Mario Ciabarra’s latest venture is improving the internet

Mario Ciabarra | Founder & CEO, Quantum Metric | Monument/Colorado Springs/Denver

“Ever since I was a kid, you could have singled me out as the entrepreneur in the group,” says Ciabarra, 42. “My father was an immigrant from Italy, and I think there’s a strong correlation with immigrant children starting startups.”

After working for PriceWaterhouseCoopers, he indulged his entrepreneurial inclinations. “Any good entrepreneur — or any good human, any person — is always looking for ways to solve problems they face on any given day,” Ciabarra says. “Some of us wonder why it hasn’t been solved by somebody else, and some of us decide to go take action on our own.”

It follows that Ciabarra launched his first startup, a server-management company called DevStream, after moving to Colorado in 2003. A hectic 11 months later, he sold his one-person company, then traveled the world with his wife for six months and came back to Monument with early retirement in mind.

But it didn’t take. Ciabarra instead followed his passion for iPhone apps with two more successful startups. The experience led him to launch Quantum Metric in 2015. “I had this pain point: I couldn’t understand what customers were doing. I couldn’t understand their frustrations. I couldn’t understand how to make a better product.”

The rest of the internet obviously had the same problem. The company’s platform took off almost immediately with customers ranging from Lululemon to Western Union. Quantum Metric is now experiencing “a hockey stick moment” with more than 300% revenue growth in 2019 and a jump to 170 employees from 50.

The crux of the success is aligning development with customer experience. “What Quantum does is help them create better digital products faster by aligning their teams,” Ciabarra says. “There’s a new methodology brewing because of the work we do with them.”

This article is part of ColoradoBiz Magazine’s annual Entrepreneur of the Year feature. Read more about this year’s winner, Katica Roy, and the other finalists:
JEFF WOODWARD & ERIC LAMBERT | KAREN HERTZ | JOSH FREED