Today we’d like to introduce you to Shams Juma.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
It was in the fall of 2011, while I was in graduate school, that the idea of building a two-sided freelance marketplace was seeded in my mind. I was working with my colleagues conducting primary research and speaking with potential customers – where one of them said to me, “what I wouldn’t give to have business expertise like your team on my staff”. That got me thinking, “what made the customer say that”, I thought, while it may have been impractical to loan our services, there were surely other ways to acquire business expertise, so what pain point was the business owner alluding to.
Over the next few days, I met with more business owners. I wanted to see if other organizations experienced the same pain points, and to my surprise, finding the right expertise, at the right time, in the right industry, at the right budget was a problem they all experienced – and they weren’t alone. According to *McKinsey & Company, firms struggled to find internal expertise to address business challenges. Clearly, this was a systemic issue. While the problem may have been to clear me, what wasn’t clear was the solution.
It wasn’t until a few years later that I realized building a platform – where talent could meet opportunity – was the efficient solution in helping firms address their “gap” in expertise.
Has it been a smooth road?
The road to commercializing my startup has been anything but a smooth road. One of my initial struggles was finding the “right” co-founders. I’ve had the opportunity to work with some wonderful people in my life, but it’s been very challenging to find people who not only understand and contribute to the vision, but also share the same risk profile, alignment with work ethic and never make long term sacrifices for short-term gains.
Another challenge I had was understanding how to sustainably scale a two-sided marketplace. Many marketplaces deal with the proverbial chicken-or-egg problem, and we inherited our share. Building a two-sided professional services marketplace is one of the most challenging business models to commercialize because you have to simultaneously grow demand both on the supply and demand side, while using relentless prioritization to address the needs of the customers on both sides of the marketplace. I had to surround myself with marketplace entrepreneurs to help me accelerate my learning curve.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Quantifye story. Tell us more about the business.
Quantifye is an online platform that enables businesses and organizations to discover, hire and work with contingent business talent on-demand. We specialize in providing MBAs from top institutions and ex-management consultants from firms like McKinsey, Bain and The Boston Consulting Group to work with businesses to address their key strategic and management challenges.
We are proud of Quantifye because we are building the workplace of the future. We believe that the old 9 – 5 work model and project-based work model is the model of the future. We believe freelancing empowers self-enterprise and empowers professionals to work for any employer, anywhere in the world. We believe that the human-cloud enables organizations and businesses to become more agile and address their talent needs.
What sets us apart from our competition is that by using our platform, businesses and organizations are able hire a business consultant at 70% of a traditional consulting firm cost and can start their project in little as 24 hours.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
When we first launched Quantifye, we were noticing many startups using our service. Over the years, we have seen enterprise companies starting to use platform like ours. I think this trend will continue and project-based employment will be the future of work.
I think businesses will have their core-work force, but compliment that with a contingent workforce to help them stay agile while benefiting from the cost efficiencies of using a platform.
We are already noticing how companies like Uber, Lyft and Airbnb (to name a few) are creating a social change to where it’s no longer considered odd to sit in someone else’s car or to stay at someone else’s house. I think we’ll see the same type of social acceptance in organizations, where having “access” to talent, not “ownership”, will be the new way of thinking.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.quantifye.co
- Phone: 650-799-9984
- Email: shams@quantifye.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/quantifye
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/quantifye
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