A homegrown tech success story
Two Union County fathers quit their jobs in 2012 — and built what would become one of Charlotte's most successful tech companies
The following article appeared in the November 29, 2023, edition of The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with smart and original local news for Charlotte. We offer free and paid subscription plans. More info here.
How Charlotte-based Payzer defied the odds and went from a lean 4-person office above a Union County garage to a $250M sale this month
Joe Giordano quit his job at Bank of America in 2012 to start a new venture offering payment services to home contractors, with a friend he met through his daughters’ basketball and lacrosse games. The company, Payzer, sold this month for $250 million. (Photo courtesy of Payzer/WEX)
by Tony Mecia
The idea for what would become one of Charlotte’s most successful tech companies started to take shape, of all places, on local youth basketball courts.
For years, Joe Giordano, a Bank of America payment-strategy executive, had coached his daughters’ basketball and lacrosse teams with fellow parent Doug Little — first through the Wesley Chapel Weddington Athletic Association, and later at Marvin Ridge Middle School. In late 2011, they started talking about work — and the two Union County fathers became intrigued by a business opportunity.
Although the internet revolution was more than a decade old, new technologies largely hadn’t trickled down to help contractors making service calls — people like plumbers and air-conditioning technicians, whose companies largely still handled billing and collections the old-fashioned way.
The more they looked into it, the more they became convinced they could start a company that could modernize that industry and draw on their finance and payments backgrounds.
“I got really excited, because I was like, ‘Oh, we didn’t miss the internet!’” Giordano recalled in a recent interview with The Ledger. “Here's this enormous market where we can develop applications for small- and medium-sized businesses. And I just pinched myself.”
In 2012, he and Little quit their jobs and started working on the project out of a room above the garage at Giordano’s house in the small Union County town of Marvin. Fast forward to last month, and the company they started — called Payzer — had one of the most successful outcomes of any Charlotte tech company: It sold to Maine-based WEX for $250M.
How it got there is a mix of vision and hard work, and also good timing. Although Charlotte isn’t known as a hotbed of homegrown tech companies, Payzer’s experience shows that tech firms can grow and prosper outside of locations that are better-known for their startup cultures, like Silicon Valley.
Payzer’s success is “a great sign of how far our ecosystem has come,” says John Espey, a Charlotte tech investor and CEO of Defiance Ventures, who is unaffiliated with Payzer.