David Gonazelez’s grandfather moved from Puerto Rico to Buffalo, operating a bodega and working at Bethlehem Steel while starting a family.
His father spent a career at the General Motors factories in Tonawanda and Lockport.
These generational building blocks helped David grow up in a middle class North Buffalo environment, going from Performing Arts High School to SUNY Buffalo State, where he played varsity football and earned a degree in business.
Gonzalez is keenly aware of his family history. He wants to use it to build something special.
“My grandfather and father allowed me to take some chances and some risks,” he said. “It’s an opportunity for me to try and create generational wealth for my family.”
After earning an MBA from Canisius College, Gonzalez spent time at a list of high-pedigree employers in Buffalo, including Delaware North, HSBC and M&T Bank.
Those places have been pathways to plenty of robust careers in Buffalo, but somewhere along the line, Gonzalez caught the startup bug. He decided in 2019 to trade the security of a corporate career for the simultaneous risk and promise of a tech startup.
Gonzalez sent a LinkedIn message to Scott Wayman, the founder and CEO of Kangarootime, a management platform for daycares and preschools. They offered him a position as a product manager.
“All of a sudden I had a choice – it was like, are you willing to take a $30,000 pay cut?” he said. “I said, ‘You know what? Yes.’ And honestly it’s been worth it.”
Wayman moved his business from California to Buffalo in 2017 after winning an award in the 43North competition. The company closed on $3.4 million in Series A funding around the time Gonzalez was hiring.
Since that time the team has grown from about 12 to about 40 employees. Gonzalez was recently promoted to vice president of operations and finance, with a specific focus on scaling up the team and managing the budget as Kangarootime’s business expands.
It’s a big difference from the specialized job descriptions of big businesses to startup land, where the lines between positions are blurred and employees need to be enthusiastic and adaptable, Gonzalez said.
“It has accelerated my learning across various functions of the business,” Gonzalez said. “It has given me access to things I probably wouldn't have been able to do in a corporate setting in 20 years.”
Gonzalez said that besides the details of different business segments, he has also learned of the importance of culture at a young company.
“The implications of your actions are so noisy at a startup,” he said. “People are paying attention to company leaders and picking up their good and bad habits.”
Like many startup employees, Gonzalez now has compensation that includes equity in Kangarootime, and as the company continues to grow and hit milestones, the value of his shares is set to grow. Kangarootime expects to raise a round of Series B funding this year or next, which will be a real time seminar in the wealth startup founders and early employees can generate when they’re on the ground floor of something big.
That's playing itself out now in Buffalo in the form of ACV Auctions, a former 43North winner that went public recently, with filings that showed its founders and executives now own tens of millions of dollars in ACV stock. Many of ACV's early employees in Buffalo also have a lucrative equity stake in the firm.
Kangarootime isn't there just yet, but Gonzalez says it is putting the building blocks in place to become a market leader that uses data to help its customers improve their businesses. The firm is expanding into enterprise software and overseas markets and beginning to invest in the process of using business data to help childcare centers be more efficient and serve more families.
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In a market with a low supply and high prices, there is a huge opportunity for new products that serve customers, Gonzalez said.
“Scott has a vision of the future that differentiates us from our competitors and will allow Kangarootime to be a market leader in childcare software, and to allow us to get into sister verticals over time,” he said. “You are seeing a company that is going to inflect soon.”
Gonzalez has successfully navigated the transition from the corporate world to a surging startup company, but his career is still in its early acts. Going back to his initial interview at the company, the experience at Kangrootime has been about preparing Gonzalez to start his own business someday.
“Scott has been gracious enough to mentor me and put me in positions to learn and continue to build a skillset that will allow me to do this on my own,” he said. “When the time is right, I’m going to go ahead and try to do this with my own vision.”
Startup scenes from Buffalo to the Bay Area have long been plagued by a lack of diversity, and Gonzalez is aware of the significance of his story as a Puerto Rican kid from Buffalo. He said minority communities lack access or visibility into this world, where opportunities at tech startups feel like they're made for someone else. He and his family often talk about what little representation their community has in the tech world.
“If you think about someone like me, I would have loved to have someone like me to talk to in college or when I was starting my career,” he said. “It’s important to be able to identify with people who are working in these spaces. It starts with being able to see there are people like you who are doing it.”
