
Jim Williams is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of MustHaveMenus, a Bend, Oregon-based platform serving 10,000+ restaurants, hotels, and food service businesses with cloud-based menu design, digital signage, and menu management tools. Before MustHaveMenus, he sold email-marketing startup MarketHome to ClickAction for $15 million in 1999, co-founded church-tech platform Sharefaith (acquired by Ministry Brands in 2018), and made an early angel investment in HotelTonight (acquired by Airbnb in 2019). An English major who started his first business at age 11, Williams embodies the accidental founder: perpetually optimistic, deeply curious about design, and committed to building software that solves genuinely unglamorous problems.
SparkPlug is a San Francisco-based incentive management platform that turns frontline retail and restaurant employees into a brand's most effective sales force. By integrating directly with point-of-sale systems, it automates sales contests, goals, and commissions - often funded by the brands and vendors whose products those employees sell - and pays rewards out automatically. The company works with thousands of retail locations and hundreds of brand partners, betting that the people closest to the customer are the most underused influence in physical commerce.
Homebase is a San Francisco-based workforce management platform built for small businesses running hourly teams. Founded in 2014, it combines employee scheduling, time tracking, payroll, HR compliance, and team communication in one mobile-first app. As of 2024, the platform serves over 150,000 businesses and 3.8 million hourly workers, having logged 8 billion hours and processed $3 billion in gross payroll. Backed by $198 million in total funding, Homebase competes by bundling tools that small business owners previously paid for separately - and more recently by embedding AI assistants across hiring, scheduling, and payroll.