A startup or start-up is a company or project begun by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable economic model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend to become registered, startups refer to new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo founder. Startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to be successful and influential. If you want to become an expert, start here.
It seems to be fashionable to talk about exponential growth. We generally associate it with atypical growth and assume that everything that grows fast is exponential.
According to Wikipedia, the only source of knowledge in the universe, "The expression exponential growth is applied to such a magnitude that its variation over time is proportional to its value, which implies that it grows faster and faster over time." To put it simply, the exponent increases with time, generating a graph that in Silicon Valley we know as "hockey stick." When the growth of a company generates that graph, we say it has exponential growth.
En el 2013 comencé a viajar a Silicon Valley, con la idea de buscar inversión y abrir la división de productos de Sm4rt Predictive en San Francisco. La tarea, además de interesante, parecía sencilla. ¿Cuántas empresas como nosotros podían existir? Con un producto sexy, inteligencia artificial, enfocada a bancos, con una patente en trámite, ventas y clientes internacionales.
La respuesta, para nuestra sorpresa: cientos.
Almost three years after I started this Venture Capital career, I had some interesting realizations. This new career brought great lessons; some of them came as a ice water bucket, some other lessons came as an “I told you so” and the most important ones I believe settled down slowly during these three first years.
Grow Pad temporary office 2016
As Ortega y Gasset said well: “ I am I and my circumstance.” Political, social, and economic changes have been essential factors in my learning process. Knowing and accepting myself as a bi-cultural investor, Mexican and American (gringo as I say) has been an exciting process. The working style, traditions, and culture, despite being neighboring countries and, despite the popular belief that Mexicans want to be more like Gringos the difference between the two cultures is huge and even sometimes have contradictory values.
Thirty months of learning, traveling, and adventures brought — in addition to AI8 Ventures — new partners and associates with whom to share the journey. Also, my son was born, my circumstance changed, I am forty now, and the middle age crisis created an inner self revolution that expanded the scope of what I wanted to achieve before I die.
