Episode 92: Jonathan Gilbert

Introducing Jonathan Gilbert

Jonathan works in Portland, Maine for an employee-owned company called Qualpay. Jon went to his first WordPress event in 2016 and has been hooked on WordPress and its community ever since. When not working, Jon enjoys hiking, traveling, cooking, and hanging out with his cats and wife.

Show Notes

Twitter | @prefont

LinkedIn | Jonathan S Gilbert

Website | www.qualpay.com

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas and perspectives.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 92.

Tara: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Jonathan Gilbert. Jonathan works in Portland, Maine for an employee-owned company called Qualpay. Jon went to his first WordPress event in 2016 and has been hooked on WordPress and its community ever since. When not working, Jon enjoys hiking, traveling, cooking, and hanging out with his cats and wife. Welcome, Jonathan.

Jonathan: Hey, thank you, guys. Thank you for having me on the show. I’m very grateful to be here.

Tara: Hey, it’s great to have you here, Jonathan. Can you tell us more about yourself?

Jonathan: Yeah. I work for an employee-owned company called Qualpay. We’re based in San Matheo, California. I’m personally based in Portland, Maine as one of two remote employees out on the east coast. We’re a solution provider for WordPress and we create payments platform that helps developers earn additional revenue by providing a service that their customers need. We help merchants by providing the most updated tech in modern payment features to help their business grow. My job is to get developers and software providers to use our platform by offering it as a value-added service to their core offering. I’ve been having a lot of fun doing that in the WordPress community so far. It’s been a really tremendous experience meeting these people.

Tara: How much of what you’re doing is number-related? You have to know a lot about accounting and that type of thing? Or is it more coding and programming?

Jonathan: That’s really interesting. I have to know quite a bit about pricing and so forth but the people who work with me don’t. We have some pretty easy calculators that we use kind of to take the load off of our partner’s back and kind of do the thinking for them. For me, there’s a couple of quick calculations that I need to be able to do but I also have to understand– I can’t code myself but I have to understand and talk about code, and certainly, we’re API-based and so it’s important to be able to communicate why our services are valuable to a developer and a merchant. It’s a little bit of both, a little bit of being able to run some numbers but also having at least a remedial understanding of how programming works.

Tara: Yeah. What is your background then?

Jonathan: My background is actually in business. I went to business school to become originally a sports agent. I went to the University of Massachusetts to the school that the McCormicks founded, who is the father of support management. I graduated high school right around the time when Jerry Macguire came out and–

Tara: Ahh. “Show me the money.”

Jonathan: Yeah, exactly. I was like, “I really want to work in sports.” And then I first started working for Michael Phelps’ agent, Peter Carlyle and through that,