Chapter 1: IF YOU ARE NOT IN - YOU ARE OUT!
Entrepreneurship is Ownership
It was a cold(!) July morning in a hot summer that I learnt one of the first hard lessons about entrepreneurship : if you’re not deeply involved, fully invested, and genuinely present (financially) in your business, it won’t hesitate to spit (read screw) you out. Entrepreneurship is unforgiving to passivity. Just being around is not enough. You have to be all in, in every aspect.
Elon Musk once said, "If you’re co-founder or CEO, you have to do all kinds of tasks you might not want to do... If you don’t do your chores, the company won’t succeed. No task is too menial." That couldn’t be more accurate. Successful businesses demand everything from you. The moment you check out or look for an easy way, you start inching toward the exit.
Looking to other entrepreneurs was valuable, but not because I could follow their exact path. They inspired me to create my own. Each decision had to be mine, each challenge personally handled. Ownership isn’t just having a title; it’s being truly, completely involved in the vision, the work, and the grind. Anything less, and you’re out.
The moment I stepped into entrepreneurship, it was like diving into the deep end of a pool—sink or swim. I learned fast that there’s no free ride, no shortcuts through someone else’s success. I had to own every decision, every failure, and every late night, knowing that no one could carry me across the finish line but me.
As Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, put it, "An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down." That’s the game I signed up for—taking the plunge and piecing things together midair. Looking up to successful people became less about finding a map and more about gathering inspiration to make my own.
Do not count on getting a free ride anywhere, and do not count on riding on other people’s success. You have to do what you have to do on your own !
Chapter 2: WHEN THINGS MOVE!
When you move things start moving
I didn’t expect progress to feel so repetitive. Often, I was just going through the motions, uncertain if any of it would pay off. But I realized that even the smallest actions can spark momentum. “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing,” said Walt Disney, and that became my guiding principle. Just moving, no matter how small, made things around me start to shift.
In tough times, just staying in motion felt like a victory. I learned that success doesn’t always arrive with a bang; sometimes it sneaks in quietly, the product of small, almost invisible efforts piling up.
Chapter 3: INVESTMENT AND FEAR
Fear of fear is the greatest fear
Money is the worst investment if it’s your only investment in business.
Like many, I thought funding would solve everything. But when the funds were tight, I had to dig deeper, investing time, grit, and my mental energy. And when fear crept in, I discovered something else: fear itself wasn’t the enemy. It was my hesitation to face it. Fear became a test of resilience.
"Fear is the disease," said tech entrepreneur and philanthropist Naveen Jain, "hustle is the antidote." There’s no way around fear except through it. The lesson wasn’t about amassing cash but amassing courage and the strength to hustle through dark days. That became the real investment.
Chapter 4: THE PRODUCT!
It was never about the product but the idea of the product
In the beginning, I was focused on the product itself, convinced that I could perfect it. I learned the hard way that it’s not the product but the idea of the product that counts. Technology is only as powerful as the clarity of the idea behind it. Steve Jobs put it best when he said, "Innovation is saying no to a thousand things." This wasn’t just about making something shiny and new—it was about refining my vision.
A true partnership, I realized, shouldn’t feel like a circle where everyone is chasing their own tail but like a vector, where each person brings momentum, aiming in a fresh direction. And, most importantly, when a problem arises, owning it is the only way to solve it. Without commitment to the idea, you’re stuck. Innovation is about moving past that fear, about not letting your product trap you in yesterday’s successes.
Chapter 5: THE FINE LINE
You think you are doing a good job, but that was not your job
There’s a fine line between being an entrepreneur and simply being lazy. I learned that real growth comes not from repeating what I’m good at but from embracing what I’m not.
This line between innovation and inertia is thin, and crossing it takes vigilance. Jeff Bezos once said, "I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying." The antidote to compromise is honest effort; without it, you fall into the trap of mental laziness, giving up bits of your vision piece by piece. I realized that if I wanted a team with ambition and edge, I’d have to learn to manage the rattlesnakes—the aggressive, hungry people—who’d push me as hard as I pushed them. As destiny would have had it, I was pushed outside - the circle and my own creations.
Chapter 6: RISE ABOVE HATE
John Cena anyone?
There came a point where resentment started to creep in judgment. Jealousy without ambition—that’s the kind of thing that can wreck an entire business from the inside as well as the self.
But I realized something powerful: doing something constructive is the only way to rise above resentment. Instead of blaming others, I had to learn to accept responsibility. As Warren Buffett said, "You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong."
Chapter 7: LIFE OVERRATES TO BERATE
*Maybe I will find it .. *
At 25, I believed in the extraordinary. I thought life would hand me success if I worked hard enough. Ten years later, I learned the bitter truth: you have to make it happen. As the years passed, that extraordinary belief got tested, torn apart by reality. Only the true believers or the damned keep going after those first years, after failure upon failure.
Steve Jobs said, "The only way to do great work is to love what you do." Passion is important, yes, but it isn’t enough. You have to be willing to take hits, to look stupid, to get back up even when it feels like the world is watching you stumble.
Life doesn’t give us a clean slate. I felt it was a bit overrated and not too much to extract from it as years when by. I failed in a lot of way, not because I was unlucky, but because I never stopped trying. I don’t have a clear endpoint in mind, just a sense that there’s more. Maybe I’ll find it. Maybe I won’t. But I’ll keep searching because that’s the only way to be truly alive, even if the world tells me otherwise.
So, Compadres, let’s not give up hope! If the search brings us moments of brilliance, like sparks from the first fire, let’s keep going.
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