His journey from banker to founder, the pursuit of excellence, and lessons learned from Y Combinator, including the painful truth.
His journey from banker to founder, the pursuit of excellence, and lessons learned from Y Combinator, including the painful truth about startup failure and product-market fit. The conversation also touches on founding a startup during COVID and building a sustainable business.
in my apartment um with three kids and and a wife as well like when the world was not ready for that and that was my first week right so we didn't have funds we had a powerpoint we didn't have employees and that was a point in time where fundraising via Zoom or hiring people engineers via Zoom was not a thing so uh we we lose sight of that now but back in the day imagine hiring your early engineers to build your product um via Zoom or like asking money to investors that were running headless like their portfolio companies were droning like they they were really struggling and then they were like they were not ready to deploy new capital they were trying to save and and refinance some of their existing companies that you know through covid had difficulties so that happened for at least six months right so hey Jorge you know you know what do we do now and then we decided we are here for
the long term um these type of crisises will come and go Right. And then but we're ready to be here for 15 20 years. So why not let's start and this is a great opportunity. Yeah. Because we will be in the cave and then we'll be building and coding and building the product and actually uh you know our early employees and teammates like we didn't have the money right. So we paid out of our salaries out of pocket our savings. So salaries we paid our our out of our savings for I don't know maybe six months or something like those were you know we were depleting that fast. So uh and then we raised our pre round with already an MBB and so on,