Sesie K. Bonsi is the Founder and CEO of Bleu. Bleu facilitates mobile transactions utilizing Bluetooth, low energy beacons. Follow them at @bleucoent.
What is the first thing you did to turn your current business from an idea into a reality?
I knew the merchant services industry — and more specifically the point-of-sale terminal — were major pain points for merchants. With the introduction of tablet-based POS, I knew the market was ripe for disruption, but I didn’t know the first thing about it. While working as an attorney, I took up a bartending job at a wine bar at night in order to gain a deeper understanding of the card payments infrastructure. I studied the point-of-sale system and peppered the manager with questions. In what little spare time I had left, I also consulted for a mobile payments startup to learn how the mobile payments infrastructure worked. After two years, I had absorbed enough to build what is now the Bleu Network.
What is the scariest part of being a young entrepreneur and how can others overcome this fear?
The scariest part of being a young entrepreneur is always questioning whether or not you made the right decision. Should I have just kept working at the law firm? If I fail, what am I going to do? No one will hire me back. But then you realize that you didn’t choose to be an entrepreneur. It makes you who you are. Rather than fear the unknown, you have to embrace it and give gratitude that you were given the opportunity to forge your own path and build something that can help someone else.
Were you ever told not to pursue your entrepreneurial dreams? Who told you that, what did they say and why did you ignore them?
My mother still sends me job openings for attorney positions! My parents are traditional African immigrant parents. Your career options are doctor, lawyer, engineer, or failure when you are young. When I told them my ambitions, at first they didn’t even understand why I would throw away a perfectly good law degree. I had to explain to them that I wasn’t throwing anything away. I was using what I had learned and what I know to build a company and that I wasn’t happy doing anything else. All any parent wants to do is see their child be happy. Once they realized that they fully supported me in my endeavors.
What is the No. 1 thing you wish you’d known starting out and how did you learn it?
The first thing about being an entrepreneur, especially in technology, is that you need to build something that works and get someone else to use it. It doesn’t matter if you are making money or not. You need to focus on creating a product that, at its most fundamental core, solves a problem for another person. Once you do, that the rest will fall into place.
With all of the available capital being thrown around, there is a terrible rubric being adopted in the tech community that if you have an idea and a great pitch, you can get funded. You can’t wait until you get funded to build the product everyone will want to use. I learned that the hard way. In my first startup, we built something to show a VC so we could get the investment, not a product that a merchant or user would want to use.
What do you recommend all new founders do for their business — or their personal lives — that will help them the most?
Meditate or find some type of positive escape. Not only from the myriad of things regarding the business, but from all stressors. Exercise, play music, fish, do anything to help you find inner peace every single day. The business lives or dies with you. You are the lifeblood that runs through it. If you’re not taking care of yourself, then you’re not taking care of the business. I thought that I had to sacrifice everything in order for the business to succeed, but it took someone very special to show me that no matter what, you always have time to take care of yourself. And when you do, it has an equal effect on the quality of work you put back into the business.
How do you end each day and why?
I try to spend each day in the company of people I care about. It reminds me why I do what I do. I also try to learn something new every night — something completely different than what I’m currently working on. Our minds are so powerful that it’s important to keep them active and challenge yourself. Plus, you never know what synchronizations could manifest themselves in places or things you have never thought about.
What is your best PR/marketing tip for business just starting up?
Let the product speak for itself. A very wise advisor told us to always remember, “The product is the belle of the ball.” Never get caught up in yourself. Your personal accomplishments and achievements are always secondary to what you’re building. That is your legacy or lasting impression. Founders and startups often lose sight of this, especially when the revenue starts to roll in. Let your personality and your goals speak through the products, merchants and users. This is the best PR or marketing you can ever have.
What is your ultimate goal? What will you do if/when you get there?
Wireless communication and what is dubbed “The Internet of Things” will have the single greatest collective effect on human society ever. For the first time in human history, the Internet will be in everything, everywhere, all the time. We will have a wirelessly connected network of our body, home, city, business and industry, and the ability to interpret all of this data to deliver insights on how to improve ourselves across the grid. And through groundbreaking innovation in wireless technologies and mobile technology, access to the grid will not be limited to just those in developed countries.
Imagine two scenarios. In Scenario A, Jane Doe wakes up in Los Angeles to an alarm clock that has been wirelessly studying her sleep patterns and knows exactly what time to wake her up based on what day of the week it is. As Jane gets dressed and walks out the door, she pre-orders her daily coffee and bagel from the same place she always does from her phone. Based on the wireless broadcast of her location, the coffee shop point-of-sale system knows exactly when she will arrive and indicates what store she will come to so she can grab it and go. At work, Jane is constantly updated and informed of her tasks to complete, and based on her co-workers’ real-time input, able to use her time efficiently. When Jane leaves work and stops by the grocery store on the way home, her fridge notifies her of items she is running low on and what items to pick up, based on the suggestions from the wireless signals her body is sending the app monitoring her health. Finally, as Jane decides where to go for the evening with her girlfriend, her social app sends her suggestions and a car to pick her up, based on her preferences, interests and previous places she has been.
In Scenario B, John Doe wakes up in a small village in Africa to the alarm on his phone that has been wirelessly studying his sleep patterns. His phone is being charged by solar energy and the kinetic energy of his body, and throughout the day, whenever his device comes close to another wireless device, it receives or transmits a charge to that device. As John gets dressed and ready to bike down to the city center, he is notified of the location of the truck that’s delivering the items he is picking up to take to his family’s small restaurant. The truck’s location and the items on the palette are constantly updated in real time at wireless checkpoints along the road. After John picks up the items and takes them to his family’s restaurant, he confirms receipt and transmits payment through his mobile phone. At his family’s restaurant, Johns mobile point-of-sale system allows patrons to pay for food items with their mobile devices, top off their device cellular and data plan, and withdraw funds from their mobile-stored value accounts for hard currency. Finally, after John closes the restaurant for the day, his mother is able to make sure he gets home safely from the wireless signal that is broadcasting from his bike.
Both scenarios represent very different people, living extremely different lives. However, the technology and solutions that interpret the data to improve their day-to-day tasks is the same. I am extremely passionate about being at the forefront of analyzing and providing these technologies that will become the core fabric of the “Internet of Things.”
