Today we have the second part of the two part series with three companies from Class 7 of QC Fintech.   Sheena Allen from Capway, James Safran from Qbrics, and Christian Zimmerman and Nate Washington from Qoins joined us to discuss their startups and life inside of Class 7.

If you want to see the companies after they have wrapped up you can come to the Southeast Fintech Venture Conference on November 20th (an all day event at Barings new headquarters in Charlotte) or just come out to listen to Class 7 at their Demo Day.  Check out our recent podcast with Dan Roselli and Sarah Smith to learn more about the upcoming Venture Conference.

In today’s interview, I wanted to focus on the companies a little more and their experiences.  As such, we dig into the following questions:

  • What’s been their biggest failure (or challenge) to date?
  • How do reach out to the partner companies? In essence, they all have to work with large financial companies in some way.  How do they reach out and start the conversations to gain ‘traction’.
  • Have they hard startup experience in the past and if so what did they learn from those previous experiences that is helping them today?
  • What is the camaraderie like in the class? Is there fighting within the program or do they support and help each other?
  • What is success for each company?
  • Are they raising money?

Stick around for next week as we have our first part of a two part series with Thom Ruhe – the President and CEO of NC IDEA. Thom has ton of experience in the startup world and developing/nurturing the ecosystems supporting them.  As such we dive into the role of NC IDEA, what programs they run, more about Tom’s history and what brought him here.

We also dig into the thorny questions about what’s missing in Charlotte from a startup perspective, why Charlotte feels slighted from NC IDEA, should we want HQ2 and much, much more.  Check back next week for another episode of the Charlotte Angel Connection.