Colin Wiel's journey as a four-time founder, highlighting his resilience, vision, and adaptation in building and scaling multiple companies.
Colin Wiel's journey as a four-time founder, highlighting his resilience, vision, and adaptation in building and scaling multiple companies. It delves into his challenging childhood experiences, lessons learned from past ventures, and his current focus on building Qurrent with lean funding and a strong revenue focus, emphasizing the importance of enjoyable work and the right team for long-term fulfillment and business success.
One thing that became clear to me is what I do next should be squarely focused on AI. Towards the end of that 2 years off, chat GBT came out in November of 22. And that was a huge aha moment for me as it was for almost everyone I think, but for me in particular cuz I'd been so focused on AI for so long and here was all the knowledge of humanity compressed into a large language model. And like it was mindblowing, mind-blowing for me. And I realized this is going to change [Music] everything. All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the dealmaker show. So today we have a an amazing founder. We have a three repeat you know founder you know very successfully so you know he's taken two companies you know very far and now on the next one you know he's actually riding you know really the wave of AI you know and before you know the craziness because he got started a couple of years ago but
again we're going to be talking about you know growing fast you know and some of the pains you know that that causes now what he's you know really learned from that and what he's up to and then as well as to you know some of the things that that he did in terms of deal making and and how he used AI uh you know very very early on and all of the good stuff of building scaling financing and all of the above. So without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Colin Wheel. Welcome to the show. Thank you. So originally born in LA, but I know that you moved quite a bit growing up. Your dad was a founder, so I'm sure that you know that was quite quite quite quite quite the journey. So tell us uh how was life growing up for you? Yeah. Well, I had a a great family, you know, had some some turmoil. Uh went to elementary school in Washington DC in a with a great community. Um and then uh went to
middle school and high school in Reno, Nevada. That was a culture shock. I was 11 when I moved from Washington DC to Reno. And you know, I think that was a little bit of a a formative experience for me because it was hard. it was, you know, kind of a a a very redneck culture and I was coming from a pretty worldly community and uh so I didn't fit in very well. I was picked on. I was also small. 11 is a tough age to move anyways and uh I think that kind of you know gave me some of the grit that I have now and the desire to succeed. I mean obviously that helps you with dealing with uncertainty with you know dealing with tough uh situations I guess. How do you think that that that shaped who you are today? You know going through that that rough period especially those first few years there um really you know gave me a sense that I got to you know I've got to be able to rely on myself to be
you know to take you know to be successful. I think I um also, you know, maybe it came away with a little chip on my shoulder like I'm going to show those people that, you know, and that I think that's helped motivate me to like work hard and be successful. That's incredible. So, I know that also as as you were mentioning too and and we alluded to it, your father was an entrepreneur. I guess being able to see his journey and and seeing the ups and downs in an indirect way. I guess how was that also for you? I think it was good. I mean, we did have downs as well as ups and you know, we we weren't a wealthy family by any means and um but we were there was a resilience in it. I got to see firsthand like when a a company of his went completely bankrupt and you know it was kind of tough times for us as a family but you know I I saw that we were going to be fine and we were and so I think that
helped give me courage to be able to um be be an entrepreneur myself. So obviously in your case you ended up studying engineering right and you went to Berkeley but after that you know it was you went to Boeing you know out of all places and you were involved with AI early on I mean way before all this craziness how did you get you know into Boeing and and and also you know into the whole AI thing. Yeah. So, I was a mechanical engineer interested in robotics, automatic control systems, and I hired into this great group at Boeing that was the the uh responsible for R&D for all the automatic control systems on Boeing commercial airplanes. And when I was there, one of the problems that my group was responsible for was anti-lock brakes. And airplanes would sometimes go off the end of an icy runway. And we knew the anti-lock braking system was giving up potential braking. It was 92%
efficient. So there's this theoretical additional 8% of efficiency that we could gain. But the algorithm was really hard like the system was highly nonlinear and so the traditional approach for developing um automatic control system algorithms kind of broke down. it's based on linear differential equations and when you have a nonlinear model um the methodology doesn't work very well and that was the case and so I had the idea and I was only 6 months out of college but I had the idea of applying u AI to this problem because then you don't need a a model of the system and and you can have a highly nonlinear algorithm and sure enough um with that approach I was able to get the braking efficiency up to 97% %. So it it made the airplane stop in a 5% shorter stopping distance. So obviously you know doing that at that age is quite impressive but you know even though you know you were doing some
good stuff you know you even decided to um turn page and become an entrepreneur. So what prompted that? Yeah. So partly it was that experience I had had you know created something kind of from scratch and realized that that um it gave me a sense of confidence that I could create something of value and I sort of always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur and that and the first job at Boeing was just sort of well if I'm ever going to work at a large company it might as well be right away out of college because I'm never going to go back later. Uh but it was time like a big bureaucratic company was not for me and um I left and did independent consulting for a little while including at Netscape in the early days really early days of the internet and then uh started my first company in 1998. I had become one of the first Java programmers and then Java emerged as the sort of de facto uh
programming language for e-commerce and there was a tremendous demand and not very many people who really knew it and so I I started a consulting firm doing e-commerce infrastructure. Well, I mean the good news there is that, you know, first um first first first time at the bat, you know, first hit, you know, you ended up getting a nice outcome. Uh and I guess what do you think this gave you in terms of visibility into the journey of entrepreneurship into really getting things all the way to the finish line? Yeah, it was hooked. I was hooked. So, I sold the company in 2000 just as the bubble was was bursting of the.com boom and um it was a it was a I'd say it was a good outcome. It was a single, you know, it wasn't a it wasn't a home run and it wasn't even a double, but it was still a you know, I was quite happy with it and it and it was material very material for me at that time. Uh and
so it gave me yeah a sense of confidence. I learned a lot. I honestly wasn't very good as an entrepreneur. You know, I I looking back, there's so many things I would do differently, but uh it was it was great to just get started. So, let's talk about now the uh next chapters. How h how do you um how do you how do you come across Doug Bryan? How do you guys meet? Yeah, so Doug Brian was my um co-founder of two companies, both in the real estate tech space. And we met through an investment club that we were in. And it was 2008 when the.com or when the uh financial crisis was at full strength. And we both had this idea of buying single family homes as investment properties at a time when single family homes were actually causing the financial crisis and no banks couldn't even give them away. Nobody wanted these things. They were considered highly toxic. But we just were having a
conversation. We barely knew each other, but we were both part of this investment group. And uh and we everyone else in the in this sort of club thought we were crazy. They thought we why would we possibly want single family homes, but we both saw it clearly and decided to um to partner up. So then what happened next? Yeah. So we started a company called Waypoint Homes which was the first company to scale single family rental. So uh we built a tech platform for identifying the best single family rental homes to buy and this is at a time when the most of them were owned you know most of the forale inventory was owned by banks and a lot of them had boarded up windows. They'd been foreclosed on the weeds were growing up in the yard. they'd maybe been trashed by the previous owner. And so we could buy these homes really inexpensively, renovate them, and then we were not flipping them. Though
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