Title:Alumni Spotlight: Christine de Wendel (SFS’02), Co-Founder & U.S. CEO of sunday

Meet Christine de Wendel (SFS’02), Co-Founder & U.S. CEO of sunday! Christine started sunday, a digital payments platform headquartered in Atlanta, five years ago after a 25 year career in management consulting and scaling tech companies in Europe. Georgetown had a tremendous and transformative impact on Christine’s life – keep reading for more about Christine’s entrepreneurial journey!

Was there any specific aspect of your time at Georgetown that influenced you to pursue entrepreneurship?

The short answer is no, if I can be totally candid. When I was at Georgetown, in the SFS as an international relations major, my dream was to be Secretary-General of the United Nations. I’m very far away from that now. I really wanted to join the U.S. Foreign Service. I failed the Foreign Service exam three times – I passed the written exam every time and then I got knocked down on the oral exam. I ended up in management consulting as a default. From management consulting, I went down the business path. My father is an entrepreneur and has encouraged me since I was probably two years old to be an entrepreneur. I finally made the jump at age 40 and started my own company. Georgetown brought me a ton of things, but when I was at Georgetown I was an idealistic 18 to 22 year old, and I didn’t have business or entrepreneurship top of mind. 

What inspired you to create the sunday app?

When I turned 40, I had been working with tech unicorns for over ten years, and so I had seen what successful scale ups looked like, and I wanted to start my own company. I had three kids in my 30s, and I frankly didn’t have the courage to start a company when I had really small children. I had a lot going on, as a lot of young parents did. When I turned 40, I said, “alright, now it’s time.” My youngest was almost four years old, so I was out of the tiny baby phase. I also was living in Europe for 15 years and I really wanted to move back to the U.S. The move to the U.S. coincided with starting sunday. 

Building a company and being a successful entrepreneur in the U.S. is so much easier than it is in a lot of other countries. There’s so much opportunity in the U.S. – the ability to raise funds, to start with any idea and run with it and create something big is much more realistic and achievable in the U.S.

I was looking for a simple yet generation-defining, transformative idea. I wanted something that resonated as much with consumers as Uber, Airbnb, or PayPal does. I wanted to address something that is so simple yet is a pain point in everyone’s life that can be solved with technology. The idea comes from my co-founder, Victor Lugger, who is a very successful restaurant operator in Europe. He’s the co-founder of the Big Mamma restaurant group and a friend of mine from Paris. He called me up and said, “Christine, I have a $100 billion idea. We’re going to change the way people pay in restaurants.”

Like everyone, I don’t like to pay in restaurants. Paying in restaurants, especially in the U.S., is pretty old school. You have to make eye contact with your server, wait for the server to bring the bill, give your credit card, somebody’s touching your payment method, then you have to use a pen to scribble a tip. If you think about it, it’s something that takes 12 minutes on average in the U.S. How can we use technology to change that? The idea was really simple: let’s put QR codes on tables and connect them to point of sale systems. We are going to make paying delightful and take 10 seconds. The idea came from my co-founder’s restaurant experience, and he wanted to partner with someone who had scaled tech companies in the past. It’s been a fabulous ride.

How has the sunday app grown and what is next?

We’ve had a classic start-up growth trajectory. Our first six months, we were tremendously successful with fundraising – we raised $125 million in a Seed round and a Series A round. We hadn’t quite figured out product-market fit, and we were not very clear on the product business model. We knew we had a really great idea, and we were great at pitching it. The first year, we grew from zero to 400 employees, launched in eight countries, and were convinced that the way to win was to get market share. The second year, we realized that the markets had turned, the tech climate was not as simple, and it was going to be much harder to fundraise. We had to scale down our operations considerably. We reduced our team by about 75%, which was brutal – frankly, one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. We had to slim back our geographic footprint. From years 3-5, we’ve been growing really quickly on a solid base around profitability, making sure we have great unit economics, and that we have excellent product-market fit. Today, we do about $4 billion in transaction volume and we have around 170 employees. It has been an absolute rollercoaster, which is very characteristic of building a startup and then a scale up. We are extremely proud of where we are today. 

What does a day in your life look like?

There are different phases of what the startup looks like. Two years ago, I was selling during the day, onboarding restaurants in the evening, and doing customer support at night. That was when we had a skeleton crew in the U.S. and needed to improve our product-market fit. It was like eating gravel – grueling hours, some exciting and validating work, but a tremendous amount of rejection, and a ton of nitty gritty work. This required so much more grit than I expected. 

Today, we have a stellar team in place and we are in more of a scale up phase than we are in a startup phase. Now I’m back to one of my favorite things to do: leading teams. My typical day, I’m managing investors and press as co-founder, I’m managing my operations teams, and then I continue to do a lot of sales. On any given day, I’m traveling to a different city in the U.S. where we have a presence, or going to France and the U.K. where we have teams. Or in New York City, where I live, selling to some of the best restaurants. The really fun part of being a co-founder is that you get to touch so many different things – fundraising, press, sales, operations, and product development. On top of that, I have three incredible children, so I would say I’m quite busy.

What is the hardest part of your job?

The hardest part of my job used to be dealing with rejection. Because I had a consulting career, and a career in more mature startups, I didn’t realize what it was like to start a new product and make sure you’re launching something that doesn’t exist yet, and get traction in the market. Learning what great salespeople know already – that you’re going to get rejected 90% of the time – was quite painful. I’m a people pleaser and an optimist, and constantly getting knocked down and told that no one was interested in my product was incredibly challenging when I started out. Now I think I have pretty thick skin, and when I onboard new salespeople, I delight in training them and helping them get the grit and resilience that’s involved in doing a sales job. I have tremendous respect for anyone who cold calls me, because it’s a pretty painful job. 

On a macro level, as a co-founder running a company, it’s balancing having a healthy P&L and investing where you want to grow. When do we accelerate, and when do we stay conservative? Our number one responsibility is to build a healthy business that is going to be successful long-term. If you go too fast on your investment, you burn too much and you’re in a fragile position. If you go too slow, then you’re at risk of getting overtaken by competition, or not following the trajectory of a successful startup. It’s managing the tempo between risk and slower growth and conservative investment.

What is the most fulfilling part of your job?

By far, my favorite part is building and leading teams. I’ll take my U.S. leadership team as an example – it brings me tremendous satisfaction to see my operations and sales leaders building a successful business. I hire them, bring them on board, and convince them to join the adventure. Once I get great individuals on board, how do I make them work together? How do you make an executive, leadership, and management team as effective as an Olympic sports team? You have different profiles and strengths, and you need those to work together toward a common goal. That’s the most rewarding and fun part of my job.

Is there anything you wish more people knew about your industry?

Coming from someone who has grown up in the tech world, the hospitality industry is a beautiful industry. People who work in hospitality love being with people and providing great experiences. By nature, the people you work with are hospitable and love other people, and have a passion for what they do. The other thing I did not know before starting sunday is that hospitality is a tough industry. People work late and long hours, it’s not the most lucrative industry, and with that comes a certain amount of passion. One thing we do is we make sure we hire people who have worked in the hospitality industry, even though we are a fintech company serving the hospitality space, because once you’ve served in restaurants and you know what it’s like, you have so much more respect and understanding, which makes you a better professional. 

How does Georgetown continue to support you as an alumna?

The biggest impact Georgetown has on me is my network and my peer group. My best friends are from Georgetown and they have been very successful in their own verticals and industries. My female support network of Georgetown grads is incredibly powerful. We have a WhatsApp group that is chatting 3-4 times a day with business advice, but also brainstorming about how to best raise our children. I often say without that Georgetown support network and those friends, I wouldn’t be able to do it. The people I met at Georgetown really changed my life. 

Finally, what is one piece of advice you would give to any Georgetown student who might be interested in entrepreneurship?

My biggest piece of advice, especially if you are just finishing up school, is that you should give it a shot. One of the biggest challenges of entrepreneurship is having the courage to start. In the U.S., there are so many resources available for entrepreneurs – every idea can be a big idea. The hardest step is taking the leap of faith. My example is I started my first company at 40, so it took me a while to get there. It takes quite a bit of courage to make that decision. It is absolutely worth it and incredibly fulfilling to make that jump.

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