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Bryan Leach took an unorthodox path to becoming the founder and CEO of Denver-based Ibotta, beginning his career as a lawyer. After a lightbulb moment and swift career change, Leach has led the cashback technology company for a decade, guiding it to more than 40 million downloads and delivering over $1.1 billion in cash rewards to its users. And, with nearly 750 total employees, Ibotta has been named one of the fastest-growing companies in America by Inc. Magazine in each of the past four years. Leach joined the VOE Podcast to chat about his unique career path, what he’s learned at the helm of Ibotta and where Denver stands as a technology hub.
The VOE Podcast is an extension of Voices of Experience, the signature speaker series at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business. Keep tuning in each month for more business insights from Daniels’ alumni voices of experience.
Transcript
Nick Greenhalgh:
Hello and welcome to the VOE Podcast,
Kristal Griffith:
An extension of Voices of Experience,
Lorne Fultonberg:
The signature speaker series at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business.
Nick Greenhalgh:
We’re your hosts, Nick Greenhalgh
Kristal Griffith:
Kristal Griffith
Lorne Fultonberg:
And I’m Lorne Fultonberg from the Daniels Office of Communications and Marketing.
Nick Greenhalgh:
We’ll be unpacking topics at the intersection of business and the public good with CEOs and other business leaders from the Daniels community. Let’s dive in.
Nick Greenhalgh:
As the founder and CEO of one Denver’s fastest-growing technology companies, the last two years have been a whirlwind for Bryan Leach. When Covid-19 struck, the longtime Ibotta leader organized weekly calls with area business leaders to discuss how they were navigating the choppy waters of a never before experienced pandemic. Now, after a decade at the helm of the cashback technology company, Leach joined the VOE podcast to share his wisdom on building culture at a fast-growing firm, how Ibotta attracts and retains key employees and what Denver needs to do to remain relevant as a tech hub. Welcome, Bryan, to the VOE Podcast.
Bryan Leach:
Thanks for having me.
Nick Greenhalgh:
Great to have you here. Before we sort of get into where Ibotta is today, I want to take a step back and talk a little bit about your background. You sort of have an unorthodox path to tech founder and CEO, with a full-fledged career in law, prior to landing at Ibotta. What led you away from law and into tech?
Bryan Leach:
I loved many aspects of being a lawyer. I thought it would be just like it was on television, like it was in A Few Good Men. It turned out that there were fewer fence line shootings in Cuba that I got to investigate and fewer cross examinations in swashbuckling form, and a little bit more research and writing. And I enjoy research and writing, but I’m really an extrovert, and I like interacting with people more often. And the trials were great, but they weren’t very frequent, compared to the writing portion.
So I started to sort of find entrepreneurial things to do within the law. So I started by helping to build an international arbitration practice at my firm, which meant dreaming up our different approach to international arbitration, going and learning about it, getting the credentials, traveling to conferences. And I realized that I was not super well suited for international arbitration when I went to a conference in Rio and I was the only person there who was monolingual. I was from a city that no one had really heard of in the international arbitration world, and a firm that really didn’t do any of this work. I also realized that I was enjoying pitching my business so much more than practicing the actual business. So I would win the business, and then what I won was a chance to write 250 pages of briefs. So I realized that the sales element was actually what I loved, and that being a trial lawyer is really telling stories and selling things. And there’s another profession that involves telling stories and selling things, and that’s being an entrepreneur.
So my path out of it was beginning to sort of manically cycle through different potential business ideas, until I landed on the one that was for Ibotta. Actually, on the flight back from Rio, I saw someone taking a picture of a receipt, started thinking about how you could use purchase data in different ways, through your mobile phone, and that led to a cash back app concept. And then, I just sort of took a little step here, a little step there, spent a little less time on my law practice, a little more time whiteboarding and dreaming about this new thing. And before you knew it, I kind of refashioned my identity a little bit, and I was suddenly a tech entrepreneur.
Nick Greenhalgh:
10 years later, here we are.
Bryan Leach:
10 years later, here we are. A lot of school of hard knocks during that decade, I would say, yes.
Nick Greenhalgh:
I want to follow up on that. Founders are not always the ideal fit to be the CEOs of fast-growing companies. And we do sometimes see them transition into new roles later on, that better fit their skills. How have you grown within your role over this last decade and maintained that founder and CEO balance?
Bryan Leach:
It’s a great question. I’m not sure I’m the world’s leading authority on it, having done it a grand total of one time. But I would say the founder is about selling the story, selling the vision to investors, and to the early employees, and the early clients. And the CEO is about managing a highly effective organization to execute on that vision. I would say though, that in an entrepreneurial venture, you’re kind of always re-founding the company. There’s enough new ideas and evolution, or the famous phrase; pivot. But basically, there’s enough change in the business model that you need that same level of storytelling, that same level of selling in the vision to employees, to investors, new investors and clients that you did in the very beginning. So I think it’s actually possible for a founder to use that skillset throughout, depending on how much they, I guess, dial the business on their first shot at it.
Now, there are aspects of being a CEO from a manager perspective that I’ve had to learn over time, because I didn’t go to business school, and because lawyers aren’t really trained in how to manage people, even small teams. And there’s a lot of best practices and things that you either agree with, or maybe you don’t agree with, and you develop your own point of view on, “Okay, what is my point of view on how I like to coach people? How do I evaluate talent? How do I do an interview? How do I do a midyear review? How do I do performance management? How do I counsel a person out of an organization?” Or all the way from that to, “What is our compensation philosophy going to be? What are we going to talk about when we talk about the culture of our firm? How are we going to maintain a fun environment, but also be disciplined and be profitable and so forth?”
And I think you just kind of confront those situations. And then, you read up on the different points of view, you work with the chief people officer, or you work with someone else who has much more experience than you. And then, you make a bunch of mistakes along the way. You roll out a policy that you deeply regret, you roll it back. You figure out other aspects of what a CEO needs to be doing. But at the end of the day, the role shrinks. So instead of being in charge of product, sales, marketing, you sort of delegate that to really outstanding senior level leaders. And your role really focuses on the vision, telling the story of the company, and increasingly on investor relations, particularly as you get closer to being a public company CEO.
So those are the parts of the job that I love and that I did as a lawyer. So I try to do those parts of the job. And when it comes to day-to-day operations and things, I recognize my limitations and I have other people that can really compliment me on those roles.
Nick Greenhalgh:
Great. You talked about not having that business background when you approached it. The flip side of that is you come with a different perspective from that law. Is there things, or a thing that you use from your career in law now as a tech CEO?
Bryan Leach:
Yeah. When you are presenting to a jury, you are trying to distill complicated ideas into something very digestible, that often resembles a narrative or a story. And you have a limited period of time to get your point across and to exude credibility, basically. And when you are doing what we do in my business, anyway, it’s the same exact thing. You’re trying to explain, “This is what our business does. This is the problem that we solve for you. This is why it’s safe for you to bet on us. We’re trustworthy and you can try it, and make sure it works the way I say it will work.” You’re really selling to a different kind of jury. It’s just the same succinct oral and written presentation persuasion. So I do think that translates pretty well.
There are things about being a lawyer that are unhelpful. So for instance, if you are afraid of disruption, because you’re sort of adhering to precedent and trying to figure out what’s been done, that is not good, as a founder and entrepreneur. So some of the risk aversion, some of the hewing to the previous practices doesn’t suit you particularly well. I think lawyers don’t really do a good job of 360 degree evaluation, coaching. There’s really no coaches available to you as a lawyer. I think having an executive coach, figuring out what your leadership style is, soliciting feedback, and then working on that, those are all habits that I had to learn in the business world, because they’re just not accentuated in law.
And then of course, creativity, I’m not saying lawyers aren’t creative, but they’re highly analytical. So they focus on kind of a lot of left brain. And so, they’re really focusing on, “Okay, this because this, because this.” And there’s this sort of rational joust that’s going on, at least in litigation. And when you’re in a founder role, you may be needing to imagine a user experience in a mobile application or choose between different ad spots or taglines. It just uses the right side of your brain. And it’s not like your analytical acumen is unhelpful, but it’s not enough. It’s not sufficient. So I actually think having two careers in law and business kind of gets you best of both worlds. You kind of get to build up both your creative and analytical side.
Nick Greenhalgh:
Great. Thanks for sharing. I want to move on here a bit and talk about Ibotta itself. For years, the company built an in-office presence and hired locally here in Denver. Since the pandemic, the company has sort of opened its hiring gaze and brought in employees in nearly 40 states across the country. How do you manage a large dispersed staff while growing at the pace that Ibotta is?
Bryan Leach:
It’s something we’re figuring out as we go along. When we started out, we were an in-person office culture. And frankly, we had concerns about being a remote or even a hybrid culture. We thought people wouldn’t be as productive if they weren’t in the office, there wouldn’t be as many serendipitous interactions, creative interactions, we would lose some sense of camaraderie. And I think to some extent, we were right, we have lost something by not being in the office, but we’ve also gained some things that I think we underestimated.
So we’ve gained the ability to repurpose that dead time that you’re commuting to and from the office, allow people to maintain their mental health by being better able to be where they need to be when they’re not working, giving people the flexibility to shift their schedule around when they have children or other things they need to take care of. And then of course, opening the talent purview to outside of Denver. Denver is a fantastic place to attract talent, and there are other places that have other types of talent.
We’re, for instance, a direct to consumer technology company, we’re one of relatively few of those in Denver. And there are other pools of talent elsewhere that are relevant to our business that we can tap into. We’re also looking to diversify our workforce, and Denver is 83% White, or at least the State of Colorado is 83% White. And so, it’s no excuse, but this gives us even less of an excuse to have a diverse workforce, because now we can draw from the entire United States.
I would say that the practicalities of that are real. You have to find a way to sell in the vision, make sure everyone’s aligned on a virtual town hall, and you don’t get as much feedback in terms of biofeedback when you’re the CEO presenting to a screen, on a webcast. That takes some getting used to.
I think another part of it is creating a hybrid structure, so you get some of the benefits of the workplace, but not mandating five days a week in the office, and really allowing some structure for hoteling or booking of rooms, because you’re going to have people that you need to meet them where they are. And we don’t think saying, “Everyone has to come into the office,” is the right way to maximize talent. But we also don’t want to go completely remote, because we do see the benefits when it comes to training, rapport building, camaraderie building, and just celebrating wins and things.
So we fly people back in from 40 states a couple times a year, to all go to a ball game, to see the Rockies, or come to a concert in City Park, just to make it feel like you’re not just working with somebody on a screen. To me, if someone said, “Here’s your new job,” and then they just FedEx you a laptop and now you’re “on the team,” I don’t think that’s going to be a sustainable, fulfilling career for people. So we’re trying to kind of support both.
Nick Greenhalgh:
You mentioned that real estate footprint. Ibotta has sort of gone in a different direction related to that. The company has long had a downtown Denver presence. What does that office footprint look like right now? And what will it look like now going forward?
Bryan Leach:
Look, if you had asked me a year ago, two years ago, we had about 110,000 square feet of downtown real estate, really in a great spot at 18th & California. We built that out to be a really nice space, because we viewed that as part of the value proposition of working at Ibotta and we wanted to make the right impression with companies that visited us. Since then, very, very few clients have come to visit us. Lots of people have not felt safe and comfortable during COVID, coming to the office. Part of it is schools have been closed. And so, it’s thrown a wrench in people’s personal schedules, even if they do feel comfortable coming to the office.
And then, the biggest thing is we’ve hired people in 40 states, in the interim, in the ensuing two years. So “return to office” is a kind of a misnomer. Those people never were in the office. They’re all over the United States. So we kind of let that genie out and I’m not sure we’ll get it all the way back in my tenure at the company, anyway. Maybe we will and we’ll reset, but I think this has fundamentally changed the expectation. And with that, the usage of space.
So now, we have 80,000 square feet. We let a third of it go. And we have a lease that I suspect we will really rethink the amount of downtown footprint, because we’re using less than a quarter of the space that we have. Even at the high point, if everybody comes in, we’re using less than half of the space that we need. I’ve even thought, “How could we benefit the local community by creating a shared workspace, ecosystem for startups?” Because we’re paying the sunk cost of the lease. The challenge then gets into, well, we have all of our laptops and trade secrets and things lying about. But it is a great sadness, that there are companies like ours that are spending millions of dollars on real estate they don’t need anymore. And I think what you’re going to see is, when these leases come up, a complete reexamination of some of these things.
Nick Greenhalgh:
I want to talk a little bit about tech talent. It’s been a big conversation over the last year or so, about retaining and recruiting that. As proof of this changing market, a recent survey by TalentLMS and Workable found that 72% of tech workers surveyed were thinking of quitting their job or exploring other job opportunities in the next 12 months. With this in mind, how does Ibotta work to retain its talent?
Bryan Leach:
At the end of the day, it is a great market for employees right now. In the sense that there are fewer barriers to working at companies in a remote and hybrid environment. And in the sense that the United States has a lot of heavily capitalized, early stage growth companies that are looking to hire. And I think that’s been the story of the last several years, three years, but especially acute in the last 12 months.
Part of it is people have dropped out of the workforce with COVID. These are historic rates of unemployment, just in general, and even more so in the tech community, and even more so in Denver. That said, at the end of the day, it comes down to meaningful work. We can try to chase the highest possible bid for every single employee and compete with Netflix and Google and other sort of monopolies, basically, that’s one way to do it, it doesn’t lead you to being a profitable high growth company. And you’re ultimately really just costing yourself and your colleagues job security when you do that, especially in this current market environment. If you’re not a profitable company and you can’t become profitable because your operating expenses continue to grow, the music stops at some point. So you don’t want to do that. You need to maintain fiscal discipline and run a business that’s viable and profitable.
At the same time, you want to accentuate the mission of your company, the vision that you’re pursuing, why it matters and helps the world. We gave away over a billion dollars in cash. We hope to be giving away a billion every year, soon. And so, that’s a very direct way in which we like to say, “We’re in the giving away money business.” But it’s not just that it’s professional development opportunities, opportunities to jump in on projects that you wouldn’t get a chance to be working on if you were at a larger company, a little bit of security and resources to go to conferences, and things that you wouldn’t get if you were at a smaller company. So it just depends on what department, what we’re focusing on.
But I think it’s the quality of the people that we have, the vision and the mission that we’re working on, the impact it has on people’s lives in general, and then also the value of our stock over time, our options. People are excited to see the company grow. And there are very few companies that are kind of over $200 million in revenue, growing 30%, profitable. If we can become one of those companies in the short term, I think we stand out as a place you really want to have stock options. Because those companies, when they do have liquidity, those people can make a significant amount of money. So it’s partly great leadership, great management, training, learning development opportunities, it’s partly mission, it’s partly financial. And you do the best you can. It is a challenging environment right now.
Nick Greenhalgh:
I want to talk about what you’ve seen on the business end. How has Ibotta seen consumer behavior change since the beginning of the pandemic?
Bryan Leach:
It’s a terrific question. So many different chapters in the pandemic. I think for starters, we saw a big shift toward online purchases, especially in the grocery space. We went from kind of 5% to 15% of all usage of our product when it was online. So online grocery tripled.
We then saw significant supply chain challenges. That meant that it was difficult for certain brands to put their products on the shelf reliably and keep up with the demand. That then meant that the appetite for promotions was briefly muted and then came roaring back. So we’ve seen a lot of challenges in the CPG supply chain, consumer package goods supply chain, and manufacture supply chain flow through and affect our business. I think of course COVID has affected the productivity of our workforce.
In terms of consumer behavior, it’s also changed consumer behavior. Click and collect behaviors, curbside pickup behaviors have become much more en vogue. And I think consumers also haven’t been spending as much money in categories like travel, have been spending less time outdoors in restaurants, things of that nature, and more buying at home, buying groceries. So the overall category of groceries benefited enormously, as you’ve seen in the performance of companies like Kroger. So consumer behavior has shifted.
As we think about our overall business model, we think about how to get to the consumer, and do we just want to get to the consumer directly through our mobile app, which is what we’ve done for most of the last 10 years, or is there a way to get to dramatically more consumers? And that’s why we’ve launched this thing we call the Ibotta Performance Network, which is allowing us to power loyalty programs for companies like Walmart. So very shortly, we’ll be launching the first ever digital item level offer program at Walmart. It’s a huge deal. Largest retailer in the world, 120 million people digitally engaged every month. That’s 10 times more than we have active on an annual basis.
So we’re now reaching consumers through other properties, in sort of a white label fashion. We have Kroger, we have now Walmart launching. And so, that’s just a way that we’re diversifying the ways that we address that consumer behavior. And in that context, we’re focusing on online, click and collect, things of that nature, which we think will be profitable because ultimately more and more behavior is trending in that direction. More and more is moving toward these, I guess, you would say non-traditional paths to purchase.
Nick Greenhalgh:
Great. We talked a little bit about the local technology ecosystem earlier, and I wanted to circle back on that. How do you think Denver compares to other like cities?
Bryan Leach:
Increasingly, the question is, where do you want to live? Because the nexus between where you want to live and the opportunities to work is loosened with the pandemic and with remote work. So, I think a lot of people always wanted to live in Denver and Boulder. And for that matter, Steamboat Springs and Aspen and a number of other places, but they couldn’t because either they or their partner couldn’t find fulfilling work, or there was maybe one job, but if that didn’t work out, then where would I go after that. With the total dissolution of those boundaries and people working for any company they want from anywhere they want, I think it just benefits the places that people want to be from a lifestyle perspective and where they want to raise their family and what kind of weather they like and so forth. So I think in that way, Denver’s benefited substantially. A lot of people have come from the coast to live in Colorado, including in Denver, because they’ve sort of always wanted a chance to do that. And why not?
I’ve got a cousin who’s currently working in New York for six months and she’s going to try out Boulder for a few months and then they’re going to decide where they want to live. And that wasn’t really done prior to the pandemic.
There are still some things about the local community that do matter for a tech company, certainly having venture capital available that’s local. They kind of know you, trust you, can reference you more easily. We got a great venture firm in Range that opened recently, which I’m, in full disclosure, an investor in. But it’s one of relatively few venture capital firms that focus on the Front Range company. Not every community has that. And I think that’s been really helpful and they’ve sort of created a keep it local, return on investment for some of these local companies. And then, there’s mentors here. There’s a high concentration of companies that have been successful recently. A lot of unicorns now, a lot of companies have moved here, like Palantir from the coast, bringing talent in and creating kind of that late stage talent pool that you need.
And I continue to think that things like Denver Startup Week are helpful. There’s resources out there that not every community has. But I do think that we’re diversifying and kind of decentralizing throughout the United States, the places that will be considered entrepreneurial hubs. Atlanta wasn’t really hugely on the map 10 years ago, it is now. It’s definitely a place that has a lot of companies coming out of it. Chicago, same thing. New York actually has so many startups now. It wasn’t really a focal point before. So I think it’s Denver and a lot of other places are perfectly good places to start businesses. And capital also doesn’t observe these boundaries. If your company’s growing, you’re profitable, they’re going to find you. I don’t care if you’re working in Huntsville, Alabama, they’re going to find you, and they’re going to invest in you. So I do think that in the past, it made a much bigger difference.
Nick Greenhalgh:
Great. I want to shift gears one last time here. From sponsoring a patch on the NBA’s New Orleans Pelicans Jersey, to offering free snacks around the Super Bowl, and additionally, some free school supplies over the summer, Ibotta’s frequently in the news for its promotions. How do you choose these opportunities over others?
Bryan Leach:
Each opportunity’s different. I think in the case of something like our free Thanksgiving giveaway, we fed five million people a free Thanksgiving dinner, which is something we just think is morally imperative at a time when food scarcity and things of that nature have become a bigger problem. Plus, it’s good business. We can show that people are interested in a free Thanksgiving and that cost of acquisition is actually pretty attractive compared to other programs and pays back in a short period of time. So you kind of looking at different programs you’ve run and seeing how much can we measure that.
Then you have some things that just can’t be measured as well, like the New Orleans Pelicans NBA jersey patch. That’s something that increases our brand awareness, both with consumers and also with our brand partners and clients and commercial partners. It’s something we use for business development purposes, but it’s something we can measure in terms of brand equity, brand awareness, a little bit the lift in that region of the country, where we are the exclusive sponsor in Mississippi, Alabama, Northern Florida, and of course Louisiana.
And it just depends, I think there are some of those deals that we wouldn’t do because we just don’t think the value of that exposure is as high. So for instance, we think the NBA’s a great demographic for us. You get 82 games that they play. We might be on national television with Zion Williamson 30 times, on TNT, on ABC, ESPN, NBA TV. I’m less convinced that naming a stadium is effective, just because I don’t think that it’s the same concentrated exposure to a national audience. So that’s not a deal that we found attractive, but it just depends.
It depends on kind of what your goal is. For us, we’re not in New Orleans. We’re obviously not using it to attract New Orleans employees. We’re using it because that team gets on national television a ton and is very watchable and attracts a young demographic of people we think will be interested in our product and will Google it. And we saw that during the playoffs, when the Pels won their two play-in games this year. There was high ratings and a lot more organic interest in Ibotta. And then, during the playoffs in particular, when they actually were against the Phoenix Suns, we saw just a lot of people writing right before a meeting, “Hey. My partner saw you guys on TV. Can’t wait to meet tomorrow,” things of that nature. So it’s been fun. It’s been a learning process and we’re evaluating a bunch of different opportunities to build our brand at the top of the funnel, while also doing kind of the analytical payback period analysis for each channel or tactic that we might use, that’s a more traditional, direct response.
Nick Greenhalgh:
Great. Really interesting. Well, thank you, Bryan. I really appreciate you joining us today and sharing on the VOE podcast. Thanks for coming in.
Bryan Leach:
Thanks for doing this. I think it’s a great resource and I appreciate y’all having me.
Nick Greenhalgh:
This has been the VOE Podcast,
Kristal Griffith:
Produced by the Daniels College of Business and sponsored by U.S. Bank.
Lorne Fultonberg:
Music by Joshua Metzel, music composition graduate student at the Lamont School of Music.
Nick Greenhalgh:
Join us next time for more business insights from our community.
Kristal Griffith:
In the meantime, visit daniels.du.edu/VOEpodcast
Lorne Fultonberg:
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