Speaks Up at Boston Business Journal’s BostInno: www.americaninno.com/boston/boston-speaks-up/
Jesse Bardo is a director in Early Stage Practice for Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in Boston, which banks upwards of 70 percent of Boston venture-backed companies. Bardo is active in the Boston innovation community and a proven entrepreneur turned angel investor and startup mentor. He was one of the founders of higher education SaaS company EverTrue (Techstars Boston 2011), which won the MassChallenge. After gaining Series A funding with Bain Capital Ventures, Bardo and his team grew EverTrue to 400-plus customers and 50 employees in Boston’s Seaport neighborhood.
Bardo joined SVB in 2018. His role is to connect entrepreneurs with Boston’s accelerators, universities and additional partners. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, Bardo has been vocal on social media and via virtual events offering advice and support to the Boston innovation community. With the House recently passing a $484 billion supplement to the CARES Act, including $321 billion in fresh funds for small businesses through the Paycheck Protection Program, Bardo and his team have been working tirelessly to help Boston startups secure SBA loans. To that end, SVB recently shared it will be donating the net fees from the loans to COVID-19 relief.
You can listen to our BSU podcast discussion below via SoundCloud or on any of your favorite audio platforms: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Google Play.
Where did you grow up?
Andover, MA
What did you love or appreciate most about your childhood?
I was a faculty child at Phillips Academy Andover. My father was an English teacher there so I grew up on the campus. I grew up in a boys dorm with 52 high school boys, it was an awesome place to grow up. I got to use all the facilities, I was the ball boy for the lacrosse and soccer teams and the students were my babysitters. I definitely learned the importance of community there and it is something that has been core to who I am.
You’re a diehard European soccer fan. When did you develop your love for the Tottenham Hotspur? I loved playing soccer but my feet could never do what my hands could- I ended up playing lacrosse in high school and college but always loved guys from the soccer team. FIFA 98, I created a player named Bardinho and he was picked up by Tottenham in the game. Ever since then, I have been a huge fan of the team.
There are so many good watering holes to watch Premier League soccer in Boston — Phoenix Landing, Parlor Sports and my personal favorite Olde Magoun’s Saloon. What’s your favorite bar in Boston to watch the Premier League?
Up until last year, it was the Kinsale since that was the Tottenham bar. I also love Phoenix Landing when Liverpool isn’t playing. With two little kids, I don’t get out to Saturday or Sunday games as much as I would like to.
When did you develop your first itch for entrepreneurship?
I never thought I would be in tech. I thought I was going to be a history teacher. I was an American studies major with a concentration in racial politics at Wesleyan. My whole family is teachers and I was headed that way as well. I worked at Northfield Mount Hermon in western mass, I started in Admissions since I didn’t want to hit the books again right after college and that is where entrepreneurship started I guess. I saw all of these brands coming up on Facebook in 2007 and thought that the school should start a Facebook fan page for Admissions. It was the right time, right place and we saved 80K on hard copy materials and had the best yield the school had ever had. I started to blog and speak about social media and education and it went from there.
Why build your career in Boston? Did you consider anywhere else?
I moved to Boston from western mass to be with my now wife and the city keeps getting better and better. The Boston tech community really embraced our Techstars class in 2011. Since that outpouring of support and the small but strong nature of the community, I have always wanted to be a part of it and contribute as much as I could.
During your seven years with EverTrue, you held most of the nontechnical roles within the company, including sales, customer success, enterprise customer success and customer experience. What was most challenging and why?
All of those roles have their unique challenges. I think that honestly, co-founder is the most challenging. It is a very odd position to have, you are not the CEO, you are not the CTO. You end up a jack of all trades and at times it can be really confusing about what the path forward is. I hung my hat on the customer experience and getting to know our customers as well as I could. Brent and Eric let me mold my career around that and play the role of customer advocate during our funding rounds. My title and experience changed as the company did but ultimately, that connection to the customer was the most important thing for me.
What drew you to your role at SVB in Boston?
SVB had been our bank at EverTrue and had been instrumental in our early growth. They sent us to South By Southwest, helped us find some of our talent, and invited us into the larger Boston community. I had appreciated that leaning in while it was happening but really had not been all that involved with that side of the business once we raised our seed round. I got more involved in angel investing and mentoring the Techstars teams in 2017. I was loving my time with early stage founders and wanted to figure out a way where they could be my next customer. Other than being a full time angel or working at a VC, I didn’t see how that could be possible. When I started looking outside of education tech for opportunities, I became aware of the early stage team at SVB and had a few conversations about what it would mean to work with the customer base. The role was essentially to be a founder for founders in the New England innovation economy and it was something that really just seemed too good to be true. It has panned out even better than expected.
What service does SVB offer startups that may most surprise people?
I think the biggest surprise honestly is that a partner should support you in every way outside of their core competency. I tell founders all the time, if you are not using your lawyer, banker, real estate broker, benefits specialist, etc for everything outside of what you pay them for, go find a new one. There are such talented and engaged partners here in Boston that see so much, you are missing out on what they are really good at if you are not asking them along with your mentors and investors about next steps for your business. I see it here at SVB every day. Everyone from our CEO Greg Becker, down to me and my team, lives, eats, and breathes the innovation economy. To have the mission be so ingrained and leading from the top like that is inspiring and I think that is what makes the biggest difference honestly. So yes- think of us as a startup concierge, I don’t think enough founders use that resource.
How challenging has it been to help secure SBA Payment Protection Program loans for small businesses?
Herculean to put it lightly. The whole process just from an infrastructure standpoint was stood up out of nowhere. Banks had one week to get a desperate client base the right information etc and stuff it all into heavily antiquated technology- no APIs, nothing provided. The SBA had to process more loans in a day than they did in entire years. So it has been a huge learning experience and one that has had growing pains for sure. I have been incredibly impressed with the way that SVB has rallied as an organization. We had not done an SBA loan since 1991 before all of this and processed $2B worth of them last time around.
What tips do you have for businesses who are struggling right now?
First off, I count myself as incredibly lucky. Working with early stage technology founders, I get to work every day with the most resilient group of people on the planet. COVID19 is just another hurdle to overcome in the day to day of these founders and they are doing it no matter the business. So I would say my biggest tip is connect. Reach out. Gather together over zoom, text, or a phone call and just see what your fellow founders are finding success with and what has failed. The hardest part of this is that I don’t believe that ideas are flowing as organically as they were. We have to manufacture that interpersonal connection and it is hard with running businesses, families, and the stresses of this time. The more that you can reach out and engage others trying to do the impossible, the better this will be and you will find various avenues for success.
How challenging has it been for you and your wife managing work and parenting/homeschooling your two children while in quarantine? Any tips here too?
God I wish. I think just being OK with mediocrity and complete failure day in and day out is a humbling and trying new normal. My wife and I are both incredibly busy with our jobs so we work half days exactly, then we switch gears completely and home school our two kids. There is a ton of guilt, tears, but a lot of laughter and we get to be a part of things that we probably would have missed normally. My daughter is now riding a two wheel bike, she is also reading fully. My son is 2 and is now wearing underwear and also doing a good job counting so those are wins. I think you can’t take yourself too seriously and when it is time to cut your losses, just do it and move to something that works and gives you joy. Then start again tomorrow.
What do you think sets Boston apart from other cities?
I could go on forever about this but at its core, when it comes to the innovation economy here, it is the people. The people here work incredibly hard, they are not building these businesses for any kind of celebrity or fame, they are building them largely because they saw a massive gap or they worked on research for 5 years and are ready to bring it to the world. I am so bullish on what the future of Boston is going to be based on the shifts we are already seeing in the kinds of founders that are coming out of the universities and I am looking forward to being a part of what is to come.
Boston has made great strides to become a premier international destination for entrepreneurship. What do you think is obstructing Boston’s growth from a public brand awareness standpoint?
Boston has never been good about self promotion. The “do your job” Patriots moniker really felt like it fit the city perfectly and that echoes throughout the various industries all over New England. While this mentality has made this ecosystem robust and a top 3 for exits in the country, it remains undersold at least on the tech side, not so much on the life science side. You and I know this all too well and there is a great group of people working on trying to elevate the narratives that we get a front row seat for, to the international level. The more that others see and hear about what is being built here from a technology side to go along with our sports, universities, and medical/ biotech, the more this place is going to explode.
How would you like to see Boston’s startup community evolve in the next 5–10 years? What’s your aspirational goal for the community?
Boston’s tech scene is so wonderfully conductive. But it has a large barrier to entry. There is this inherent mistrust I think that is very much the New England way. I would like to see this barrier lowered and the entry into the inner circle of Boston tech to be opened up over time. We have many first time founders that just can’t navigate the ecosystem. I also would like to see better communication and execution between the various parts of the tech community. The universities have to continue to push on student collaboration across the Charles. Biotech and Tech need to cross pollinate. All of this is happening in little pools but once this is really opened up, the sky is the limit. It is going to happen in this window.
