On this week’s show, we spoke with Jafar Owainati, co-founder & COO @ Loopio.
In his role, he focuses on operations, finance, and marketing. Before venturing into entrepreneurship, Jafar started his career as a mechanical engineer working on a range of projects, from a multi-billion dollar nickel mine in Madagascar to advising the government of Dubai on how to build green buildings on palm-shaped islands.
Jafar’s passion for business eventually led him to the Kellogg School of Management to pursue his MBA with a concentration in entrepreneurship, marketing, and business strategy. After Kellogg, he joined Monitor Deloitte in Chicago as a Senior Consultant with a focus on marketing and channel sales strategy. While building the Digital Strategy practice within the company’s Innovation Center, Jafar caught the tech bug and, in early 2014, he and his two Co-Founders (Zak and Matt) started Loopio, a SaaS platform that helps enterprises supercharge their response process for RFPs, RFIs, and Security Questionnaires.
On the show, we spoke about:
- How he jumped from the world of consulting to tech entrepreneurship and founding Loopio
- The importance of the team over the idea
- How focusing on the customer helped Loopio scale to 50 employees
- Loopio’s strategic planning process and how they conduct monthly offsites
Jafar is a natural entrepreneur and has built a very impressive technology startup, all without funding. He was very generous in sharing his insights. I hope that you enjoy the show.
Let us know what you think. What types of guests would like to see on the show? What topics interest you the most? Send me your thoughts at nectar@thepnr.com
