A Fat Startup from Virginia: Andrew Rose, CEO of Compare.com (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of job did you get in Richmond?

Andrew Rose: That was my big break from chemical engineering. I had ended up getting a Master’s in Project Management from George Washington while I was with Shell. I started my MBA down there as well. I knew where I wanted to go. The move to Richmond gave me the opportunity to leverage the Master’s rather than the undergraduate degree. So I locked into a job with Capital One.

I joined the dot-com boom and got to see all the silliness and the craziness that was going on during that time period. I remember clearly watching what a startup was doing. Wingspan Bank was offering a $100 to each person that opened a new bank account with them. We thought “That’s what we’ve got to do” as we launched our particular bank.

Luckily, someone there was smart enough to go “Wait a minute. These numbers just don’t add up. This doesn’t make sense.” We sun-setted that project before it ever launched. We didn’t lose a mountain of money. I had been bitten by the technology bug and ended up moving over and working for an internet consulting firm.

Again, I got to see the irrational exuberance of the dot-com age. We moved into a new building that had bamboo floors and 42-inch flat screen TV’s. What’s the big deal? Well, 42-inch flat screen TVs in the year 1999 and 2000’s cost thousands of dollars. I quickly got to see unit-costs that were never ever going to make sense. We were sitting here at a consulting firm having a fixed cost of more than $1000 dollars per person related to rent and other costs. You could just see that this wasn’t going to work.

We were one of many crazy ventures during the dot-com boom. But I had fortunate timing. I used that as my turning point to go to business school. As the dot-com boom became the dot-com bust, I ended up going to a business school at Darden of University of Virginia in 2001 to 2003.

Sramana Mitra: When you come out of business school, what happened?

Andrew Rose: I wanted to be a management consultant. I had gotten a consulting job in summer there. I had opportunities with PCG, A.T. Kearney, etc. This is where I was going. Then we found out my wife and I were expecting our first child. That causes you to take a very deep look at where your priorities are.

What makes sense for the whole family? My wife had a fantastic job and intended to continue working after the birth of our first child. But that was going to be very difficult if my job moved us to another location and she has to start over from scratch. So she convinced me to look in Richmond, Virginia where her job was.

Instead of consulting, I ended up in auto insurance, which is everyone’s dream job while coming out of business school. It’s not what everybody is seeking out of business school, but those who find themselves there find it fascinating. I fall into that category. My early tenure in the insurance phase was progressive. They have a big operation here in Richmond, so it ended up being a great way for me to see a very analytical way of managing an insurance business. It was great but one of the things that I didn’t feed was a bit of that entrepreneurial bug that was gnawing at me.

As a kid, I started lots of little businesses doing a variety of different things to make my own money. I wanted to do more of that. That ultimately led me to leave and join Countrywide in 2006. At this point, if you think back at 2006, the mortgage market was absolutely booming.

Countrywide is one of the largest mortgage providers in the country. They hired me to help them build an auto insurance business and I ended up ultimately running their auto insurance business. So that was my first big foray, I get to jump in and build a business from scratch. It’s what I call intra-preneurship. You’re doing a bit of the entrepreneurship, but you’re doing it inside a big company.

This segment is part 2 in the series : A Fat Startup from Virginia: Andrew Rose, CEO of Compare.com
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