When Chase Pion talks about how he went from investment banking to entrepreneurship, there’s a clear through line: preparation, passion, and people. Today, as COO and CFO of Bezel—a fast-growing startup that authenticates and connects buyers and sellers of high-end watches—Pion balances his background in financial rigor with team-building leadership. How he got here is actually no secret, and he’ll openly tell you it all began at McIntire.
A McIntire Foundation for a Finance Career
Pion arrived at UVA from Los Angeles as a Jefferson Scholar, drawn in no small part by the possibility of studying business at the Comm School as an undergrad and refining the skills that would give him a foundation for success. “I chose UVA specifically because of the fact that McIntire was there,” he recalls. “I was going to hopefully be able to get an undergraduate business education versus a more liberal arts education somewhere else.”
That decision paid off quickly. At McIntire, he immersed himself in his Finance and Management concentrations, while he remained intent on securing a summer internship in investment banking. He landed at J.P. Morgan after his third year, and thanks to the School’s rigor, he found himself unusually well prepared. “When I got into training, I quickly realized that those from McIntire were a lot further ahead,” he says. “I definitely felt like I had a leg up based on the curriculum.”
Two courses proved pivotal in getting him where he wanted to be: Global Macro Investing with Chris Shumway (McIntire ’88) and Private Equity with Professor Felicia Marston. The hedge fund–style analysis in Shumway’s seminar drew Pion into the world of funds, while Marston’s class sharpened his understanding of private markets. That experience directly led to an early opportunity at a hedge fund affiliated with Shumway. “It was relatively unusual to make the jump so early,” Pion admits. “But McIntire gave me the building blocks to take that leap.”
Just as influential was McIntire’s focus on organizational behavior. “We learned a lot about the way people think, how to motivate teams, interact with individuals who might have different motivations and different values—and how to make a cohesive team out of that,” Pion says. Those lessons, reinforced through leadership in the successful student-led McIntire Investment Institute (MII), remain central to his current work leading a growing team of more than 20 employees advancing a new company.
A Passion Meets a Market Gap: The Birth of Bezel
While finance sharpened his skills, Pion’s interest in watches had been wound up and ticking away since childhood. “When I was 10 years old, I got my hands on a watch magazine and thought they were really interesting,” he says. Later, as his career afforded him disposable income, he began collecting timepieces.
As his passion grew, he and his childhood friend Quaid Walker, also a watch afficionado, noticed a glaring problem impacting potential purchases: counterfeits. “We realized quickly that it was really difficult to collect in the secondary market because of the counterfeit risk,” he explains. “We were surprised that a business like Bezel didn’t exist in the secondary watch space already.”
In 2021, Pion and Walker moved back to their hometown of LA to launch Bezel along with co-founder Darryl Johnson. They borrowed inspiration from sneaker resale platforms that had mastered authentication, but tailored it to the even trickier world of watches. Their solution? Keep authentication in-house. “That’s a big differentiator for us,” Pion says. “Our belief is that it has to be in-house. And the people doing it have to be aligned with our brand ethos and our core pillars of protecting buyers. If you outsource that, people don’t care as much. That’s such a core value proposition for our buyers that we want to control that entire process, which we do by hiring the best of the best to do that.”
Bezel’s watchmakers and authentication specialists, many with backgrounds at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Rolex, and more scrutinize every timepiece that passes through the platform. Sellers list their watches, ship them to Bezel once sold, and only after authentication is the transaction completed. It’s a system designed to protect buyers and build trust in a notoriously opaque market.
The hardest part of building Bezel hasn’t been the product, but the people. “For such a specialized business, you want to make sure you hire the right people who not only have the skill set, but also the right motivations,” Pion says. “They also have to want to work at a startup, which is much different than most people’s careers.”
Leading for Growth and the Long Run
Running Bezel as COO and CFO has meant drawing equally on Pion’s finance training and his Comm School-honed management instincts. “The CFO part of my role is easier because we’re still a small startup, but being COO and making sure all the pieces of the puzzle work together to move the ball forward is something that was part of the McIntire curriculum and also my extracurriculars.”
He thrives on the immediacy of startup life. “Every day is essentially an exercise in problem-solving something you didn’t think you’d have to do the day before,” he says. “The instant feedback, the importance of every decision, and the immediate effects—it’s really exciting.”
Success at Bezel, for Pion, is measured on two levels. There are the hard metrics: user growth, revenue, fundraising milestones. But there are also the softer measures: team culture, competitive advantage, and whether the company is building something with staying power. “It’s all about marrying the two,” he explains.
That balance has paid off. After just three years, Bezel has earned recognition in the watch world. “We’ve finally hit a point where we’ve kind of penetrated the cultural zeitgeist,” Pion says, noting that friends now spot Bezel hats on strangers in New York subways.
Looking ahead, Pion is eager to expand Bezel into more than just a marketplace. “We can provide this holistic platform that can do anything that any watch collector or seller would need for their journey,” he says. “We’ve spent a couple of years trying to build the best place to buy and sell a watch. Now we can start to add to that and make it a true platform where buyers, sellers, and users can find value in many different ways.”
For himself, Pion’s goals remain deeply tied to Bezel’s trajectory: growing the business, strengthening its culture, and seeing through personal initiatives that make the company stronger. “Every day, there are 300 things I could be doing, but picking the five that matter is a challenge to prioritize my time and effort,” he says.
Regarding students considering whether they should launch their own venture or try to cultivate something entrepreneurial at an established company, he believes it depends on the type of person and how comfortable a person is with taking risks.
“I felt that it was really important to build transferable skill sets early on in my career, and so I put a premium on things that taught me hard skills that I knew would be valuable no matter what I ended up doing,” he says. “I focused on acquiring skills and experience that would be valuable anywhere so that when something unique came along I felt I would be qualified and capable of grabbing that opportunity.”
Acknowledging that he personally knows many founders who “start a business when they graduate college—or even while they’re in high school—it’s a little bit more of a risk-seeking tolerance,” he says. “I’ve always been a little bit more risk averse, so my path to doing something risky was trying to check a lot of boxes to feel like I could maximize the success doing it. If it fails, I feel like I have a really amazing landing pad from the career I built prior, and that knowledge allowed me to feel comfortable taking the leap.”
