Why This Coder Quit His $300,000 Job At Fintech Stripe

• Sumit Kumar, a 34-year-old coder from Hamburg, Germany, quit his $300,000-a-year job at Stripe.
• He left in May 2022 to build the startup Parqet, a financial platform he started as a side project.
• He told Insider why leaving his job to run his own business was the right choice.

This is an edited, translated version of an article which originally appeared on August 29, 2022.

Sumit Kumar, 34, quit his €300,000, which is around $300,000, job as a solutions architect at fintech Stripe to build his own financial platform.

In January 2020, Kumar invested several thousand euros from his salary in the stock market every month with assets spread across 31 stocks, 15 mutual funds and three bank deposits, he said.

“It became a problem,” Kumar told Insider, as he had to constantly log into different accounts to keep track of his portfolios.

“I wanted something digital, highly automated, and that I could access online and on my mobile,” Kumar said.

That’s when he decided to build a platform himself.

Kumar began building his asset management platform, which he called Parqet, as an aftermarket project. Parqet offers stock market investors an “all-in-one” tool to manage their asset portfolio.

According to Kumar, the platform allows users to merge their portfolios and compare them with benchmarks, which helps users identify cluster risks or see when the next dividend payout will land in their account.

He said the program also provides information about market movements, such as which stocks are currently in demand among other users.

Parqet users upload order receipts from the bank’s mailbox to have their securities account analyzed by the platform’s algorithm, which then reads the documents and creates a portfolio overview with various charts and tables that provide clear visualizations.

Kumar quit his job as a solutions architect at billion-dollar fintech Stripe in May 2022 to devote himself entirely to his startup, giving up an annual salary of €300,000 and stock options.

“In the beginning, I worked on the tool alone every night until about 1 a.m., but now I have ten people working on it full-time or part-time,” he said.

He said giving up salary and stock options was a big thing to lose when you have a family. “We’re putting vacations on hold for now, cooking at home more often, and generally paying better attention to our costs,” he added.

He said he has also cut back significantly on his stock investments.

Still, he is convinced that his resignation was the right thing to do. He has big plans for the startup: “In five years, Parqet will be an internationally active asset management software provider,” Kumar said.

Kumar said Parqet now receives 3.5 million page views per month, has 145,000 users, and the monthly recurring revenue is around 38,000 euros.

He also pointed to the high level of competition between new brokers such as Trade Republic or Scalable Capital, which he said had led many investors to open portfolios with multiple providers.

He added that the conversion rate for users who take out a paid subscription after using the free version is 15%, which is considered high for this business model.

However, the platform has tough competition.

Getquin is a “social network for investors” that allows users to track their assets in one place.

The company has already received $16.2 million in funding, including investment from N26 founder Maximilian Tayenthal and financial services provider Sino, which was instrumental in helping grow Trade Republic.

Parqet, for its part, finances itself exclusively from its own funds. “We are cash flow positive and up to now,” Kumar said.

He said that he has repeatedly turned down investors, but he does not see this as a disadvantage.

“The company grows more slowly this way, as we can’t run big marketing campaigns, for example. But it also makes it easier for us to survive times of economic crisis,” Kumar said.

He added that while heavily funded fintechs such as Trade Republic have laid off staff as pressure from investors to cut costs increased, Parqet could continue to grow.

“We don’t have to worry about running out of money,” Kumar said.

Social media and word of mouth have been crucial to Parqet’s growth so far, Kumar said, but he added that he now plans to invest some of the company’s profits in a marketing campaign.

Kumar said he plans to focus on Google Ads, which he hopes will spark renewed investor interest as he no longer completely rules out funding rounds.

“I am constantly in talks; there would be enough options,” Kumar said.