About

Jason Roth, wearing a black t-shirt and beige Kangol cap, sits on a bench next to a bronze statue of Albert Einstein in formal attire and appears to have a conversation with the statue

Jason Roth - Fintech Founder & Technology Strategy Consultant in San Francisco

I’ve built products on various tech, from Windows desktop to enterprise Java, for almost 30 years. I was a day-to-day coder for the first part of my career. When I co-founded a mortgage tech company called ComplianceEase, I needed to focus on other areas of the company, such as product strategy, so I took about 10 years off from coding professionally.

The company was acquired in 2020 and now I’m working on a new financial advisory startup. This time doing product, design, marketing, and coding by myself. At least for now. I also provide technology strategy consulting on a limited basis for select clients.

Things I Write About

On this site I usually write about technology trends and business strategy. Sometimes I write about specific things I’ve built or projects I’ve worked on, often just so I can refer back to them later to remember what I did. All of my business experience comes from founding, running, and working in technology companies. But, in my experience, good strategy (and learning from strategic mistakes) is universal.

The most important decisions at a tech company often aren’t decisions about technology at all. Instead they're about making choices that differentiate the company and support a clear strategy. For example, at ComplianceEase we provided standardized compliance audit results across the mortgage industry, while competitors let clients customize tests without a common baseline. This early decision later uniquely positioned us for certain opportunities, such as working with regulators. Insights like this can be applied (carefully) to other industries.

My Early Years

In his high school years, Jason Roth, wearing a white Oregon Coast t-shirt, sits in front of a cluttered table with a computer keyboard and stacks of CDs and software boxes including Windows 95, smiling at the camera — Me with a pile of stuff I worked with in high school

In junior high I was very lucky to get introduced to a software company that did hardware and software consulting projects. My friend who worked there introduced me to the owner, since he knew I was into computers. The owner was a former school teacher and electrical engineer who believed that kids could learn to code while working on real projects. Back then, programming computers was a mystery and an oddity to most people. It was like belonging to a club that spoke a language nobody else understood.

Since several of the consulting projects were for Microsoft, I learned and worked mostly on Windows programming (3.X and NT). On one contract, I built an automated testing suite for a very early voice recognition product. For me, working on real projects is still the best way to learn. When we started ComplianceEase, we didn't exclusively hire people who already knew how to do the work. Instead, we looked for people who had the potential to learn how to do it. In many ways, my career so far has been driven by trying to recreate the best parts of my first coding job.

Founding in Mortgage Technology

In his early career at his startup offices, Jason Roth, with dark curly hair and wearing a dark sweater, stands next to a large paper flipchart with diagrams drawn on it — Discussing technical design and/or pretending I know what I'm doing

At Adobe, I worked on desktop versions of Acrobat and related PDF tech. But it was the early 2000's and it felt like the Internet was the future. So I eventually joined a SaaS startup co-founded by the same friend who I worked with in high school. That company didn’t survive the dot-com bust. But, a couple of weeks later, someone who I had worked with there needed help on a consulting project for mortgage executives who were interested in automating compliance for lenders. I had never even had a mortgage, so I had to learn a lot along the way.

We built a working prototype of a SaaS loan auditing system in about five months. It could check loans for compliance with Federal and a handful of state laws, enough value that some regional lenders were immediately interested. A few of us decided to found ComplianceEase around that early product, with the vision of using technology to change the industry’s approach to compliance from slow and reactive to real-time and fully automated.

Building & Fintech Strategy

Jason Roth, wearing a dark suit jacket and checkered shirt and a name tag that reads 'Jason' is standing behind a podium — Speaking at our risk & compliance conference

What I thought would be a few months of consulting turned out to be 15 years of creating new ways for the mortgage industry to stay compliant. Our products performed thousands of tests and calculations in seconds, which enabled lenders to embed compliance directly into the lending process. Our baseline tests were standard across the industry, so our audits were uniquely valuable to capital markets and to regulators. For me, the best part was that, because we were a new company building everything from scratch, I could spend time in many different parts of our business.

I designed our legal rules development process, which enabled compliance attorneys to write specs for developers without needing to understand code and helped developers write code without fully comprehending the laws. As we grew, we hit a point where customer needs, company strategy, and development priorites seemed to be going in different directions. This was challenging for many people across various departments. So, I learned about this thing called “product management” and built a PM department and process.

We tried to give similar freedom to other people at the company. We had a lot of departments run by people who maybe didn’t have experience on paper, but who had big potential and knew how to learn. One of the best products of the company was a team of people who have gone on to do great things wherever they ended up working.

New Fintech Startup & Strategy Consulting

AI-generated image of Jason Roth wearing a dark blue button-down shirt and sitting at a desk with his hands positioned over a glowing blue holographic interface, surrounded by floating digital displays and data visualizations in a futuristic technology setting — What AI thinks I look like when I'm working on my startup

ComplianceEase was acquired in 2020 and now I’m building Centoic, a Registered Investment Advisor focused on helping families plan and save for education expenses. Centoic is providing traditional advisory services while working on a tech-powered advisor that will guide people through planning, saving, and investing for education. I believe we can use technology to make financial planning more accessible to everyone, just like how regular people who aren't experts use technology to do complicated things like file their taxes.

I’ve returned to hands-on coding for this new startup, following a 15 year hiatus from coding while I was doing all sorts of different things at my previous company. With the advent of AI coding tools and incredible open source libraries and frameworks, going back to coding doesn’t feel like as crazy an idea as it did a couple of years ago. I’m also excited about modern full-stack frameworks that let front-end and back-end code live in the same files, and about the return of server-side rendering. In fact, the previous time I was coding at a SaaS startup, server-side rendering was the only way you could build a web app. The more things change...

I’m also doing some work as a strategy consultant in fintech and mortgage tech on a limited basis. And I write about what I’m learning as a fintech consultant and founder along the way, both for my own reference and to share with others.

Other Interests

A rustic artisanal sourdough bread loaf with a golden-brown crust and flour dusting sits cooling on a wire rack, showing the characteristic scoring patterns and texture of handmade bread — Sometimes sourdough baking is successful

There’s honestly a lot of overlap between “work” and my other interests. People will ask me where I work and I’ll tell them, “I’m working on a new startup”. Then they’ll ask what I do for fun and I’ll tell them, “I’m working on a new startup”. There’s always more to learn and build and those are really my favorite things to do. But I do some other stuff too.

I’ve been making sourdough bread for over 12 years. I took a couple of years off in 2020 for obvious reasons. I hope you used all that flour you bought. My approach to baking is not too different from my approach to other projects I work on. It does involve spreadsheets.

Also, music has always been important to me. I used to DJ at friends’ parties. I mostly played CDs and did a lot of editing and burning of my own CDs to do interesting stuff live. When software (Ableton Live version 3) made real-time production and performance more accessible, I started using a laptop instead. I don’t do as much of this as I used to, but you are welcome to “check out my Soundcloud”. I own a lot of music on physical disks but I’m reluctantly starting to buy things digitally now, as long as the audio files are lossless. I don't subscribe to any streaming music services, though.

A few years ago, we fostered and adopted a three year old German Shepherd/Husky from animal control. Training her has been an interesting challenge and a hobby in itself. She’s not the best-trained dog in the world, but, considering she couldn't even walk on a leash when she first arrived, she’s made very good progress. Through trying to train her, I became interested in how dogs learn. It’s not that different from how people learn. Manageable-sized lessons, clear feedback, and small wins. Again, I like to learn by doing real things, experimenting, building, and improving.