Jorge’s startup journey:

• clothing retail business (sold)
• Second startup: marketing agency (sold)
• Music production software company (sold)
• Healthcare consulting (sold his shares)
• Kanteron systems ($1.2B valuation at its peak)

Key takeaways:

1. When you are just getting started with your bootstrapped business, you need to sell whatever you can. Identify where you have the biggest competitive advantage and jump on it.
   1. His first startup was a clothing retail company because he saw an opportunity and same for his marketing agency where he saw a need among his dad’s clients’ companies
   2. Leverage your resources (easy access to customers, easy to build the solution)
2. You need to do what other competition doesn’t want to do to win deals as a bootstrapped company (e.g. sell to sketchy hospitals, flying in the air 365 days of the year)
3. Bad luck will happen in entrepreneurship so you should not be surprised(e.g. CEO dies when signing a contract)
4. Know your drives in entrepreneurship and know your limits early
5. You need set the culture of the company on day 1 because it’s hard to change when a company scales
6. Three stages of a CEO - startup, scaleup and exit. They all require very different skillsets.
7. Only raise when the money can help you scale - don’t raise too early or too late.
8. How he would accelerate a startup today:
   1. Spend a lot more time on customer discovery
   2. Construct a dream team and know what a dream team looks like on day 1 and find the pieces
   3. Understand competitive landscape of your industry from an insider.
   4. Leverage technology
   5. Leverage your own resources and unfair advantages
9. Don’t say you are a founder or a student - say you are a researcher