Our History

Charlie started Next Jump from his college dorm room in 1994, as a print coupon book: The Collegiate Web. He went to school on financial aid and did not intend to start his own company; the coupon book was a means of funding his long-distance relationship with his high school sweetheart.

When we first hired interns, Charlie went out of his way to mentor and coach them despite our overall lack of resources.
We launched our first products aimed at corporate HR departments in 1998. ClickatWork was a combination of playbill-sized guidebooks and websites aimed at corporate employees.
First investment round which led to $45M raised from 100 angels.
(half dozen billionaires, No VCs, No PE)
This was our first e-commerce platform where small businesses could add themselves; we became a hub for new and developing merchants to showcase their products. This laid the foundations for our ONECart technology.
Click at Work becomes Corporate Perks.
By the time of the first dot-com bubble, we had grown to 150 employees in 5 offices (Boston, New York, Washington, Chicago, and San Francisco). We survived the dot-com bust by shrinking down to 4 employees before building the business back up.
Next Jump acquired its largest competitor: Abilizer, the #1 provider of employee discount programs.
Full Engagement. Exceeding Expectations. Consistent Execution. Active Learning. Trust. Collaboration. Tenacity.

We completed our first Code for a Cause project, partnering with the non-profit Angelwish.org to help build them a website and blog.
After increasing our hiring for software engineers, we ended up realizing we had hired a bunch of “brilliant jerks.” Overnight, we ended up firing 50% of our engineers.
We introduced a loyalty currency, WOWPoints, into our employee perks program.
We introduced ONECart Technology to our Employee Perks Program. ONECart allows our users to make purchases from multiple retailers, all at the same time, directly from us. The orders placed at checkout are sent directly to the individual retailers, saving people the trouble of having to place multiple orders on multiple websites.

We introduced Human Capital Engineering (HCE) programs as a way for Next Jumpers to upgrade their leadership development.

Next Jump became top recruiter in tech; turnover skyrockets.
Next Jump hosted Silicon Alley 500 (SA500) annual recruiting event. We brought together 50 of the best East Coast-founded technology companies to meet 500 select engineering students and hosted the event on New York Stock Exchange floor.
Our holiday party at Next Jump is held once a year in February, and we bring together all employees from four offices for the event. It’s an amazing perk of being a Next Jumper, one that truly connects us. The highlight of the evening is the Dance Battle, in which each of our four offices performs three choreographed routines in front of external judges to compete for the best dance crew of Next Jump, and the coveted trophy. We don’t hire dancers at Next Jump. From engineers to customer service reps, we all dance.
What started as a casual dance battle turned into a fierce yearly competition as we discovered the dance battle was also a great practice ground for leadership development. It has been said in only halfway jest that Next Jumpers take nothing more seriously than the dance competition.

We introduced our first ever “Avengers Award,” the highest honor given at Next Jump. This award recognizes the Next Jumper who most exemplifies steward leadership and honors our mothers, who taught us to help others.

We introduced our first ever “Avengers Award,” the highest honor given at Next Jump. This award recognizes the Next Jumper who most exemplifies steward leadership and honors our mothers, who taught us to help others.

Meghan Messenger, currently our co-CEO, considered working part-time as she and Charlie were managing all of our revenue and culture initiatives. We doubled down on our leadership development programs including Talking Partners, Situational Workshops, and the FLO Model as ways to create organic leadership across the entire company.

We worked with Simon Sinek to better articulate this culture we have developed and strengthened the articulation of our WHY, Better ME + Better YOU = Better US
In 2011, we launched OO.com as the first product from our partnership with LivingSocial. Every time you shopped, customers had the choice to donate reward points to support a cause of their choice.

Aside from increasing our hiring standards, this was a signal of intent for employees to show that you can expose vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and faults without the fear of losing your job.
Read this Charlie HR interview with London MDs Kevin McCoy and Tarun Gidoomal: https://magazine.charliehr.com/next-jump-ddo/
Dr. Srikumar Rao, a celebrated coach/mentor/teacher who has taught his course “Creativity and Personal Mastery” at top business schools, as well as for many top executives globally, spoke at our offices. He is the author of several best seller books and also a popular TedTalker. Many of Dr. Rao’s past students & mentees have said that his course changed their lives and we were very excited to have him speak at our offices.

We began hosting regular Next Jump Leadership Academy workshops, bringing in Heads of Talent Development and Culture to observe, learn, and participate in our culture.
We are mentioned in Simon Sinek’s TedTalk on ‘Why good leaders make you feel safe’ – we are a great example of a company that creates trust and safety in order for employees to experiment without fear. He uses us as an example of how companies should run and the environments they’ve built, talking about our no-firing/ lifetime employment policy.

The New York Office launched its Adopt-a-School Program, adopting PS-119 in the Bronx.
In 2015, we invested millions of dollars in our biggest technology upgrade in company history, transitioning our e-commerce platform from corporateperks.com to perksatwork.com. The platform goes above discounts to include all technologies to help run company culture.
We upgraded and launched our most powerful e-commerce platform globally: Perks at Work. We are the largest employee benefits provider in the US and make over $2bil in sales annually.
Next Jump was chosen and awarded as 1 of the 9 healthiest workplaces in US.
We released our first 5 apps to the Apple App and Google Play store available to our clients. These are the first of over 50 culture apps developed internally to help run our company culture better.

The People Org Chart ensures that every NxJer has a coach who is responsible for their growth, which includes setting up their environment with training, feedback loops, and coaching.

We set up an environment to help people grow – training, feedback loops and coaching, and baked it into our culture. This allows for faster learning and leads to more agile teams.
Charlie and Meghan, Next Jump Co-CEOs, were invited to speak at the CIA. They took their “Level 5 Leaders” and shared their insights on leadership development, strategy, and decision making. Invited to the session were 70 of the most senior talent in the agency across all divisions.

Next Jump was recognized by Harvard Professors Dr Lisa Laskow and Robert Kegan in the book ‘An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization’ and by the organization, Way to Grow, as a Deliberately Developmental Organization. A Deliberately Developmental Organization (a DDO) is an organization – large or small, private or public, for-profit or not – with a culture explicitly designed to advance the mutual flourishing of the organization and its people. Next Jump was one of three organizations globally recognized for this honor.




So much of our lives have been disrupted. For the fortunate ones of us that have our job and can be at home, we have new challenges of balancing work, kids, life all in close quarters – all while having fear of staying healthy and for loved ones.

