Many technical startup founders engage in consulting work to add runway, but Pandera Labs takes that practice to the next level. Part dev shop, part startup incubator and part investor, the startup juggles client work with products of its own — and it puts money behind some of its clients’ startups as well.
Although its parent company is based in Orlando, Fla., the Pandera Labs team chose Chicago as a home. To partner Ryan Redmann, who has built companies in several other cities, Chicago has proven the most fertile ground for startups he has encountered yet.
What is Pandera Labs?
What makes us special is the story of our origin. Our team has a combination of people who built products for clients at dev shops and agencies and people who joined startups to work on individual products. Generally speaking, all of us were dissatisfied with both of those worlds. At dev shops, we didn’t see well-formed partnerships between people and their clients — they were missing pieces of the puzzle, whether that was strategy or technical creativity. On the startup side, when companies raised money, they would get gouged for large equity stakes but they wouldn’t get a lot of advice or help with engineering talent. We decided to create a different model where we would serve both as a startup lab and a VC.
What does that mean in practice?
We build custom software solutions for companies of all sizes, whether they’re small startups or Fortune 500 companies. But we also launch our own products. Using that model, we are creating more of a platform for launching companies that includes money, expertise, engineering talent, design talent and the experience needed to launch a product into market. And our work for bigger companies helps fund our investing and our in-house products.
How much do you typically invest in a startup?
We write checks for anywhere between $50,000 and $500,000, depending on the stage of the company and the value that we’re bringing to the table. For some companies, we’ll also provide at-cost development, which they can ramp up and down as they need.
How do the ideas for your in-house products come to be?
If someone is playing with an idea or an emerging technology, they will often bring it up to the team. We’ll toss the idea around for a bit and come up with some new angles on it.
Recently, one of our senior engineers brought in a chat bot he had built. It helped you find other members of the team who knew something you needed to learn or if you were stuck on a problem and needed help. You would ask the bot about the best person to ask, and it would come up with a list of team members who had the skills you were seeking to acquire. He just did it for fun, but we showed it to one of our clients and they wanted to buy it as a product.
Other times, we’ll build something for a client based on their needs while retaining the intellectual property rights so we can turn it into a product.
You recently launched in Chicago in full. What has it been like to build a new tech team here?
I’ve started a couple of companies in different places, and Chicago has been the most fertile ground for doing so thus far. There’s a wealth of talent, people have the right mindset and there’s plenty of great clients in the area who are willing to step up and experiment with emerging technology. We’re already a 30-person team, and it just keeps getting bigger and stronger. The only bad thing is that we can’t hire all the great people we meet.
What do you look for in the people you hire?
One of our most important interview questions has always been: “What is the most exciting thing you’ve learned recently?” We’re looking for people who are naturally curious, invested in continuous learning and who are always inventing things. Everyone here is always pushing their expertise forward.
What should we expect to see from you over the next year?
We’ve almost outgrown our office, so we may have to move again. We’re also launching our first big incubated product, Traena, which is a learning and knowledge-sharing platform. We’ve raised almost $1 million for it, and we already have paying pilot customers using it. We’ve also built a really sharp leadership team around the product, so we’re really excited about where that’s going.
Image via Pandera Labs.
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