The team from Tech in Motion: Chicago sat down earlier this year to speak with Rahier Rahman, founder of Pangea Payments. He was gracious enough to sit down prior to one of our events and answer a few of our questions about running a start-up and how he came up with the idea for Pangea. Here's our interview:
T.I.M: What was the inspiration behind your start-up?
RR: The purpose of Pangea is to have societal impact and disrupt the world of money transferring. Basically we want to empower people to be able to send money. The only means that people can transfer money nowadays is if they have credit cards or bank accounts and can use services such as Western Union. But this ignores the "under banked" sector who tends to deal in cash only. There are over 200 million people that deal strictly in cash who send over 500 billion dollars annually. Our aim is to assist this group of people and make money transfers accessible to all people.
After growing up in several developing countries and traveling quite a bit as a child and young adult, I realized there was a piece of the market that was not being fulfilled. So we launched Pangea in September 2012 to make it possible for people everywhere to safely transfer money to friends and family throughout the world for a flat fee with no hidden charges. Eventually this will be able to be done through the web, on mobile devices and at various retail locations.
T.I.M: Do you think Chicago is a place with lots of opportunities for startups to flourish? What do you think of the Chicago tech scene?
RR: Absolutely. There are so many companies headquartered here including giants like McDonald's which draws great tech talent to the area. We've also seen the success of many start-ups that began right here in Chicago such as Braintree, Groupon and 37signals. It's great to see the tech sector booming in Chicago.
T.I.M: Tell me about some of the challenges of being involved in a start-up?
RR: At the beginning you have a vision of what your start-up is going to look like and accomplish. But success isn't determined by the vision - success is determined by the execution of this idea.
Thanks to the team at Pangea for presenting at our event and thanks also to Rahier for taking the time to give us some additional insight into his start-up!