**In the months since this original write up was published, Dan is now the VP of Product at Cyvl.ai. They are a transportation infrastructure AI startup making waves with engineering firms and governments to build and maintain great transportation infrastructure**
Dan McCarthy has been building bridges since undergrad, only the context of what kind of bridges and how they are built has changed. A consultant turned Product leader, Dan serves as the Senior Director of Product at Kard, a remote fintech startup.
Dan grew up locally west of Boston with two younger sisters who also happen to both work in tech. One sister is at LinkSquares here in Boston and the other is down in New York at VMWare. Dan’s mom worked in real estate and his dad was an engineer who did some consulting before eventually transitioning over to a product career at an insurance company.
Dan went out to Chicago and studied civil engineering at Northwestern, an expert with soil mechanics. Northwestern helped him grow and understand how to both balance a workload and leverage numbers. Upon graduation, the classic civil engineering paths didn’t speak to him, so he decided to follow the typical path when you’re not sure what you want to do and became a consultant. He moved back to Boston to join Deloitte in their technology consulting group.
His mind was quickly opened up to a wider set of possibilities after previously breaking concrete as a civil engineer in a lab. Dan jokes that he was “tech illiterate” in college too. He never really got into social media and didn’t have Instagram or TikTok on his phone. Deloitte helped him get “business trained”, from writing e-mails to figuring out how to “go to work” each day. He made great friends at Deloitte and two are even going to be in his upcoming wedding. Good luck Dan!
Dan got a lot of valuable experience at Deloitte seeing different technologies & industries crunched together all at once. He helped implement technology solutions at various clients and work across a lot of different projects and managers. He got repetitions in seeing what works and doesn’t work so well. At Deloitte he first learned about SaaS through his work with major software vendors.
Most impactfully, he worked on healthcare implementations where he would sit with clients onsite doing requirements gathering. Plugging in insurance claims, he learned how to take in customer feedback and developed empathy for the end user.
Dan thought pretty clearly he was ready to go in-house to a smaller company and perhaps try a SaaS startup, although unsure what role within that ecosystem. Around the same time he was recruited over to Bulger Partners. Bulger had a former Deloitte colleague who pitched Dan on doing technical due diligence for PE firms acquiring Series B+ companies. If he wanted to work in SaaS, this was a great way to see inside those types of companies and what career best fit his skillset.
Bulger only had about 15 people and he got a lot more responsibility and exposure. Yes, there were some long hours churning out projects. But he got to see a ton working alongside former CTOs & CPOs who aided the firm in their technical due diligence. Each project introduced him to a new company where he worked up close and got to hear product leaders’ insights around how they were planning to pair technical solutions with strategic decision making, solidifying his interest in product.
Bulger was eventually acquired and Dan jumped at the opportunity to finally move to a software startup, joining SessionM as a Product Manager. He again found a former Deloitte alum who recognized the applicability of his skillset and how it would translate into their open PM role.
Dan shared that there is a balance in product where the soft skills are really important but you also need to be comfortable in the weeds. He thinks he was uniquely experienced in the way engineering prepared him for comfort with numbers and high-detail work, but balance working in teams. Being a jack of all trades, master of none, was a helpful transition into a Product role.
He really enjoyed his time at SessionM. They built loyalty products to help make connections between brands and consumers, providing the engine and logic largely in the quick serve restaurant and retail space to financial providers. It was a big enough company where there was structure & support and Dan got to learn from an awesome manager in Joe Bartell. It was also a small enough growth stage company where he could quickly take on new responsibilities. It was super helpful to understand what a Product Manager should do at an API first company.
Dan’s team led the launch for SessionM’s “Insights” product. It was a reporting tool and one of the first products he got to help manage all the way through. Dan eventually owned the Reporting & Loyalty products and the Loyalty product line was a big revenue generator for the company. SessionM was acquired by Mastercard in 2018 and, after another year, Dan began looking to join a small independent startup where he could find the same types of opportunities he found at SessionM taking on more responsibility, impacting culture, and finding that energy he gets from small startups & scrappy teams operating at a high level.
His goal for his next role was to be the first product hire at a startup. He had a lot of experience in the loyalty & API space when he first heard about Kard. Kard builds API products in the form of a marketplace that integrates with modern issuers on one side, typically Neobanks, and brands on the other side. They power their rewards experiences through “card linked offers”. For example, if you made a purchase at McDonalds with a bank card integrated with Kard you might get 10% cash back.
Kard came to him through Underscore VC’s Core Community from a former SessionM colleague. He had the loyalty experience but didn’t necessarily have as much fintech experience. Luckily he was able to land the job. Kard has about 50 people and is a distributed workforce. They have a cluster of employees in New York but are predominantly remote.
Dan recently moved back to the Boston area after spending some of the Covid years in San Diego. With he and his fiance remote and both with New England roots, it made sense to come back East. They love getting outdoors across New England to Maine, Vermont & New Hampshire with Tuckerman Ravine being a favorite skiing destination. They previously lived in Cambridge the longest and enjoy getting back to visit when they can for a night out. They’re more recently getting to know places like Brewer’s Fork closer to their place in Charlestown.
Dan was Kard’s first product hire and has helped build out their product team to nine team members across product management, data & solutions architecture. It’s been a really fun experience building and implementing Kard’s product solutions and demonstrating how they show value through data.
In startups, there are few specialized playbooks to help you understand where to place people when, so Dan’s biggest mandate has been making sure his team feels empowered to make decisions on what Kard’s customers need. Next is to continue to iterate on the long term vision of Kard. In the quarters ahead it will be critical for their team to figure out how to add to their current rewards experiences for digital banks and brands. An exciting but challenging dilemma for a two sided marketplace.
Here are two career learnings Dan shared on his path from building physical bridges to consulting to SaaS and now Fintech at Kard:
Having Low Ego – “In reality, most good ideas come from the plethora of other people funneling stuff to you. A really good product person helps assess everything coming in and then figure out what needs to be built for the customer. Be thoughtful and comfortable by not being too tied to your own ideas. I don’t say no ego because you’re talking to a bunch of different people and not everyone will always be happy with you so you have to have some confidence, or ego, to continue forward”
Getting comfortable with the unknown – “I had blinders on to an extent earlier in my career and got uncomfortable with how much I didn’t know. I’ve worked at being more ‘ok’ with the unknown and coaching my team to understand there isn’t always going to be a clear answer in what we’re doing. Startups are hard and that’s ok, it’s part of it.”
Dan really enjoys his career in Product. Eventually, he’d love to be a Chief Product Officer at a company where he helps scale a team from a startup to a large product organization and work on businesses with sustainability in mind. He’s really optimistic about Kard’s trajectory, a two sided marketplace with a long runway and a dynamic, growing product org.
Thanks for sharing Dan. If you’d like to learn more about his career or Kard you can reach out to him on LinkedIn, catch him on some trails around New England, or shipping some very enticing merchant offers through digital banking. Excited to see the financial waves you & the Kard team make in the coming years!