Sramana Mitra: You learn a tremendous amount in failures. It gives you the time to pivot. There are a lot of pivots involved in finding product-market fit. Having the time to do that pivot without going bankrupt is very helpful.

Gabino Roche: Just to tie to the freedom of failure and pivoting, at the mobile app company I was running, when you come up with an idea like Saphyre and you’re trying to get clients to adopt it; you may have an initial idea that’s really good, but you have to put yourself in the selfish interest of the potential partners and clients that you want to win. You may want to build something else to get to your idea.

I always mention this funny story about a Kuwaiti royal family member reaching out to me. They found my mobile app company on a clickbait website. We didn’t advertise there but, somehow, this website said we were the number two mobile app developer. We were good but not that good. They had this idea to be a Supermarket Delivery App.

I asked them why the need for another one. I wanted to understand the core business and not just the symptoms. They said they wanted to build a supermarket delivery app. I said, “Do you have relationships with supermarket or logistics companies?” Nope. They said they were just going to build a beautiful user experience and the supermarket will just want to use it.

After some thinking, I came back to them and said, “If you want to do this, you need to be a coupon-sharing app first. You can do some guerilla marketing and choose one supermarket you want to partner with. Stand outside and give them a QR code for customers to download coupons. You’re going to manually scan these coupons from the Sunday newspapers. Once you collect about 50,000 of their customers, you’ll approach the supermarket and all you’re going to ask them for is an API connection. They will likely be open to it, because you’re helping drive business to them.

Once you have about 100,000 of their customers, then you can ask them to do the supermarket delivery option. Now you’ve created a value proposition and you cannot be ignored. You have to figure out the things you have to set up in place to do your big play.

Sramana Mitra: First and foremost, you guys are not identical twins? You don’t look alike.

Stephen Roche: We are.

Sramana Mitra: Do you guys dance?

Stephen Roche: I’m into breakdancing. My brother is into formal dancing.

Sramana Mitra: What formal dancing? I’m sorry. I’m completely going off on a tangent.

Gabino Roche: I do Argentine Tango.

Sramana Mitra: I’m a world-class Argentine Tango dancer. Let’s get back to Stephen’s story.

Stephen Roche: I always loved technology. I started in retail working for an electronics boutique. They were involved with software and hardware components. They eventually got into the video game business. They got acquired after I left. They’re now known as Game Stop. I left to go work for AT&T about five years after Gabino. I was on the B2B side helping small market growth cap companies grow into Fortune 5000 companies.

This is after the dot com bust. AT&T had its hands in all kinds of things and not just telecommunications. They were involved in software and physical data centers. They were also inventing the hybrid cloud technology that got killed by Amazon and Azure, but they were the leaders in it. Through that experience, I’ve worked with almost a thousand different companies.

Some of the notable names I’ve worked with were Louis Vuitton, New York Yankee Stadium, and Formula One. These are massive deals that I work in multiple areas. New York Yankee Stadium was doing the media room and the cameras behind the batting box. They were doing all kinds of feeds. The more interesting stories were the small companies that were up and coming. I worked a lot in fashion areas. Michael Kors was one of those companies that was up and coming.

I got to see how a lot of these small companies grew to multi-billion dollar companies and how technology gave them competitive advantages over other vendors. During my time at AT&T, I had an opportunity to go on my own consulting run. It was a huge gig. I relented because I was working on all these flashy big deals. I passed on it. I see some of my peers who took advantage of it and started doing well. I could have joined and tried to compete against them but I was now behind the eight ball on that.

When my brother was thinking about saving that consortium deal, it was me talking to him about my regret of missing that opportunity. I had been saving money at that time for him to jump and do that. I told him I would be his first investor. When he was growing the business, finance had a very old mentality of having things on-premise. That causes some of the technology issues that exist today because everybody has different databases of information and different jurisdiction of location. We need a cloud solution.

Finance is very scared about cloud because of security reasons. I had worked in the virtualization environment with AT&T and lost the business to Azure. I had worked with many IT departments of these companies that are growing. One of the key hires that Gabino had brought on was a CIO that I had been dealing with for years selling AT&T services. Then ended up working for Gabino at Saphyre.

I also helped him on how to present and project to executives about his technology. This is disruptive. It’s not like anything else. We would get people to come to us and say, “I only need two wheels.” No, the car doesn’t drive unless you have all four wheels. This becomes an education process.