Scott Grimes and Lynne Laube settled one question before Cardlytics had much of a company to organise. Sitting in Laube’s kitchen, they agreed that neither founder would have a private office. A startup can postpone plenty of decisions. Apparently, the seating plan was too consequential to leave until later.
By 2018, Cardlytics occupied 74,000 square feet at Atlanta’s Ponce City Market. The founders still sat among their colleagues. There were Star Wars-themed conference rooms and the familiar bustle of a technology business. The agreement from the kitchen had survived the furniture budget.
It is a useful way into Grimes’s story. He helped build a company whose product required several parties to cooperate: banks with purchase records, advertisers with offers and customers who might welcome some money back. Inside the business, he wanted fewer barriers between people. Outside it, he had to persuade institutions to let a young company close enough to do useful work.
An engineer learns the language of money
Grimes arrived at entrepreneurship by a route with several changes of vocabulary. He studied electrical engineering at Union College and earned an MBA at Stanford. His career began as an electrical engineer at Schlumberger, then took him through management consulting at McKinsey, an executive role at the electronic sourcing business FreeMarkets and venture investing at Canaan Partners.
Those jobs put him on different sides of a business decision. An engineer has to make a system work. A consultant has to explain what a company should do. An investor has to decide whether the proposition deserves capital. A founder eventually receives all three assignments, usually with less time than seems civilised.
At Capital One, the subjects became strategy and payments. Grimes was vice president of strategy from 2003 to 2005, then senior vice president and general manager of payments until 2008. The work included developing decoupled debit, a payment approach that separated the card relationship from the institution holding a customer’s deposit account.
Cardlytics grew from this familiarity with the machinery of everyday spending. Grimes and Laube had seen what transaction records could reveal. A purchase had an amount, a merchant and a place in a sequence. Together, such entries could help a business understand shopping behaviour without asking customers to complete another questionnaire.
His later board work reached beyond advertising. In August 2014, Great Plains Energy appointed him a director, citing the combination of strategy and consumer technology in his background. He subsequently served on Evergy’s board until May 2020. His committee assignments included audit and finance, alongside oversight of utility operations. It was another setting where technology decisions met an established institution’s obligations. The customer relationship, the operating system and the consequences of a decision all had to be considered together.
A receipt has a better memory
A late afternoon before Thanksgiving in 2007 supplied an early glimpse of the idea. Grimes and Laube were discussing anonymous transaction histories at Capital One, looking at what patterns of spending suggested about the people behind them. The habit of reading purchases as a story would become the basis of a business.
There is an obvious commercial attraction to a record of what someone actually bought. A person can express an interest and never spend a dollar. A transaction records a decision already made. For advertisers, that difference offered another way to choose an audience and to assess what happened after an offer appeared.
The Cardlytics proposition joined that record to a place customers already visited: digital banking. In the early version Grimes described, an offer appeared near a relevant transaction. The customer activated it, shopped with the associated card and earned a reward after meeting its terms. The reward then arrived as an account credit.
The convenience was part of the argument. Customers could use a payment method they already carried. Banks could offer another reason to engage with their accounts. Merchants could reach a selected audience and connect an advertising campaign with later purchases. Each participant had a practical reason to consider the arrangement.
For the shopper, the sequence was refreshingly specific: find the offer, activate it and meet the purchase conditions. For the business buying the campaign, the sequence raised a further question: did the offer change what the customer did? Cardlytics’ emphasis on measurement put that question near the centre of the sales pitch. An advertisement could look persuasive on a screen; the purchase record supplied something more concrete to examine. Grimes had chosen a channel in which the advertisement and the eventual transaction could be connected.
By March 2010, Grimes was explaining transaction-based marketing to an audience of more than 800 investors and executives at the Montgomery Technology Conference. His concern was the gap between what merchants spent on offers and what they could establish about the results. A reward was useful only if the recipient noticed it, redeemed it and did something valuable for the merchant.
The bank has to say yes
Founding Cardlytics in 2008 gave Grimes and Laube a particularly awkward audience for a new banking proposition. The financial crisis soon made confidence scarce. They secured early financing in August, before the autumn upheaval, and kept working through a period when the institutions they needed were facing problems considerably larger than advertising.
“The world was a scary place at that time.”
Scott Grimes, reflecting on 2008
A banking background helped with the conversation. Grimes understood that a useful commercial idea still had to satisfy people responsible for sensitive information. In describing Cardlytics’ early architecture, he emphasised bank control and the ability to work without personally identifying information. Privacy and security belonged in the design of the proposition from the start.
Introductions mattered, too. Laube later recalled a board member connecting the founders with financial institutions, helping the company reach its first major banking agreement. She also described an internal bank advocate named Jason who supported an early national launch. Someone inside a cautious organisation had to put a reputation behind the decision.
That is a less solitary version of entrepreneurship than the usual portrait permits. The founder may supply the pitch, but a partner’s employee must often carry it into rooms the founder never enters. Cardlytics depended on people willing to make that case, as well as on the technology being proposed.
No offices, even after the kitchen
Atlanta was a deliberate choice. Grimes pointed to its payments industry, available talent and the distance early venture funding could travel there. Location affected both whom Cardlytics could hire and how much it could accomplish before needing more money. The address was part of the operating plan.
The eventual Ponce City Market workplace gave the kitchen agreement room to prove itself. A visitor could find the founders at desks alongside employees. The arrangement made access an everyday matter of geography. An open door is a fine expression; dispensing with the door saves everyone the trouble of interpreting it.
Grimes’s stated approach was to recruit capable people, provide resources and let them work. He gave the team credit for the company’s execution. There is a practical consistency between that language and sitting within reach of the people expected to deliver. Neither proves that management becomes effortless. It does make one preference visible.
The business also had an unromantic demand on its infrastructure: more banking partners meant more data to process. In discussing Cardlytics’ analytics platform, Grimes highlighted predictable costs as the system expanded. The appeal of a growing audience had to be matched by the capacity to serve it. A clever offer still needed the computing to arrive on time.
The bell rings; the work continues
In February 2018, Grimes and Laube reached Nasdaq. Cardlytics initially offered 5.4 million shares at $13 each, representing $70.2 million before underwriting discounts and commissions. A decade separated the company’s founding from the public offering. The celebratory photograph compressed those years into two people standing behind a lectern.
Markets supplied little ceremonial courtesy. Cardlytics proceeded during a volatile week when other companies pulled offerings. The founders described the decision in terms of the business’s next stage: bank pilots and integrations could increase its reach, and a stronger balance sheet could help fund that work. The public listing had an operating purpose.
Being embedded in banks also shaped the company before it reached the market. Large institutional customers already expected discipline. Going public added processes, but Cardlytics had been learning to satisfy demanding counterparties for years. The bankers had conducted their own education, with considerably less applause than the opening bell.
A company outlasts its first arrangement
The partnership changed form in May 2020. Laube became chief executive and Grimes moved into the newly created executive chairman role. The company described the change as part of succession planning. For a business built by two colleagues, it was another arrangement of responsibilities after twelve years of working together.
- Grimes and Laube co-found Cardlytics. Grimes becomes CEO.
- The company makes its Nasdaq debut.
- Laube becomes CEO on May 15; Grimes becomes executive chairman.
- Grimes resigns from all company positions on November 11.
His departure in November 2022 ended his executive chairmanship and board service. Cardlytics said the resignation did not arise from a disagreement over its operations, policies or practices. Laube also resigned from her remaining positions that day. Their founding chapter had a beginning, a succession and an end.
The company they started had asked an unfashionably practical question: could the record of an ordinary purchase help make the next offer more useful? Answering it required engineering, banking knowledge, advertisers, capital and patient cooperation. Grimes’s contribution sits across that work. The kitchen table makes a pleasing beginning. The years spent persuading everyone else to pull up a chair give it substance.