Dave McLaughlin has a pretty interesting resume: co-founder at Fig Card, Founding Executive Director of Boston World Partnerships, Director of Marketing for Boston Redevelopment Authority and even feature film director.
As such, we here at BostInno thought he’d make for a great interview. So, I sat down for 5 questions with Dave McLaughlin, fresh off of a successful exit for Fig Card, to discuss team chemistry, new ventures & exciting developments in the Boston start-up scene.
BostInno: Congrats on the Paypal deal – How did it all go down?
DM: Thanks. I’m limited in what I can say but we all are excited about the synergies and the scale, and when we saw that excitement from John Donahoe and the senior team at PayPal it gave us a pretty enormous sense of what would be possible in this partnership. I’m psyched to see what the team does with it and I’ll be cheering for them like crazy.
The story of Fig Card prior to that is an interesting one because it happened so fast. Max Metral and Hasty Granbery came up with this clever concept and they got an alpha going in a bakery. I brought in some angels and we circled up a round and simultaneously landed a bunch of merchants and a major POS provider for the beta. We did all that in like a month or two, and then we used that momentum to get into some pretty high-level strategic conversations and one thing led to another and here we are.
BostInno: What led you to Fig Card?
DM: It’s always about people first for me. I jumped in with Fig Card because Hasty and Max are the kind of super-brilliant technologists who see the court like very few people do, and I wanted to work with them. Then once we really got immersed in shaping the vision, it just kept getting bigger and bolder, which I loved. It wasn’t about replacing a swipe with a wave. It was about revolutionizing payment in ways that would create a ton of value for brick-and-mortar merchants and for consumers like you and me and my mom and so on. That kind of goal is easy to get fired up about.
Fig Card also felt like the right fit on a personal chemistry level. The three of us knew each other a couple years and there was real respect for what each of us does well, and it felt like a team that didn’t already have my skillset, so that I could bring resources and partnerships and excitement in a way that would change the trajectory for this really clever technology the guys had created. The sense that I could really support what they had developed and really impact the outcome was a big reason to go there.
BostInno: What’s next for you?
DM: It’s another case of a being infected with a big idea and a desire to go build a killer team. I’m launching Vsnap. It’s a stripped down set of applications for sharing short, rich videos to help people feel closer and more connected. The goal is to pair the ease of texting with the robustness of video, because we have this paradox happening right now — we all know that 90-something % of communication is not about the words we use. It’s about tone and body language and eye contact and place and emotion and so on. That’s all the stuff that really, really matters. But more and more of our interactions are happening in words-only formats.
By the way I’m looking for an amazing UI / UX person as well as a couple of recent college grads who are smart and curious and nice and eager and can go in five different directions on any given day. They have to be amazing and, to steal Paul English’s phrase, I want energy amplifiers.
BostInno: How did your time at Boston World Partnership (BWP) prepare you for life as a CEO and tell me about your decision to leave.
DM: Leaving BWP wasn’t easy because I loved the team there and I appreciated the close working relationship with Mayor Menino, Mark Maloney and the rest of the board, but it felt like time for a new challenge personally and I was fortunate in that I had Yoon Lee working there and it was clear she had the chops to run the whole thing. Also, we built a great new relationship with the Boston.com team, and that really represents a new phase in the life of the organization, which meant it felt like the right time for Yoon to take the helm. And of course it’s the best of both worlds, because I’m still active as a Connector and a board member and I still get to spend a bunch of time with all those awesome people.
In terms of how that experience shaped me as a leader, I’d say that one of the things that really coalesced for me there is a notion of what I call earned leadership. What I mean by that is that when you’re leading a network, as opposed to a traditional, hierarchical organization, you really have to earn your authority every single day. You can’t tell people to do x because you’re the boss. It’s a network – they don’t work for you and they can tell you to screw any time they want. That kind of earned leadership is, I think, critical for today’s competitive environment if one wants to stay lean and harness networks of partners and customers and so on.
BostInno: What’s next for the Boston Entrepreneurial scene?
DM: Two things on my mind right now – I think the consumer tech startup scene here is ready to emerge in a bigger way, so I just started a little side project called BoCoCos (Boston Consumer Companies) to put together free monthly meetups so we can all pat each other on the ass a little bit and rally and give the relevant talent a place to pool up and so on. With all that’s been happening with Fig Card and Vsnap, I’ve only gotten as far as lining up the free beer sponsors – I have them – so maybe this can be a call for someone over in the Innovation District to volunteer a space for an evening in late May and we can kick this off nice and easy. Let me know.
Also I’ve been in a bunch of conversations lately with the teams at BWP and Boston.com about how those two can work together to blow the lid off the economic development crowd-sourcing thing we built over there. I really believe we’re finally cracking the code on how to scale that, and I’m super excited about the impact and excitement and energy it’ll unlock.
You can contact Dave @ dave (@) vsnap.com and follow him on Twitter at @BoCoCos
