Scaling Startups
This is the first of a series of posts I’ll be writing about my escapades in building and scaling Startups. The first few will be deeply personal and then the goal is to illustrate common things that happen when trying to scale a startup. I focus solely on Startups that have product/market fit and are looking to move to the next level.
I started my career working at IBM Global Business Services (Consulting) where I was able to implement systems that help run Fortune 500 companies. I built my love for Finance and Tech here.
After working at IBM for almost a decade, I had an itch to do my own startup and I launched a Kid’s iPhone App company, where the first game, Go Go Mongo! was featured a number of times by Apple. I moved to the Bay Area to start this company and gave me an opportunity to learn about new product development, user testing, and finding product/market fit. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a business that could scale.
The concept for Go Go Mongo! actually came out of an event that I participated in called Startup Weekend. It was a 54 hour event where you would pitch an idea, build a team, build a product, and then show it to a panel of judges towards the end. My team’s concept, at the time called EnglEasy won the competition and was my first real foray into tech entrepreneurship.
I fell in love with Startup Weekend as a concept. At the time, the concept of these types of events and Hackathons were fairly new, and the waters were untested. Startup Weekend had product/market fit, but we wanted to try more things. I took this as an opportunity to scale this event series from being in one city once a year to going to once a month. We tested all sorts of ideas in the Bay Area by launching vertical events such as Startup Weekend Health, Education, Gaming, Robotics, Mobile, Maker, and the grand daddy of them all, MEGA Startup Weekend. I dedicated my time to helping other entrepreneurs and engineers build their own startups. It was incredibly rewarding and some of my best friendships and relationships came from Startup Weekend.
Having run these events, I got in touch with a lot of investors, and I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be a VC, sitting on the other side of table. I was fortunate to meet Chris Farmer who was leaving General Catalyst and going on to forming his own venture fund, SignalFire. I got a chance to work for him and learn all about VC. But the one major thing I learned about VC, was that I actually get more joy out of building things and I like “investing” by giving my time to building startups.
I then joined my High School friend, Dave Matter to help scale Marqeta, a startup company in the Fintech Space. I had the opportunity of a lifetime to build something amazing with him for the last 4 years and the lessons I learned by doing this will be the basis of my ongoing blogs.
