The Startup Phase

I was attending Sloan during the height of the startup craze in 1999. I got the bug, as did most everybody else. Fortunately, I came out of it relatively unscathed.

The basics - Harmonix

When I joined Harmonix, in 1994, I didn't even know what a startup was or that it was something that can balloon out of proportion. To me, it was just a job. It was a peculiar job in that it seemed a very small company, where I had to make quite a bit of the decisions. As it turns out, Harmonix was the first true startup I worked for, giving me a chance to learn and experience the building of a team and product from the ground up.

The First Try - LetsCargo

Along with four other colleagues and friends we set out to build LetsCargo.com. In a nutshell, it was a transportation marketplace for trucking in Latin and Central America. We were very successful in building a business plan and marketing to VCs, having obtained funding commitment. We also made it as finalists in MIT's 50K entrepreneurship competition. We visited potential clients (with a nice presentation) and arranged preliminary agreements for use of our service. We even forged a partnership with a leading logistics consultancy in the region. All in all we were doing OK. The market started tanking and the risk-benefit ration got too high when we realized that we would have had to uproot our families and move from the US. Thus we folded, but others (our friendly competitor NetLogistiK among them) didn't.

A Second Go - iRapid

Through my involvement in LetsCargo I met a couple of latin-american investors that were keen on starting an outsourcing concern focused in the areas of software development. I joined the team and worked through a number of partnerships (here, Latin America, and India) and helped with the strategy. We also incorporated and engineered arrangements with foreign universities to obtain the human capital required. However, the market had tanked by then and prospects were dim, if that. We shelved the idea for better times.

This is under construction. Hopefully you'll read about some success stories when you check back :)