Venture Everywhere Podcast: Mike Quinn with Rio Xin Chen
Mike Quinn, co-founder and CEO of Boost, chats with Rio Xin Chen, co-founder and CEO of Pandas on episode 97: Boosting the Last Mile.
In episode 97 of Venture Everywhere, the host is Dr. Rio Xin Chen, co-founder and co-CEO of Pandas, a B2B platform that was acquired and connected Asia with millions of small merchants across Latin America. He sits down with Mike Quinn, co-founder and CEO of Boost, a technology company digitizing last-mile supply chains in emerging markets. Mike shares how a decade building fintech ventures in Africa shaped his vision for Boost and the role of technology in driving inclusive growth. He also discusses how Boost’s asset-light model is helping small distributors and retailers thrive in fast-growing markets.
In this episode, you will hear:
Digitizing last-mile supply chains in emerging markets
Empowering small distributors and retailers through digital tools
Partnering with Unilever to modernize distribution networks
Scaling an asset-light model across Africa and beyond
Unlocking working capital through partnerships with Mastercard and local banks
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TRANSCRIPT
00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.
00:00:13 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:33 Rio: Welcome to Venture Everywhere. I’m Dr. Rio Xin, co-founder and co-CEO of Pandas, a B2B platform connecting Asia with millions of Latin American small merchants. We recently got acquired by a Chinese manufacturer.
00:00:47 Rio: Previously, I was an EM at McKinsey, and before that, I have a PhD in the intersection of aerospace engineering and machine learning. Currently, I’m working on my new venture. I’m here with Mike Quinn, co-founder and CEO of Boost with a mission to power growth and last mile supply chains and emerging markets with radically easy ordering. Mike, great to have you here.
00:01:07 Mike: Thank you so much, Rio. It’s a pleasure to be here with you on the Everywhere Ventures podcast. I’m really excited to get into this conversation and also learn from your journey. I think we can probably share a lot of stories along the way.
00:01:20 Mike: I’ll give you a bit of background to myself. So I grew up in Calgary in Western Canada. Did engineering at university in Vancouver. And then I joined this organization called Engineers Without Borders. This was 20 plus years ago now, but they sent me to Ghana in West Africa. I ended up spending a year there, then a second 18-month placement with the same organization in Zambia in Southern Africa, really learning about grassroots development and working with small businesses in Africa.
00:01:49 Mike: I was hooked. I saw so much opportunity and potential. Also learned so much about how hard it is to live in Africa, how hard people work and some of the challenges people have to overcome in their day-to-day lives and wanted to make a lifelong commitment to building entrepreneurial ventures in Africa.
00:02:04 Mike: I ended up doing two years of higher education in the UK. So I studied a master’s in development studies at London School of Economics. And then I got my MBA after that from the University of Oxford.
00:02:16 Mike: And then I moved back to Africa, back to Zambia where I was previously and ended up co-founding a company called Zoona that became one of the very first fintechs on the continent and was there for 10 years. So we scaled it across Zambia, Malawi with a back office in Cape Town. It grew to serve 2 million active customers with mobile financial services and really evolved to become like a digital bank.
00:02:38 Mike: And then in 2019, I left that, ended up reflecting back on that journey. I authored a book called Failing to Win about the challenges of building companies, not only in Africa, but just the challenge of being a founder and building companies and how important failure is and learning from failure.
00:02:54 Mike: And that became the roots of starting this new business, Boost. I’ve been in Boost now since early 2020, right before COVID, which is a funny time to start a business. But we’re well into the journey now.
00:03:05 Rio: Great. That’s incredible. Your life journey. Super interesting, all you’ve done. And tell us a little bit more about Boost.
00:03:11 Mike: So as you said in the intro, Boost exists to power growth in last mile supply chains with radically easy ordering. We’ve started in Africa, but we’re focused on emerging markets. We really have a global scope. So we’re looking at now Middle East and Latin America, because we see the very same pain points in many of these markets.
00:03:29 Mike: So maybe to take a step back before I show what we do, I need to explain the problem a little bit for people that don’t know the context. The way manufacturers get their products to market was largely set up before the internet existed. So you have large companies, like we work with Unilever, that will then distribute products to a first level of distribution.
00:03:48 Mike: Think a distributor, a family-owned business that has a warehouse and trucks and vans, what you would expect from a distribution business. But then what then happens is those distributors will then distribute to another level of smaller wholesalers, and sub distributors, which are similar businesses, but smaller.
00:04:07 Mike: And then those businesses will then distribute to all of the mom and pop retail stores. And for the manufacturers like Unilever, they don’t have any visibility below that first level. So they’ll see the purchase orders and the inventory from their first level distributor. But then they don’t see what happens to the second level distributor. They have no communication or engagement with the point of sale retailer.
00:04:28 Mike: They can’t send promotions to them. They don’t know how many they even have most of the time. And then for the retailers at the bottom that are selling the products to the consumers, they don’t have access to the latest pricing, latest promotions.
00:04:41 Mike: It’s largely like a cash model where the sub distributors or wholesalers will either supply with motorbikes or cash fans, or the retailers will just go to their shop and do cash and carry.
00:04:53 Mike: So it’s a huge opportunity to bring digital tools into this ecosystem and make it a lot more efficient. That’s what we focused on to start is we wanted to really own this category of last mile ordering by having a very simple WhatsApp based ordering tool for retailers to order from wholesalers and sub distributors.
00:05:13 Mike: And then we built a fulfillment platform because we started learning that the sub distributors and wholesalers were also running their business on pen and paper and outdated accounting software and maybe Microsoft Excel.
00:05:26 Mike: Businesses that could turn over 20 to $100,000 a month, but not very much technology. And so we kind of built a ordering platform and a fulfillment platform. We ended up starting to sell it to manufacturers and we got this anchor partnership with Unilever.
00:05:39 Mike: They’re now rolling us out across several markets. We’re live in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Egypt. We’ve got another partnership with a milk manufacturer in Senegal and starting to expand more broadly. But it’s really around digitizing last mile ordering and providing insights to the manufacturer and better pricing and services to the retailer.
00:05:59 Mike: And then one last thing I’ll mention is we’ve got another partnership that we’ve signed on with MasterCard to layer in a digital payment and credit solution. So we’re expanding from just ordering to now ordering plus payments plus credit.
00:06:10 Rio: That sounds amazing. Just a little bit more into the fulfillment part. What part of the product does that entail in terms of fulfillment?
00:06:17 Mike: When we started the business, one of our founding principles was to be an enabler, and not try to compete or replace the existing distributors in the market. There were other startups and models that were raising quite a bit of money. They also were going after retailers with ordering and payment and credit solutions.
00:06:35 Mike: But then they would do the fulfillment themselves. So they would take the money and then invest it in the logistics or fulfillment. Or they might try to build a marketplace and take orders and route it to other distributors.
00:06:45 Mike: But what we wanted to do is to find all of the existing distributors that have really been around forever. A lot of these businesses are multi-generational family run businesses. They’ve been part of the manufacturer distribution networks and even set up by the manufacturers. They have very long standing and personal relationships with all of the retailers they supply.
00:07:06 Mike: Think like a you run a distribution business and maybe you have 10 vans and motorbikes that are supplying a thousand stores. Those vans and motorbikes with their sales reps are visiting those stores once a week. You’ve been running that business for 30, 40 years. This is the typical category.
00:07:21 Mike: We don’t want to compete with those businesses. We want to enable them. We started off just by giving them… our platform where they could register the stores that they supply so they have now a CRM. They can then receive the order. Then they can allocate inventory from their warehouse. Then they can manage their delivery drivers and their sales reps.
00:07:40 Mike: And then they start getting data insights around who’s ordering what and really managing the end-to-end order to cash. And then tracking payments, even though a lot of it, when we started, was cash, the ability just to record a person was collecting cash from a customer, and then reconcile that against like what inventory left your warehouse that was put on the motorbike or the van was a major pain point.
00:08:01 Mike: So we built tools really for that distributor. And then to figure out how do we acquire those distributors, instead of going to them one by one and selling them a SaaS product and trying to get them to pay for it, that’s where we wanted to build a partnership with a manufacturer.
00:00:08:13 Mike: The partnership we have with Unilever, they now are rolling this out countrywide in the markets we’re working in. So they can go to distributors like in Nigeria, channel by channel and say, you now need to use Boost because we’re bringing you this tool that can help you digitize your business. And then Unilever wants to get the data access to understand what products are being sold to their end customers as well.
00:08:35 Rio: That makes a lot of sense. So basically Boost is an asset light. So what it does is giving all these digital tools, digital assets for everyone in the supply chain from the manufacturer to the distributor and ultimately to retailers as well. Would that be correct?
00:08:50 Mike: 100%. We’ve always said from the beginning, we want to be asset zero. We never touch stock. We never touch cash. We have very small teams because it’s a B2B model.
00:08:59 Mike: We work with Unilever to then support them to deploy the platform and on board their distributors. And then we work with the distributors to onboard all of the retailers they supply. I think in Nigeria, our total headcount is five people and we have close to 20,000 stores that’s now scaling to like 100,000 retail stores next year.
00:09:16 Mike: We can do this because the technology is being scaled through our partnerships, and we don’t get involved in like the logistics or the catalog or the pricing. That’s all the job of the manufacturers and the distributors. We’re just the enabler with that digital transformation layer.
00:09:31 Rio: Makes sense. I’m very interested on your journey with Boost. What was the initial journey? What were the initial challenges? And when do you feel like you got product market fit?
00:09:40 Mike: We’re still on that journey. So we feel like we have some good degree of product market fit. And now we’re trying to figure out how do we really scale this, which is becoming a new challenge.
00:09:48 Mike: But to get to that point, as I mentioned initially, we were launching during COVID. We had this counterintuitive hypothesis that we want to start in multiple markets from the very beginning to try to build a scalable product and have a proposition where a manufacturer working across different markets would want to adopt it.
00:10:07 Mike: In continents like Africa, there’s 54 different markets and you have in all these regional clusters. And if you go one market or one region at a time, it’s really slow. So we kind of standardized on WhatsApp ordering for retailers to self order products. And then we built a sales rep ordering solution for the people that don’t have smartphones so the sales rep could still capture the orders.
00:10:27 Mike: And then tested that across different markets. Those were the things that from the very beginning, we had this hypothesis and we figured out product market fit with those products because they’re universally used and like scalable.
00:10:39 Mike: Where in every market, in every supply chain, with every manufacturer, you have some customers that you want to receive orders from and then some customers that your sales reps need to visit and still capture the orders so you can get the data.
00:10:52 Mike: From the very beginning, we really started with these two things. But then the challenge along the way was how do you get a partnership like Unilever? It wasn’t our intent. We knew we wanted a partnership, but we didn’t know it was going to be them.
00:11:04 Mike: Initially, back in 2020, 2021, we had very small pilots in Ghana, then in Nigeria, also in South Africa. We just built out the products and the tools. And then we were trying to get a couple of distributors to use them and validate that the product would actually work.
00:11:19 Mike: We learned all the hard lessons about how hard you can get a use case, but you don’t have a business case where like distributors would love the product, but they wouldn’t want to pay for it.
00:11:28 Mike: We also learned that even if the distributors loved the product and the tools, they were so influenced by the principal manufacturers that they’d say like, we need our manufacturer to give us permission for this. And we learned also that the manufacturers would sometimes force tools or at least processes on the distributors.
00:11:43 Mike: Unilever would assign, for example, sales reps and allocate motorbikes to wholesalers and sub distributors. So to get them to use the Boost platform, they really would want Unilever to consent to that, and to introduce it. It’s like much stronger kind of acquisition model.
00:11:59 Mike: But we learned all this the hard way. And eventually, it took a couple of years, but we ended up getting a strong case study with one distributor for Unilever in Nigeria. Made a contact with the Unilever Nigeria team, showed them all of this data that they could get. They loved it. And then they introduced us to their team and their headquarters in London.
00:12:18 Mike: That got us into a process where a year or so later, we then had pilots in Ghana, then in Kenya, then in Egypt. And then we got escalated to their global procurement, which is in India. So learning how these big complicated organizations work. You need this parallel track of traction on the ground, like proof of concepts and pilots.
00:12:36 Mike: But then you need to like constantly network and identify who are the decision makers at different levels and different departments. It took us a couple of years, but eventually we like had a globally procured platform. We became a technology vendor. We then got contracted, and then we started deploying it more broadly and scaling up.
00:12:56 Mike: Now we’re figuring out how do we replicate that and scale that with other manufacturers as well. It’s been a journey. I would have thought in the early days, this was probably my two to three year plan and it’s taken us five to get here. So it’s been a little bit longer, but that’s where we’re at.
00:13:10 Rio: It sounds amazing having the partnership with Unilever. I’m interested in whether it was a specific “aha” moment. Or it was more gradual?
00:13:18 Mike: It’s actually a combination of both. I’m curious, also Rio, from your experience, how you find doing B2B partnerships or B2B sales. One thing I could just share and then I’ll give you the question as well is the aha moment often comes from very specific individuals that initially we stumbled upon them by accident. And then we started getting really smart and trying to figure out who they were.
00:13:38 Mike: Because we were doing these pilots on the ground and working with execution staff and middle management down. These people are critical to success and they can block you very easily. In that world, they have the existing KPIs, existing habits, behaviors. They’ve always done things the way they’ve done them.
00:13:54 Mike: So introducing new technologies and changes of business processes, it’s very hard. We needed to really get the wheels greased ourselves and really put all of the energy into proving value in small scale pilots that we would almost do ourselves, despite of some of the local staff that we’re working with.
00:14:11 Mike: But then taking headlines and stories. I’ll give you an example. In Kenya, we worked with one distributor and then we, within three months, had expanded the territory by 20% just by getting new stores that their sales reps weren’t serving to start self-ordering using WhatsApp.
00:14:28 Mike: That was something that they’d been trying to do for a long time. But we hired a few sales reps ourselves and just went out and did acquisition and it was non-scalable, but we wanted to show a use case, that this was possible.
00:14:40 Mike: Then we got another headline that showed the stores that would self-order on WhatsApp would order 30% more products than stores that were served by sales reps because all of these retailers could browse. They didn’t have somebody to come visit them. They could order on their own time, they could browse the catalog, then they could start seeing different promotions and different baskets.
00:14:59 Mike: We took these things and then packaged them into stories with headlines and then just started testing them with different audiences. And then learning how to interact between people who are responsible for like technology, people who are responsible for sales, people who are responsible for like distribution.
00:15:13 Mike: They all need different stories packaged to them. A lot of it was just initially trying a lot of different things. One person would be like, “Wow, this is actually really awesome. Let me now introduce you to somebody else.” So then that would open the door for us.
00:15:27 Rio: I think that fully resonates because a lot of times the people who are actually doing the work are very busy. So when you introduce something new, maybe they don’t have enough time to do it. So if you actually offer a little bit as a service, and you can show them how you can improve their work and their objectives and KPIs, that fully resonates with them and they will basically share with the rest of the company.
00:15:47 Rio: So I think my experience really tracks to what we just explained. That’s probably the best way to show value, and then it will go up the chain. And the people who are up the chain, they’re fully on board with it, it will be a lot easier.
00:15:59 Mike: And to your point as well, especially when you’re introducing new products or innovations or technologies, there’s a change management process that needs to happen. People will change because they’re told to, but then they’re a bit resentful.
00:16:13 Mike: If you just go top down, you can get the change, but then you don’t get the buy-in. But then at the same time, I found, if you just do the bottom up, you don’t necessarily get the scale as quickly because you can make a difference in some people’s lives or work, but then it will just stop with them.
00:16:28 Mike: And then there’s still a decision maker above them who will just introduce something new because it’s a new global tool or policy. So it’s really the bottom up approach where it’s like, I like this new product. It’s making my work easier. It’s helping me hit my KPIs.
00:16:42 Mike: But then the more strategic and senior people are like, this fits into like the medium to longer term vision and the direction I’m trying to take the company and what the changes I want for my team. But it’s hard. It’s a balance you need to strike with those two approaches.
00:16:54 Rio: Exactly. It’s like a pincheer move. So you go bottoms up and top down at the same time. Just switching gears, I’m very interested in the new credit product that you guys are introducing.
00:17:03 Mike: This is another example of our philosophy of what I mentioned of being asset zero. We knew from the very beginning that we need to get into supply chain financing because it’s the first thing that customers ask, investors ask as well.
00:17:18 Mike: So you get somebody who’s ordering from you, using our ordering platform. We get all the data on their orders and then you realize very quickly that there’s huge working capital bottlenecks. As an example, where we see this most acutely is before holiday seasons, like Christmas or Eid like Nigeria in before Christmas.
00:17:35 Mike: In November, anybody who has capital will bulk order stock, and then they will sit on it. And then they will release it into the market when the prices start rising. Prices will rise so that people will start selling their stock.
00:17:47 Mike: But what that means is that anybody without capital, so all this small retail stores and then also a lot of small distributors and wholesalers, they don’t have enough working capital, so they can’t order more in advance. Then what happens is when the demand goes up, they just run out of stock. So their shelves go bare. And then the stuff that they need to order, the prices have gone up. So their margins also get squeezed.
00:18:08 Mike: This happens all the time in the market. So there’s these working capital bottlenecks. We wanted to solve them. We know also that there’s a great money making opportunity because to improve margins, getting a slice of credit.
00:18:19 Mike: But we didn’t want to be the balance sheet ourselves and provide it ourselves because then A, you have to take the risk and B, I know from personal experience in my last business as well, you spend all of your life fundraising.
00:18:31 Mike: And even if you’re raising debts, you then often have to raise a chunk of equity to get the debt, to provide the working capital. And as soon as you raise one round, you’ve got to start the next one because if it starts working, it just scales up bigger and bigger.
00:18:44 Mike: So we wanted to take this approach of how do we be an enabler and take an asset zero approach where we look at who has balance sheets in the market. Obvious case in point is banks. So the markets we work in, there’s banks that provide credit to larger SMEs but a lot of the sub distributors and wholesalers and retailers do not.
00:19:05 Mike: They don’t provide any financing to, but credit exists in those markets. And the way it happens is Unilever will give their first distributor goods on credit, 30 day payment terms. A person will pass it down to the wholesaler, also 30 day payment terms, who then passes it down to some of the retailers. Some are cash and carry, some are credit, but it’s just informally done. It just is as payment terms.
00:19:28 Mike: So the design we figured out is, how do we get banks to actually provide the financing into the bottom layers and make it a revenue opportunity for the banks. Cause they have the balance sheet. A lot of them want to drive financial inclusion, provide supply chain financing, but they don’t have customers or the data. They don’t have the expertise working in like these informal general trade parts of the market.
00:19:49 Mike: We ended up starting ourselves. So we picked a market in Ghana. We just took $50,000 and did a pilot so we could show retailers could effectively get credit scored, have a limit, order up to that limit, prove that they could pay it back. So we took 50K of our own money, spun it around 20 times to show we could get like a million dollars of credit orders.
00:20:07 Mike: And it allowed us to build the product of how do you identify and price and things like that. We knew we couldn’t scale it. So it was just to really get this proof of concept.
00:20:16 Mike: And then we got a connection to MasterCard. We were starting to like socialize this and figure out how do we scale it up. With MasterCard, what was really attractive is they work with all the banks. MasterCard and Visa cover all the banks in the world.
00:20:30 Mike: They were looking exactly for this type of product because they wanted to like say how do they work with their banks to provide supply chain financing to like FMCG and CPG, consumer packaged goods companies in emerging markets. They had a whole strategy around it.
00:20:44 Mike: We ended up starting a partnership with them, started with an MOU, then went to a commercial business agreement. Then we got into their accelerator. Now we’re signing partnerships with four banks in four different markets where the bank will provide the balance sheets of their risk, issue credit through the Boost platform to the distributors and wholesalers and retailers, based on product that we’ve designed with them around who qualifies for what.
00:21:10 Mike: We’re very close to taking this to market. But it’s also been a journey. It meant we had to be quite patient because working with these big companies like MasterCard, Unilever, banks, it takes time. So the processes are very slow to get it to market. But we believe we’re ending this with something that is really scalable.
00:21:26 Mike: With MasterCard now, because they’re seeing the potential of this, they’re starting to help us with new business development, with new manufacturers in new markets, and also trying to package it as a model where we can work with them and bring on board a bank in any market in the world.
00:21:40 Mike: For example, I mentioned in Latin America, we’re starting this journey. Unilever also, we’ve got some conversations with them in Latin America. But with Mastercard now, they’ve got a global SME team and they’re like, “How do we now work with Boost and start bringing this product to banks in Latin America?”
00:21:56 Mike: When we launch with new manufacturers, our vision is to be able to have this set up from day one. It’s a lot of setup costs, but then once it’s in the market, we have a bank that we can work with that is providing financing, like at the last mile of supply chains to release all of these working capital bottlenecks.
00:22:12 Mike: And everybody can really benefit from that because the piloting we’ve done, especially for like smaller retailers, they can grow their average sales by 30 to 50%. Just providing them financing terms that are affordable and help them keep their shelves stocked.
00:22:26 Mike And then distributors can improve their product availability. They can improve their margins because they can buy on better terms, like a little bit higher quantities. It’s a solution we’re really excited about.
00:22:37 Rio: One of the biggest challenges for SMEs is working capital so they’re able to grow. And I think this product makes a lot of sense given that you guys have all the data that you would do for the perfect underwriting for banks.
00:22:48 Mike: How do you guys do this at Pandas? Because you guys provide supply chain financing as well.
00:22:53 Rio: Exactly. We did that as well. In our case, it’s smoothed up the platform. It really enabled our clients to be able to grow. And the same way as you guys are doing right now, we did it with a third party. It was a fintech company that they specifically focused on giving credit to SMEs, similar to like a buy now, pay later product.
00:23:14 Rio: And we embedded the product into our platform with some of the similar notions that you just explained, because we didn’t want to take the risk in our balance sheet. We had the data, but we were not the best underwriters. So we knew that these companies had the expertise. So we embedded that into our platform.
00:23:29 Mike: Awesome.
00:23:30 Rio: And just as you were saying about Latin America, what’s next for Boost? Are you guys focusing on the new market with the credit product or you guys in trend with the last mile product?
00:23:40 Mike: We have three pillars to our business. Pillar one is expanding our partnership with Unilever because they’re really our anchor in this. Within each market, there’s multiple channels. So there’s a lot of scope. Countries like Nigeria, Egypt, huge markets that we can go after just with them. But within Unilever, it’s a global business. They have like an Africa team, a Middle East, North Africa group, a Latin America group. We’re expanding with them.
00:24:06 Mike: Pillar two is now a B2B sales process of new manufacturers, both global and local and regional. For example, you have the other Unilever companies like Mars, P&G, Nestle, all of these global manufacturers.
00:24:20 Mike: Some also consumer packaged goods and agri businesses, we think could fit really well because they all have the same challenges of a multi-tiered distribution without a lot of visibility or digitization at the bottom.
00:24:32 Mike: That’s a huge amount of work because they’re slow sales cycles with the larger ones. But we see a great opportunity for, like, smaller local manufacturers that also have very limited technology and probably don’t have an ordering platform. They might have an ERP, but not necessarily ordering.
00:24:49 Mike: The third is what we’ve been talking about, is now bringing in the payments and credit through our partnership with MasterCard and local banks and trying to do those concurrently in multiple markets with a very small team.
00:25:00 Mike: We have a low headcount philosophy. We work mostly remotely. But in each country, we have small teams that are client-facing on the ground. But it’s a massive challenge as well, which is fun.
00:25:10 Rio: Yeah, exciting times ahead. Just to close it off, a very quick speed round. What’s the book, newsletter, or podcast that you’re enjoying?
00:25:17 Mike: Trevor Noah’s What Now podcast is probably my favorite. He’s got amazing guests all the time. He’s one of my favorite comedians and just an amazing person. I highly recommend checking that out.
00:25:327 Rio: If you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be?
00:25:30 Mike: I’m going to go back to my roots. I’m kind of in Western Canada and say Squamish, British Columbia. Because in the winter, you can go skiing and in the spring, summer and autumn, the hiking and kayaking and kite surfing and all of that is amazing. It’s like the adventure capital for Canada and a really beautiful part of the world.
00:25:49 Rio: Amazing. I love nature. What’s your favorite productivity hack?
00:25:53 Mike: I’ll give you a non-conventional answer. I think not traveling that much. As I mentioned, we’re spread out. We’ve got teams now in like five different countries and travel costs money, but it costs a lot of time as well and a lot of energy. As a startup, I’m working in like Africa and emerging markets. You don’t do like very comfortable travel a lot.
00:26:13 Mike: And so we really focus on getting really good people on the team and building really good ways of working. Now I’m mid-forties. I’ve got two kids. I just really take more care of myself and my energy. I still need to travel from time to time, but I find not traveling that much gives me more energy for myself and really helps me be more productive as well.
00:26:34 Rio: Yeah. So be very mindful on where you travel and be very selective about it.
00:26:38 Mike: Yes. If I go somewhere, it’s for a really key meeting where it’s been set up in advance. It’s not just like, “Hey, I need to get on the ground to go micromanage things or make stuff happen.” I really focus on value added travel and picking my moments, my trips very carefully.
00:26:51 Rio: Makes sense. Finally, where can listeners find you?
00:26:55 Mike: Probably LinkedIn. Trying to kind of have somewhat of a presence there and get better at posting and sharing like insights and stories. If you just add LinkedIn, Mike Quinn Boost or Boost Technology is our official company name, you’ll find me. But how about you Rio? Where do our listeners find you?
00:27:11 Rio: Yeah, the same. LinkedIn will be the easiest, Dr. Rio Xin. I’m on LinkedIn as well. I think it’s the easiest. Thanks to all our listeners and thanks to Mike for being on the podcast.
00:27:21 Mike: Thank you, Dr. Rio. It’s a pleasure to meet you and also learn from your journey. I’m excited to hear more.
00:27:27 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere, where a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
Read more from Mike Quinn in Founders Everywhere.