As cofounder of Cake, Jason brings plenty of positive energy and drive, and has developed into a national startup community leader, and prolific startup mentor and advisor.
Jason is a global authority on startup funding and employee equity, with his content and mentoring widely adopted in top programs including Starmate, Techstars, Antler and Founder Institute. His authentic and highly practical mentoring is highly sought after as it enables startups to progress through complex tasks quickly and effectively.
Jason led the well known startup, Cake, through zero to one, driving it forward, responsible for fundraising, sales and marketing and finance. His mantra of ‘Be The Train’ kept Cake moving at all times as Cake developed an innovative fintech product to streamline and simplify startup equity in a highly regulated industry, and secured market leadership in Australia within 3 years, developing a highly regarded product, brand and community. Cake now has over 15,000 companies managing their equity in 15 countries, with over 200,000 investors and employees owning equity on Cake in 80 countries.
In scaling Cake into a global software company, Jason realised early the need to learn super fast and access the best mentors to help develop his skills, helping him to excel at community building, partnerships and sales, balancing growth and efficiency, and building a quality executive team to help scale the business. He built Australia’s leading startup community and partnership network at Cake, which was instrumental in Cake’s market leadership, and in doing so, has authored leading content, and run industry leading events and workshops. In 2023 and 2024 Jason successfully led the US expansion of Cake’s US business, which is developing into a contender in the US equity management sector.
Before Cake, starting out in accounting, Jason quickly developed exceptional leadership and communication skills which led to Financial Planning and Control leadership roles at MasterCard in London and then to CFO roles, including for Ultra HNW Family Office, Zupp Property Group where he managed investment strategies, and financial planning and control of a diversified portfolio, reporting to the CEO and the Chairman. But this was not enough and he needed to test himself to the limit! And so he threw himself into entrepreneurship in 2016 to learn and see what he could achieve.
In addition to Cake, Jason cofounded Torus, which is a fast growing startup community that has a unique and powerful program for helping early-stage founders to learn more about the capital raising process. He plans to scale Torus into a leading global community for early stage founders to raise capital. Torus has invested in almost 20 startups since 2022, with plans to continue to back the best founders!
You can also check out Jason’s podcast, Startup Equity Matters, where he helps early stage startup founders and their teams to understand their equity, and get value from it, by interviewing founders, lawyers, investors and other equity nerds to unpack what is otherwise a hard to access and understand topic.
Proudly based out of the Gold Coast, Jason is championing the city as a top place to work in tech, and helping the startup community to develop the experience and network to develop a tech ecosystem, and have a good time while doing it!
