I’ve had the luck of starting up 3 companies in 3 different countries and in this post I would like to share 4 of the most important things I’ve learnt along the road.
It all starts in in April of 2009 when together with a group of friends we decided to sign up into business plan competition in our university. We wanted to build a website that would allow people to make restaurant reservations in real time. Our webpage would be connected with the restaurants ERP allowing us to know in real time the availability of tables each restaurant had.
We ended up winning the competition and were happy and motivated. We decided we would build the business. That’s how CenaPlus.com was born.
Happiness didn’t last long. We soon learnt one of the most relevant Argentinean entrepreneurs was building the same business we were. Worst of all, he had funds with really big pockets supporting him.
This was big deal, but at the end of the day it ended up motivating us even more and gave us one more reason to work extremely hard.
For the next year and a half, we didn’t rest a second. We also had no money to hire employees. That meant everything had to be done by us. From financial planning, sales, customer service and so on. But we didn’t care about it. We loved what we did and that gave us focus and resilience that we needed to run the company.
In November of 2011, after having operated the company for a year and a half with almost no money we sold the company to Restorando.
I don’t believe we would have been able to make the company last for so long if we didn’t love what we did. Building a company is hard, you will have few resources, you will have competition and will need a lot of resilience. If you do not love what you are doing you will always will be one step behind someone who really does and your odds of succeeding will be much lower.
In March of 2014 I received an offer from Rocket Internet to join them in Vietnam to build a car classified company. I spent a lot of time reflecting on whether I should go or not and I really could not make my mind. However, when I realised the worst that could happen would be not adapting to Vietnamese culture I decided to go. If that happened, I would just quit and come back to Buenos Aires. On the other hand, if I didn’t go, I was risking missing a unique and once in a life time opportunity.
Looking back in time, that was one of the best decisions I did in my life and I am grateful I took the risk of going. Or in other words, I didn’t take the risk of staying. The culture shock I experienced over there made me a different person. I grew insanely in personal and professional terms.
I consider myself a risk taker. Generally, whenever I took risks it really payed off.
My framework has always been, if things go well I will be better off, if they don’t, I will learn something new and that will enlighten me to know which my next steps should be
When I arrived to Vietnam to build Carmudi, the startup already had 3 months of life, the teams had already been built and their general tasks were clear. However, there were little processes at despite the great job that had already been done, things were still very messy. I had arrived there to re-structure those teams, build the processes and make them work. The challenge was big.
It didn’t take me long to start making changes and setting up processes and results soon stared to show. However, results were not radical as I expected.
I didn’t understand why. The decisions I had took were completely rational and logical. I had done my job. I had researched intensively on the topics I was working, I had consulted the decision with my superiors and even with smart ex colleagues.
Some weeks later I received one of the best insights. My boss came and tell me that some members of the team were not really following the changes I was making and that they didn’t feel so happy with the way they were working.
When I heard that, a clash of thoughts, feeling came to my mind. It was mind-blowing. I had aligned the changes with them in meetings and they told me they understood the changes. However, it seemed they did not. They had not bought in the changes. They just told me they did because they did not want to question my “authority”.
After learning that I understood I needed to:
• Be less top down
• Became a better leader getting more involved in their daily activities
• Became one of them
I took 3 immediate action to address those issues:
• Do more meetings to collect feedback. I started doing group meetings every week to collect feedback, propose ideas to test the issues we had,etc. I also stared doing bi-monthly individual meetings where they had to come with things to criticise me. I did not want any more to receive a bad feedback from my team by a third party.
• I started to join them in some of their daily activities to suffer their pains. I started visiting clients with them, getting in touch with the platforms they did.
• Created the Rocket Vietnam Soccer cup where Rocket startups (Lamudi, Lazada, Food Panda) would play soccer every Wednesday. That would allow me to be closer to the team and get to know them better.
These changes motivated the team and the results I was expecting from the first day finally stared to come.
Aside from respecting me, my team also stared to like me, and that me feel very happy and fulfilled.
Respect your team, feel their pains, trust them, ask them what they think. Nothing its a one man show. You can be the smartest man in the world, but without your team you are nobody.
In 2015 I decided to come to Brazil to build InstaCarro. InstaCarro is a company whose mission is to help people sell their car faster at a fair price. In parallel we help car dealers source car more effectively.
Several weeks before launching our service we organized a launch event focused on car dealers. We knew we needed to build a relationship with them and inviting them to our office was the best way to do it.
The event was a complete failure. No-show was way higher than we expected and all the dealers that showed up told us they would never buy a car online with us.
Today we have more than 1600 dealers subscribed to our platform who fight every single day to buy our cars and are one of the fastest growing startup in LATAM.
Luckily we trusted our gut and our analysis; if we had followed what our main clients told us that day InstaCarro would not exist.
You need to believe in your ideas as if you don’t, nobody will. Be careful with too many surveys. Not everyone really knows what they want. And if they know, they rarely say. If you have a vision, a dream, go after it and do not let anyone stop you.
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