Tulips To Table? These MBAs Try To Disrupt FTD

John Tabis. Courtesy photo

Meanwhile, Tabis majored in finance at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. And the competing forces of his upbringing made their presence known. “When I began my career, I had this weird push and pull where part of me wanted to try the crazy thing and the other part wanted to stay on the straight and narrow and ride the corporate ladder,” reasons Tabis.

Indeed. Tabis began at Bain & Company where he spent two years. Then he dabbled in advertising, independent filmmaking and even started another band that he managed. Eventually the straight and narrow pulled him back to a Chicago-based advertising firm where he worked primarily on the Gerber Baby Products account.

B-SCHOOL: A ‘TWO YEAR HIATUS FROM LIFE’

And then Tabis tapped into a little bit of the dreaming and realistic genes. He applied and was accepted into UCLA Anderson School of Management’s full-time MBA program in 2004. “I looked at B-school as this opportunity to try something with very little risk,” remembers Tabis.

“You get this two-year hiatus from life where it’s funded by loans, and gives you this huge option where you can go and start something if that’s what you want,” continues Tabis. “What an amazing deal. Wouldn’t anyone take this pause where they can get an advanced degree so if they decide to go back on the traditional corporate path they are going to make a lot more money and have a lot more responsibility and education and network?”

But when graduation came, Tabis was staring down an attractive offer. It was a position in corporate brand development for the Walt Disney Company in nearby Burbank, California. Despite focusing on entrepreneurship at Anderson, Tabis believes his upbringing and a guaranteed good-sized paycheck factored in his decision to work for Walt Disney. He do so for nearly six years.

A NEW MODEL IS BORN

Then, true to his internal competing forces, the lust for complete ownership and autonomy consumed Tabis and he began stewing over what to start. Except there was one problem. “I didn’t know anyone in the L.A. ecosystem,” says Tabis. “I didn’t have any problem to solve. I didn’t know how to code.” So he tip-toed into the entrepreneurial sea in 2012 by joining an early-stage e-commerce venture called ShoeDazzle. Tabis was able to develop his network, learn about the environment of a fledgling startup and even was offered a position with Twitter.

Meanwhile, Montúfar also snagged an MBA, from Notre Dame’s Mendoza, and moved back to Ecuador where he was a general manager of a flower farm. He was hatching a plan. As a manager of a flower farm, Montúfar saw first-hand the back-end issues with floral delivery. His idea to fix the convoluted and wasteful supply chain? Skip it.

“He created a model for his farm to skip all the players and sell straight to the buyers,” says Tabis. Montúfar called Tabis and told him about all the problems of the current system. “He said, ‘I have this thing and it’s way better for the environment, it’s way better for the farmer, it results in a better quality product, there’s transparency to the source and you know it was sourced in a way that you as a buyer can be proud of, now how do I get people to care about it,'” recalls Tabis.