Lumin Digital CEO Jeff Chambers took four weeks off in 2022. The 49-year old founder promises to do better this year: He's booked five weeks in vacation spots from Lake Tahoe to Hawaii. His company, which runs an online banking platform for credit unions and community banks, is heading for another year of 25 percent growth—evidence that his team clearly can function without him. “It's like we have 180 CEOs,” he says. “I'm OK with that.”
Although Lumin is a five-year-old tech startup whose cloud-based platform and weekly, zero-downtime upgrades give it a competitive advantage over legacy sys tems, the company actually isn't built around the technology. “We said let's go build a company that can build a better experience for employees and customers,” Chambers says. “We can make investors a little less money and employees can have a happy life.” For starters, he says, Lumin pays 10 percent above the
