A payments lifer who switched to talking
Walk into Attentive's New York headquarters and you will find a company that sends billions of text messages a month for retailers and consumer brands. The person setting its direction spent the previous decade in a completely different building: payments. Amit Jhawar runs Attentive now, but the thread that connects Venmo to a marketing platform is simpler than it looks - he keeps finding small revenue lines and turning them into large businesses.
Start with the detail that sticks. When Jhawar was a finance and operations executive at Braintree, the company acquired Venmo. That was 2012, before most people had downloaded the app or used "Venmo" as a verb. Jhawar helped engineer the deal. A few years later, after PayPal bought Braintree, he was named CEO of the very product he had once shopped for. Buying a company and then running it is not a career path you can plan. It happened because he was the person in the room who understood both the spreadsheet and the product.
Before any of that, the resume reads like a tour of the most selective addresses in business: McKinsey, Bain Capital, KKR. He earned an engineering and business degree from UC Berkeley in 2003 and an MBA from Harvard Business School in 2010. Then, in 2012, he made the move that defined the next ten years - he left the safety of finance to become one of roughly the first thirty employees at a payments startup most people had never heard of.
From under $50M to well past $500M
At Braintree, Jhawar served as CFO and COO. He championed seamless mobile payment experiences at a moment when "pay with your phone" still felt novel, and the company signed the names that would define the on-demand decade: Uber, Airbnb, Wish. In 2013, PayPal acquired Braintree for roughly $800 million. The acquisition came with Venmo attached - the social payments app Braintree had folded in a year earlier.
Inside PayPal, Jhawar climbed to General Manager of Braintree and then CEO of Venmo. The numbers from that stretch are the kind operators frame on a wall: the two businesses went from less than $50 million in revenue to well over $500 million, and Venmo went from clever startup to a word people use at dinner. He did not invent peer-to-peer payments. He scaled them into something ordinary, which is harder.
A seat at the VC table, briefly
In 2020, Jhawar tried the other side of the table. He joined Accel as a Partner, backing fintech and commerce founders and lending them the playbook he had written at Venmo. Plenty of operators make that move and never look back. He looked back. Within a year he was itching to build again, and in 2021 he joined Attentive as President. The venture detour reads, in hindsight, like a man confirming he would rather run the company than fund it.
Teaching brands to text like humans
Jhawar joined Attentive to push up the shopping funnel - to personalize commerce through marketing rather than process the checkout at the end of it. He arrived as President in 2021. In June 2023, co-founder Brian Long moved to Executive Chairman and handed Jhawar the CEO title, citing his decision-making, work ethic, and genuine care for employees. The timing was deliberate: Attentive was preparing to scale toward a potential public offering and wanted an operator, not a visionary, at the controls.
Since then, Jhawar has pointed the company hard at AI. The pitch is blunt: the era of sending the same text to a million people - "batch-and-blast" - is over. In its place he wants software that talks to each consumer as an individual, a personal shopper that lives in the messaging app. Through 2025 the company stacked up AI product launches and partnerships, including a deal with Mindbody to bring AI marketing to the wellness industry. The throughline from Venmo holds: take a channel everyone uses casually, and make it do serious commercial work.
What makes Jhawar unusual is not a single dramatic bet. It is the pattern. McKinsey to Braintree to Venmo to Accel to Attentive looks scattered until you notice that each stop is the same job: find the thing that already works at small scale, and make it enormous. He is, by the evidence, less interested in inventing categories than in operating them into the mainstream.