Founder Friday: David Marquez from Shipmates (S21)

David Marquez is the CTO of Shipmates, a courier platform that connects online stores to different couriers.

What has been the most surprising thing for you about being a founder?

1. You have to learn everything. Not knowing what you don't know (especially if not taken care of by your co-founders) can sometimes kill you or your business.
2. You can't expect employees to have the same level of ownership the same way a founder does.

What was the highlight of your Iterative experience?

Watching everyone improve on their pitches during fundraising bootcamp. Seeing the pitches improve meeting after meeting was something.

What is one thing that you would tell to your 10 year old self?

Play football earlier and be great at it. Then maybe spend more time on the internet and buy bitcoin.

What's the craziest thing that has happened to you in your job?

You wouldn't consider me the most consistent in a group of people but in the earlier days of our agency, when we just built the courier integration software, we had to book the orders of all of the brands every night before midnight so they could be picked up the next day. You had to pull the orders from the different sites, double check and make sure the addresses were correctly put, and then book them with a courier. The last part of booking a courier was the stuff that I built and was majorly automated, but pulling the orders and double-checking the addresses weren't. We convinced the brands that it was automatic but actually it was just me booking orders for brands for almost 365 days straight save for holidays and the weekends.

Where did the idea of your company come from?

We were building e-commerce websites for brands before Shipmates and one of their requests was to build integrations with couriers. During the pandemic, we took a pause to rethink the e-commerce agency model and decided to turn the courier integration software into its own product.

If you could be an animal, what would you be? Why?

A dragon, cause why not?

What was your dream occupation growing up?

I wanted to be a scientist that worked at a research lab. Sorta like Dexter.

If you had a superpower, what would it be and why?

I'm great at buying the top.