“Build it, and they will come” is a dangerous mindset in the startup world. Even if you create a great product, building a successful company around it can be nuanced and challenging. In addition to product development, you need to find and prove productmarket fit—then repeat and scale through sales and marketing.

About the Speaker:

Chris Gardner is a partner at Underscore VC, a Bostonbased firm investing in bold B2B software founders.

Chris is a resident builder, happiest when he’s handson with a project. At Underscore VC, that means identifying and investing in uniquely qualified founders, and then helping to build their company in any way needed: networker, salesperson, mentor, coach, psychotherapist, even drinking buddy.

His tinkering and building extend to his personal life, where you’ll find him getting handson in any manner of project. Car maintenance? He has a lift in his garage. Music? He’s recording an album in his barn studio. Cooking? His BBQ ribs are the stuff of legend. In short, if he can get his hands on it, he can master it (except golf; don’t ever ask Chris to play golf).

Though he’s known as a FinTech entrepreneur, Chris is a selfprofessed nerd and technology omnivore who, prior to Underscore VC, spent nearly three decades at companies focused on speech recognition, video streaming, mobile marketing, mobile messaging, ebilling, and document management. His last five roles all resulted in exits that created good outcomes for employees and investors.

Most recently, Chris was an executive at PayPal and led their P2P, PayPal Here, and InStore payments products after Paydiant, the company he cofounded and built, was acquired by PayPal in 2015. Prior to that, Chris was CMO and head of products at ExtendMedia, a video content delivery and commerce platform software company that was acquired by Cisco in 2010; SVP of Products and Marketing at mQube, North America’s leading premium SMS mobile payments provider that was acquired by Verisign in 2006; and VP of Products and Marketing at edocs, Inc., an ebilling, payments, and customer selfservice company that was acquired by Siebel Systems in 2004.

Chris earned a BA in Communications from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst a really long time ago.