These CEOs are putting brotherly support to work
If the technology startup world is about whom you know, the Gavin family sure has benefited from its contacts.
Brothers Tim and Tom Gavin are not only former co-workers and current tech CEOs, but they have used their family ties to build two financial services software businesses by encouragement and a fair amount of ribbing.
“If you ask our mother, she likes Eze better,” said older brother Tom, CEO of South Boston’s Eze Castle Software.
Eze Castle is working as a big brother for Tim’s young financial research management software company, Boston’s Code:Red Inc., providing a bit of capital and a lot of relationships in the handshake-heavy financial services field. But the two say their businesses are more than just linked by blood and money.
“We obviously try to keep work and personal stuff separate, but the beauty of it is our businesses are highly complementary,” Tom said.
Tim was the first Gavin of the six boys and two girls to be employed at Eze or Code:Red. He was referred to Eze founder Sean McLaughlin by a sister who was middle-school friends with Sean’s sister.
Tim was the third Eze employee in 1996 and eventually brought on Tom who “was laboring in the salt mines of consulting.”
Together, the two helped take the company developing software for traders and investment banks from its early startup phase to having a sizable presence in the financial services world with about 120 employees. (Tom and Tim joke that much of that growth came from Gavin and McLaughlin relations.)
But by the time 2004 rolled around, Tim — then an executive vice president working on strategic initiatives — was ready to break out on his own.
“I basically was with Eze from the beginning and I said I really wanted to do the same thing on my own,” he said low fee cash advance. “But it was difficult to leave.”
He and another former Eze executive, Dwight Wyatt, who happened to have come to the company through Tom, started up their own financial services software shop. But the ties were not completely broken, as Eze provided an undisclosed amount of cash to the venture.
“The amount of money Eze put in was more for the relationship than for the funding,” Tim said. “As a startup there weren’t clients that were ready to jump on board. But when you’re trying to go off to a client and say, ‘Hey, we have a big brother behind us with Eze Castle,’ that makes them comfortable.”
Tom and Tim find a way to work with each other that attempts to transcend the business partnership. The two companies are liberal with their employees’ career tracks, allowing talent to flow back and forth depending on an individual’s interests and talents. They also share sales leads, even advocating for the other business in their sales pitches.
While Tim would not say what the future is for the 19-person company — Eze aligned with Bank of New York in 2006 and now employs about 350 people — he hope’s to model big brother’s success.
Jackie Noblett can be reached at jnoblett@bizjournals.com.