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?

David Chmielewski: A colleague of mine was in a different situation. He was working at Auto Owners and his wife needed to leave for her job and go to a different location. The company wasn’t going to allow remote work. Auto Owners was an onsite job. He actually needed to find a job remotely so he could travel with his wife. He knew she was going to bounce around from one location to another. Her career was like she had to be in three places in the next four years.

Remote work wasn’t a thing back then. He found a job at Bank of America and several of us went to Bank of America. Bank of America had a new program. It was called My Work. It was a remote work sort of thing. They were doing it way before it was popular.

Sramana Mitra: How did you stay at Bank of America?

David Chmielewski: I stayed there for about six years. That is where I met some of the other co-founders of Quavo. We built several systems for processing disputes for their card holders. We were building them on the Pega platform. We got to the point where we thought there was probably a need for this in the market. Can we take this and build it in a way that’s consumable for banks and credit unions?

We had all these ideas and all these things we have learned. We could certainly stay at Bank of America and have a wonderful career there. We saw this opportunity in the market where we could take this software, productize it, and then bring it down. We took those ideas and then we decided to form Quavo.

At that time, there were four of us at Bank of America that decided to find Quavo. We interviewed one other person. His name is Rich. He was working for Pega at that time. He was of a similar mindset but working for Pega. It was a really good fit. The five of us decided to leave our positions with nothing on our backs and start the company.

Sramana Mitra: You were a remote worker at Bank of America. Rich was at Pega. How about the other three?

David Chmielewski: They’re from BoA. About three or four years at BoA, I started to travel quite a bit to Delaware. That’s the old acquisition from Bank of America. I met these other co-founders by being on-site and interacting with them. For the first two or three years, I never traveled and never interacted with anybody who I hadn’t met before.

It was too much remote. You need good interaction. I found that mix in my travels to Delaware. I had time to be remote and I had the ability to be remote. But I also had the ability to be in the office. I used that quite a bit and grew those relationships with those other three folks that we founded the company with. It may not have happened virtually honestly. That is an important part of the story.