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”.

Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski (Part 3)

David Chmielewski: We established Quavo as a virtual company. We used most of the methodology that we learned at BoA. How do you run a remote company? We all decided to leave our positions and start the company.

We knew our platform like what we wanted to build on. We had a general idea of what we wanted to do. We wanted to work in financial services. We wanted to build products. We wanted them to be repeatable from one financial institution to another. It was very difficult to bootstrap from that.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Our focus is on the early stage. Let’s double-click down on your early-stage work. How do you define early-stage?

Dheeraj Pandey: I don’t believe in spray-and-pray. I get to know someone over five to seven meetings and sometimes tenacity helps as well. They must succeed if they’re tenacious. In the world of sales, I basically call it fearless. Sometimes we would use the word shameless. You cannot have shame if you’re asking for something. We do Series A and Series B as well. We started out with biotech and life sciences, but we’re looking at software more and more. It’s across geographies – US and Bangalore.

Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Why were you looking for remote work?

David Chmielewski: I had found my wife at Auto Owners, got married, and didn’t want to leave. I grew up in Michigan. I still live there. I wanted to have the ability to spread my wings a little bit, but I knew it wasn’t necessarily going to be an option to stay in Michigan with an on-premise job. I found this remote job.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find a remote job back then?

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

Dheeraj Pandey, founder of Nutanix and DevRev. The conversation spans a variety of topics and has some brilliant insights into the gaps in the tech industry.

Sramana Mitra: We’re going to continue the conversation we’ve had where we talked about his background as a founder of a successful high-growth company. We’re going to talk about investment today. Let’s start by however you want to introduce yourself and your companies.