Nick Baum found a business hiding inside a gift

Nick Baum’s startup once had an alarm clock made of customers. When GiftRocket appeared on TechCrunch, software announced each new website visitor with a ding. The founders had turned their speakers up. In came the traffic, out came the founders, and for a little while the internet sounded wonderfully interested.

Then the intervals grew longer. Eventually, the room became quiet. A launch can supply applause; it is less obliging about supplying a business. For Baum, that difference would take years to understand fully. The company he runs today, Tremendous, emerged from watching people use his first idea for purposes he had not designed it to serve.

There is something appealingly awkward about that beginning. A founder builds a gifting product, while the useful clue arrives wearing the duller clothes of corporate administration. Someone needs to pay a survey participant. Someone else needs to reward an employee. Neither wants a grand theory of presents. They would quite like the money to arrive.

A mathematician returns to making things

Baum grew up in Berkeley, California, and went east to Dartmouth. He studied computer science and mathematics, graduating in 2007. His next three years were spent in quantitative finance, building algorithmic trading models in Boston. It was a respectable application of his education. Respectability, however, cannot make every occupation interesting to the person doing it.

As a child, he had enjoyed taking turns programming with friends, making drawing applications and other small projects. What pleased him was the shared act of building something another person might use. Finance offered a different relationship to the finished work. He wanted to get back to creating a tangible product with other people.

One connection from Dartmouth proved durable. He met Kapil Kale during freshman orientation, years before they would work together. The later company therefore began with a friendship that had already survived the ordinary business of growing up. Their professional partnership would eventually place Baum in charge of the company’s direction and Kale over product and engineering.

The customers had another idea

GiftRocket started in 2010 and went through Y Combinator’s Winter 2011 batch. Its early proposition involved sending a gift associated with a business, including businesses that did not sell their own gift cards. The concept required explanation. A customer looking for a simple present is not always in the mood for a lecture on the future of gifting.

The business found paying customers and became profitable, but its consumer growth had limits. Meanwhile, a peculiar clientele appeared. Nike used GiftRocket for survey participants; SoulCycle used it for employee recognition. Large organizations were making a consumer website do corporate work. Baum and his colleagues had, in effect, left a chair outside and discovered people using it as a ladder.

He has described their early reluctance to pursue business customers with refreshing candor. The team was technically minded and did not particularly want to do sales. That preference made the opportunity easier to overlook. Customers, inconveniently, do not organize their problems around a founder’s preferred working day.

In 2018, Tremendous launched to serve those organizations directly. The move put bulk distribution and administration at the center. Research incentives became an early focus, alongside the broader problem of businesses paying people outside payroll. The interesting change was in the question: what did these customers need to accomplish, and what tools were they already struggling to improvise?

The unusual luxury of spending your own money

The funding story requires a little precision. GiftRocket raised money; the later business did not simply spring from an untouched savings account. The founders bought out the original investors in 2013. Tremendous has been owned by founders and employees since then, and profits from the consumer business helped finance the move into corporate payouts.

Baum’s description of the discipline is admirably short: “We only spend money we have.” A budget acquires a certain clarity when the money must already exist. There is less opportunity to mistake the next fundraising round for an operating plan, and less reason to employ people merely to demonstrate that more people have been employed.

Today, Tremendous lists more than $3 billion delivered and over 100 million payouts, with 25,000-plus companies using the platform. Those are cumulative company figures, rather than a measure of Baum’s personal wealth or annual revenue. The organization has grown to more than 150 employees across three continents. The little gifting site has acquired rather different responsibilities.

Give the recipient a vote

For the person receiving a payment, a payout platform is only useful if it leads to something they can use. A reward chosen with great confidence by a company can land with considerably less enthusiasm in somebody else’s inbox. Taste is a difficult thing to centralize. Geography makes the exercise harder still.

Baum’s discussions with researchers return to recipient choice and the practical work surrounding incentives. A research team needs people to participate, then needs to compensate them without making the payment process another research project. Tremendous lets organizations offer options suited to recipients, rather than requiring a researcher to choose one universally pleasing gift card.

The administrative details explain why the corporate pivot mattered. Sending a present to a friend and coordinating payments to many participants are different jobs, even when both involve moving money. The second job brings tracking, budgets and international availability into the picture. It rewards software that understands repetition. An occasional inconvenience becomes an entire afternoon when multiplied by a participant list.

The appeal of Baum’s approach is its attention to that afternoon. His stated ambition to simplify giving and receiving funds has a distinctly practical shape. Researchers should have more time for research. Recipients should have usable choices. The work succeeds when fewer people have to interrupt their actual jobs to ask what happened to a payment.

Before another meeting, try a paragraph

Inside Tremendous, the effort to remove avoidable friction takes another form: written communication. The company has built its remote culture around substantial documentation and relatively few meetings. That preference reaches all the way into hiring. A persuasive voice on a video call is insufficient preparation for a job conducted through documents.

The engineering process uses practical sample work and a writing exercise. Candidates may be asked to explain a proposed technology migration, with enough detail to support a decision and enough restraint to spare their readers a small novel. Clear prose becomes part of the work itself. Even the code must occasionally make its case in sentences.

Baum or Kale also asks candidates about changing their minds. The question is direct: “Tell me about a time when you changed your perspective on something important to you.” A company that found its market by reconsidering its first product has some standing to ask. Intellectual flexibility has already had a commercial application there.

“We only spend money we have.”

Nick Baum, on funding the business

Written collaboration does not mean an absence of company. Baum has publicly celebrated week-long retreats in Medellín and Lisbon, with leisure given an unapologetic place alongside work. Distance can protect concentration; occasional proximity can help colleagues become more than helpful names in a chat window. Both arrangements require deliberate choices.

The less picturesque responsibilities

Baum also makes room for a more uncomfortable gathering. He has described leadership sessions lasting six to eight hours, devoted to imagining what could threaten the business. These quarterly premortems produce a list of risks and plans to reduce them. It is an unusual agenda for people who would ordinarily prefer to talk about growth.

His advice on resilience connects capital discipline with hiring standards and shared knowledge. Too much hiring, too quickly, can overwhelm the organization expected to support it. Information about the business should circulate beyond leadership. The underlying concern is continuity: customers need a provider that will still exist, and employees need more than an attractive announcement about expansion.

The earlier product also carries a contested legacy. Small businesses brought a lawsuit alleging that GiftRocket misleadingly presented money transfers as gift cards associated with their businesses. Baum and other founders were named as defendants. In December 2025, a federal judge denied opposing summary judgment motions concerning operations executive Benjamin Kubic. That ruling did not establish Baum’s liability. The allegations should be understood as allegations, rather than folded into a tidy verdict on his career.

GiftRocket stopped accepting new orders on January 1, 2025. Its farewell notice says the team’s attention had shifted to Tremendous and promises continued support for existing gifts. A product can cease to be the company’s future while remaining part of its obligations. That is a less charming side of longevity, but a necessary one.

A gift, after all

For a more personal glimpse of Baum, consider a commission he gave designer Mike Kus. Kus had worked on GiftRocket’s original design. Years later, Baum asked him to make an illustrated wedding gift for Kale and his wife, Holly. The finished piece featured a sailboat and Newport’s Claiborne Pell Bridge, recalling the location of their wedding.

It is a pleasing detail for someone whose working life has revolved around gifts and payments. Here, the choice was particular: a familiar designer, a long friendship, a place worth remembering. No catalog could have selected those connections automatically. The technology can carry the money. Somebody still has to know the friend.