David Stone - CEO and Co-Founder, First Rate

The first customer finally signed. In January 1992, PNC Bank agreed to pay First Rate $28,000. David Stone and his wife, Trina, had been waiting months for a sale. They had a young family, a new software business and very good reasons to keep every dollar. They gave $2,800 to their church.

The arithmetic had been settled before the customer arrived. When the Stones founded First Rate in April 1991, they committed to giving away a tenth of revenue. Revenue is an unforgiving choice of denominator. Expenses still need paying. A promise made against it gets tested early.

Thirty-five years later, David, usually called Dave, remains the company’s CEO and co-founder. First Rate develops technology for wealth managers. Its founding decision asks a question that a portfolio report cannot answer: what should the business make possible for other people?

JANUARY 1992 / THE FIRST CONTRACT

$28,000× 10%$2,800

One tenth committed to giving, from the first customer payment.

Banking first. Then the code.

Stone’s working life began in 1979 in the management training program at Banker's Trust of South Carolina. He went on to work as an investment officer. Before there was a software company to run, there was the business that software would have to serve.

At Dartmouth, he had studied economics and mathematics, earning varsity letters in football and track along the way. His subsequent jobs covered programming, development and product management at National FSI and SEI Investments, as well as application consulting at ComShare. It was a practical education in the distance between a financial calculation and a product somebody can use.

That background helps explain the kind of founder he became. The work involved investment information, technical decisions and customer service. All three had to coexist. A reporting system needs correct calculations; the person receiving its report needs to understand what those calculations mean.

Two founders, three small children

Dave and Trina had known each other since growing up in Sumter, South Carolina. In their new business, he handled sales and technology; she handled operations and accounting. After an expected software purchase from his former employer fell through, he had to rebuild the product for personal computers and local networks. Starting again put the technology in step with a changing market, although it hardly made the household’s immediate situation easier.

Stone’s own recollection of the early office is wonderfully domestic. The business began in their dining room with three children, aged five, three and two. “Every day was bring your kid to work day,” he recalled. The phrase sounds like an employee initiative until you consider the floor plan.

It is a useful detail to keep in view. A company’s history tends to become tidier as the company grows. Dates acquire significance. Early customers become milestones. The children remind us that these decisions happened amid a family’s ordinary demands. Someone still needed attention while somebody else was trying to sell software.

Two founders, one long conversation. Trina and Dave Stone at First Rate. Photograph: First Rate.

By September 2026, the couple were discussing 44 years of marriage and decades of working together. Their advice included respecting each other’s responsibilities and keeping boundaries between home and office. The simplicity is appealing. It also suggests practice: a shared business gives two people plentiful opportunities to discover precisely where the other person’s territory begins.

Their partnership deserves to remain visible in a story about Dave. First Rate had two founders. The division of work gave the business both someone to build and sell its product and someone to manage its operations and accounts. A promising idea still needs the bills handled.

“Every day was bring your kid to work day.”
Dave Stone, remembering First Rate’s beginnings

A question at a summer job

One glimpse of Stone as a colleague comes through Marshall Smith, who took a summer job at First Rate after his freshman year at Dartmouth. Smith was drawn to church work and had considered full-time ministry. Stone asked whether he had considered that business could be a place to serve his faith.

Smith did not immediately adopt the idea. He initially regarded that route with suspicion. After college, he returned to First Rate, and his understanding of work gradually changed. He came to see the job itself as a place to put his convictions into practice.

It is a quieter measure of a founder’s influence than revenue or headcount. Stone offered a young colleague another way to think about a career. The exchange also makes his own motivation easier to understand. His Christian faith belongs inside his account of working life, and he was willing to discuss it with someone still deciding what work should mean.

Put the values on the calendar

At First Rate, the vocabulary is short enough to remember: love, give, serve, enjoy. The company pairs those words with 25 behavioral pillars, revisiting a pillar each week. Employees can help direct charitable dollars to organizations they choose. A founder’s promise has become something colleagues participate in.

The company also explicitly welcomes religious faiths and secular philosophies. That matters in a workplace whose founders speak openly about Christianity. Stone’s convictions are personal; the daily business includes people with different beliefs. Respect has to hold up in those relationships as well.

The arrangement gives generosity an administrative life. Someone has to decide where a contribution goes. Someone has to listen to what a community needs. Giving becomes a recurring task with participants, rather than an occasional announcement from the owners.

FIRST RATE’S FOUR VALUES

Love.Give.Serve.Enjoy.

A weekly rotation through 25 pillars brings the words back into working life.

The calendar contains physical work, too. In June 2011, First Rate described a Memorial Day trip to Baja, Mexico, to help build homes, with another trip to Tijuana planned for July. Employees and clients took part in the homebuilding work through Youth With A Mission. The July project was to involve Turner Twelve, a Dallas organization supporting young people.

That combination puts a client relationship in a different setting. People accustomed to discussing software get another job to do together. They meet local families and spend time outside their usual professional roles. The company was already describing these trips as a fifteen-year tradition in 2011; this was becoming a habit.

By June 2022, Dave and Trina had participated in more than 80 homebuilding experiences. They had also helped establish an entrepreneurship course and were teaching several weeks each year in the United States, India and Thailand. Teaching takes the experience of building one company and offers it to people who may build something else.

There is a pleasing continuity here. In 2009, the Stones returned to Dartmouth to discuss First Rate at the Tuck School Founder’s Forum. Years later, they were still making time to teach. Their experience had become material they could share beyond the office.

A long way from Arlington

The international part of Stone’s story did not begin with a map of prospective software customers. During a 2002 visit to Afghanistan, he established a partnership involving First Rate, Crosslink Development International and The Women’s Council. The early plans included helping women learn to read, write and earn through rug-making.

Those details give the geographic expansion a human scale. The first questions concerned skills and livelihoods. They were a considerable distance from the problems of an American wealth management office, even if Stone’s instinct to build relationships travelled with him.

His colleagues supply a less solemn travel detail. Alex Serman remembers a trip to India when he and Stone kept being offered food their hosts thought would be too spicy. They kept eating and asking for seconds. The promised breaking point proved elusive. Even a founder with a well-developed philosophy may be remembered by a colleague for his enthusiasm at lunch.

Serman’s account also describes his own participation in First Rate’s giving circle and helping secure roughly $80,000 for the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Tarrant County. It offers a specific view of what employee participation can mean: a colleague bringing attention and money to a local organization.

The company he wants to keep

First Rate now works across four continents. Its reporting and data technology serves financial organizations managing complicated portfolios, and its company-reported average customer tenure exceeds 14 years. The business has grown around work that rewards continuity: information must keep arriving, calculations must keep working and customers need someone to call.

The company describes a long-term trust ownership structure and an intention to remain independent. For Stone, the question of what a business serves has reached the question of how it should be held. Ownership decisions can outlast the daily involvement of the people who make them.

In their September 2026 interview, Dave and Trina discussed employee-led governance and keeping First Rate from being sold. The ambition extends their original concern with coworkers, customers and community into the company’s future. Preserving that intention requires other people to carry it forward.

Stone has a compact way of expressing his priorities: “Relationships are the currency of significance.” It is an unusual line for someone whose business helps financial firms report on money. After a career in banking, programming and leadership, he still returns to the people around the calculation.

The first contract can now sit comfortably in a company history. At the time, it had to support a family and keep a business going. Dave and Trina had already decided that part of it belonged elsewhere. That decision remains unfinished work, renewed whenever the next payment arrives.

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David Stone and the promise that came before the customers