WePay CEO Pulled Leadership Skills from Sideline Antics and Socrates

Dressing up as an eagle would seem to have little application in the world of entrepreneurship. But Bill Clerico ’07, Founder and CEO of WePay, says he learned plenty about business by playing Baldwin, Boston College’s mascot, during his time as an undergrad.

“It taught me about branding—Baldwin was really my first exposure to marketing. And I got to build a bunch of relationships—I got to know Peter Bell ’86 from Highland Capital through BC athletics.” Thanks to Bell, Highland Capital Partners ended up investing in WePay, which is based in Redwood City, Calif.

WePay, which Clerico founded with fellow BC grad Rich Aberman ’07 processes payments for online marketplaces such as Care.com and Meetup. It not only handles transactions but also protects clients from scammers. Clerico calls the company’s fraud-detection technology, Veda, its secret sauce. WePay employs 130 people and has raised about $75 million in venture capital.

Online marketplaces bring together dispersed buyers and sellers. Clerico distinguishes marketplaces—AirBnB and Uber typify the niche—from online retailers like Amazon and Zappo’s. “Marketplaces need a special kind of payment company behind them,” he says. “Uber has spent millions to build payment and fraud-detection technologies. We’re offering that same kind of technology as a service, so marketplaces don’t have to build it themselves. We think there will be Ubers in other segments too.”

Clerico and Aberman devised the idea for WePay because of a payment problem Aberman faced in their first year after college. Clerico had gone into investment banking, and Aberman was headed to law school. Aberman was organizing a bachelor party and had to collect and disburse money from a bunch of friends. PayPal didn’t make that easy. The two friends decided they could create a company that could better handle group payments and accounts. Thus WePay was born. They started out focusing on consumer transactions like the one that had bedeviled Aberman. Several years ago, they realized the marketplaces offered a better pool of potential customers.

WePay wasn’t the first company Clerico and Aberman, who were freshman roommates at BC, tried to start together. They were both Gabelli Presidential Scholars and had batted around business ideas from their early days on campus. One summer, they traveled to Hong Kong in hopes of starting a company, though that idea didn’t work out.

“There’s no better time to start a company than when you’re in your 20s,” Clerico says. “You have boundless energy and no responsibilities.”

When Clerico recollects his time at BC, he says two things he wouldn’t have expected—a class and an extracurricular—have assisted him as an entrepreneur.

The class was a seminar on Western cultural tradition that required lots of writing and discussion. “The ability to write that came with that has been very helpful,” he says. “I have to communicate ideas and plans as a leader, and a lot of that is in writing. You’d be shocked at how bad some people in business are at writing.”

The extracurricular, in contrast, addressed emergencies, not Aristotle. Clerico led Boston College’s American Red Cross emergency-response team. “If there’s a big flood or fire, the Red Cross sends local teams to help out,” he explains. “We were one of the groups that would be called on to respond. We’d check people into a hotel and make sure they had clothing and food. That was my first taste of how to lead and motivate.”

If his Red Cross volunteering taught him leadership, then his stint as Baldwin showed him the importance of being game for anything. That willingness to be open to unexpected possibilities also landed him on a television program called The Millionaire Matchmaker in 2011. On the show, the host gives dating advice and introduces singles to each other. In one such scene, Clerico plunged into a pool in his bathing suit, hand in hand with his date.

“Rich and I were focused then on reaching consumers and were trying to find ways to get our name out. That show reaches about 3 million people with each episode. I decided what the heck, I’d do it.”

The matchmaking didn’t take, but Clerico has managed well enough on his own: he’s engaged to fellow BC grad Katey Sullivan ’07, who’s a recruiter at Facebook.