He Took A $1 Billion-Company Public, Merged A $800 Million-Company, And Is Now Deploying and Managing Custom AI Workforces For Businesses

In the world of entrepreneurship, few stories embody resilience, vision, and adaptation like that of Colin Wiel. A four-time founder, Colin has built and scaled multiple companies, navigated financial crises, pioneered tech-driven real estate ventures, and is now at the forefront of AI innovation.

From his early days as an engineer at Boeing to co-founding Waypoint Homes, Mynd, and his latest venture, Qurrent, Colin’s journey is a testament to grit, strategic foresight, and the ability to harness emerging technologies.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

From Reno to Boeing: The Formative Years

Born in Los Angeles and raised in multiple cities, including Washington, D.C., and Reno, Nevada, Colin’s early years shaped his resilience. After going through tough periods, he was determined to work hard and be successful.

Moving at 11 from a cosmopolitan environment to what Colin describes as a “redneck culture” in Reno was a challenging transition, but it instilled in him a drive to succeed. Watching his father navigate the ups and downs of entrepreneurship also left a lasting impression.

After studying mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley, Colin joined Boeing, where he was introduced to AI long before it became a mainstream topic. He was keenly interested in robotics and automatic control systems.

Tasked with optimizing airplane anti-lock braking systems, Colin developed an AI-based solution that increased braking efficiency from 92% to 97%, significantly improving stopping distances.

This solution made the airplane stop at a 5% shorter stopping distance and also helped gain a theoretical additional 5% efficiency.

Colin recalls how the algorithm was highly challenging since the system was highly nonlinear. The traditional approach for developing automatic control system algorithms broke down because it was based on linear differential equations.

As Colin explains, when you have a nonlinear model, the methodology doesn’t work very well. Although he was just six months out of college, he developed the idea of applying AI to the problem to get a highly nonlinear algorithm.

This early success gave Colin the confidence to venture into entrepreneurship.

The Leap into Entrepreneurship: Java, Real Estate, and Scaling to 17,000 Homes

Colin’s first foray into startups was in 1998, when he capitalized on the growing demand for Java programmers. By then, Java had emerged as the de facto programming language for e-commerce.

Colin’s consulting firm provided e-commerce infrastructure during the dot-com boom, leading to a successful exit in 2000. While it wasn’t a massive financial win, the experience laid the foundation for his future ventures.

In 2008, Colin met Doug Brien through an investment club amid the full-blown financial crisis. The duo identified a contrarian opportunity—investing in single-family rental homes at a time when banks were practically giving them away.

Colin and Doug co-founded Waypoint Homes, pioneering large-scale single-family rentals. At that time, most of the for-sale inventory was owned by banks and had been foreclosed or in bad condition. The duo built a portfolio of 17,000 homes over six years with a tech-driven approach.

Their goal was to buy inexpensive homes, renovate them, and hold the assets until the market recovered, though it was unclear when that would happen. Meanwhile, they could earn a good rental income. However, the journey was far from smooth.

Colin and Doug had lined up the first large loan on a portfolio of single-family rental homes where the pool of homes was the collateral. A nerve-wracking moment came when Wells Fargo backed out of a $200M deal at the last minute, nearly crippling the company.

Colin and Doug needed to continue buying, renovating, and leasing homes to keep their people employed. Scrambling to secure funds with a runway of just six to eight weeks left, they brought in Citibank and individual investors to stay afloat, raising a small $30M fund and $200M in debt financing.

Their persistence paid off when Waypoint went public, reaching a $1B valuation. Looking back, Colin remarks how those times were especially stressful since they had a lot of people banking on them.

Mynd: Lessons in Scaling Too Fast

Following the success of Waypoint, Colin and Doug launched Mynd. With strong investor confidence, the duo secured $5.3M in funding pre-product and pre-revenue, but they made one crucial mistake—scaling too fast before nailing the product-market fit and building the technology.

Growing to 70 employees in year one and 150 by year two, they soon realized that rapid headcount growth hindered agility. The company eventually found its footing, pivoting to focus solely on single-family rentals.

Mynd raised funds at a $800M valuation and later merged with Roofstock, which had also raised funding at a $1.9B valuation. Colin believes the company could have been even more successful had they taken a more measured approach to scaling.

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Comparing their experiences with Waypoint and Mynd, Colin points out that they had bought and owned single-family rental properties with Waypoint. But, with Mynd, they wanted to be a third-party service provider and not own any real estate.

Essentially, Mynd was a property management company that managed both small multifamily buildings, like a 20-unit apartment complex. and single-family rentals as a service for others. Colin and Doug had significant knowledge of the sector.

However, they quickly realized that managing a 20-unit apartment building complex is quite different from managing 20 single-family homes. Colin and Doug devised multiple solutions, including thousands of micro pivots.

They build their own technology and an internal platform for managing all the property. As they continued to evolve their technology, they also had to retrain their team, which was challenging to iterate quickly.

A Two-Year Reset and the Birth of Qurrent

Burnt out from years in the startup grind, Colin took a two-year hiatus after the merger with Roofstock. He spent this time reflecting, hiking in nature, and resisting the urge to jump into another venture prematurely.

When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, it reignited Colin’s passion for AI. Recognizing the tech paradigm shift AI was ushering in, he immersed himself in understanding generative AI and large language models.

As Colin saw it, all the knowledge of humanity was compressed into a large language model that could be used for reasoning and natural language processing. He could foresee how AI would change the playing field.

Colin decided to go all in on it. For the next few months, he studied extensively, reading papers to understand Gen AI. He understood traditional AI very deeply, and now his focus was on the large language model, how it worked, the transformer architecture, and embeddings.

Colin met August Rosedale, an exceptionally talented AI engineer, during this period. Together, they started building autonomous AI agents for coding—well ahead of the broader AI agent movement.

This project evolved into Qurrent, an AI company focused on developing and managing custom-built AI agent workforces for businesses. Qurrent manages and hosts them on its tech platform and takes care of the ongoing performance management for companies.

As Colin explains, the platform has deep technology that sits on top of the large language model. It uses large language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, etc.

Qurrent orchestrates teams of AI agents, their functions, and how they run in a mission-critical enterprise fashion. It also ensures that they continuously evolve and improve.

The Future of AI-Powered Workforces

Colin underscores the emerging model where the engineers at AI agent companies are custom-building solutions for their customers. He cites the Palantir example, where every customer gets a customized application built by forward-deployed engineers.

Qurrent builds AI agents that autonomously handle complex business functions, co-working alongside human employees. These agents are integrated into companies’ ERP and SaaS platforms, making critical decisions and executing repetitive workflows without human intervention.

Unlike traditional SaaS software, which requires user inputs, AI agents autonomously take actions, negotiate transactions, and optimize business processes. Since every company is unique in the way its decisions are made, the actions taken by AI agents are also unique to the company.

One of the most fascinating use cases Colin shared was AI agents negotiating large financial transactions—such as securing the best price for a vehicle—entirely autonomously.

These agents engage with multiple dealerships simultaneously, negotiating pricing and terms to finalize binding agreements.

At Qurrent, engineers work closely with their customer-partners to identify their workflows and develop AI agents to automate them.

These AI agents are undergoing a continuous improvement process where they exhibit behavior different from software in the past, which was very deterministic and limited in scope. Present-day AI agents are much broader in scope and not probabilistic or deterministic.

Their behavior is more like humans who also go through a continuous improvement process. Qurrent rapidly and continuously iterates and improves the performance of AI agents.

Looking ahead, Colin envisions a world where AI agents predominantly run companies, handling everything from planning and inventory management to customer interactions. Humans, freed from repetitive tasks, will focus on innovation, strategy, and relationship-building.

A New Approach to Startup Financing

Having learned from his experiences with Mynd, Colin has taken a more strategic approach to funding Qurrent. Rather than prematurely raising large venture capital rounds, he has relied on friends and angel investors who provide capital and bring strategic value.

With $4M raised and meaningful revenue already flowing in, Qurrent is growing steadily while maintaining financial discipline. Unlike his previous ventures, Colin sees Qurrent requiring no more than $20M in total funding to achieve massive scale—highlighting the efficiency AI enables.

He also has individuals contributing more than just capital, like introductions to potential customers and advice, which is very valuable. Qurrent now has 20 people on its team, and Colin is keen on growing slowly.

Qurrent is also using AI agents as part of its workforce–essentially, agents they have built for themselves to get much more work done with fewer people.

Parting Advice: Focus on Fun and Impact

Reflecting on his journey, Colin shares two key pieces of advice for aspiring entrepreneurs:

• Stay True to Your Passion – Colin would have remained deeply immersed in AI from the start if he could do it over again.
• Prioritize Enjoyment Over Financial Gain – Doing what excites you with people you enjoy working with will naturally lead to success.

With Qurrent at the forefront of the AI revolution, Colin is once again demonstrating his ability to identify and execute on transformative opportunities.

As AI reshapes industries, his latest venture is set to redefine how businesses operate, paving the way for a future where AI agents seamlessly collaborate with humans to drive unprecedented efficiency and innovation.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Colin Wiel’s challenging childhood experiences instilled grit and a drive to succeed.
• His work at Boeing in AI-driven braking systems foreshadowed his future ventures in automation.
• Investing in single-family rentals during the 2008 financial crisis led to the billion-dollar success of Waypoint Homes.
• Mynd’s rapid hiring before achieving product-market fit hindered agility and long-term growth.
• Qurrent is pioneering AI agent-driven workforces that autonomously execute complex tasks.
• Learning from past experiences, Colin is building Qurrent with lean funding and strong revenue focus.
  Prioritizing enjoyable work with the right people drives long-term fulfillment and business success.

 

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