Jeff Stewart and the business of waiting less

A copy shop is an excellent place to discover how little your time is worth to somebody else. There is the queue, the proof, the return journey, and the small revelation that the document you finished hours ago still requires an evening of supervision. Jeff Stewart encountered that routine while producing business proposals on the road. Eventually, he helped build Mimeo to remove it.

The proposition had a pleasingly concrete test. Could a customer send a file over the internet and receive a professionally finished document without visiting a shop? Mimeo’s launch offer in 2000 put a clock on the answer: order bound documents by 10 p.m. Eastern and delivery could arrive as early as 8 a.m. the following morning. An internet business would be judged by what appeared at the door.

Stewart, Mimeo’s co-founder and first CEO, has since moved through credit technology and into investing. He now co-leads GPO Fund and writes about international stock markets. The subjects sound like separate careers. Follow the customers, however, and a connection appears: people with something useful to do keep getting stuck behind a process somebody else considers perfectly reasonable.

The ski trip with a business interruption

Before Mimeo, there were college friendships. Stewart graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1991 with a business management degree and a concentration in entrepreneurship. John Delbridge and David Uyttendaele were fellow Rensselaer students and fraternity brothers. Their collaboration began at college and survived graduation, when most ambitious conversations acquire the quieter status of things people once meant to do.

In early 1993, the three stopped at Rensselaer on their way to a Vermont ski trip. Stewart had an idea to discuss: online printing for businesses. The timing matters. Mimeo would be founded in 1998. The conversation preceded the company by five years, a useful corrective to the tidy startup story in which inspiration and incorporation happen over the same lunch.

His professional education was happening on the road. At Ernst & Young’s technology practice, Stewart advised large financial institutions and exchanges. Consulting meant travel, client work and repeated exposure to the machinery inside established companies. It also supplied the printing irritation that would eventually become a product. A proposal was valuable; organising its physical production was a remarkably elaborate way to spend a consultant’s day.

First, teach companies what the web can do

Stewart’s first company addressed an earlier problem: getting corporations onto the internet at all. Around 1994 and 1995, he started Square Earth, a firm developing methods for deploying internet technology inside large organisations. Uyttendaele was his co-founder. The pair were working in a market where even the vocabulary required care.

The company’s name carried a small historical joke. Stewart later explained that they had considered using “web” but potential customers did not yet know what it meant. A business could be early enough to need to sell the concept before selling the service. Calling it Square Earth avoided putting an unfamiliar technology in the name and expecting everyone to nod intelligently.

Square Earth was sold to Proxicom. The combined business went public in 1999. Stewart therefore experienced a route from founding to a public company before he became known for arguing that more founders should consider one. His later interest in stock exchanges had practical roots, alongside the familiarity he had developed with financial institutions as a consultant.

Ten at night. Eight in the morning.

Mimeo brought the internet back to a thoroughly physical activity. Its original corporate name was EasyCopy.com, incorporated in 1998; Mimeo followed in 1999. Online ordering became a service customers could use in 2000. Those are three different milestones, each doing a different job in the company’s history.

The product required more than a convenient upload button. Customers needed confidence in the thing that would eventually be printed. Mimeo developed a visual proofing system that showed a document’s binding and finishing online. The Ezviewer patent was filed in 1999. The production workflow, too, was designed around orders arriving digitally. A customer could approve a book on screen before a physical copy existed.

The economics of urgency could become wonderfully literal. In 2011, a Mimeo customer needed 250 presentations, each 119 colour pages, delivered to Houston by eight the next morning. The content would arrive too late for the normal overnight shipping cutoff. Employees arranged a private plane, adding $6,500 to a $34,000 order with the customer’s approval. The boxes reached the airport at two in the morning.

Stewart was no longer running the company by then. The incident belongs to the organisation he helped create, and illustrates what its original promise demanded. The internet could make ordering effortless; fulfilling the order still involved ink, people, vehicles and a deadline. Someone had to carry the boxes.

A founder’s title changes; the company keeps going

In May 2001, John F. Lyons replaced Stewart as Mimeo’s CEO. Stewart remained a director and took day-to-day responsibility as chief strategist. That distinction is useful when tracing a founder’s career: creating a company, managing it and remaining involved in its direction can become separate jobs.

Mimeo also outlasted the dot-com period that had made its proposition possible and its financing environment precarious. In February 2025, its production footprint included Memphis, Huntingdon in the United Kingdom, and Berlin. The business had grown from its early Manhattan office into a network of facilities doing the physical work behind a screen-based order.

Recognition brought the college friends back together. In 2014, Stewart, Delbridge and Uyttendaele were named Rensselaer’s William F. Glaser Entrepreneurs of the Year. Their different disciplines had remained relevant: management, operations and engineering. Entrepreneurship here involved relationships lasting long enough for an idea discussed on the way to the slopes to become something alumni could visit on a factory tour.

“At the foundation, it is technology”

Jeff Stewart · Rensselaer recognition, 2014

The employees asking their employers for loans

The next problem came from people Stewart and Richard Eldridge employed in the Philippines. Stewart was working on a business that used artificial intelligence to analyse internet data for hedge funds. Building training datasets required people. Eldridge ran an outsourcing operation, and the two worked with shared employees.

Those employees repeatedly asked for loans. They had jobs, yet obtaining credit remained difficult. Stewart and Eldridge saw a gap between the people they knew through work and the people a bank could evaluate through its usual records. Lenddo, founded in 2011, grew out of that gap.

Its approach used non-traditional data, including online social connections, to help assess creditworthiness and verify identity. An applicant without an established credit history might still have an extensive digital life. Lenddo’s proposition was that some of that information could help financial institutions make an assessment. It took the emerging social web into a transaction with consequences well beyond sharing a photograph.

By April 2014, the company was offering loans in the Philippines, Mexico and Colombia. A Colombian credit card, issued through Banco Colpatria, extended the approach into another financial product. Its algorithms considered online activity and trusted connections. Lenddo had raised an $8 million Series A round in 2012, attracting investors including Accel, Blumberg Capital and Omidyar Network.

In 2014, Lenddo received World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer recognition. Stewart’s ambition extended far beyond those first markets: in a 2017 interview, he described a mission to help a billion people access financial services. That was a stated goal, an indication of the scale of the problem he wanted the company to address.

By 2026, the queue is for capital

In 2018, Stewart co-founded GPO Fund. Today its team lists him, Key Compton and Chris Fisher as managing directors. The firm focuses on founder-led technology businesses that can benefit from international expansion and access to global capital markets. Compton’s presence also gives the current chapter a connection to Mimeo’s founding history.

The fund’s approach includes earlier public listings, simpler capital structures and access to investors across borders. It also treats a listing as part of running a company: a way to support recruitment, acquisitions and continuing growth. The company’s home address need not determine the only exchange its founders consider.

His book, Global IPO: The Great Rewiring of Capital Markets, puts that position into print. In a March 2026 interview, Stewart argued that staying private too long can leave a company with a capital structure that makes hiring, winning customers and acquisitions harder. His case is that founders should study their international options rather than inherit a default timetable.

That argument comes with an awkward personal example. Discussing Mimeo in a 2026 podcast, he recalled preparing for a public offering before the technology bubble burst. The company remained private. Stewart now asks how public markets might serve companies earlier in their development. It is a question shaped by having watched one business enter those markets and another continue without doing so.

A September 2026 conversation with Seedcamp added a less flattering item to the record: a deal he passed on that became Twilio. Even an investor with decades of pattern recognition has a collection of opportunities that look clearer afterwards. The same conversation returned to cash flow and planning possible outcomes before incorporation. Experience supplies both convictions and receipts.

There is something fitting about a printing founder writing a book. Stewart’s early customer needed a document to travel without a wasted evening. His later borrower needed to become legible to a financial institution. The founders he backs now need a wider audience for their companies. Across those settings, his work keeps returning to access: who can get through, how long they must wait, and whether the process can be rebuilt.