The Spiff Story | Why the Best Founders are Knife Fighters with Jeron Paul

Jeron Paul is a 4x founder and a defining entrepreneur in the Utah ecosystem. Most recently, Jeron was the Co-founder & CEO of Spiff, the leading incentive compensation platform which he successfully sold to Salesforce in one of the most strategic acquisitions in the space. Before Spiff, Jeron founded and sold Boardlink, Scalar, and CapShare.

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00:00 Breaking into VC by selling a 401k and working for free.

06:30 Learning what not to do from dysfunctional venture cultures.

19:40 How to double your price when a giant tries to lock you up.

26:50 Why "Founder Mode" requires being in the technical weeds.

34:10 Identifying your acquirer on Day 1.

44:30 Why a small first exit is the secret to a massive second home run.

01:03:15 Why UX is a CEO-level concern, not a department.

01:15:20 The "Infinite Scale" framework for evaluating your management team.

01:21:40 The ultimate success metric.

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Gavin Christensen founded Kickstart in 2008, establishing the region’s first seed-stage venture fund.

You can follow Gavin on LinkedIn.

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Kickstart is the Mountain West’s most experienced and active early-stage venture capital fund. Kickstart provides pre-seed & seed funding to ambitious tech founders across Utah & Colorado with a focus on AI, B2B SaaS, and frontier tech.

See Kickstart’s full investment portfolio here.