Summary:
In this episode of Startup Junkies, hosts Caleb Talley, Davis McEntire, and Grace Gill were joined by Joe Garafalo, the COO and co-founder of Mosaic, a technology company building its first strategic finance platform. Joe has a background in finance with a varied career history, but he has found his true passion in developing Mosaic in order to help companies do their jobs more efficiently. Though Mosaic is just getting started, they have a future of success and growth ahead of them. Throughout the episode, they discussed how Mosaic got started, what it looks like now, and what’s on the horizon.
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Show Notes:
(1:15) Origin Story
(6:58) What Mosaic Looks Like Now
(7:40) Ease of Implementation
(8:48) Target Company Size
(9:45) Building Mosaic’s Teams
(13:11) Co-founder’s Journey
(14:32) What’s Next for Mosaic
(15:40) Weathering the Current Economic Storm
(22:31) Advice to Younger Self
Links:
Quotes:
“Once [the first version of Mosaic] was built, people would ask us questions and we would get back to them with an answer in a couple minutes. And they were like, ‘Hey, it used to take you guys like three or four weeks to respond to us’…so we showed them what we had built and they were like, ‘Hey, put a front end on top of this tool so that we can interact with it.’” Joe Garafalo, (4:32)
“What we’re building at Mosaic is much more generalized so that any company can plug in, regardless of the nuances of their individual businesses.” Joe Garafalo, (6:00)
“As a founder, you should do all of the jobs across the company. So for us, we were three finance guys. We had never sold, we never did marketing, we never did product design. But the cool part about it was as you embark on the journey and you do all of those individual jobs, you learn what the qualities and the traits are, the skill sets that you need to then go out hire for.” Joe Garafalo, (11:03)
“The most important thing is we want to build an important company that helps people do their jobs more efficiently.” Joe Garafalo, (14:43)
Refreshing the Role of Finance with Mosaic
In this episode of the Startup Junkies podcast, hosts Caleb Talley, Davis McEntire, and Grace Gill were joined by Joe Garafalo, the COO and co-founder of Mosaic, a technology company building its first strategic finance platform. Joe has a background in finance with a varied career history, but he has found his true passion in developing Mosaic in order to help companies do their jobs more efficiently. Though Mosaic is just getting started, they have a future of success and growth ahead of them. Throughout the episode, they discussed how Mosaic got started, what it looks like now, and what’s on the horizon.
Getting to Know Joe
Like many others, Joe Garafalo started his career out of school in the Big Four as a public accountant with KPMG. While he was working, Joe got a message from Palantir. After researching the company more, Joe realized he had to be part of the team, and he eventually got hired and was part of the rapid growth from 200 employees to 2,000.
At Palantir, they used many systems, which meant that data was scattered. The only way to get data together was to spend a lot of time gathering and organizing. This led Joe to invent essentially the first version of Mosaic, which connected all the different cloud-based tools into a central database.
After Palantir, Joe went on to lead finance and accounting teams of other high-growth venture back companies. Most recently, Joe and his team have been working on Mosaic for the past two years so that other companies can simplify and expedite their processes as well.
All about Mosaic
“What we’re building at Mosaic is much more generalized so that any company can plug in, regardless of the nuances of their individual businesses.” Joe Garafalo, (6:00)
Though the first version of Mosiac was born while Joe was with Palantir, the current version is much more generalized. This allows Mosaic to reach a wide variety of clients, and already, some of the fastest-growing tech companies in Silicon Valley are using Mosaic to get clear, real-time data and analytics around their finances.
Mosaic works with companies as soon as they’ve closed their first round of venture financing because that’s when finance really starts to become important and complex enough for the platform. Mosaic works with companies that have anywhere from 25-750 employees.
“The most important thing is we want to build an important company that helps people do their jobs more efficiently.” Joe Garafalo, (14:43)
Mosaic is just getting started, but Joe and the team hope to eventually have thousands of customers, including companies with more than 750 employees. Normally, finance and accounting have a stigma around them of being backward-looking, but the ultimate goal of Mosaic is to refresh the role of finance and help others make more profitable business decisions by being more forward-looking.
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