The Aha Moment Learning From the Journey Jerry Huskins’s aha moment dates to 2008 during the financial Jerry had never developed or sold software before he began depression while he was living in San Francisco. He had been Fonteva, but that didn’t stop him from founding a multimillion working with the first salesperson hired at Salesforce.org and, dollar business. Personal fulfillment and motivation are what as a result, was exposed to the nonprofit world. Jerry shares, drove him to success. “Don’t do it unless you really feel like you “With that early window into how nonprofits used the Salesforce love it and you’ve got a passion for it,” says Jerry. He believes Platform, I saw deals where membership management was that it’s important to love what you do every day. If you have an really the requirement.” He then realized that there was an entire exit plan, you’ll constantly be thinking of your way out instead of category of software that had grown up over 30 years on client- what truly matters. server networks and mainframe computers that no one had built in the public cloud. As you can imagine, this realization led to an idea, and the idea turned into an opportunity. Not long after, Jerry took a giant leap to found the first membership product built 100% natively on Salesforce. The Secret to Scaling When it comes to growing a business, Jerry believes that capital efficiency is key. He has been able to make his money go further by investing in the right places and focusing efforts where it matters most. Instead of building its own infrastructure, Fonteva leveraged Salesforce technology so that it could focus on its customers. Jerry shares that “With the Salesforce infrastructure, we have invested significantly less in this business than we would have had we built it on .NET or built a stand-alone Java application on AWS.” 7