<aside> 🕝 11 minute read

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Antonio, Jorge and I recently started a company together. It's called Justos, and it's an insurtech startup focused on the Latin American market. This post is about how it all came together, what drove our decision making and how we think about company building.

By no means is this

1. An exhaustive list of anything
2. A manual
3. A playbook
4. A how-to

Rather, it's meant to

1. Offer some insight 💡 that might be helpful to other founders as they consider the existential who, what, where, when and how questions about starting a company.
2. Give a tiny glimpse into what kind of people we are for those of you who might want to be a part of this journey with us.

Here we go!

🤝 Start with who

Above anything else, my co-founders decided that we wanted to work together. At the time, we had no ideas about what to build, no specific insights about users, and no clear mission about what we wanted to change in the world. As serial entrepreneurs, we had all come to believe that perhaps the most important thing about creating a start-up is facing and overcoming challenges together with amazing people by your side.

<aside> 👉🏼 No problems are insurmountable when you have the right team, and success has no meaning if you have no one to share it with.

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Image credit: Michel Bachmann

There are many good reasons to start a company — scratching one's own itch, stumbling upon an insight, deep sectoral experience that allows for a unique point of view, singular obsession with improving upon a sub-optimal status quo, among others.

In our case, being on a meaningful journey with an exceptional group of people came first. To read more about starting with who, and how it borrows and contrasts from the more famous Start With Why by Simon Sinek, check out this article.

😎 Focus on problems and on learning

Once we had committed to building something together, we had to figure out the why (the “problem”), what and how. A lot of founders make the mistake of confusing their startup's success with their life's purpose. This makes the stakes of success very high and if the company fails, the founder considers it a personal failure since his/her identity is so intricately tied up with the company.