Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski (Part 1)

Dave transitioned from a developer to an entrepreneur by leveraging his solid domain knowledge in a particular area of FinTech: dispute resolution for credit card transactions. He and his co-founders effectively used bootstrapping using services and piggybacked on the Pega Systems platform. Read on to learn more about his journey.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

David Chmielewski: I was born in Michigan in a small tourism-driven town. They have good schools but generally not a tremendous amount of job opportunities if you wanted to do something in technology. I was one of the lucky people who always knew what I wanted to do. I was exposed to computers pretty early.

Back then, that was really edgy. If you were in a good school system, they’d have computers in the classroom. I knew this was what I wanted to work with, but there were no universities in my town. My parents didn’t have a ton of money but they did manage to scrape enough to buy me a car and send me off to college.

I graduated high school and decided to go to Central Michigan University for my undergraduate. I picked Computer Science. They had a pretty good program. There are much better schools in Michigan. Certainly much more expensive ones. I decided to pick a school that was far enough from home but not too far away from home. It’s a couple of hours of driving. I did have a job at the age of 14 when I was in junior high school.

I started working at a very young age. I started by bagging groceries. I kept that job all the way through college. I did all kinds of things at this grocery store. I ended up as a bookkeeper at the end of my journey. I went to school and got my undergraduate in computer science in about 2003. I graduated from high school in 1999.

After that, I decided I wasn’t ready to go into the workforce. I wanted to hang around a little bit. I stayed for graduate school at Central Michigan. I spent another two years getting my Masters in Computer Science. By the time I was done with that, I had taught classes at the university. I kept my job at the grocery store. I took a bunch of classes. I felt I was ready for the workforce. I had been at that grocery store for 15 years at that point.

I got my first job at Auto Owners Insurance. They’re based in Lansing, Michigan which is a couple of hours away from where I went to undergrad. I got that job by interviewing on campus. They did a lot of recruiting at college campuses. My first gig was as a C developer. I would build software that went out to insurance agents. They would do insurance quotes and things like that. It wasn’t really an internet or web-based sort of thing at that time. It was software shipped out on CDs.

I worked at Auto Owners for five years. It changed my skillsets several times. As a developer, I rounded out there. I was building web services and getting into a lot of this internet stuff. Then toward the end of it, I was getting into a technology platform called Pega. When my time at Auto Owners was up, I decided to look for a remote job that I could do for a larger company. I ended up at Bank of America, which is a significantly larger company. I took that knowledge of the Pega platform. I was skilled at it and got a job working remotely.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski
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