For Gregg Spiridellis, the co-founder and CEO of JibJab, business has always been a family affair.
If JibJab doesn’t sound familiar, its product might: the company makes digital greeting cards that let users import photos of friends and family onto dancing, GIF-ified elves. Gregg started JibJab with his brother, Evan, 17 years ago. “We were three years apart. We had the normal sibling rivalries, but we were on very different paths,” says Gregg. “I was a former Wall Street banker at Wharton and he was out of art school and producing independent films.”
Thanks, in large part, to these divergent skill sets, the brothers were able to turn a garage-based eCard operation into a digital studio that today employs 75 people. Gregg oversees technology, product, and business marketing, while Evan runs the art and production teams.
It also helped that both clearly inherited the entrepreneurial gene from their father, who immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam and founded a tech consulting business in New York City in the late ‘70s, Gregg says.
Watch the above video to hear Gregg talk about JibJab, his family, and the ways in which the two overlap.