Jayme Fishman

EVP, Chief Strategy and Product Officer Avalara

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Jayme Fishman is Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy and Product Officer at Avalara, where he owns corporate and product strategy and runs the product management organisation across a global team of more than 150 people. Avalara exists because indirect tax is a computation problem that gets worse every year: there are tens of thousands of taxing jurisdictions in the United States alone, rates and rules change constantly, and the 2018 Wayfair decision made remote sellers liable in states they have never set foot in. Avalara automates that determination and filing at transaction speed. Fishman is well suited to it in an unusual way — he is a lawyer who left litigation more than twenty-five years ago for tax technology, and has spent the whole of the intervening career in the same narrow, unglamorous and structurally growing market, at Taxware, at Ryan, at his own company Second Decimal, and now at Avalara.

Career Highlights

• EVP and Chief Strategy and Product Officer at Avalara, responsible for overall corporate and product strategy and for the product management teams.
• Leads a global organisation of more than 150 people.
• Joined Avalara in August 2020 as Executive Vice President of Corporate Development, running growth and acquisition strategy.
• Subsequently served as Executive Vice President and General Manager of Indirect Tax, Avalara’s core business, before taking the strategy and product role.
• President of the Software Division at Ryan, the global tax services firm, having joined as a Principal.
• Chief Executive Officer of Second Decimal, a technology company built to improve corporate tax processes.
• Senior Vice President of sales, marketing and professional services at Taxware.
• Began his career as a litigator before moving into tax technology more than twenty-five years ago.

Professional Journey

Fishman trained as a lawyer, taking a Juris Doctor at Louisiana State University after a business and accounting degree at Northeastern, and began his working life in litigation. He has described the pivot out of the courtroom and into business as a decision he never revisited, made more than twenty-five years ago. The combination of legal training and accounting background turned out to be precisely the right preparation for tax software, a field where the product is ultimately an interpretation of statute rendered as code.

His early industry years were at Taxware, one of the original sales-tax calculation vendors, where he ran sales, marketing and professional services as a Senior Vice President. He encountered Avalara’s founding team in the early 2000s while at a competitor, and kept up the relationship for roughly sixteen years before eventually joining them.

In between, he went to Ryan, the global tax services firm, joining as a Principal and rising to President of its software division, which he is credited with building and growing. He also served as Chief Executive Officer of Second Decimal, a technology company aimed at improving corporate tax processes — the founder-operator experience that sits behind his later corporate development work.

Avalara recruited him in August 2020 as Executive Vice President of Corporate Development, a role focused on acquisitions and growth strategy at a company that has grown substantially by acquiring content, jurisdictions and adjacent compliance capabilities. He then moved into the line, running Indirect Tax as Executive Vice President and General Manager — Avalara’s central business — before taking his current role as Chief Strategy and Product Officer, combining corporate strategy with ownership of the product organisation. In that seat he has been one of the company’s public voices on applying agentic AI to compliance work.

Outside Avalara he co-founded The Unofficial Syndicate, an early-stage investment syndicate, and sits on the advisory board of the MIT FinTech@CSAIL initiative.

Education

Louisiana State University

Juris Doctor, Law

Northeastern University

Bachelor of Science, Business, Accounting