From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Michael Morris, CEO of Torc (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I have a slightly different kind of question. You are a developer who turned into a successful entrepreneur. You have a real insight into how a developer becomes an entrepreneur. Torc is working on the basis of equipping developers to be freelancers and blossom their careers. Given what’s going on in the world today, there is this tremendous desire for developers to be entrepreneurs. Is that something that you’re thinking about? Is that something that you want to facilitate?

Michael Morris: In our original business plan, we wanted to have a track in Torc that allows that path of going from a developer to an entrepreneur. I also want to be realistic. I think that for 9 out of 10 developers that want to go down that path, it’s not a great idea. Maybe they’re part of an entrepreneurial team. Everybody wants to be a CEO or a visionary.

Building a Global Hardcore Financial Technology Company from Brazil: Ricardo Josua, CEO of Pismo (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Your core value proposition when it comes to the global market is the combination of payments and core banking?

Ricardo Josua: This is one of the main features. You have everything rolled up in a single integration. The second one was that this is not a monolithic solution. It can provide all the systems, but you can build around them. One of the pains that we try to solve was that we don’t want to be the bottleneck in the development of products from our clients. We have to make sure that we have out-of-the-box solutions if you want a basic product.

From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Michael Morris, CEO of Torc (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How big is the developer community now?

Michael Morris: It’s about 2,600 people. We’re still getting off the ground. Out of that, about 500 are vetted. These are people who have gone through our assessment process, built their profiles, linked up their GitHub accounts, and installed and started using our productivity tool.

Sramana Mitra: You have enterprise customers already?

Building a Global Hardcore Financial Technology Company from Brazil: Ricardo Josua, CEO of Pismo (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Were these Brazilian banks?

Ricardo Josua: The first ones, yes. The first one we went to was the largest bank in Brazil. We ended up closing this large contract. It was an experiment. Just having the open door there changed everything.

Sramana Mitra: Now you can go to all the other Brazilian banks and say that you’re working with the largest bank.

From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Michael Morris, CEO of Torc (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me what is the beginning of Torc. How much funding did Frank put in?

Michael Morris: That was an important piece for me. Through my experiences at Appirio and Topcoder, I knew about the effort it takes to fundraise. I was concerned about it. I didn’t want to spend all my time constantly fundraising. I just wanted to build something and focus on that. The fact that they were private equity was a little bit of a different structure. I don’t see myself going to somebody else. We had a commitment for a large level of funding, but we’ve only taken $5 million.

Building a Global Hardcore Financial Technology Company from Brazil: Ricardo Josua, CEO of Pismo (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Pinpoint for me exactly what problem you are solving now.

Ricardo Josua: We are solving agility with robustness for core banking capabilities. What banks have done for the past 10 years is take an agile team or a group of young developers and build experiences that are very cool but have to integrate with old legacy infrastructure. In 99% of the cases, that’s a major bottleneck. What we were providing is the backbone to match the chops of their customer experience needs. We have agile, microservices-oriented solutions for banking infrastructure.

From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Michael Morris, CEO of Torc (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is it all word-of-mouth that developers found out about you?

Michael Morris: Word-of-mouth. I referenced that Social Network movie because it mostly started in Computer Science departments at universities across the globe. Once we got a foothold in the US, it started going globally. Once we went global, it expanded. There was a point in time when we were adding about 50,000 people per quarter to the community. It was hugely viral growth. We did a great job of celebrating the top talent. That helped.

Sramana Mitra: That was helping their careers.

Building a Global Hardcore Financial Technology Company from Brazil: Ricardo Josua, CEO of Pismo (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Now we’re in 2012?

Ricardo Josua: 2014. I started another venture in finance providing structuring for asset-backed security. It was lateral to the business we were doing at that point. I also began working with EdTech on modernization for schools.

Sramana Mitra: In what capacity were you involved in these ventures?