Interviewing Cameron Mulvey | Co-Founder of Sute

Welcome back to Welty’s Words’ Interview Series!

It’s been awhile, but I’m excited to share with you all a conversation I had with a former classmate of mine, Cameron Mulvey. If you are interested in what it’s like to pivot into building a startup, you’ll love this piece!

Enjoy!
- Welty

Today’s Guest

Cameron Mulvey is a friend and fellow Wake Forest grad who, early in his career, decided to leave a traditional job and build a new platform for the creator economy. After a year in private banking at JP Morgan in New York City, Cam decided to move back to Boston, reconnect with a friend from school, and start their company Sute.

The below responses have been paraphrased for clarity and ease of reading.

How did you know you wanted to be a Founder?

During my time at Wake, I met my friend and Co-Founder Saahith Gondi. We connected over our shared love of investing as retail investors and joined a club focused on investing. The whole Gamestop saga really catalyzed us into seeing an opportunity to build a reliable community for retail investors, which is where our idea for Sute and desire to be founders initially took hold.

What was it like leaving JP Morgan to begin building?

Honestly, it wasn’t that hard for me. Sai and I knew we wanted to start Sute sometime in 2023, and that I wanted to move back to Boston when my lease ended. I spent my time at JP building out a skillset, and gathering feedback on our initial Sute idea. This led to the idea of creating a community offering JP Morgan-quality resources and access to experts for the retail investing community. At the time, most investors in this category used Discord servers and many felt a lack of sophistication in these communities. The more I talked with people about my idea, the stronger conviction I developed, which made it much easier to take the plunge.

What’s been the most difficult part in transitioning from employee to founder?

While it may seem obvious, truly having to make every single decision is a massive change. As a junior employee at a large bank, not that many decisions fell onto my plate previously. The complete 180 into making decisions from product, to marketing, to finance and more is a big jump. It’s one thing to have the idea and conviction behind your initial idea, and then applying that same confidence to every minor decision is difficult but super enjoyable. It’s one of those things that is never comfortable at first, but a crucial part of the journey.

Can you tell me a little more about the development of Sute? How has the core idea evolved?

While we’re still holding true to our initial idea around building a more professionalized community for investors, we’ve expanded the scope into what we call “personal growth”. Career development and entrepreneurship content are now additional categories that Sute supports, enabling educational creators to thrive and build their high-quality communities. Additionally, Sute is no longer just a messenger, but a feed-based platform that supports announcements and evergreen content posting through creator’s own libraries.

The expansion of the Sute platform highlights how important the iterative mindset is when building something new. Like I did while at JP Morgan, I continued refining the problem we aim to solve by talking to more content creators and consumers. Recently, the problem of low-quality content in other community providers like Discord and Twitter are more apparent than ever. Doubling down on high-quality, invite-only communities for more creators made sense given this pervasive issue.

What’s next for Sute?

We’re excited to launch our beta soon for our first batch of “edu-creators”. If you’re interested in joining the beta, reach out to me here! A fundraising round is also on the horizon, as we’re looking to expand our staff and ramp up our marketing efforts.

Want to connect with Cam? Reach out to him on LinkedIn and check out Sute!

Interested in sitting down for a chat with me? Follow me on Twitter, or send me a DM on LinkedIn, and subscribe to the newsletter! Make sure to share with your friends too if you enjoyed!