Today we’d like to introduce you to TJ Muehleman.
TJ, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I come from a big family; two brothers, one (awesome) sister, and three step brothers. We’re like the Brady Bunch of dysfunctional families. My mom is a loud and crazy and awesome Yankee and my step dad is a sweet gentile Virginian. The mashup of those families when I was 13 gave me a lot of perspectives. Growing up, we kind of bounced between not having any money (my mom is a talented seamstress and would make clothes for us a bunch) and middle class. So I feel like I had a pretty good point of view of life.
We moved from Texas (where I’m originally from) to ATL right after my mom and step dad got married in 1991. While I’m a native Texan, my heart will always be an Atlantan. I went to HS out in Gwinnett and somehow got into Georgia Tech and even more amazingly, I somehow got out in 2000. I lost my Hope Scholarship about 45 minutes after starting there so I ended up bartending my way through college. I’m still the only one in my immediate family to graduate from college so I take a lot of pride in working my way through the hellscape that is Tech. 🙂
When I got out, I had this vision of working at a big consulting firm, making sweet bank, traveling, all that jive. But with a crappy GPA, the only people who would hire me were startups. I ended up taking a job at a small startup company about three months before I graduated from college. I kind of bullshitted my way into the job as a programmer (read: I did not know how to code). I learned on the fly and loved the wild ups and downs of startup life. One day I might be building some cool new component, the next day I might be writing a blog about some completely random subject, and by the end of the week, I might be fixing a broken toilet.
I did this job until the bottom fell out of the economy (anyone remember the dot com bubble??). Even though I only had a few months of real world experience under my belt, I was able to parlay that into another startup gig, which leads to another startup gig, which leads to yet another startup gig. After about 10 years of working for other people’s startups, I got the itch to finally branch out and start my own company. I had always wanted to start my own company but I was too afraid to. I craved the shelter of someone else being in charge of my paycheck and insurance and 401(k). I was finally motivated to start my gig, not by some grand idea or the desire to be a founder. No, I was motivated by my youngest brother’s sudden death. At the time I was in my early 30s and I was like “what am I waiting around for? Just do this thing already”. Within 6 months I had quit my job, the steady paycheck, the healthcare, and the 401k for the opportunity to help start my own company. Not a day goes by where I don’t curse my brother Andy’s name for helping me make one of the dumbest, best decisions of my life. 😊
Has it been a smooth road?
Hell, no it hasn’t been smooth. Anyone who tells you it is is either lying or oblivious to what’s going on around them. The biggest challenge is staying consistent and staying focused. Years ago, a well established ATL entrepreneur told me it would take seven years to see *real* success. I scoffed at this. SEVEN Years? As if. This was shortly after Instagram sold to Facebook for almost $1B and had been at it for less than 2 years (which is not exactly true but whatever). I think we’re conditioned to expect immediate success. Maybe it’s social media. Maybe we can access any information we want from anywhere in the world at any time. I dunno. But the reality is good things need time to grow.
I think our biggest struggle is balancing our interest in building a meaningful, impactful company without raising money. This means we had to be damn near surgical with the decisions we made and when we made them because we didn’t have a war chest sitting in our bank account that could absorb stupid mistakes. I do think this has forced us to be more thoughtful about how and where we grow. So while it’s been hard and bumpy, I wouldn’t trade it for the alternative.
Please tell us about your organization.
I’m proud of the weird little company we’ve created. In short, we’re a data platform for global public health organizations. What this means is we work with large global health orgs like the CDC, WHO, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Ministries of Health mostly in Africa and South Asia to help them use data to tell the story of their progress. Practically speaking, that means our platform is used to tell where the disease is happening, to whom, and how best to make sure those folks are getting treated for those diseases. Our platform is used mostly like a survey and analysis tool to help track where the disease is happening and how effective treatment therapies are. We process around 100k surveys each week from over 60 countries.
Through this work, we’ve had an opportunity to travel all over the world. I’ve now been to over 30 countries including six in Africa. I’ve visited schools in the remotest parts of the world to see how our platform is making sure that children at those schools are being treated for diseases that most people in the Global North have never heard of (I certainly hadn’t until six years ago).
Our unique spin is that technology can be a force for good. But technology is pretty useless without the people behind it to help make sense of it. The Standard Co team is full of really bright, empathetic, curious, problem solvers who are fascinated by the problems we’re helping solve. We’re also a bunch of oddballs who have enjoyed holding company wide Plant Growing competitions, margarita making parties, and the occasional game of ping pong (instagram.com/switchyardspingpongclub for examples).
What role has luck (good luck or bad luck) played in your life and business?
I’m of the mind that you find good luck at the intersection of persistence and hard work. Persistence in the sense that you keep taking swings at things. I look at how we got into this industry in the first place. It was when our company was young and we were still a development agency. A friend approached us about taking on a very small client doing seemingly boring things.
Logically we should have said no; it would be a distraction. But we said yes b/c at the time we were gobbling up everything we could see to see where a problem might exist that we could solve. And when we took that client on, we realized a unique opportunity. There was a problem (no real digital tools in global public health), we met in our client someone who could help open a lot of doors for us, and we realized we could apply our unique talents (in tech) to have a meaningful impact in the world. Using data to transform lives. I think bad luck happens to all of us. The big question is what do you do with that bad luck.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.standardco.de
- Email: tj@standardco.de
- Twitter: twitter.com/tjmule
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