Deciding when it’s time to make the jump

When I tell my story of entrepreneurship to friends they always have the impression that I’m braver than they are for having the guts to quit a perfectly fine job to embark myself in the journey of starting a business. The reality however, is quite different and much less romantic than what people usually think.

I was not brave or smart in any way. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I had a lot of energy and I was very lucky. You can safely say I was a complete ignorant of the risks involved in starting a business.

I think a huge amount of young founders don’t really know what they are doing at all when they start. What we have in common is usually that we have very little to lose and substantial amounts of energy focused into making a single goal become a reality.

Taking my ignorance aside for a moment, I did realize that I was probably never going to be in a more comfortable position to take the risk of creating Toky so here’s a list of the things that worked out for me to decide it was the right time:

I had money saved up

Not a lot, but around 4 months worth of living expenses. No debts.

Good health

I felt very strong physically and mentally. I was eating good and exercising a lot. My mind was also in a good place.

I changed my environment

I had just moved to Mexico. I didn’t have friends, family around and I didn’t feel like being home. Everything felt like new and I wasn’t attached to anything.

The change inspired me

Moving from Asunciรณn to Mexico City was a shock in every way. From living all my life in small towns and cities to suddenly being in a gigantic city surrounded by millions of people made me see the world differently. It made me feel that I was maybe capable of doing things I thought I couldn’t.

I was focused on a single objective

My wife received a big promotion and with that came a salary increase for her. I felt that I could fail with Toky without being afraid of becoming homeless as consequence. This mental state was fundamental at that time because it subconsciously gave me permission to risk everything I had and freed my mind to solely focus on Toky.

I felt supported

I built an MVP of Toky and with that I went to pitch it to Wayra and to my surprise, they decided to invest. This is probably the single biggest signal I received it was time to make the jump. That’s exactly what I did in September 2014.

As you can see, I was not brave at all and I was really lucky to be in the position I was when I decided to start Toky. I can only take one merit out of this entire situation and that is that I recognized the opportunity and I didn’t let it escape.

Every person and situation is different but maybe after reading my experience you can relate to it in some ways. Maybe you are hesitant because you are afraid or feel unprepared and for what it’s worth, I don’t think you will ever feel prepared and that’s okay.

Focus or fail

It’s so easy to fall into the illusion of work where you can spend hours doing something that feels like work but that in reality is not contributing anything to the health of your startup.

I fell into this trap many times during the initial 18 months of Toky by attending to conferences, doing interviews for media outlets in Paraguay and in Mexico, actively seeking attention for my “successes” with Toky and generally enjoying the praise I was receiving from the public for being “brave and smart” for having created a tech startup.

I was enjoying myself feeling important. It’s an addictive feeling that’s so hard to let go of and that’s so toxic at the same time.

I felt like a winner back then and ironically, I was absolutely certain that I was great and that Toky was going to turn out to be a huge success. It’s ironic because today, after almost 6 years and having survived all sorts of shit-shows, I still need to remind myself every day that I’m more experienced now so that I can gain the confidence I need to execute.

I wasted many months working on the wrong things and focusing on unimportant stuff. My fellow batch founders in Wayra were doing exactly the same thing and no one was telling us we should be focusing on our businesses instead. Many startups on my batch died, and I don’t know enough to make a fair judgment here, but I’m sure the lack of focus was one of the main reasons for this outcome.

In 2015, and after realizing we had an expiration date because we were quickly running out of money, the shock of learning this fact opened our eyes and we were forced to work on the right things or admit we were going to fail.

In a memory that I can recall vividly, I remember Oscar and I walking around Parque Mรฉxico in Mexico City discussing that we needed to change focus and start charging money for our product or that otherwise our days were numbered. After a few walk-arounds that park, we turned Toky from a B2C business into B2B.

A similar view of the one we had that day during that walk in Parque Mรฉxico

After that, our attention-seeking addiction slowly started to vanish and we slowly also started disappearing from the visible world. We locked ourselves down and started building the product that we have today.

In an unsurprising turn of events, we saw that the world didn’t actually care at all about us. When we chose to not show ourselves any more people hardly noticed. It was a new reality that was hard swallow but that we learned to move on from eventually.

Focus doesn’t receive enough attention and is a piece of advice that is easy to accept but very hard to follow. I’ve been there myself and I get it, but this time you need to not just listen, you need to act.

Determine what’s important for the success of your startup, determine the order of importance of each thing, and focus on one (or a small few) thing(s) at a time.

Have everything written down in paper

At the beginning of a new project everyone is super energized, hopeful and ready to bleed for the end goal. Hopefully those days will never end but if they do, you have to be prepared and protected.

You have to do an explicitly targeted work to keep the relationship with your business partners healthy. You have to truly care about their wellbeing and you have to mean this. It has to come from the inside and you have to make time to talk about it regularly.

The above advice will keep you from ever having to recur to the legal papers I’m talking about here. The order is important. Invest in your relationships first so that you don’t have to fall back to the legal documents ever.

Having said that, every aspect of your business deal must have a paper counterpart. How much everyone owns, vesting periods, what happens if someone decides to leave, how to decide if someone is no longer a fit and what to do about it, how is decision power divided, how to fire a cofounder, how to handle dividends, how to decide if you want to sell the company, etc.

This post is not about creating a comprehensive list of the things you need to consider for the contract between you and your partner. It’s more about bringing to your attention that you need to protect yourself and everyone involved by having all rules of the game very clear from the very start.

Remember that creating a startup is already stressful. You don’t need yet another worry to your anxiety bucket if for any reason something unexpected, like a cofounder wanting to leave, happens.