Who is David Lieb?
David Lieb would have been a second year MBA at Booth had he not dropped out to found Bump Technologies—famous for the iPhone app letting people exchange contact information via fist tap.
Below: 35 second video on how Bump works
Released in March 2009, Bump became the billionth iPhone app downloaded from iTunes. It’s become the defacto way to swap contact info among Stanford’s MBA Class of 2011, much to the chagrin of the 10% of our class now desperately trying to hock their BlackBerries to buy an iPhone.
I first met David at JobNob’s Ivy League Happy Hour event a couple weeks ago at Illusions where I made the mistake of asking him for a business card. Duh.
Above: (left) David Lieb at JobKnob’s Ivy League Happy Hour; (middle) David’s contact info via Bump; (right) RockYou engineering manager installing Bump so we could exchange contact info.
Got to do a follow-up with David after the event, here’s how it went down:
What is Bump?
Bump is a technology that lets you identify and connect two mobile devices by simply bumping them together. The first incarnation of that technology is a mobile app that lets users exchange information on iPhone and Android.
Who’s your target audience and what do they like best about Bump?
Well, broadly, our target audience is anyone with a mobile phone, but at the moment we’re only launched on iPhone and Android. I think people like the simplicity and ease of use of Bump the best — it is something that I can explain to my mom, and she can actually figure out how to use it herself.
How did you get started?
It was really a personal frustration. As a first-year MBA student at University of Chicago, I found myself meeting a lot of my new classmates and manually entering their contact information into my phone. Frankly, I just got sick of that. One day during Accounting class, the idea for Bump just hit me, and we got started building it right away.
What was it like to leave Booth to start Bump?
It was certainly not what I’d planned when first starting business school. But as the year went on, I (and another of our cofounders who was my classmate there) found myself spending an increasing amount on time on Bump. The faculty and administration were, and are, extremely supportive, so the decision to go on leave to pursue Bump was actually pretty clear.
What have been your highs and lows at the company?
Entrepreneurs always talk about the roller coaster ride. I never really understood what they meant until I started living it. Some days, when either our usage numbers look good or we have a good meeting with an important partner, you feel unstoppable. But other days, when either the numbers are down, or we feel we are moving too slowly, you feel like everything is going to fall apart any moment. The nice thing is that reality is almost always somewhere in the middle, and it is important not to get too high during the highs or too low during the lows.
What’s the most important thing for you to work on this week?
Hiring. That’s what I call it, but it is really much more than that. With a small team, each incremental person can have a huge influence on the group, so we’ve set an incredible high bar. That said, we have more ideas and opportunities than we can handle right now, so it’s really important that we move quickly. Each day, I try to get closer to finding the right next hire.
What about Bump matters most to you?
From a personal standpoint, I feel a large amount of responsibility, to our investors but more so to our team, to make sure that we do everything we can to make the company both successful in the market and a great place to work.
To learn more about Bump, or to download its iPhone or Android version, check out the company website. Check out job postings here.
