Carlos' blog

Throughout the years I learned that people will only listen to what you have to say if your reputation—or the perception they have of said reputation—matches what they consider to be within the scope of their definition of success.

I believe there are some things that are universally accepted as being part of achieving success but many things that people think define a successful person are highly dependent on external factors like beliefs, geography, age, and access to opportunities.

In my own experience, my definition of success matched that of the “American Dream” as crazy as that may sound. I’m not even from the United States, I didn’t really speak English until the 2010s, and the first time I visited the country was in 2014.

It was hard for me to realize I needed to find my own definition of success if I ever wanted to get out of that constant feeling of being an underachiever.

I noticed that I was often comparing myself to people in the startup scene that were clearly more achieving than I was (or I will ever be) and feeling terrible in consequence because I knew I couldn’t possibly get to their level even if I worked 20-hours workdays.

I don’t remember the day it happened when I turned that sensation of feeling less into inspiration for wanting to achieve more. I stopped comparing myself to others and I started competing against myself only.

That didn’t mean I didn’t have role models anymore or that I didn’t check out on other founders from time to time. What it means is that I have a direction of where I want to be in my life and sometimes that direction coincides with where other people are, so I follow them to try to learn from them, but I no longer feel disappointed that I’m so far behind and I am fine with the thought of me potentially never getting there in my lifetime.

I learned that success means different things for many people. Mine keeps morphing but I noticed that a few things are always around: family, health, happiness, and money.

Financial freedom, a.k.a. having money, is one of those things that everyone pursues and it’s often used as a synonym of being successful.

I want financial freedom and I always wanted it—I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with it—but it quickly becomes worthless if you have to sacrifice your health, family or happiness in order to get it. See the point?

I believe being well–off financially is a byproduct of doing other things well in life, maybe by starting a business you are passionate about, maybe by doing a job really well because you love it. Maybe our focus should be on finding that passion instead of blindly following money while we wreck other things in our life that are obviously more important.

There’s a saying that really touched me that was brought to me thanks to @naval:

A healthy man wants 10,000 things, a sick man only wants one thing.

Confucius?

This saying is 2,500 years old. I don’t think there’s a better reminder than this to sit down and reconsider your priorities regularly.

At the time of this writing, we are a team of 24 people working at Toky. We are a small team and we try to keep it that way. We optimize for happiness and impact and you don’t need a huge team for that.

The playbook we created is simple and obvious, and it basically consists of evaluating three aspects of the candidate: good person, good communication skills, and intelligence.

Good person

No one likes working with douchebags, no matter how brilliant they are.

Being a good person means for me that they are not selfish, that they can be empathetic towards others, that they won’t selfishly prioritize themselves above everyone else to get where they want to be.

What has worked for me is asking questions that can lead you to see things that may not be compatible with your culture. Open-ended questions like “what makes you happy” are good for this purpose as they can lead the way into more profound questions that will let you understand better about their personality and values.

This one is probably the hardest thing to evaluate because it can be easily faked in an interview.

Good communication skills

Along the way you are always going to encounter problems of all kinds, and it is fundamental that you can communicate yourselves out of them when it happens.

A good sign a person is good at communicating is when they ask hard questions during the interview, or when they can openly talk about failures they have experienced in the past and how they got themselves out of them.

Seeing traits of introversion is not necessarily a bad sign either—people can be reserved and still be able to communicate well with their peers—but being too reserved can be an issue if everyone else in your team is an extrovert.

A person that can articulate in simple words what’s on their mind, that can tell me I’m wrong when I’m wrong, that can openly accept feedback and give feedback back in a constructive way, is what I look for every time.

Intelligence

This one is not about raw IQ measurements or how well they did on their last exam, in fact, I don’t even believe good grades are a sign of intelligence, but that’s a conversation for another time.

Building a product like Toky is not only very hard on the technical side, but the environment is also constantly changing that we need to adapt ourselves and the product regularly if we want to continue on business.

Dealing with change, with shifting priorities, with needing to acquire new technical skills when it is required, is something not a lot of people are comfortable with.

The kind of intelligence I’m talking about here doesn’t have a specific name. It’s probably an intersection between the resourcefulness mathematical intelligence gives you and the ability to successfully adapt to change that emotional intelligence can bring.

What’s clear is that our customers and industry will continue mutating and the only option we have is to adapt or perish. Everyone at Toky knows this and we welcome change every time it comes knocking at our door.

This set of rules brought to our team the most amazing people that I feel very fortunate to be working with.

It’s definitely not a comprehensive list but hopefully good enough to give you an idea of the kind of values we cherish that made us the kind of company we are today.

Situational awareness is a concept I learned from the aviation industry that pretty much describes everything I want to say here.

I’m a tech-startup founder, an admirer of what Silicon Valley (SV) embodies, and a long time follower of the personalities that came out of that place. I don’t live there, I don’t have any contacts there, I’ve been there only two times before (both paid by YCombinator) and I don’t have any way of moving there even if I wanted to.

For the few months leading to the founding of Toky, and until late 2016 more or less, I was obsessed with the SV way of doing things. I was consuming startup advice originating there, reading VC Twitter like crazy, checking TechCrunch daily, and following founders with huge investment rounds running their companies from San Francisco.

All of that knowledge shared for free is fantastic but if you don’t realize you have to adjust it to your reality it will end up killing your startup sooner rather than later.

For example, access to funding in Latin America—where Toky was born—is significantly harder than it is in SV or in some countries in Europe. I remember that getting funding for our seed stage in Mexico was so hard because we are a SaaS company and most of the investors back then didn’t have experience with it or with our industry in general. They were funding B2C or marketplace deals only.

Things that people take for granted in SV were an ordeal for us. Basic things like getting a credit-card processor to work took weeks, Stripe didn’t even exist here when we started in 2014, and the one we used instead ended up not working reliably for payments outside of Mexico so we had to take care of that too.

Purchasing a bunch of subscription software to “streamline processes”, like project management tools, monitoring tools, hosted services for open-source free software, all come from the idea that you should optimize your time for running your business in the most efficient way but what you need to account for is that paying $100/month for a project management tool that could have been just a Google Sheet, or paying $50/month for a hosted WordPress blog when you can do it for $5/month installing it yourself, quickly add up to what is lunch money in SV but could be a weekly salary for people in Mexico or other countries.

When you have millions of dollars in funding you are expected to optimize for maximum growth at the expense of profitability, but when your funding is slim, you have to focus on what is most important for keeping your startup alive, maybe profitability or maybe something else. As Paul Graham puts it, you need to be default-alive [1].

Once you have reached a state where you no longer worry—too much—about running out of money, then making optimizations make more sense. At this stage, paying for project management tools becomes an investment and not an expense, and having to worry about updating your WordPress site can be delegated to a hosted service provider.

Read everything you can about how to do what you want to do but have your own playbook that is in accordance with your reality, otherwise, you will just end up frustrated and most likely, with a dying business.

[1] If you want to start with general knowledge about how to create a tech-startup, check out Startup School by YCombinator. It’s offered free of charge and with the best intentions.