Stephen Lester

About Stephen Lester

The greatest thing I ever did was offer 12 months of automated bookkeeping for free at the outset of COVID to help our customers get loans. It was in part a bet on the fundamental goodness of humanity, that they would stay customers. And they did, we went from 8,600 to paying customers during COVID. Including QuickBooks Desktop.Experienced Fintech executive with product roots who has worn more hats than a Kentucky Derby party- Product: transaction processing, cardholder tokenization, federated security / OAuth, automated bookkeeping, front-end design and implementation, QA / UAT ownership, internal tools- People / Process: P&L, Board letters / service, contract negotiation and execution, business development, security reviews (i.e. Visa, Intuit), hiring and promoting, running standups / All-Hands, managing / rolling up my sleeves and helping the CX teamPeople > Product > Process = Profit. On a personal note, I play 1.c4 and beat Civ VI and Civ VII on Deity. I am also a lifelong Browns fan, so while people may question my sanity nobody questions my loyalty.

Experience

1. Board Member, Techretary

   Colorado Veterans Chamber Of Commerce

   Feb 2025 — Present · Denver, CO, US

   Two hats, one mission: empowering veteran-owned businesses in Colorado- Tech: leading the website relaunch as robust web application with Vue > FastAPI > Python > Postgres; Donorbox; supportive tools for things like email, Git, analytics, Auth-n / Auth-z; and of course AI to help groom our secret agent- Retary: Building the certain aspects of of the org, such as setting up Google Workspace, Slack, other collaboration tools, establishing support for the site / members / donations, and helping manage the P&L.Launching soon at

Education

• Boston College

  BA, English, Mathematics, Honors Program

  1998 — 2002

• University of Colorado Boulder

  MA, Creative Writing

  2002 — 2005

Skills

• Jira
• Mobile Applications
• Product Development
• Software Development
• Strategic Partnerships
• Integration
• Payment Gateways
• Scalability
• Web Applications
• .net
• Electronic Payments
• Agile Project Management
• Product Management
• Xml
• Rest
• Payment Card Processing
• Service-Oriented Architecture (Soa)
• E-Commerce
• Mobile Payments
• Agile Methodologies
• Payments
• Payment Systems
• Start-Ups
• Enterprise Software
• Software Project Management
• Requirements Analysis
• Cloud Computing
• User Experience
• Software as a Service (Saas)
• Soa
• Project Management
• Web Services
• Analytics
• Mobile Devices
• Saas