I come from an entrepreneurial background. In my early days, I was involved in a rock band, formed a family business that was sold after it became successful, and then became a partner in A3Sec in order to evolve the organization. My career has gone through several phases to get to this point, which now connects me to my recent experience in Israel.
Since I finished my undergraduate degree I felt that starting my professional career was urgent due to the responsibilities I had at the time. Sebastian, my oldest son, was going to be two years old and this was an additional motivation to fulfill my goals.
And being a manager of my own company was always my great goal. And to be able to fulfill it became my mantra every morning, as my mother reminds me, to whom I repeated it daily. This goal was so strongly installed in my brain that by the time I was 10 years old, everything unraveled.
My first attempt at entrepreneurship was to support a rock band. I told my wife that we were going to invest some of our assets to support a group of friends who had been making that dream that I never achieved, to be a musician. I believe that in order to succeed you have to know failure. First investment and first disappointment!
Later on, we started one of the most interesting paths with my partner David Rojas, to create a family business that would be the patrimony of our homes and give opportunities to our families.
We made a family committee and established those agreements in which each of the members had to develop that dream of being entrepreneurs with a clear purpose of transforming our society. One of our guidelines was that we were not going to sell that company, but it did not last long: entrepreneurs are not willing to sell until a buyer appears.
In those times of due diligence, I told David: "I would rather start a company with money in my pocket than start again from scratch".So we sold it.
We continue to work together with our current A3Sec partners, with whom we have managed to evolve our organization, creating new companies and evolving our business.
Before the pandemic, I made the decision to set up a small investment fund to fulfill a new dream: "To help new generations to fulfill their dream of being an entrepreneur". We have eight investments in which we have been accompanied by friends and family. We have two small "exits" so far, and this return will be focused on continuing to support entrepreneurship in Latin America and Spain.
Although we have a current "boom" of startups in Latin America, there are many elements that we must develop to quickly become countries with an adequate ecosystem.
A few days ago I had the opportunity to spend ten days in Israel, the "Startup Nation", in order to understand what elements have been fundamental for the development of the country and the exponential growth of startups and business ventures there.
A virtuous circle
They were ten intense days between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in which we had talks, visits to companies, meetings with investment funds, Venture Capital and educational and government institutions.
Human Capital
As always, the key element of societies is human capital. Israel has less than 10 million inhabitants and difficult geographical conditions, but a lot of intellect and knowledge generation. They have several Nobel Prize winners, a high level of education and most importantly: an innovative and entrepreneurial mindset.
Culture
They are a society of more than 3,000 years, with very defined principles and values. Their behavior is defined by these guidelines of ancient sages (kaballah), which they apply to their daily life, their relationship with others and even in business.
I leave a couple of examples of how their culture makes them special and how it can help entrepreneurship:
- They are direct: something that is difficult for Latinos is to be direct, we believe that we can affect the relationship or the other person. Something that does not happen in Israel, since for them time is money and they prefer not to waste it if they do not see value in what the other person proposes.
- Tajles (from Hebrew תכלית): to be concrete and not beat around the bush. Hebrews have a class where they are taught to be concrete. Go to the main idea and conclude or ask for what is required.
- Purpose: really have an intention to transform society and share what is built.
Government
The government has given what is necessary to support the entrepreneurial movement. From benefits to relationships with other countries. Being such a small market, everyone has in mind to expand their operations and reach many more countries. This has been achieved very well by the State of Israel through its missions in other countries and diplomatic representations.
Now they are working on something important and that is to reduce the number of "exits", as well as to support the growth of the companies so that they remain prosperous, but also that they continue to be located in Israel. We will have to learn from this as well.
Finance
Funds and VCs have evolved a lot in Israel and something that caught my attention is that they want to invest mainly in local companies, which is vital for the ecosystem to have developed under the premise of trust in its people.
An example that I found interesting and that I invite you to analyze, both as a business idea and as a leverage model, is the high-tech company MeaTech 3D, which is dedicated to printing meat for human consumption through biotechnology and 3D printers. This company is already on NASDAQ with a product that is expected to be commercialized between 1 to 3 years.
Education
One element that has always bothered me is why our educational institutions are so far removed from our business community. Visiting the Waissman Institute I found a very different model. Institutions dedicated to research developing publications and patents on a continuous basis within the basic sciences. There is also an institution parallel to the institute that develops the technology transfer of such research to companies that wish to apply them in new solutions to the problems of humanity. Each patent of the institute is licensed and the company pays according to its benefits.
First clients
Something that I found wonderful is that within their culture the concept of helping your brother is very strong and Israelis feel like family. They are early adopters. They themselves test MVPs and help companies evolve. Something we should learn in Latin America.
What are we missing?
There are many issues that we are missing and I believe that in each of the elements of the virtuous circle of the entrepreneurship ecosystem there may be many opportunities for improvement in our Latin American countries, but I want to leave three keys that can help to wake us up while we change the existing structures:
- Believe in ourselves. Our distrust in others is what makes our startups have a high failure rate. We do not buy from startups, big companies and the government itself have put barriers, but we ourselves as people do not give the opportunity to those ideas that can change our society.
- Financial support and training: Every entrepreneur must take responsibility to help new entrepreneurs. Money is very important to make things happen and evolve quickly. But I believe that support as a consultant and to develop those key skills is fundamental.
- Values: Although this is something that affects all Latin American societies, I would like to focus on Colombia, my country. Drug trafficking affected us as a society, it deteriorated our values. We must rebuild this, our actions must be framed in guidelines that do not allow us to go over the heads of others, which promotes fairness and really transform our society. We must be coherent between what we think, feel and do.
What about Cybersecurity?
I cannot end this blog without sharing a bit of what I am most passionate about: cybersecurity. I had the ability, supported by the Israeli mission in Colombia and with several contacts generated through LinkedIn, to meet with several Cyber StartUPs.
Within the Start Up Nation Central page, there is a database of companies from different sectors and in different stages: bootstrapped, pre-seed, seed, A, B, C+ or Public.
Analyzing the Cybersecurity data we found that everything is focusing on Intelligence and Cybersecurity Operations (something that shows that our strategy at A3Sec is the right one!). I share with you a couple of startups that are really worth keeping in mind:
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Intezer: SecOps. Automation of Triage Alerts, Threat Hunting and Incident Response.
Stop! Threat Hunt Automation? This has had a lot of discussion, hunting is seen as a craft activity, but A3Sec being the Unified Cybersecurity Operation of many organizations in the financial sector, utilities, ISP, etc.; we have understood that time is critical in cybersecurity all repeatable activities in the operation must be automated.
Intezer has an interesting philosophy, more than 81% of the threats that use malware reuse code, therefore the hunting automation is oriented to analyze information from the files that are analyzed with a database of threat source code. It is clear that each new malware is hardly created from scratch and can be easily related to pieces of code from others.
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Snyk: Cloud Security. Security development platform for securing code, containers and infrastructure as code.
Security as we knew it changed with the cloud. Scalability, elasticity and agility are fundamental. A3Sec Group's vision of an efficient Cyber Security Operation is oriented to involve prevention concepts in DevOps cycles.
There are many more involved in our Prevention, Detection and Response services, want to know more, watch our WEBinar: StartUps and Cybersecurity or schedule an appointment with an expert.
Special Thanks
This experience in Israel was thanks to being in the Innovation Experience 360 International Program, thanks to Damian Katz and Ryan Fain for this wonderful experience both professionally and culturally.
We invite you to watch our WEBinar: Startups and Cyber Security
