The experiential : Educator | Executive | entrepreneur
Every person has innate abilities that can lead to entrepreneurial success. I am here to help unlock them. Driving innovation, growth, and instinctive entrepreneurship across fintech, SaaS, and regulated markets.
About Daren
Daren Jackson started his career teaching economics, accounting, and entrepreneurship in a high school classroom in Smithfield, Utah. He has never stopped teaching. The difference is that the classroom is now boardrooms, investor meetings, and the companies he builds.
In 2004 he founded RefPay, a payment distribution network for sports officials across the US and Canada. In 2009 RefPay was acquired by the NCAA, that business innovation became the foundation for Rapid Financial Solutions, a SaaS fintech company he built over 11 years to a client base of more than 2,500 US counties before selling it to Tyler Technologies in 2022.
https://investors.tylertech.com/news/news-details/2022/Tyler-Technologies-to-Acquire-Rapid-Financial-Solutions/default.aspx
During that same period he served as EVP of Payments at ArbiterSports, where he helped take the company through its acquisition by Serent Capital. He holds a Doctorate in Business Administration from the University of Florida and dual graduate and undergraduate degrees from Utah State, both with honors.
Daren's work has always sat at the intersection of infrastructure, regulation, and markets that generic software has failed. Payments for sports officials, cowboys, jurors, poll workers, disbursements for county governments, Financial infrastructure for regulated industries, and a host of non profit solutions. These are not glamorous verticals. They are undeserved ones, and that is precisely the point.
Daren’s latest venture AVATARé, is the culmination of that body of work. A vertical SaaS infrastructure company built to solve the infrastructure problem once, at the platform level, so that every product deployed on top of it can focus on its market rather than reinventing the plumbing.
Areas of expertise
Career highlights
Business Administration, Management and Operations — 2017 to 2020
Accounting — Cum Laude Graduate
Business and Managerial Economics — Cum Laude Graduate
Issued 2014
Credential ID 447780
73D Accounting Specialist
Whether you are an Entreprenuer Educator Executive looking for perspective, an organization exploring a partnership, or someone who wants to understand the AVATARé thesis, the conversation starts the same way.
