Jason Wilk is an American entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Dave, a publicly traded financial services company on NASDAQ. He grew up in

Los Angeles, California Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world' ...

. Wilk created several small businesses before selling a video advertising network called AllScreen for $85 million in 2015. That gave him the money to start Dave, a digital banking upstart that works off of tips and subscription fees rather than overdraft fees. Over the years, Dave has grown to more than 10 million users and went public in January, 2022 at a valuation close to $4 billon.

Early life

Wilk was born in Los Angeles, California, where he also spent his youth. He attended

Loyola Marymount University Loyola Marymount University (LMU) is a private Jesuit and Marymount research university in Los Angeles, California. It is located on the west side of the city near Playa Vista. LMU is the parent school to Loyola Law School, which is located ...

in California, where he played golf. Initially, Wilk wanted to be a professional golfer, but at college decided to pursue entrepreneurship instead. He graduated from Loyola Maymount in 2007.

Career

Early career

Wilk's first business venture was a retail website for golf equipment called 1DaySports.com. He sold the website for $100,000 and used the money for a backpacking trip across several continents. Wilk also founded a startup called AllScreen. It was funded by

Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, St ...

. AllScreen was a video distribution network for media companies to easily share their content and ad revenue with other websites to achieve more views . The company was also backed by celebrity venture capitalist

Mark Cuban Mark Cuban (born July 31, 1958) is an American billionaire entrepreneur, television personality, and media proprietor whose net worth is an estimated $4.8 billion, according to ''Forbes'', and ranked No. 177 on the 2020 ''Forbes'' 400 list ...

. Mr. Cuban invested in several of Wilk's ventures and had a big impact on Wilk's career after they met at the

TechCrunch TechCrunch is an American online newspaper focusing on high tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare. In 2010, AOL acquired the company for approximately $ ...

40 conference around 2010. While AllScreen was still in stealth mode, he cofounded a company called WriteyBoard that sold stick-in whiteboards to startup companies. AllScreen sold to Zealot Networks in 2015 for $85 million.

Dave

Wilk founded digital banking upstart, Dave, with co-founders Paras Chitrakar and John Wolanin in 2016. The startup was inspired by Wilk's prior frustration with overdraft fees According to Wilk, he had more than 120 meetings with venture capitalists, attempting to get financial support for Dave from investors that do not themselves experience overdraft fees. Dave grew to 10 million members within 5 years and $122 million in annual revenues by 2020, using subscriptions and optional tips as its business model, instead of overdraft fees. Wilk is largely credited with the disruption of overdraft fees in American banking. In 2022, Wilk was asked to give a Congressional testimony in front of the Senate Banking Subcommittee for Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection on the topic of “Examining Overdraft Fees and Their Effects on Working Families”. In 2021, Dave was ranked the fifth fastest growing company in America on the Inc5000 list.https://www.inc.com/profile/dave In January 2022, Wilk took the company public on NASDAQ at a valuation of close to $4 billion.

Personal life

Wilk lives in

with his wife, Briana.

Awards And Honors

2020 EY Entrepreneur of the year, Los Angeles Dave ranked fifth fastest growing company on INC 5000 List 2021 AllScreen ranked 29th fastest growing company on INC 5000 List 2015 https://www.inc.com/profile/allscreen

References

Notes

External links

Podcast interview with Wilk
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wilk, Jason Businesspeople from Los Angeles American financial company founders Loyola Law School alumni Loyola Marymount Lions athletes Living people 1985 births