This is the second part of a collection of two essays. In the first part, I presented the business ventures I attempted during my first three years after high school. Now, we will explore the last three years: from 2020 to 2023. This period of my life has been the one where I learned the most, and have also experienced success for the first time in the real world at a small local scale.

In November 2020, almost two years after that first taste of business success when I sold summaries in high school, I founded a student organization at Universidad del Pacífico—while I was still studying in Peru. It was called “Lee UP” and its mission was to promote reading among students on campus.

The idea that motivated me to found the organization was conceived on an unplanned trip my parents decided to make to Paracas, a beach in the south of the province of Lima, over a weekend. Then, I was stressed because my performance in college was bad, so I started tinkering with ways to make my resume stand out despite my low grades. I knew that when I applied for an internship, I would need to have something that would make me stand out from other candidates to improve my chances of getting hired.

I had already read Deep Work and Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, so while in Paracas, I crammed “How to Win at College” by Cal Newport in a single night, hoping to gain inspiration for ideas. One of the “secrets” Cal shares is “9. Become a Club President”:

He encourages the reader (all college students) to believe they are capable of leading a student organization. And even if you don’t want to lead one, you can still work at one that interests you. I’ve already enrolled at the Coding Club during my freshman year. I enjoyed it, but I wanted to build an organization that would continue even after I graduated—during that time, the idea of dropping out of college was inconceivable, but two years later I eventually did.

The concept of the organization was simple: gather people who liked reading and who wanted to publish essays that would serve as a timestamp during their time in college of what they liked to read during their undergrad, what ideas they agreed and disagreed upon, how these books were shaping their views, etc. To comply with all the responsibilities to make the organization succeed we would divide into smaller teams, each one had someone in charge who was responsible for dividing the tasks in an evenly manner among members.

I didn’t spend any time thinking if my idea was good, I simply assumed it was and committed to figuring out anything I needed to learn during the journey. I had the idea, pitched it to a small group of friends, made them all enroll in the organization to comply with the minimum number of members required, and filled out the application form to be sent to the person in charge.

We got accepted a couple of weeks later and we started the recruitment process. I didn’t know how to code a website back then, so I set up an MVP of it in WordPress over a weekend. There, I explained what the organization’s mission and vision were, the responsibilities of each member, and what was the hierarchy.

I led Lee UP as the founder and president from 2021 to 2022. Over those two years, the three main achievements were:

At the beginning of 2023, I stepped down as president of the organization and handed the leadership to our vice president, Acacia Bautista. By the time I’m writing this, she has managed to keep leading the organization, not only has she renovated the partnership with Librerías SBS, but she now has signed one with Editorial UP, the official publisher of the university. The team keeps growing more and more and I couldn’t be more proud of her. I knew she was the right person when I picked her.

Building Lee UP didn’t make me earn money, but it was pivotal in my understanding of what was required to succeed as a leader of a team that has a common mission. This was the second taste of success I experienced after selling the summaries. Interestingly, it was again inside an academic context.

Lee UP couldn’t have been built without the help of every single person who joined the organization and worked to make it become what it is today. After seeing the team grow and succeed, my confidence grew. It also taught me that to navigate any endeavor successfully, you must work with talented people. If I had to summarize in three lessons what this experience taught me, these would be:

A bad hire can screw the organization’s culture. Growth is important, but not at the expense of the values the organization was set upon.

At the beginning of 2021, I let a lot of my friends join the organization just because of our bond. This was a mistake on my part. Friendship is important, but when mixed with work, it should be handled very delicately. It can happen that because you are friends with someone, they might believe they can skip their responsibilities since you won’t be severe. Even worse, if everyone works and they don’t, your leadership might start to get questioned. Avoid this mistake. Aim to hire people based on their skill, work ethic, and personality. Make sure they acknowledge the values the organization is built upon. Don’t hire someone just because they are your friend. There are better ways to show your appreciation. In case you made the mistake of hiring someone because of your friendship and they are not doing a good job, tell them your point of view, and ask them to make a decision, either change their ways or leave. If they don’t change, then fire them as soon as possible; don’t keep the wound open.

First, understand what motivates people. Then, find a way to incorporate their talent into the team’s mission. Build an environment where it is impossible for them not to succeed. Finally, recognize their work, strive for constant improvement, and be patient with everyone, especially with yourself.

Probably, the greatest measure of your skill as a leader is if you can motivate people to do something voluntarily without getting paid. Lee UP was the testament to that. I was asking people to work for a mission that didn’t make them earn any money. Certainly, it was very challenging, and a lot of times I didn’t lead in the best way I could. Still, it showed me that if people believe in the mission you are on, you position them on a team where they can show their talent, and give feedback constantly, they will feel intrinsically motivated to help you achieve the mission.

The best way to lead others is by being the living embodiment of the values you are looking for in others. If you want to work with responsible individuals, become a responsible individual yourself. Otherwise, you are asking others to be something you are not even yourself. Listen to them a lot and aim to make the most rational decision based on their commentaries. To increase your chances of success with this task, you must have a broad understanding of what the organization's mission is, figure out a way to achieve it with your peers by communicating it to them in a clear and actionable manner, listen to their opinions, and then decide what is best for everyone.

In Spring 2022, after a year of building Lee UP, I started applying for internships. I was 21 years old at the time. After applying for a lot of positions, I got a couple of interviews and eventually landed a job at Alegra, a Colombian scale-up, where I stayed for eight months. Alegra is a cloud-based ERP for SMEs in Latin America and the U.S., offering integrated accounting, invoicing, inventory, and tax management. My role there was Financial Analyst. During those eight months, I learned a lot. The three main lessons were:

Let’s dissect each one.

When you don’t see people like you achieve something great, it’s very hard to imagine yourself being able to do it. If everyone around you is a fireman, you would most likely aspire to be one too. Alegra opened my eyes and showed me that Latinos can build a great software company. What was even more impressive was that they bootstrapped the company completely.

I will always be thankful to Jorge and Santiago, the founders, for letting me work at their company and showing me that greatness is possible for us too. I met people from all over Latin America and reckoned how many experiences and traditions we shared. Even though we met mostly through video calls, I saw how important establishing a good remote culture was and how much people from all parts of the world shared.

In case you don’t know, my major was Economics and Finance while studying in Peru. Like most universities, mine focused on teaching us how to perform a good financial analysis for a traditional business, not for a software company. The metrics I knew like Inventory Turnover didn’t apply to a software company—there was no inventory. But metrics like CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), LTV (Lifetime Value), Churn, and more were the ones I needed to learn about.

I started educating myself on how to perform a good financial analysis for a SaaS company: what metrics to look for, what were good benchmarks according to the industry, and read the lessons the main players in the industry were sharing to serve us as guidance. Particularly, one of the main resources I dived into was Lenny’s Newsletter, my boss recommended it to me and I started devouring his articles.

Thanks to the reports I presented and the dashboards I built for the team to visualize the metrics better, I was trusted with setting up the budget for the rest of the teams of the company: development, growth, sales, product, etc. Talking to the representatives of each team helped me understand the needs of each team and gave me a good overview of the company.

Leadership can take many styles. Some people might prefer to be cold, distant, and play “bad cop”, and others prefer to embrace a more empathic, direct, and “good cop” style. Balance here, like in most things in life, is very important. A good leader knows when to swing their management style from good to bad cop and vice versa.

At Alegra, I encountered different styles of leadership, which helped me form my own conclusion of what kind of leader I wanted to be. Probably the most important lesson I learned was to listen to what is required from me and not try to shine by overshadowing other people’s work. Sometimes, in the quest to be acknowledged for my work, I overstepped into other people’s work. That is not how a team succeeds. It’s better to have a team of A-players than a single rockstar.

I must thank them for giving me the space to share my ideas freely and for always appreciating my work. After working at Alegra for eight months, I was offered a promotion but decided to resign to pursue my first startup idea: Dudda. From 2022 to 2023, I worked on trying to make Dudda succeed but failed to gain traction. If you want to read more about this venture and everything I learned, you can read my essay “How I Made My First Startup Fail” here.

Late 2023 was the time when I experienced success again in the e-commerce space. Once again, thanks to my mom's sales skills. She has always been a keen business partner in my journey. While scrolling on TikTok, she found out about Lattafa perfumes—an Arab brand cologne. One of their best sellers is “Asad” and it was trending on TikTok. People were promoting it as a cheap cologne with an awesome smell.

She searched the cologne on Amazon and saw that it was being sold for $25. Then, she looked on Facebook Marketplace to see if people were selling it in Lima and almost no post had been made at that point; the few posts that were listed the cologne for $50. An arbitrage opportunity was clear. She pitched me the idea of importing these colognes from America and selling them in Peru via Facebook Marketplace. I agreed, and both of us bought four units each as our first lot.

We sold every single unit of the perfumes. After our first lot ran out of stock, we ordered another one, now with more units, and then another one with even more units. For three months, all perfumes were sold. After almost six years on the lookout for something to sell and make money online, I finally experienced success again, thanks to her.

Eventually, after three months of selling these perfumes, I stopped importing them because I was going to move from Peru to San Francisco to complete my undergraduate degree, but she kept doing this for a while. The biggest barrier to scaling the business was to acquire the legal permits to import these perfumes in bulk. In addition, after talking to Lattafa’s sales representatives, they explained to us that the required minimum amount is $350k for them to deliver perfumes via cargo. Unfortunately, we didn’t have that amount of money. Still, we were very happy with what we achieved. My mom kept looking for new products to sell online, and I focused on my studies and on succeeding at the new job I had as a software engineer, but that is a story for another day.