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He built Ecuador’s leading e-commerce company, sold it without the exit he wanted, and bounced back at Rappi. Alejandro Freund explains why falling in love with the solution kills startups, and how disciplined real estate investing bought him the freedom to start again.
Founders fall in love with the solution when they should be obsessed with the problem. At Yaesta, Alejandro assumed everyone shops online and built a catalog that was really a random assortment. Without understanding how people actually bought, the value proposition never generated the frequency to justify the marketing spend.
Real estate discipline is what funds entrepreneurial freedom. Alejandro channels roughly 70 percent of his investing into leveraged property, where the bank enforces the consistency a brokerage account never will. That nest egg is precisely what allowed him to quit a unicorn and bet ten years on a new venture.
You are building a company, not a family. His hardest lesson: culture matters, but loyalty in business is conditional on performance. Bringing phenomenal talent at every level, and letting go of people who no longer perform, is what separates his next venture from his first.
