Steve Gatena - CEO of PRAY.COM

Steve Gatena is the co-founder and CEO of Pray.com, the #1 app for Daily Prayer and Bedtime Bible stories. Launched in 2017, Pray.com has become the digital destination for faith content with over ten million downloads from people around the world.?

Steve is one of those guys who lights up any room he walks into. At 6’5”, the former USC football player has a commanding presence. But it’s Steve’s intelligence and thoughtfulness that acts like a magnet, propelling you to his every word.?

Steve’s journey to becoming a successful entrepreneur is legendary. It is a story of hard work and perseverance. And you can read all about it here.?

In 2016, Steve was running a helicopter company when his business partner died tragically. This was a very traumatic experience. To process, Steve started listening to audiobooks from Tony Robbins and Deepak Chopra then one of his friends shared a podcast from a Pastor. Steve pushed back, telling his friend that religion wasn’t for him. Steve didn't grow up going to church and wasn't particularly religious. But when he started listening to the Pastor speak, it woke something deep inside.?

After winding down the helicopter company, Steve wasn’t sure what to do next. He wanted to build a new startup but didn’t know what business he wanted to build. So Steve started researching several industries.?

In his recent discovery of faith, Steve did a deep dive into the business of religious media. He was surprised by his findings. There are billions of religious people on the planet but the business of religious media is highly fragmented, totally underserved, and completely low-tech. Steve believed he could reorganize this industry.?

Steve also knew to do this, it would need to be a venture-backed business, and he was worried that venture was not active in the industry. Steve reached out to Mike Jones from Science, a venture firm in Los Angeles, and he pitched the idea for a digital destination for all things faith related. Steve also had an ace up his sleeve. He had the opportunity to acquire the domain Pray.com, which he believed would help build the world’s strongest faith brand.?

Mike was excited by the business opportunity and more importantly, believed Steve was the person who could execute the idea. He immediately invested in the company, which provided Steve the confidence he needed to realize his new purpose.?

Steve started cranking on setting up the business. One of the toughest decisions in becoming an entrepreneur is determining if you will start solo or with a business partner. In business and life, partnerships can be tough to navigate.?

Steve thought Pray.com would be a solo entrepreneurial endeavor until one day, early on, Steve got a call from an old friend, Mike Lynn. It had been a while and Mike wanted to grab dinner and catch up. At dinner, Steve explained what he was working on and the grand vision of Pray.com. Without hesitation, Mike told Steve he would quit his job at Merrill Lynch to build Pray.com together. Steve was hesitant at first but after speaking to his wife, realized that Mike would be an incredible talent and together their complimentary skills could build this business. Next, they needed to find technical assistance to help build the app.?

About a week later, Steve bumped into a childhood friend outside of a Mexican restaurant in town named Ryan. Ryan Beck had made the poor choice of selling narcotics while in high school, a path that landed him in jail at a young age. However, after prison, Rob McCoy a Pastor from Godspeak Calvary Chapel gave Ryan a job as a janitor at the Church. He and the church mentored Ryan and Ryan became a born-again evangelical Christian who later got a degree in computer science. When Steve told Ryan about Pray.com, Ryan offered to work for free but only if Steve would attend a Pastors conference to meet the customers they would be serving. Steve recognized Ryan’s talents and was happy to bring him onto the founding team.?

With the trifecta in play, they thought they were good to go. However, Ryan was not a product designer. He was a backend engineer. And if the app was going to have a chance, they would need to find someone with the product chops who could help take the vision and turn it into an aesthetically pleasing app that people wanted to use.?

Steve knew a developer in India who flew to LA to meet with him to see if he could help design the app. During the meeting, Steve realized the developer wasn't the right partner. On his way out of the meeting, Steve bumped into another old friend, Matt Potter. Matt was a successful entrepreneur who had built a company that creates apps for real estate agents.?

Matt and Steve started chatting. Steve mentioned that he was building Pray.com. This resonated with Mike so much that he immediately asked to join the company. He wanted to be part of something bigger than himself and believed that not only did he have the skills to help but this was a business that was calling to him.?

Within a few weeks of establishing the company, Steve had inadvertently assembled an outstanding founding team of four. Each person brought a different skill set to the table and each person even had a different personality type. Before they got started, Steve made it clear that he was the final decision maker and as the CEO, he would always be the determining factor. He also made it clear that they would define their vision, mission, and values together based on who they believed they already were and what they believed God’s purpose for their life was. With everyone fully aligned, they clarified roles and responsibilities, and made a pact to doing whatever job was needed to make the business succeed.

That is how Pray.com got started and that is how the company has continued to thrive.?

The founding team at Pray.com sees themselves as stewards of the company culture. In the team’s first few meetings, they collectively went through their life stories, DISC assessments, Myers Briggs tests, and other exercises to better understand each other and identify how to best work together. From there, they created a list of the company values they all believed were core to them and also would be core to the business. In this exercise, they didn't need to create new values. They only needed to lean into the values they collectively shared that were superpowers that could accelerate the company. From the values, they focused on putting together the mission to grow faith and cultivate community. And from that mission evolved the vision to create a world where everyone leaves a legacy of helping others.?

In building Pray.com’s vision, mission, values, the team feels a deep sense of accountability. It has enabled Pray.com to thrive both internally, externally, and through iterations of the product. And as a result, Pray.com has become one of the top places to work and it has become an integral part of its customers' lives.?

To Steve, both profit and purpose matter. Pray.com prioritizes mission, margin, and then the founders desires in that order. Steve calls this a mission>team>self model.?

Steve believes in leaves a legacy of helping others and he believes he can do this by growing faith and cultivating community. His method for executing on that today is called Pray.com, a mobile app and website that helps people incorporate prayer into their daily life.

By understanding Steve’s priorities, it’s easy to see how the company has experienced hyper growth thus far, and I’m excited to watch it continue its trajectory into the future.?