Lessons from My Failed Startup

“That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

I was 20 years old when I used my first credit card. One night in college I was working as a pizza delivery driver when my car broke down. It was late, there was a pothole, and my tire quite literally snapped off. I was sitting on the side of the road trying to call a tow truck and thinking about how I would be able to work tomorrow–worried if I’d lose my job–and how I’d afford rent if I didn’t work. Finally, the car got to the shop and they told me it would cost two thousand dollars to repair it. I didn’t have that kind of money.

I remember how scared I was not knowing how I could afford to repair my car, but then I remembered my credit card could provide me with the liquidity I needed. It wasn’t the cheapest money I could have used but I didn’t know any better and, regardless, the resolution of my crippling stress, anxiety, and fear was well worth the price I paid in interest.

I didn’t know much then but I knew that money helped me.

Fast forward to 2017. That fearful moment set me on a path to understand how finance worked and make it more accessible for others. I graduated and went on to get a masters in economics and statistics, and eventually another in data science and machine learning. I worked at financial institutions like AIG and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. 

Then a moment came that felt rather significant: I was approached by Goldman Sachs to join their consumer bank, Marcus.

It was a great opportunity not because it was Goldman but because I believed in the product they were building: a simple loan with transparent costs and no fees. What a wild product idea: transparency. Somewhat shockingly, this was novel at the time as many lenders had hidden fees and costs but Marcus is consumer-centric and I loved that.

I truly did love my time there and I actually thought I’d never leave...but I couldn’t help but notice a common theme in postmortems we were doing on non-performing loans: many of them were originated by Hispanics/Latinos. To be fair, they were not the worst performing loans, but as a Latino myself, these data points stood out to me.

As someone who grew up working class with immigrant parents from Mexico in the South side of Chicago, I thought to myself “Maybe I could build a product to help my community.” On paper, given my finance, technology, and personal background I was (arguably) uniquely positioned to do it.

So in 2019, I left Goldman to start my own company: Unidos. I built a personal financial management tool in both Spanish and English that aimed to educate and empower my community with a simple understanding of finance and interest. After 3 years, I can objectively say it was an utter business failure.

Which is the primary reason I am writing this article: to vent all of the mistakes I made so that, hopefully, you (and maybe even future me) can avoid them.

Remember, most startups fail which means that in probability if you are going to launch a startup, you will probably fail, too.

Be bold. Reject this data anyways but avoid the mistakes I once made.

All of the ways I failed as a founder

Some important facts about my experience as a founder:

• I did not have any previous experience as a founder
• I did have lots of experience at big companies
• I was a very technical founder
• I had significant misalignment with my cofounder
• I was working full-time while doing my startup
• I did not ever try to raise any venture capital

(I should note that I was occasionally approached by investors and I politely declined. It was mostly because I thought my business model was terrible and that’s probably a good sign I should have changed it but oh well.)

I launched the first version of the product (a web app) in 2020 and you’ll see in the photo below that I wrote a lot of code in that time…all of which only aimed to solve for what I thought my parents and I needed when we were learning about the US financial system, which was an abhorrent waste of time and obviously a very narrow target market.