Entrepreneur Meetup: Jewel Burks Solomon of Partpic Inc.
This December we hosted a Q&A with Jon Birdsong and Jewel Burks Solomon, Founder & CEO of Partpic. Partpic is an Atlanta based computer vision startup that provides a simple way to search for parts by allowing a user to upload a picture of the part he/she is looking to replace. In 2016, the company was acquired by Amazon.
Early morning SaaS folks cozied up in the Community Center of Atlanta Tech Village to hear Jewel’s story, network…and eat donuts!
How She Started
As the daughter of two entrepreneurs, it was in her blood to start something and get people to join the vision. Jewel studied at Howard University in Washington DC and during a campus recruiting event, sold herself on her creativity and landed a Google internship. While there, she was able to hone her sales skills and even went to the President of Howard to get the University to switch over to mainly using Google software.
Lessons from Google
Jewel was mainly doing enterprise sales for Google. She talked about how working at Google really helped her get out of her shell. Growing up she was rather shy, but by pushing herself in this new environment, she was able to break away from the shyness.
“I had not been accustomed to hearing no. Most people were telling me no, so I just had to smile and dial.”
From SF to ATL
She began traveling back and forth a lot from California for family reasons and decided to look for jobs in Atlanta to be closer to home. She connected with McMaster-Carr and landed a role as a Sales Manager, managing the sales call center.
Launching Partpic
“The reason I started Partpic is because I was the person who got a lot of the escalations when we sent the wrong part out.”
Customers had difficulty describing to her team what they wanted to buy. They didn’t know what the part was even called. They would ask if they could just send a picture of what they needed. Customers would fax over pictures but unfortunately, they ended up losing a lot of money and leaving lots of money on the table.
Ideas Take Time
“It wasn’t day one, it was several months of feeling like this is the worst job ever. I was being yelled at by customers all day.”
It took 6 months from the spark idea of Partpic, to creating and fleshing out the idea, to then believing in it. It was 12/12/12 when she had the lightbulb moment. The first person she told was her mom — trying to get her buy-in so that if it failed, she could move back in.
Pricing and Early Customers
The vision was to build a software and sell it to suppliers selling parts, then license that technology for them to embed in their mobile apps and websites. Luckily they did have some guinea pigs willing to test.
“If you can build that, we’ll be your first customer!”
The only thing stopping Jewel was the money to build it. She was saving up and scaling back her lifestyle so she could be her first investor. When things became more expensive than she predicted, she got a loan and in 2013, they had a working MVP.
“We had a very, very, VERY basic MVP.”
Pitching and Raising
In September of 2014, they were really gaining traction. Jewel presented at TechCrunch and kicked off fundraising. All in, she raised $250K from pitch competitions. Midway through her pitching she realized she needed to get a job — she convinced Google to let her come back as an Entrepreneur in Residence which allowed her to pay her own bills and still have time to build Partpic. Then in 2015, she raised a Seed Round, with Joanne Wilson being the first person to write a check.
Next, Enter… Amazon
“We initially asked them to be a customer. This was before we were ready… classic me!”
May 2016 she went back out to raise a Series A, however, they weren’t the terms she wanted to see. Then Amazon came to the table with an offer and she had to make a quick decision. Ultimately, she chose acquisition and now works there along with her Partpic team.
The ultimate vision was to get the technology in the hands of everyone. She’s now focused on helping more entrepreneurs build great products and helping them understand funding opportunities.
Photos by Luke Beard