Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: When you decided to pick on, what was the process?

David Chmielewski: My initial endeavors were around disputes. It was always near and dear to our hearts. For Joe, one of the other co-founders, that’s where he started. His first job was at Bank of America as a call center agent. This was the fundamental use case.

More important than that, having a good business case for clients when we sell. We can save our clients so much money by selling them dispute systems. Some of the other products didn’t have the business value that disputes do. It wasn’t a technology decision; it was more around how we can make our clients successful and to what level we can save them money.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: This is a topic that I’ve been very passionate about – The Renaissance Mind. I have a large body of writings on this. If you follow me on LinkedIn, I have a series called Colors where I publish paintings. I ask people to meditate on just that painting. The whole point is to draw attention to the visual impact of colors and design.

I wrote a series quite a few years ago on the future of Silicon Valley being at the cusp of design and technology, but it hasn’t gone that way. I thought that movement of bringing those two sides together would come faster. Instead, we went deep into data, AI, and machine learning. The design side went by the sidelines. The liberal arts and the humanities side went on the sideline. That still remains to be done.

Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Who on your team was the key sales guy?

David Chmielewski: That’s Joe McLean who’s now our CEO. He was able to sell and fill clients with that confidence. I also did a fair amount of sales myself, but it was more of solutions consulting and technical design. Joe and I got into a pretty good pattern where he’d handle the business folks and I’d handle the ops and technology folks. We would tackle sales in that direction and it got a lot of deals done.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You’ve touched upon a few different open opportunities. One is you talked about the gap in the visualization space. There are a lot of data solutions but, when it comes to presenting, there’s a lot more to be done.

The second thing that I find interesting is a lot of technologies especially on the data engineering side are very expensive. They are affordable for large enterprises, but when it comes down to small businesses, it’s not accessible. Where is the affordable version of that?

Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski (Part 5)

David Chmielewski: The closer you can stick to having a real product, the better you’re going to come out in the end. It’s really those first three or four clients that help refine your product and allow you to understand what’s truly different and what’s not. We had the experience at BoA. At First Tech, we had the experience of two clients, so we had some ideas.

Our next two clients were Golden One Credit Union and CardWorks. By the time we were done with them, we knew what our product should look like. We had a breadth of knowledge that allowed us to say that this is what our product is.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Name the companies that are very expensive to use but address the problems you’re talking about.

Dheeraj Pandey: SQL-based data warehouses. Snowflake did an amazing job in the last 10 years to make it more accessible. Data was still locked in a few people’s bureaucracies. I helped create some of those back at Oracle, but we created big systems. These were hardware-based systems that had the traditional Oracle software. Not many people had access to it. They’re not elastic.

Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You knew the specs of what needed to be built. That kind of domain knowledge is invaluable.

David Chmielewski: Right. We knew what we wanted to build. We already built it. Our flagship product is a dispute system. At BoA, I had already built three of them. We didn’t have a single line of code, but I knew what we had done and I knew how to make it better. I know First Tech saw that. We were all confident that we could do this.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Wearables is a very interesting industry that is going to be entirely design-driven. What about on the IT side whether it’s a healthcare IT or software-driven solution? What have you invested in that is interesting?

Dheeraj Pandey: We’ve done a late-stage investment in a healthcare analytics company. They’re trying to surround Epic, which is, kind of, the mainframe of healthcare. It’s a very interesting play because they’re not going directly after the “mainframe”.