Nathan Baumeister
CO-Founder & CEO, ZSUITE TECH
GET TO KNOW NATHAN...
Hometown:
McAllen, TX
Alma Mater:
BBA and MBA, The University of Texas at Austin, McCombs School of Business
First Job:
My first job was distributing flyers door-to-door with my family on weekends. I was also a lifeguard, which I enjoyed a heck of a lot more!
Q: Tell me a little about your background, growing up.
A: I was born in Alaska but grew up in a Texas border town, McAllen, where my dad worked in oil and gas and my mom worked in the citrus industry. By the time I was a senior in high school, I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur and start my own company.
Q: Which life experiences or events have influenced you?
A: While completing my undergraduate degree, I took two years off to live in in Paraguay doing volunteer work. This was super impactful for me—being immersed in a new culture and country—and learning three languages while I was there. This experience truly taught me how to better connect, help and serve others.
Q: Who has been your biggest supporter or mentor in your business journey?
A: That's a good question because I've had several. During my 11 years at BancVue, now Kasasa, I had three mentors that all helped me in very different ways: Don Shafer, Gabe Krajicek, and Marty Sunde. To this day, Marty—who is technically retired—is my mentor, executive coach, and board advisor.
Q: What is the best advice you have received?
A: I learned the most meaningful lesson about entrepreneurship when I was getting my MBA and took a class on new venture creation by Rob Adams, a long-time venture veteran. By this time in life, I had been part of three startups. Rob went through a list of the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make, and I realized I had made every mistake he mentioned! The biggest take-away: “your idea doesn’t really matter. It’s all about knowing who you're serving and what pain points they have.” It sounds so obvious, but in practice, many businesses start with a great idea rather than focusing on the customer’s needs. I remember coming home after the first class and telling my wife that my MBA just paid for itself with that one class.
Q: How would you describe your leadership style?
A: I think leadership style depends on who you're leading. However, one thing that always comes to mind is that “leaders let leaders lead.” I think the best leaders are the ones that back off and “not lead”: bring in great people and let them do the things that you've hired them to do—which they are better positioned than you to accomplish. So, letting go of control to enable your internal team to flourish is the foundation of how I approach leadership.
Q: What is a non-negotiable characteristic in every employee you hire?
A: They must be a good person. A lot can be accomplished with good people. If someone is very skilled and good at their job but they aren’t fundamentally a good person, it can cause a lot of destruction: the culture and morale go down the drain—and no one is going to have fun. They must be good people and that is non-negotiable.
Q: What is the most interesting trend you see in 2024?
A: I’ve been thinking about the pros and cons of ‘hyper-personalized content’—which will continue to impact every aspect of our lives. It allows you to find niche interests and people that think just like you—which can be very cool. However, most of the time I don't even connect with the person that lives right next door or in my neighborhood. Why? Because it’s easy to find people who are most like me and have the same opinions online. But when you get so hyper-personalized, the implications to creativity, innovation, political systems, societal connections—all types of things—can get pushed off to the side and neglected. It affects our ability to drive unity and cooperation. Humans are communal people, and we need community. It can't just be digital; it must be physical as well. So, while hyper-personalization can be good—there are negative implications as well.
Q: What is something most people don’t know about you?
A: I have two party tricks. I grew-up a gymnast and can still do flips—standing back flips, back handsprings, front handsprings, walking on my hands. Occasionally, I’ll do a stunt at a party or speaking event just for fun. My other party trick is that I learned three languages when I lived in Paraguay: Spanish, Portuguese, and Guaraní, which is a Native American language in South America.
Q: Tell me about the podcast you host.
A: “Builder, Banker, Hacker, Chief” is the name of the podcast. It’s a lot of fun. We created it to talk to leaders including CEOs or presidents of financial institutions and FinTech companies. We focus on capturing their stories about how they became who they are and what shaped them to be the leaders that they are within these specific industries.
Q: What are you watching now?
A: The Bear.
ZSuite Technologies provides a digital commercial escrow and subaccounting platform to help financial institutions grow commercial deposits and expand business relationships. Property managers, law firms, municipalities, title companies and other industries that heavily utilize escrow and subaccounts provide a tremendous opportunity to grow sustainable, low-cost deposits. This value-added relationship can easily expand to lending opportunities increasing operational efficiency for you and your clients. The birth of our company began in 2015 when Leader Bank, a community bank based out of Arlington, MA created an in-house product innovation division. After several successful product launches, Leader Bank and the product innovation team recognized a much bigger vision: to change the commercial banking industry by creating an independent company. In the summer of 2019, ZSuite Technologies was founded.
More info: www.zsuitetech.com/.
“… The best leaders are the ones that back off and ‘not lead’: bring in great people and let them do the things that you’ve hired them to do—which they are better positioned than you to accomplish.”