JD Case Study · Fetch

Director of Executive Operations

Where: Remote (US) or a Fetch office
Pays: $185K–$222K + equity
Posting: Read the job description →
Shelf: All briefings

Fetch is not hiring a chief of staff who takes notes. It is handing someone custody of the numbers the leadership team runs on, users, CAC, LTV, and the cadence they are argued over: the leadership meeting, the QBR, the offsite, the OKR tree beneath them. Thirteen million receipts a day feed the product; this seat decides which dozen numbers from that stream the executive team is allowed to disagree about.

One kind of number here. The analysis below runs on illustrative figures invented to show method. No Fetch data is used or implied; the operating logic is the deliverable.

Oct 6, 202615 sources

What they’re actually buying

One number per metric, one decision per meeting, one owner per outcome

Strip the title down and the mandate is three systems: metric custody (users, CAC, LTV defined once, reconciled to the warehouse, and surfaced the same way in every forum), a rhythm of business (agendas, pre-reads and decision frameworks that end in a logged decision with an owner and a date), and an OKR architecture that connects company priorities to team execution without turning into a quarterly form-filling exercise. The hard part is not building the dashboard or the agenda template. It is that an executive operating system only works when the COO’s peers believe the numbers in it, and that belief is lost the first time two decks disagree on CAC or a decision made in the room quietly un-happens the following week.

The arena · public data

The rival that files with the SEC is leaving its own app

Fetch is private, so its numbers are the ones it chooses to publish: a run rate, a user count, a receipt count. Ibotta is public, and its filings show what a receipt-rewards business looks like from the inside — and that for three years it has been moving its revenue out of its own app and into Walmart, Instacart and DoorDash. Fetch is the opposite bet: the app is the business. The executive operating system this posting describes will be read against these filings by every board member and investor who opens them [2][7].

Fetch · gross revenue run rate

$700 M

Profitable, 900 employees, July 2026; $500 M and +65% at the end of 2024 [2][3]

Fetch · monthly active users

13 M

13 M receipts a day; $212 B of spending in view; $1 B+ in points awarded [1][2]

Ibotta · revenue, 2025

$342 M

−7% on 2024; back to +3% in Q2 2026, all of it from the retailer rail [7][9]

Ibotta · its own app, 2025

$140 M

-25% on 2024, and -27% again in Q2 2026; the app is now 31% of Ibotta [7][9]

Ibotta has two businesses, and only one of them is an app

Revenue by where the offer was redeemed: Ibotta’s own app (direct-to-consumer) against the third-party publishers — Walmart, Dollar General, Instacart, DoorDash, Uber — that carry the same offers inside their own apps. US$ millions; the last two bars are single quarters.

Its own app (direct-to-consumer)Third-party publishers (the retailer rail)

The app went from $240 M to $140 M in two years while the rail went from $80.2 M to $203 M; in Q2 2026 the rail grew 27% and the app fell 27%. The company’s own explanation for the app: fewer redeemers, and “a decrease in the quantity and quality of offers available to each D2C redeemer.” [7][8][9]

What one receipt is worth, to each model

Ibotta is paid about a dollar for a verified redemption of a brand’s offer. Fetch takes every receipt, so its money comes in cents per receipt and the volume does the work: about 4.7 billion receipts a year at the posting’s pace.

Ibotta app · per redemption$1.10Q2 2026, redemption revenue per redemption

Ibotta · per redemption, 2025$0.87all publishers, full year

Ibotta rail · per redemption$0.83Q2 2026, third-party publishers

Fetch · gross per receiptderived$0.15$700 M run rate ÷ 13 M receipts × 365 — arithmetic on two disclosed numbers, gross of points

Two different objects: a redemption is one verified offer on one item; a receipt is a whole basket, most of it with no offer attached. The comparison says what each company’s unit of work is, not which is the better business. Ibotta also reports a user redemption liability of $65.5 M — rewards earned in its app and not yet cashed out — and recognised $9.6 M of breakage in 2025, down from $31.5 M in 2023 as the app audience thinned. Fetch does not publish its points liability. [1][2][7][9]

What earns the reward, and whose app it lives in

An analyst’s placement built from the sourced facts in the dossier, not a survey. Dot size is each company’s own audience measure where it publishes one (monthly actives, quarterly redeemers, consumers reached: not the same measure). Hover or tab to a dot.

The dossier

One row per company: who owns it, the audience it reports, what a shopper has to do to earn, whose app the offer lives in, and its latest move. Private companies that publish no revenue are left at “not disclosed” rather than estimated.

Company	Audience	Revenue	What earns the reward	Where the offer lives	Latest move
FetchPrivate · SoftBank, ICONIQ, DST, Greycroft	13 Mmonthly active users · July 2026, the CEO	$700 M gross run rate (Jul 2026); $500 M, +65% (Q4 2024)	Any receipt from any store, restaurant or gas station; points, redeemed as gift cards	Its own app only — the receipt is the product; brands buy outcomes against the SKU-level view	Profitable at a $700 M gross run rate with 900 employees (Jul 2026); debt facility upsized to $110 M (Sep 2025) [1][2][3][6]
Ibotta — its own appNYSE: IBTA · direct-to-consumer	1.4 Mredeemers · Q2 2026, 10-Q	$139.9 M (2025), −25%; $27.4 M in Q2 2026, −27%	An offer activated before checkout, then a receipt or a linked loyalty account; cash, not points	Its own app, now the smaller of Ibotta’s two businesses: 41% of revenue in 2025, 31% in Q2 2026	D2C redeemers down every year since 2023 (2.04 M → 1.63 M; 1.40 M in Q2 2026); ad & other revenue −32% in Q2 2026 [7][9]
Ibotta Performance NetworkNYSE: IBTA · third-party publishers	19.5 Mredeemers · Q2 2026, third-party publishers, 10-Q	$202.5 M (2025), +12%; $61.5 M in Q2 2026, +27%	The same CPG offers, surfaced inside Walmart, Dollar General, Instacart, DoorDash and Uber	Inside the retailer’s own app and checkout — Ibotta is the offer rail, the publisher owns the shopper	Uber launched in Q2 2026; Giant Eagle and 7-Eleven (11,500+ locations) announced after the quarter [7][9][10]
UpsidePrivate · $1.5 B valuation (Apr 2022)	35 Mconsumers reached · Sep 2025, incl. partner networks	not disclosed	Claim an offer, buy, then verify by receipt or linked card; cash back, strongest at the pump	Its own app plus partner networks; 100,000 retailers across fuel, c-store, food and hardware	Users passed $1 B in cash back (Sep 2025); restaurant transactions +64% year on year [11][12]
Rakuten RewardsRakuten Group (TSE: 4755)	not disclosed	not disclosed separately	Shop through Rakuten’s link, extension or card; a share of the affiliate commission comes back as cash	Its own site, app and browser extension; "thousands of top brands", mostly online	More than $4.6 B in cash back paid since 1999; the largest platform of its kind by its own count [13]
Receipt HogNumerator (Kantar)	not disclosed	not disclosed	Any receipt, plus surveys; coins for gift cards or PayPal	Its own app, run as a market-research panel: the receipts are the product sold to brands and retailers	Launched in Germany in May 2025, Numerator’s first European market [14]
ShopkickTrax (acquired 2019)	not disclosed	not disclosed	Walking into a store, scanning a barcode, watching a video, or a receipt; "kicks" for gift cards	Its own app, owned by a retail-execution company that sells shelf data	Bought by Singapore’s Trax to add a consumer-tracking service to its shelf-analytics stack [15]

What this means for the seat. The metrics the posting names — users, CAC, LTV — are the ones on which Ibotta’s own app is deteriorating in public: fewer redeemers each year, fewer and weaker offers per redeemer, ad revenue down by a third. Fetch’s single source of truth will be interrogated by people with Ibotta’s 10-K on the next tab, so the first job of the operating system is a definition of “user” and “LTV” that survives that comparison, and a cadence that notices the app’s own version of the D2C slide a quarter before it shows up in the number.

The first 90 days

Reconcile the numbers. Fix the cadence. Run one quarter on OKRs.

The order matters. Nobody should change a system they haven’t reconciled, and nobody should present a verdict before the numbers under it can be trusted.

Days 1–30

Listen, then reconcile the definitions

Sit with the COO and every leader who reports into the executive cadence; read the last two quarters of leadership decks, QBRs and board materials and write down every number that appears in more than one with more than one value. Audit where users, CAC and LTV actually come from — the warehouse tables, the finance model, the growth team’s own sheet — and who owns each. Inventory the forums: which meetings decide something, which only inform, and which decisions from the last quarter are still open. Ship one artifact: a metric register with a definition, an owner, a source and a refresh cadence per number.

Days 31–60

Ship the single source of truth and the new cadence

Stand up the executive metric layer on the register — tested definitions, a freshness check per number, and a discrepancy log that surfaces when a forum’s figure drifts from the source, so the gap is reported rather than discovered mid-meeting. Redesign the leadership cadence around decisions: a pre-read standard, a decision template (options, recommendation, owner, date), a decision log, and a weekly follow-through review. Run the first QBR on the new materials and measure the forum itself: decisions raised, decided, owned, closed.

Days 61–90

Run one OKR cycle end to end, and report the system

Lead the OKR design for the next quarter: company objectives, three to five key results each with a live data source in the metric layer, team-level KRs that ladder up, and a tracking cadence that reuses the leadership meeting instead of adding one. Close the quarter by presenting the operating system to the COO as its own scorecard — metric discrepancies found and closed, decision velocity and follow-through by forum, OKR coverage by team — with the three changes the data argues for next.

Signature analysis · illustrative data

The decision funnel

The management move: a rhythm of business is a funnel, not a calendar. Each drop has a different owner and a different fix — the pre-read standard, the decision framework, the log, the follow-through review — so the cadence redesign the posting asks for falls out of measuring the forum the way the company measures its own product: raised, converted, retained. Report the funnel itself to the COO every month; it is the executive operating system’s own health metric.

Of the decisions a leadership team raises in a quarter, how many actually close?Indexed to the first stage

Decisions raised in a leadership forum100indexed to 100 — a quarter’s worth

Arrived with a pre-read and a recommendation64

Decided in the room, not deferred46the velocity the posting names

Logged with an owner and a date31

Closed on time, still standing a quarter later19the number the COO is really buying

Illustrative figures to demonstrate the method. No Fetch data is used or implied; the operating logic is the deliverable.

Requirement → proof

The posting, answered line by line

Each line of the posting against something already built and running on this site. Where the fit is a ramp rather than a match, the row says so.

What Fetch asks for	What I’ve already shipped
Own the single source of truth for core business metrics — users, CAC, LTV — with accuracy and real-time visibility	A live data hub where every dataset on this site has a registered owner, a refresh clock, a 90-day freshness strip and an alarm that files an issue when a feed goes stale: metric custody as a system, not a spreadsheet.
Build processes that surface discrepancies before they reach executive decisions	A dbt gate that blocks a publish when a definition breaks or a sensitive field leaks. The same pattern, pointed at CAC and LTV, catches a drifting number before the QBR deck does.
Design and run the executive cadence — leadership meetings, QBRs, offsites — with decision frameworks and follow-through	An agent fleet that runs this site on a published cadence, with schedules, QC gates and a freshness ledger: the operating rhythm shown as a receipt rather than described in a deck.
Enforce accountability — tracking systems, reporting cadences and feedback loops	A public scorecard that measures the operators (agent versus human) on cost, latency and error rate, every week, instead of asserting the work got done.
Executive-ready briefs, presentations and materials; board-level reporting	An executive intelligence brief built the way I would hand it to a leadership team on day one: the company, its rivals, the numbers that matter and the three moves, from public filings.
Strong analytical capability — LTV, acquisition economics, performance frameworks	A growth model that separates acquisition cost, payback and cohort LTV, with the arithmetic shown and the levers ranked.
12+ years in operations or strategy; a trusted proxy to the C-suite	Honest fit: fourteen years in business intelligence and revenue operations, most of it building the reporting infrastructure executives ran on. I have been the person the COO calls about a number far more often than the person who sets the agenda. This brief is the ramp from the first to the second, and the operating system is the same.

The same engine

Every requirement above runs on one engine: governed definitions, a gate that catches a broken number before it ships, a published cadence with receipts, and a scorecard that measures the operation instead of describing it. I have already built it in public, over my own site, and it runs without me every morning. Point it at Fetch’s users, CAC and LTV and at the COO’s calendar instead, and the machine is the same — the funnel gets a decision at the top, the metric layer guards the numbers it is made with, and the leadership team gets one figure per metric that means one thing in every room.

Read the engine →

Hire the work, not the headcount

You’ve already priced this role. Here’s what the money buys.

Fetch says Director of Executive Operations is worth $185K–$222K a year (posted base range). Fully loaded — payroll taxes, health insurance, benefits, roughly +25% — the midpoint runs about $255K a year: $123 an hour, for all 2,080 hours, ramp and meetings included. And the ramp is real: a new leader’s breakeven averages about 6 months (Watkins, The First 90 Days) — call it $128K spent before the first shipped thing. The candidate who interviews well will be great in the room and diligent on the kanban board. What they won’t do is build the systems. That’s the part I sell.

The build · 90 days

$30,000

~120 hours at $250/hr ships the first-year plan on this page as working systems on your data — dashboards, pipelines, automations that keep running after I stop billing. You buy the 120 hours that ship, not the 2,080 you’d pay a hire for. Value in week one, not month 9; compare $128K for the hire’s ramp alone.

The bench · monthly

$3,000/mo · 10 hrs

10 hours of me a month, plus my agents running your data refreshes on a schedule — the same fleet that keeps this site current — evals green, costs flat, and me on call. Month to month; cancel anytime; the systems are yours either way.

Prepay the quarter and it’s $7,500 for 3 months — $1,500 off the $9,000 month-to-month price, for paying up front.

Founding-build rate: the first 3 builds run $15,000 — half the list price — in exchange for a named, written case study — open now. Email me to take one; when the third case study ships, so does this rate.

Or keep the req. Hire the person who’s great in the room — and pay me to make them dangerous: the same $30,000 build, handed to your new director on day one, pulls their breakeven from month 6+ to month two. The expensive mistake isn’t the hire; it’s the hire with no system underneath them. This case study is the free sample of what the system looks like.

Email me the req Work with me

The hard part of this role isn’t the OKR template or the metric dashboard — it’s that an executive operating system is only as real as the leadership team’s belief in it, and that belief is earned one reconciled number and one kept decision at a time. That is a trust-first build, and this page is the free sample of how I’d run it. — Paul Brown

Sources

Every public figure, numbered

Fetch, Director of Executive Operations — job posting (Oct 2026). 13 M receipts a day, $212 B GMV visibility, $1 B+ in points awarded, 6 M+ five-star reviews, base range $184,896–$222,000.
Entrepreneur (Wes Schroll, Fetch CEO), Here’s How I Got My 900 Employees to Love Using AI (Jul 21, 2026). “A profitable, fast-growing company with a $700 million gross revenue run rate and 13 million monthly active users.” A run rate annualises a recent pace; it is not a completed year.
Fetch newsroom, Fetch Reports Strong Momentum for 2025 (Mar 11, 2025). Q4 2024 annual revenue run rate of $500 M, +65% year over year; 12.5 M monthly active users; 11 M receipts a day; 5 M+ five-star reviews.
PR Newswire (Fetch), Fetch Rewards Raises $240 Million in a Round Led By Hamilton Lane (Apr 2022). Valuation above $2.5 B.
PR Newswire (Fetch), Fetch Secures $50 Million from Morgan Stanley After Achieving Profitability (Mar 2024).
Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Morgan Stanley Private Credit Leads Strategic Growth Capital Investment in Fetch (Sep 16, 2025). Senior debt facility upsized to $110 M aggregate.
Ibotta, Inc. (SEC), Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025 (Feb 26, 2026). Revenue by publisher type and by service; redeemers, redemptions and revenue per redemption; breakage; user redemption liability $65.5 M; ~800 employees; 900+ clients, 3,100+ CPG brands.
Ibotta, Inc. (SEC), Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2024 (Feb 27, 2025). The 2023 split: D2C $239.8 M, third-party $80.2 M; 2.04 M D2C and 6.19 M third-party redeemers.
Ibotta, Inc. (SEC), Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026 (Aug 4, 2026). Q2 2026 vs Q2 2025: third-party redemption revenue $61.5 M (+27%), D2C revenue $27.4 M (−27%); 19.5 M third-party and 1.40 M D2C redeemers.
Ibotta, Inc. (SEC, Form 8-K exhibit), Ibotta Reports Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results (Aug 3, 2026). Adjusted EBITDA $16.5 M; Uber launched in the quarter; Giant Eagle and 7-Eleven after it; Q3 guide $86–90 M.
Upside, Upside Users Earn More Than $1 Billion In Cash Back (Sep 4, 2025). 35 M consumers reached; 100,000 retailers; founded 2016.
Built In, GetUpside Rebrands as Upside, Hits $1.5B Valuation (Apr 2022).
Rakuten Rewards, Our company. More than $4.6 B in cash back since 1999; no member count given.
Numerator (GlobeNewswire), Numerator Announces May 2025 Expansion into Germany, First European Market (Mar 31, 2025). Receipt Hog described as Numerator’s gamified receipt app.
The Edge Singapore, Singapore’s Trax acquires US retail rewards app Shopkick (2019).