Early experiences

“From an early age, I wanted to start a company,” Mitch says. “My parents have been very encouraging of entrepreneurship and going down that path. So it's always been kind of something I wanted to do.” In high school, he and a buddy ran a lawn-mowing business together. After college, he went through the rotational program at GE, hoping to learn how different functions of a big business operated. By the end of the two-year program, he couldn't see himself climbing the corporate ladder and wanted exposure to smaller companies. He moved to San Francisco and joined Bolt, a fintech startup building towards a one-click checkout experience, first as a software engineer, then transitioned into product.

Mitch had always been exploring ideas on the side, but it was during his time at Bolt that a clearer conviction began to form. He noticed that across much of the US, business payments were still predominantly made via checks, which was causing a lot of problems for parties on both sides of the transaction. The more he saw it, the more it felt like a problem worth solving. Eventually, that conviction became strong enough to take the leap. He decided to go all in and start something of his own.

Starting alone

Mitch left Bolt to start Zocha as a solo founder. Zocha’s goal was to help businesses accept secure payments through ACH to replace outdated paper-based workflows. He immediately started to build based on his hunch. But a few months in, reality hit hard as he couldn’t get his target users to try the product or even talk about their challenges. “I had this general perspective of challenges in the space,” he says. “I built something horizontal, broad, and then tried to figure out people who could use it later, which, is not the right way to go about it.”

After learning the painful lesson of talking to users first, another deeper struggle surfaced. He realized that without a co-founder, every setback hits harder. “Anytime you have a big deal on the hook and it falls through, it feels like a death blow.” Mitch recalls, “Having somebody to say, ‘We’re good, let’s move on to the next one.’ That’s so important.” Mitch decided to shut down the company and go for a reset.

The experience made one thing very clear to Mitch: he thrives on collaboration. But he knew he wasn’t done with startups. “Before I start another company, I don’t want to go down that road until I know I have a co-founder that I feel like shares all the priorities and that I’m excited to partner with.”

Building relationships

After Zocha, Mitch joined Heymarket as their first product hire. Shortly after, he was interviewing candidates for their first full-stack engineer. They wanted someone who had an entrepreneurial mindset that takes ownership, similar to how Mitch and the founders operated at the Series A startup. From dozens of interviews, the candidate who stood out was Eric.

Eric’s background mirrored Mitch’s in many ways. He’d spent time at Express Scripts as a Software Engineer, then later moved to Meta. He’d even tried a startup of his own right out of college with a couple of friends. That combination of big tech experience, startup curiosity, and entrepreneurial instinct made an immediate impression on Mitch.

They made an offer to Eric, and he accepted. But Mitch, looking back now, said he saw something more from that process. “I remember interviewing him and literally thinking at the time, oh, I could see this guy being a co-founder of mine,” Mitch says.

After Eric joined Heymarket as Mitch’s engineering counterpart, they worked closely together to improve the processes and metric tracking across the company. “How do we do sprint planning? How do we improve communication with the support team? We worked on some really cool features and helped expand the core capabilities of the platform.”

Their bond stretched beyond their jobs, too. Pickleball, tennis, and mountain biking became regular routines. Naturally, the conversations drifted toward startups, the type of products they were passionate about, and even bigger questions of ‘If we were to start a company together, what kind of company would we want to build? What values would we care about?'

Soon, those conversations turned into real hypotheses. “One night a week, we would spend time together just ideating and talking about the areas we were interested in,” Mitch says. It was during these late-night brainstorming sessions that confirmed what Mitch had sensed in that first interview: they not only could build something together, but they also wanted to.

YC interview from just an idea

One night, Mitch floated the idea of applying to YC. Eric laughed, “What do you mean? What are we going to apply with?” Mitch remembers him asking.

They had no users, no product, no landing page, barely even a fleshed-out idea. But Mitch knew from working at his first startup that the best investors bet on founders, not their ideas. And to Mitch, their time at Heymarket was an indication of two product-minded technical people who can work extremely well together.

In their YC application, they described a hairy problem they had just tackled themselves at Heymarket. The company was growing but lacked visibility into key metrics like usage and retention, but pulling all that data into one place was far from simple. Mitch and Eric spoke with experts, tried different tools, and realized that the only way to do it properly was to piece together an entire data stack: syncing data with Airbyte, storing it in a data warehouse like Snowflake, transforming the data with dbt, and visualizing it through tools like Looker. Their hypothesis was that other companies had the same problem and there weren’t any good solutions out there.

They put this down in the concise form-based YC application. “Our application was pretty bare bones,” Mitch says. Even knowing their experiences mattered more, it was still a surprise to Mitch when they heard back from YC that they had been selected for an interview.

With just a few days to interview with YC, they knew their idea looked like what it is - just an idea. So they got to work. “I stayed up till like 3 or 4 a.m. building Figma mockups and recording a quick Loom demo video,” he recalls. “I was worried they’d ask us for something, and I didn’t want to have nothing to show.”

In their interview, they answered important questions about their relationship and their understanding of the problem they’re trying to solve. The 10-minute session ended in a flash, and they didn't end up showing what they prepped in Figma or Loom.

The effort paid off as they were informed shortly after that they had been accepted. Reflecting on this experience, Mitch says, “I had prepped all of the standard questions you see online, but even though we didn’t show the demo, I felt so much more confident going in knowing that I had it. I could prove to them that I can turn around something extremely quickly.” He added, “Part of what it takes to become a founder is just figuring things out. Nobody knows what the answer is.”

They quit their jobs and set out to solve this hairy problem. And this time, Mitch wasn’t alone. He remembers thinking, “Even if I’m wrong, at least somebody else is wrong with me on this bet.”

Pivoting around their own problems

They spent the first part of the batch working on this idea and narrowed down their target users to leaders at Series A companies. Although this problem came from their personal experience at Heymarket, they soon learned that it wasn’t going to work after talking to their target users. “We realized what we solved was a point-in-time problem for a company. They needed to be small enough to not have a data team or a data engineer, but they needed to be big enough to care about it,” Mitch says. He added, “It was always we’re either too early or too late. Even if we got them to sign on, they wouldn’t pay much, and once they raised a Series B, they’d bring it in-house.”

They pivoted. Around the same time, they had open-sourced a small side project that got tons of stars on GitHub. Mitch, knowing that it was the wrong signal now, says, “We thought, oh, stars equals traction. We should pull this thread.” The tool helped track production database changes, something they had struggled with firsthand at Heymarket. They built a v1, got LOIs, and saw more interest from users. But the deeper they went, the more misaligned it felt. Mitch says, “There’s a whole world of database experts, and that was not us. Eric and I love databases, but we see them as a tool to build products, not as the product.”

These pivots could have been demoralizing, but this time, Mitch had someone to share the weight. When one idea stalled, they could take a step back, talk it through, and move on. “You don’t question yourself as much when someone else is in it with you,” Mitch says. “Instead of feeling like every dead end is the end, it just feels like the process.”

After spending months in the weeds of database tooling, a new idea started to take shape. Still rooted in data but with a different angle that was worth exploring.

Focusing on data imports

This time, Mitch and Eric turned their attention to data imports, a problem they knew all too well. They’d seen firsthand how operations teams wrestled with extracting data from messy PDFs and spreadsheets. They built something with basic features, launched it, and got tons of inbound interest.

This time, they didn’t rely on hunches or signals; every feature came from conversations with users. “Our product has evolved completely based on what customers told us they wanted,” Mitch says. “It started with CSV imports and grew from there.”

As they kept listening, the product, which they had named TableFlow, expanded well beyond imports to a flexible AI-powered platform that could automate entire document workflows. Each new use case, from reconciling packing lists to cleaning invoices to itemizing product catalogs, was pulled directly from customer needs. TableFlow became less about a single feature and more about adaptability.

The more TableFlow grew, the more it reinforced that progress came from strong relationships. Whether with customers, each other, or friends they made in YC, those connections shaped the way they built, and would soon become the defining angle they leaned into next.

Meeting customers in person

From the beginning, Mitch and Eric treated customer relationships as more than transactions. They set up shared Slack channels and visited offices in person, always with cupcakes in hand. “When you meet people in person, the relationships just develop,” Mitch says. “It becomes a human connection, and when issues come up, they’re not just upset with your product, they come to you for help.”

That approach created a new dynamic with customers. Instead of closing a deal and moving on, they became part of their customers’ teams. At Ghost, a wholesale marketplace, it started with one messy spreadsheet problem that involved packing lists from dozens of shipping providers. Solving that opened the door to helping smooth out and automate issues with reconciliation, itemization, and more. “Because we already knew their business, we could combine components of our platform to solve the next use case without having to go through onboarding again,” Mitch explains.

Customers kept bringing more workflows they needed help with, and each time Mitch and Eric proved they were more than just a software vendor, by building new features and offering their experience to solve whatever challenge came next.

Even when the results looked effortless from the outside, Mitch and Eric were deeply familiar with the work it took to establish strong relationships.

The work behind a great relationship

Behind the scenes, Mitch and Eric had committed to a routine that Mitch says all co-founders should try. They meet for one-on-ones regularly, where they each write down what they thought they were doing well and what they needed to improve, both for themselves and for each other. “Typically, our lists are almost identical,” Mitch says. “It turns frustrations into alignment.”

That honesty mattered when real conflicts came up. Eric, shaped by his time at Meta, liked building robust, production-ready systems. Mitch pushed to ship quickly. “It’s a constant balance,” Mitch admits. “Ship something fast versus ship something that doesn’t break at scale.” Instead of letting disagreements fester, they could talk openly, reset, and move forward without resentment.

That rhythm of communication became their resilience. “You don’t get stuck,” Mitch says. “Even when you’re frustrated, you can take a step back, give each other space, and then get back to work.”

That give and take, but always finding the way to move forward united, is the foundation that’s carried them through two years of building, and it’s what will carry them into the next phase.

The future of TableFlow

What began as a point solution is now expanding into something much bigger. Mitch and Eric are cultivating a company where new relationships will amplify what they started. “One of the things I’m most excited about in terms of being a founder is just building a culture and community, and working with other people,” Mitch says.

They’ve just launched a major release for TableFlow, moving beyond standardized imports to a system where customers can bring any messy workflow and the platform can quickly piece together a solution using AI.

The future of TableFlow is about scaling what’s worked, including a trust-filled, deep relationship between co-founders and the people they serve every day. What started as Mitch’s lonely solo run has grown into a company built on the very thing he was missing back then, relationships deep enough to weather the lows, celebrate the highs, and keep building together.