The Christmas presents came with an itinerary. Stephanie Alsbrooks Hanson gave her daughters suitcases and travel books, then proposed a family undertaking: visit all 50 states together in three years. Previous trips would not count. They were starting over. There was also a rule for their mother, who was building a software company: work could wait until the girls were asleep, or until she was in the bathroom.
It is an unusually frank account of trying to fit a company and a family into the same life. The trip had a deadline, a defined scope and a restriction on the founder’s availability. Even leisure had acquired some project management. The family completed the states. The more interesting part is that Hanson had given herself a constraint she could not simply delegate to somebody else.
Freedom runs through Hanson’s career with a similar complication. She likes organizing things. She also builds businesses that promise to give other people room to act. At defi SOLUTIONS, that meant helping lenders change their own software. At Gestalt, where she is CEO and co-founder, it means making scattered financial data usable. Getting the machinery in order is her way of allowing someone else to get on with the day.
Fifteen years on the receiving end
Hanson founded defi in 2012 after spending about 15 years buying, modifying and building loan origination systems. She knew the work from the customer’s side. An origination system helps a lender move an application through evaluation and toward a funded loan. If changing the system is difficult, changing the business becomes difficult, too.
The frustration supplied a fairly precise brief: make something flexible enough for lenders with different processes, sizes and ambitions. She gathered advisers and industry specialists who accepted a mixture of pay and equity. The first product arrived by the end of that year, after a six-month development effort. A familiar complaint had become a product with a delivery date.
The company’s early public launch made the contrast visible. Cars were acquiring new technology while the software used to finance them remained cumbersome to alter. defi offered a cloud-based system that lenders could configure. For a customer, that promise was practical: more ability to adjust the work without treating every alteration as a separate construction project.
There is an appealing lack of glamour in this starting point. Loan origination is unlikely to stop dinner conversation. Yet anyone who has waited for a financial application to move knows that ordinary processes can exert considerable authority over a person’s time. Hanson chose a part of the industry whose limitations she had already spent years encountering.
The barbecue problem
Inside the growing company, freedom produced a less orderly result. People could choose how to work, but their messages kept interrupting one another. Hanson’s 2015 account of the problem includes attempted remedies such as red and green availability lights. A new employee suggested replacing Skype with Slack. The suggestion met a reception familiar to anyone who has recommended another workplace app: weary eyes.
Hanson agreed to try it despite her doubts. She later reported an 80 percent reduction in email traffic. One example involved a colleague’s barbecue lunches. An invitation to eat generated a procession of replies about attendance and side dishes. Everyone received the conversation, including people who had no intention of eating the steak. A dedicated channel let the interested parties discuss lunch without conscripting the rest of the office.
The episode makes her argument for configurable software rather tangible. Give people the right boundaries and they can decide what deserves their attention. Leave the boundaries vague and somebody else’s potato salad becomes your administrative responsibility.
It also gives the founder an undignified but useful role: the person who almost declined the improvement. Hanson preserved that detail when she wrote about it. She credited an employee whose stay at the company was brief, but whose suggestion continued to shape how the team communicated. Influence, in this account, did not require seniority or a long tenure.
A playbook that other people could write
By 2017, she was describing another adjustment. A small team could rely on shared habits. A larger one needed a clearer account of what those habits meant. defi developed a Freedom Playbook after its chief operating officer brought back the idea from a Vistage meeting. Employees helped identify what the company was, what it wanted to become and what it hoped to preserve.
Hanson organized the resulting material. At first, she explained individual items herself, in Slack and at company meetings. The approach evolved until different employees took turns explaining the ideas. Values became something colleagues could interpret in their own voices, rather than a recurring speech from the same chair.
“Some of the best ideas in our company haven’t come from me. Actually, most of them haven’t.”
Stephanie Alsbrooks Hanson · 2017
There was a vocabulary to go with it. Work anniversaries became defiaversaries. The number 444 had significance because of the telephone keypad letters in the company’s name. These are small inventions, but small inventions can make a workplace recognizable to the people inside it. A company acquires character through what its people repeat.
Hanson’s own tastes fit comfortably into that picture. Her Gestalt biography lists travel, games and organizing among her interests, alongside an affection for Weird Al Yankovic. It also lists Command and Arranger among her StrengthsFinder results. Taken together, those details suggest someone quite willing to run the meeting and equally willing to appreciate a ridiculous song.
When the company outgrew the first chapter
The business was gaining institutional recognition as well as internal customs. In 2017, Hanson won EY’s Southwest regional Entrepreneur of the Year award in Emerging Technology. She had started defi with her own money and help from friends. The award recognized a business built in a specific, often overlooked corner of financial services.
In January 2018, Bain Capital Ventures announced a $55 million Series C investment. Its investment case emphasized Hanson and co-founder Georgine Muntz’s experience inside auto finance and the control defi offered lenders. Industry knowledge had become something an outside investor could underwrite. The inconvenience Hanson knew as a customer was substantial enough to support a company.
The next change involved the shape of that company. In 2019, defi and Sagent Auto announced a merger. Bret Leech would lead the combined business. Hanson, identified as founder and vice chair, would continue working on relationships with current and prospective clients. Her responsibilities had changed along with the organization she helped create.
In February 2021, she was named president of the newly formed Tricolor Financial, a software business. Her public conversation that March included both entrepreneurial transitions and encouraging future female founders. The career was continuing beyond the company with which her name had become associated.
The data was still waiting
Gestalt brought her back to a problem underneath the applications. Financial institutions accumulate information across origination, servicing and other operational systems. Having that information somewhere does not automatically make it available for a useful question. A team may spend its time assembling the material it needs before the analysis can begin.
The company’s data foundation launched in 2023. Hanson co-founded Gestalt with the involvement of the Ensemblex venture studio; Justin McClintick is its CTO/CPO and co-founder. The proposition is to centralize and organize lenders’ information so that each institution does not have to recreate the same underlying infrastructure for itself.
That choice has a family resemblance to defi. Both businesses address work customers would rather spend less time arranging. Both ask institutions to consider a shared software foundation for something that has often been handled through individual projects. Their customers still have decisions to make. The pitch is that those decisions should not all begin with rebuilding the tools.
In September 2024, Gestalt announced a $5.9 million seed round led by Alpha Edison and Yamaha Motor Ventures, bringing total investment to $8 million. That same month, Rapid Finance announced an integration with Gestalt connecting lending automation and fraud-related insights with the data platform. The organizing work was becoming part of a network of other tools.
Hanson’s stated ambition is access. In an August 2025 explanation of Gestalt’s purpose, she argued that every financial institution deserves access to its own data. Credit bureaus and accounting systems already provide shared capabilities; she believes data infrastructure can be approached in a similar way. The case is about the expense and distraction of repeatedly building the foundations.
Room to get on with it
Her later writing keeps returning to the people doing the work. In a newsletter written in May 2025, she described a remote team using Kumospace, flexible hours, goals and coaching. Commitments mattered more than identical schedules. The arrangement depended on adults following through and speaking clearly when circumstances changed.
The opening memory in that newsletter was from Nebraska, where she grew up delivering May Day candy baskets to neighbors, ringing the doorbell and running away. As a child, she remembered the running. Looking back, she saw the pleasure of brightening somebody’s day. It is a small, cheerful admission that the point of an activity can become clearer afterward.
For Hanson, the work has repeatedly involved arranging something complicated so that another person has more choices. A lender can alter a process. A colleague can avoid an irrelevant conversation. A financial team can ask a question without beginning a data excavation. And a mother can give her children suitcases, put a deadline on the map and try to keep the company out of the passenger seat.