How Andrés Moreno Built Open English and Raised $150 Million

In this episode of Made By Challenge, entrepreneur Andrés Moreno, founder of Open English, shares the lessons behind building one of Latin America's biggest education companies, raising more than $150 million, serving millions of students, and launching new ventures including Escala and Longevi.

From dropping out of engineering school to sleeping on couches in Silicon Valley while pitching investors, Andrés explains why resilience, discipline, and execution matter more than having the perfect idea.

Whether you're building your first startup, growing a business, or looking for the confidence to finally begin, this conversation is packed with practical advice you can apply immediately.

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe for more conversations with entrepreneurs, creators and leaders who turn challenges into opportunities.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I remember I had like one month in terms of cash flow.

SPEAKER_01 0:02

He dropped out of engineering school in Venezuela. His father didn't speak to him for three months. And then he went on to raise over $150 million.

SPEAKER_00 0:14

My superpower is that I finish what I start.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Is it true that at some point you paid your programmers with a suit or a purchase? Founder of Open English, Escala, Longevo, millions of users, over $150 million raised.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

You may come back with nine toes, and that's normal, you know.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

Because every breakthrough begins with a challenge. Andrés Moreno, lead by challenge. Most people watch this, get the value, and disappear. The ones who subscribe, they're the ones building something. So hit subscribe, turn on notifications, because you never know, you never know which guest drops the next exact framework, the one that you need, the one that rewires how you think about your career and your life. Andres Moreno, you dropped out of engineering school to build the largest online English learning platform in Latin America. More than three million users, you raised $150 million. Now there's somebody watching or listening now that has maybe 25, 26 years of age. They're trying to figure things out right now in life. Why should they pay attention to what you have to say?

SPEAKER_00 1:29

Alberto, thanks for inviting me. It's a great question. I would say, look, because we went through it, and I was exactly that age when uh I started open English. I dropped out of engineering school. My father didn't speak to me for like three months because he was so disappointed that the first son that was gonna graduate school was gonna drop out and be an entrepreneur. Uh and it took me, gosh, like five years of you know walking through the desert with no water, uh, very little funding, right? Uh and uh, you know, I don't come from a family that had any special resources or you know, my parents weren't wealthy. Um I didn't I didn't go to Stanford, I didn't have a network of connections. So I had to really hustle and work hard to move through all the different steps needed to succeed. But we got there, right? And so I think that to answer your question, I'm happy to share some of the learnings. And uh and I think in those learnings, uh anyone who listens will be able to hopefully be able to accelerate their own trajectory to success. And uh and it's something by the way that I'm doing now. So as you know, I've started other companies. And the reason I started other companies is because I said, wow, if if a 25-26 with no money, um no uh no no no connections, uh I didn't know anyone that could work with me to build these companies, no network. Um, I built this very special thing, open English. Um, now with all that you know in my favor and all the learnings we're gonna, I'm sure, talk about today, it's gonna be an easier path and it has been. So um, yeah, excited about the conversation.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

So it's interesting because you explained that that you didn't have, you know, you didn't come from a wealthy family or somebody who would put in a million dollars into your into your idea. And we have this tendency online where if we don't see someone who hit rock bottom or came from absolutely nothing, then we feel that the story is not interesting enough. And when you look a little bit of about your background, I mean, you've you lived in a bunch of different countries, you had the opportunity to see the world in a different way. I'm sure that that had its advantages, and it also had certain disadvantages. What did being around the world give you that maybe gave you a little bit of an edge in your journey?

SPEAKER_00 3:36

It's a great question. Um, so look, my father worked in international organizations, so we had to travel and move countries every year growing up. And that was kind of traumatic back then. I mean, we lived in in very random places, I would say, like Slovenia and you know, Peru during the Sender Luminoso days, which was a terrorist group that was operating there. Um we lived in Chile right after 17 years of the Pinochet dictatorship. So these were tough places to go into. Um we didn't have a luxurious life, but it was a life that forced us to be very adaptable. You know, when I was growing up, um, I think I had like a high IQ, low EQ. Like I was I was more comfortable like in my room. I remember I spent like a summer trying to design like a hydrogen-fueled vehicle. You know, I was not out like making friends, right? But having to adapt to a different language, having to adapt to a different country, to a different culture, um, you know, getting beat up at school more times than I can count. Like all these things happen to me. And and ultimately what it is, it sort of shaped me to value more my social skills, develop my emotional intelligence, be able to connect with people in a in a special way. And if I look now at what I do every day, it's all about managing and leading people, right? There's there's people that are smarter than me on the IQ side at everything that we do in these companies. Um, so I think that that adaptability has has proven to be very important. Actually, somebody asked me the other day, like, how if if I um how to edu if I have a kid now, like what what how you work in education, like what should they study? You know, I I think that um whatever you study now is less important because you know AI is gonna do a really good job probably of filling in the gaps for anything that's hard knowledge. But being human and being a good human, being a responsible human, being a human with values, being adaptable, being resilient, I think those are the things that if you can train your child or yourself to do that, I think those are probably the most valuable skills in the future.

SPEAKER_01 5:29

Now, anybody listening to you see someone who's very confident uh speaking on camera, being on a podcast, etc. But as you were just saying, I mean, maybe you had this very high IQ, like you were big on the intellectual side, but on the emotional side, it was a lot harder for you to break through. So I'm wondering, could you take us to the Andres from back in the day that didn't speak to people, that was afraid to socialize? Describe maybe a moment, a situation, a circumstance that would describe to someone what you looked like and acted like when you were, you know, maybe in your 20s or maybe in your teens.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

Yeah. Well, I'll share a story actually. My I mentioned my father, um, actually, he was my stepfather. So my parents got um uh divorced when they were very young. My mom had me at age 20, you know, almost 19, barely 20. Um, and you know, it wasn't a long marriage. Unfortunately, you know, I think there wasn't the maturity there to be able to have, you know, build a home and all these things. So they end up separating. And and uh and my mom eventually, you know, three years later, meets my stepdad, who's you know, older than her and you know, very mature, great human being. Uh, and he's the one that worked in regional planning across you know around the world, and we started traveling uh the world with with my dad. Um, so but when I met him, I was incredibly shy. I remember I would uh step behind my dad. I was probably I remember being you know six years old, seven years old, and they would take me to a dinner or you know, some sort of social affair, and I would hide behind my mom or my dad. Um and uh my dad walked up to me one day, he said, Hey Andrés, tienes que perder la pena, no, you have to you have to not be as shy, and let me give you a trick. So he looked at me, he's like, Hey, here's how you do it. So you're gonna you're gonna take, you're gonna hold your finger here and you're gonna snap it. And I remember he would snap his finger really loud. When you do that, you know, it's like la pena, the shyness is gonna go away. So I remember like walking into social situations and I was like, you know, seven, eight, nine years old, you know, hiding behind a door and like going like really. So it worked. So it worked, clearly it worked, yeah. It's a tip that anybody can use. Um, but you know, but that gives you, I mean, if you want to think about a moment in time or like where I came from, I was much more comfortable like uh, you know, behind a book, eventually behind a computer than I was socially. Um, but hey, but you know, life is very forming, you know, and I think the challenges of uh having to adapt to a different culture every year, and then eventually putting myself through the school of entrepreneurship, because there's nothing that forms you uh like that. I mean, I think there's no MBA in the world, there's no a PhD, there's no program, right? That because when you're an entrepreneur, things are not gonna work most of the time, right? And you're gonna be fearing for your life, you're gonna be playing a video game that you're running out of lives every month, and you have, you know, three months of cash, four months of cash, one month of cash, and you know, you have investors that are breathing down your neck, you have expectations that you have to hit so you know, all these things really help you manage your emotions, your stress, other people, right? And uh and preserve calm through the storm. And I think those are the types of things that were very forming to me.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

So before you had open English, I believe you had a company called Optimal English. And and this was, I guess, less online learning and more in-person learning. Is that how it worked out? Because the point I'm trying to make here is that your first attempt at entrepreneurship wasn't necessarily what worked.

SPEAKER_00 8:47

Yeah, absolutely. So I see, so I co-founded this company called Optimal, and it was completely offline. This was the one that I sort of paused my school uh for. And what we did is we brought college graduates from the US to live in Latin America, and they would teach English to executives at Fortune 500 company.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

So That sounds like such a stretch right now. It's like right now we see it, and we're like, who in the world would necessarily move to teach English somewhere else, right?

SPEAKER_00 9:11

But you know, still thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people do this, and they're still valued, by the way, in the humanity of in-person teaching, right? I mean, I think if you had to choose what's the best way to learn a language, it would be to have a one-on-one instructor by your side, or what's the best way to get fit, it's probably still having a trainer, right, that's gonna be with you.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

So you would bring college students into Latin America.

SPEAKER_00 9:31

Yeah, that wanted to learn Spanish and spend a year learning Spanish. And uh, and then and they would do that. We would find an apartment for them, we would house them, we would take them every day to work on a bus, and like and you know, yeah, like you say, it's an old school way of doing things. But it was a terrific experience, and it helped me learn so much about how to manage people, how to have a vision and execute it, how to go out and get corporate clients right for this business. And uh and and it when it came to English learning, it was really the seed that helped kind of form that idea behind open English, which is that humans actually do a very good job at supporting you through a learning process. Because learning a language is like getting in shape back to that idea. It's not something you're gonna do overnight, it's something that you're gonna do over a period of time, right? Maybe a year, a year and a half. So you need to be engaged, you need to be motivated. Um, and sometimes like just an asynchronous app doesn't do that. You need somebody like supporting you, motivating you through that. So I knew that that was the case because of the physical teachers, right, that we were bringing down to Latin America. But the aha moment came when I used Skype for the first time, I know Skype is now like out of business. But that technology behind it, voice over IP that we now use when you make a phone call with WhatsApp or however else, you know, or you jump on Zoom, right? That technology allowed us to basically leave the teachers sitting in the US where they where they were and be much more efficient and have clients that were all over the world. And by the way, that weren't only corporate clients, because the other thing is it was difficult in Latin America to send a teacher to your home, right? That would be like very awkward. But via you know our our virtual instruction platform, yeah, you could be in your pajamas at 3 a.m. and be taking a class with a teacher in the US, right?

SPEAKER_01 11:09

So that's so that's what you call your Skype moment, right? Because I know that was like a night, like night and day moment for you. That's right. But so so you're running this other business and you're teaching people English in person. You look at this Skype platform, did that just was that like a make it or break it moment in which you said, I'm just forgetting the old company and I'm all going all in? Because a lot of people love the black or white type of moment, or was this a transition into a new model that took some time?

SPEAKER_00 11:37

You know, it actually was pretty black or white. Um, black and white. So it was it was the end of the optimal phase, and I decided I was gonna put all my, I was gonna bet all my uh chips on this new model. It was the internet, and it's a little bit, it feels a little bit like what's happening now, where there are companies that have a successful company or have something that works, but they now have to decide if they're gonna continue in that traditional model, which is now, by the way, now being an online company is a traditional model, right? Um, and gonna jump into the world of AI. And how is that gonna transform your business? And it's really, I'm glad I did because I think if we would have it, by the way, it doesn't mean that those physical businesses again don't exist. They still exist and probably will be here five years from now or ten years from now, and there will be online businesses that didn't fully commit to AI, which will still be around. Maybe you can still get an online tuner, but it's probably the companies that bet fully and bet the farm on AI that are gonna actually make that step and be able to raise money and and grow big.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

Take me to the moment in which you decided at 25 that you were gonna go to Silicon Valley. I believe you had only a few hundred dollars in your pocket. And I like to, you know, get that story, and at the same time, I would like to know if you recommend that for a 25-year-old in 2026.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

Well, you know, I had started this precursor to open English. Um, I decided to leave it, as I as I mentioned, right? And then I went and talked to my best friend that I studied engineering with, who did graduate, uh, Wilmer Sarmiento, who was my co-founder. He was my technical co-founder. So he was a CTO of the company. And I said, hey, why don't you recruit some of the friends that are studying engineering and why don't we start developing this initial platform? And uh, and it the name was not open English, we had to change names three times, like I can tell you that story. But uh, but anyway, but everybody started coding for my student apartment. So this was a small two-bedroom apartment. Wilmer was in one bedroom, I was in the other. We had a little living room and a kitchen, and we ended up having like 20 people there coding everything. Caracas? In Caracas, yes, Caracas, yeah. Back in the day, by the way, if you want to think about uh like coming from not a lot or conditions that are difficult, like starting a company 15 years ago, like a tech company 15 years ago in Caracas, Venezuela, you know, and actually trying to raise money for that in Silicon Valley is uh is a tall order, right? I mean, you would get there and you'd be like, okay, this this kid from Caracas is raising money to teach English in Latin America. So it was it was a it was a but but by the way, one of the things that helped me is that I had started an offline business already, and that I understood the dynamics of selling English, of recruiting teachers, of you know, quality instruction, and I had a vision, right? I I understood what it took for actually for someone to reach fluency in the language. Now we were just enabling that with technology, but that helped me have an informed, smart conversation with investors. Um yeah, I actually jumped on a plane, I ran out of money several times. I didn't really have a lot of money, I had a little bit of money uh, you know, that I had in savings, but then I immediately went to credit cards, then I started asking for debt and banks, which at 25 in Venezuela you weren't getting a lot of credit lines. Um but when we ran through all that, uh, and I was I remember I had like one month to of to live right in terms of cash flow. I said, oh my God, I I we're not gonna be able to fund the company. So I told my my partner Wilmers like, hey man, I'm gonna go to Silicon Valley because I read this blog that said that there are these angel investors you know in San Francisco that can you know basically invest in your business. By the way, we had met with some angel investors in Venezuela. Um, I ran into one the other day, but the offer was like, hey, we'll give you like $50,000 for 51% of your companies. Of course. And then it was like a control control, right? It's a Latam style at the time. So, you know, we didn't want to do that because we felt like, boy, we're gonna work on this for the next, you know, we thought three years, it turned out to be 15. I'm glad we're not, you know, working, working for that, you know, for one family that gave us $50,000. But it when we got to Silicon Valley, there was a different model, there was convertible debt, and I was able to raise, took two years, but I was able to raise $2 million from angel investors in the valley. But but mind you, I remember being on the plane, back to like those crucial moments, being on the plane, I had butterflies in my stomach because I was like, oh my god, I'm gonna land in this place I've never been. I know one person that's gonna lend me a couch and I'm gonna sleep there tonight, and I have about a month of cash, right? And I was you know calculating how many foods I had and how many meals I could pay, and and every coffee that I would pay because I took someone out, I was like, okay, that's you know ten dollars less. So that that was the that was the time. But hey, I was able to get the first $10,000 to fuel the company, and then that led to like the next $20,000, and then it ended up being $2 million of seed financing, which was enough to kind of build a prototype that we launched. And today we can talk about, you know, I think today launching a company takes a lot less money than that. But at the time, you know, we were like buying servers, right? There was like servers in my kitchen, you know, under the microwave. It was a different, there wasn't AWS and to market, you didn't have like, you know, Meta. There was like everything was a little bit more archaic and expensive and difficult, uh, especially afar. So that was that was a start.

SPEAKER_01 16:28

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SPEAKER_00 18:08

You know, I think that um we were living in Venezuela at the time, and obviously Venezuela went for a very difficult trajectory the last 20 years, but still at the time, you know, you could see that there was and there is a growing middle class that has a lot of needs, and those needs, you know, and the and we knew that that middle class, almost like regardless of political party, regardless of situation in the country, like those folks were gonna get online, right? We knew that those people were eventually gonna have smartphones and computers, and and so uh uh we just bet on the future. It was kind of obvious to us, like looking around. But yes, if you went to Silicon Valley, I remember like pitching this, you know, very you know knowledgeable investor. You might know the name if I say it from one of the top-tier, you know, VCs in the valley. And he looked at me, he's like, Well, you know, this is so this is for Latinos. Okay, so uh who do I know that's Latin? Oh, I think I know like you know, Pedro who does my lawn, you know. It was like the his only like reference to was Pedro, like that's the only Latino he had met, you know, or like, oh, I know these guys that work behind, you know, at whatever taco thing. And you know, but but I think, and whereas they are, of course, customers also and potential customers of open English, I think they missed right the bigger opportunity in emerging markets, which was a digitization of services. And uh and that's still happening now with AI. So that was the opportunity that that we bet on. But it was difficult to raise money because people didn't really see it or it wasn't obvious at the time.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

Is it true that at some point you paid your programmers with a suit or a purchase? Is that true or not?

SPEAKER_00 19:37

I think I paid with whatever was in my closet. So it was true. Yeah, yeah. Look, whatever, yeah. I mean I when I jumped on that plane, I remember telling Wilmer we went for a walk and forget, I said, Look, man, I have a month, right, where we need to figure out what we're gonna do because I have, you know, my mom needs me to support her, I need to go get a job. And I we spoke to the other programmers like, hey, we all need to go get jobs. We we're out of school and we haven't made a dollar. Uh, we have we have a debt that we have to pay off, etc. So I really had this pressure, right? That if we didn't generate some funding, right, to pay some sort of compensation for the folks there, we wouldn't have a team a month later. So, yeah, in that in that precise moment, I probably gave out everything I had to be able to get through the next stage.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

That's unbelievable. I can relate so much to the generalization about Latinos because my wife and I met at a conference and I was a keynote speaker in San Diego, California. And my wife is Mexican, she grew up in San Diego, but I've never forget, you know, I'm from Venezuela, and I'll never forget the story of how a coworker said you should meet the speaker at the conference because he's single and you're single too, and he speaks Spanish, so he's probably Mexican. That's all she knew, right? I mean, that's all she knew because in California, you know, high percentage of people, you know, if you spoke Spanish, you were, you know, you're you were Mexican. At least that's what they that's what they thought. How different is it when you go to Silicon Valley today? How much has this changed? And what can someone learn that's maybe only getting started within their first company and they're just trying to give that a shot when they have to speak to someone who has a little bit of money to give them because you have the ability now to go to Silicon Valley and be heard a lot easier. But a lot of people are just getting started in 2026 and they're saying, Well, how do I get my first thousand dollars, ten thousand dollars, fifty thousand dollars from someone? How much has the perception changed in terms of fundraising and and all these cliches that we used to have?

SPEAKER_00 21:30

Yeah, sure. Look, first of all, I I don't think you necessarily go to Silicon Valley the first time around. If you want to raise some initial capital to get your business off the ground, I don't think you have to quit your job anymore. I don't think you have to go raise a million dollars. I think you need to have a clear problem that you're delineating, right? And then once you have that clear problem, you can start to vive code and to uh generate uh proof of concept of that with very little money. I mean, today's companies can be you, your dog, your you know, Chat GPT, or Claude Code rather. And and you guys are gonna come up with a business plan, right? And it's gonna be coherent, it's gonna be good. And you can actually test it, and we can talk more about the steps to test into the market, right? But uh but that that's all it takes. And I think if you need your first hundred thousand dollars, it's more likely you're gonna get that if you don't have any special connections from the people that you know, people around you, right? That can maybe offer a hand, maybe you can find $10,000 here or there for your business. And then once you have a proof of concept, you can reach out to people that have already done it before. Like I get a lot of emails, I get a lot of you know Instagram messages, and it's very different when somebody says, Hey, I have this idea or I have this PowerPoint than somebody that says, like, hey, I've invested zero into this business. I'm already generating, you know, $15,000 a month, and uh I created this thing with AI and uh and look what it's doing, and it's taking off, and I need your support or support, right, to really figure out how to scale this. I mean, that if you know, if you were an angel investor, that would pique your interest. Like, oh, how is this person generating fifteen, twenty thousand dollars a month, right, with no help, uh without any investment? Like, I I want to figure out what's there. So that's that I think you can do that now credibly, whereas before I think that was very difficult.

SPEAKER_01 23:08

So we had recently on the podcast uh Aaron Speeback. And Aaron, he's the founder of the Founders Club, which is very popular right now with members that that start at a million dollar revenue in their companies and it's a million dollars.

SPEAKER_00 23:20

I think I'm getting targeted by his ads. I'm sure.

SPEAKER_01 23:23

But what's interesting with Aaron is that you know he had a hard time trying to find you know investors and how to do it. So they went very with his second company, uh Hush Blankets, they went very, you know, uh guerrilla, so to speak, you know, and trying to get those sales and and and and see everything happen. But there was a point in which uh he shared with me how sales just like went down to almost zero. You know, I mean, he was selling blankets, he was living in Canada, the summer came in, and then he had to come up with a cooling blanket, that kind of thing. Does it take someone special to be able to go through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship? A lot of people may be saying, wow, entrepreneurship sounds like a lot of fun. It sounds like it has more potential, maybe, than being an employee for the rest of my life. But do I have what it takes? How did you know you had what it takes? And how does somebody in their 20s know that they have what it takes?

SPEAKER_00 24:19

It's a great question. And I think it has a lot more to do with resilience and perseverance and structure than it has to do with being a genius, right? Like I am not a genius. I know a lot of people that uh have started companies that are not geniuses, some are, right? And uh those people are exceptional. Um but I think in my case, at least, what I had was I just had a my superpower is that I finish what I start. My superpower is that I wake up every day and I have a schedule. You I could show you my calendar if I had my phone here, but I'm highly structured, right? Like every single moment of my day is color-coded. I know like which uh idea I'm working on, which business I'm advising or working with, what I'm doing, and it's all there. So I and you know, with when it comes to, for example, my work at Open English, like it's all also color-coded. I know I'm meeting with you know marketing and sales, and this day worked working on this, we're meeting with finance. I mean, so I don't miss a beat. Like, I don't wake up in the morning being like, oh, what am I gonna do today? Um I I wake up every day and I already have 12 hours of things to do, right? But so and if you do that consecutively, it's like getting fit and you don't realize it, but you're gonna lose weight, right? So it's the same thing, like if you're just consistent about it. But I think there's a disconnect in today's society where you think that like, oh, I should be the next amazing entrepreneur, the next amazing YouTuber, the next amazing, you know, whatever it is. But it's like if if you want to be the best at uh at whichever field, uh you want to be the best MMA fighter, you're gonna have to get in the ring every day for 10 hours and fight, right? You're not gonna just wake up magically one day and win a fight, right? So I think you need that muscle memory, you need that ability to solve problems, whether it be when you're backed into a corner physically in a in a in an octagon, right? If you're an MMA fighter, or if you're doing it in life, but you need to be able to do that. And so I think just putting yourself through the discipline is important. And I talked to so many, so many uh, you know, 20 to 25, 26 year olds are like, oh, I want to do this, I want to do that, but there's a disconnect, right? And by the way, that's not true. It's at like 20 to 35 or whatever, 40. It's like there's a disconnect in in between like what they want to do and the actions that they're taking every day to accomplish them. Like if you look at like, okay, what did you spend your time on today, literally? And we do math, you're like, okay, we'll spent two hours on Instagram. Okay. You spent uh, you know, an hour getting ready, you spent like an hour having coffee, you spent an hour talking to a friend, you spent an hour like, you know, doing whatever, like and okay, what are your goals? Okay, I want to be super fit and I want to look hot, and I want to be an entrepreneur. It's like, well, like these things don't align, right? So so that that lack of alignment is a big problem. Yes. Um, and I think if people just like lined up what they want to do and accomplish with their actions, and I said to them, I want to get fit every day, I need to allocate two hours a day to make sure that I can go to the gym, make sure that I can have time to eat well, make sure that I sleep enough, right? We're talking about this, like, okay, and that's that's what it takes to get fit and look good. Okay, if you want to be an entrepreneur, you want to be successful, all right. You need to dedicate at least eight hours a day to do that to that. And you know, it's research, whether it's this and that, but it needs to be a big F and block on your calendar that says, like, I want to be an entrepreneur, right? It's not like, oh, I'm gonna just do this between like Instagram reels. So I think that that's that's my biggest, I think, advice.

SPEAKER_01 27:27

Yeah, and and if you I don't know, did you read uh Atomic Habits by James Clear? No, I haven't. It's one of the one of the biggest best-selling books in habits, and one of the things that he says, he's a researcher that that that looked into habits and has done extremely well. And he says that you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fail to the level of your systems, which is exactly what you're saying. I mean we all focus so much on the goals, the goals, the goals, the goals, and then in reality, what we have to do is understand that our system is the one that's gonna hold us at least. Even during the most difficult moment.

SPEAKER_00 28:01

And I love that you call it systems because it is a system, right? You have to actually I systematically calendar my day. And I and I, by the way, and then I I go and actually, if I promise myself that I look at my calendar the night before and I'm gonna get up and work out, if I'm gonna get up and spend you know time working on this project or I'm gonna be on a call with this person, like I go and do all those things, right? Like I'm gonna come and spend time with you at this podcast, like I'm gonna do all those things because I prioritize them. But so you have to actually plan and execute, and that's it. I mean, but you're right, if you don't get out of bed and you don't start your day early and you don't do the things that you have to do, like uh by the way, that's gonna take in a negative loop because you're gonna still have the same expectations, but every day that you don't accomplish them or that you don't think that you're actually making progress, you know, you're just gonna get more and more demotivated, which leads then to anxiety and depression and other issues that I think we see every day in our society.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

Yeah. So when you were uh starting open English and your interpreter journey, did you suffer a lot from negative self-talk? Did you did you constantly catch yourself, you know, saying, I won't be able to do this, this is too hard? Because a lot of people I think that they face negative self-talk, especially now in the world of social media where everybody seems to be succeeding and they're really not. Yeah. And you compare yourself with others.

SPEAKER_00 29:15

I had a great thing, which was that like I had nothing to lose, and I just was like, I was coming from Venezuela, I didn't have a penny to my name, I had left university and I couldn't go back now because it wouldn't take me back. My parents told me like that was the best, worst thing I ever did in my life. Like I just I was so committed. I was you're like, my chips were all in, and I had taken my shirt off, and that was in, and my shoes, I was all in, right? So at that point, it's just like, well, we're just gonna keep rowing, right? We're gonna keep rowing to see if this thing, there's an actual other side of this river. And I still feel a little bit that way, right? In the sense that you knew just it. But I think it's like um it's we're talking about fight, like fighters. I think it's different when you see like Mike Tyson when he didn't have like a penny to his name and he was fighting for his life, and then like you see, like when they already make money, and maybe the oh, I gotta want to get hit. I don't I actually don't want to be in this ring anymore.

SPEAKER_01 30:05

But were you ever your worst enemy in terms of your thinking?

SPEAKER_00 30:08

I I think at that time I was just thinking of how am I gonna make it? And all my thoughts, all my energy was like, How am I gonna make it? And still to this day, whenever I'm pressured into a tough situation, um, yes, I do get negative self-talk, and I I could go through a bad time, and I I can even get emotional. Um, so that's like you know, the moment you get punched in the face, but then quickly you just sort of like snap out of it, it's like, okay, what am I gonna do about it? And then and then you I think that that like will to survive kicks in, and you're gonna do everything it takes to get through the other side. And by the way, sometimes, most times, there was opportunity in all those tough moments. Like you just I think you just have to like you know, emotionally detach from whatever you're feeling and start to think about like, okay, how can I actually take advantage of this opportunity to to make it into something bigger, better for myself, or what did I learn and how can I apply that to the next thing?

SPEAKER_01 31:00

So, uh Andres, you've you've grown open English tremendously. You then uh created Escala, which is a CRM company that that you still manage and you're still uh very involved in, and then you created Longevo, which is a virtual health and wellness coaching platform uh that is also succeeding and doing extremely well. There was uh this piece in the news where I saw that open English, uh which already has had you know three million users and 15,000 companies uh affiliated, now made a deal with the Costa Rica government to make sure that everybody in Costa Rica can learn English through open English. That's like really next level stuff when you can get a government to actually adopt your platform and buy licenses for the entire population.

SPEAKER_00 31:46

Yeah, it was a very special uh moment for the company. And uh this this happened only three weeks ago. It was in Costa Rica. We announced it together with the president and the president-elect uh in a stage of you know 5,000 people there. And and then I did 30 news interviews that week. And and uh yeah, but it's a it's probably the largest ed tech deal that's ever been inked in the region.

SPEAKER_01 32:09

And it's ed tech meaning educational technology.

SPEAKER_00 32:11

Yeah, that's right. Okay. And it speaks to the ambition of the Costa Rican government and its leaders to actually understand and and and realize that English is a social mobility tool. It is not something you learn in school. Uh and uh and by help helping the whole country be bilingual, you're giving everybody a tremendous opportunity and a tremendous tool to level up vis-a-vis other competitors in the region, right? Other countries that are offering you shoring or other types of solutions. And yes, it was imagine two million people now can learn English. All you have to do is basically prove that you're Costa Rican, we do biometrics on you, and you get a free open English license and you start learning English right away for free.

SPEAKER_01 32:48

That is amazing. So now let's get ready for the masterclass because I know a lot of people are toying with ideas, they have three or four different ideas. Everybody wants to see if they really have something in their hands. So are you ready for a masterclass where we can help us gauge if our idea is good enough or not and what to do about it? Let's do it. Yeah. Let's do it. So if I am kind of like following the traditional path, you know, I went to college, I graduated from college, maybe I'm 22, 23, I know that I have to apply for jobs, and you know, I'm just doing whatever is expected of me, but I know that I want more. And then I come up with three, four, five different ideas, and I go into AI every night, and I'm sure AI keeps giving me ideas. How do I find an idea, number one, that can be meaningful to me, and number two, that can be tested? So I don't spend the rest of my life just dreaming of something, but actually acting on something.

SPEAKER_00 33:40

Yeah, yeah, it's a it's a great question. I think several things. First of all, um play to your strengths. And uh I you know there are many there I've been pitched on several ideas these last three months that are things in AI. Like, hey, you should start uh uh you should fund like an AI law firm that skips the lawyer. You know, that's actually a great idea, and there are there are many other startups out there that are doing that. I don't know the first thing about that, right? It just does not play to my strengths. I don't understand how to convert those customers, I don't understand uh the legality of it, I don't understand the compliance network. So there's there are things that are just outside of my comfort zone that are so outside of my comfort zone that probably the learning curve to get there is gonna be something that someone else is just gonna be faster at. So number one, right? Um there are other things where, and this is this is an area I like where maybe there's a lot that's new, and there's gonna be a lot that's new because you're not gonna be an expert at at everything, right? Um, but maybe you have an alignment with your passion, with your vision, with prior experiences that's gonna give you an angle. It's like when I got to Silicon Valley to raise money for open English for the first time, again, it really helped that I had started an offline English learning company because although it wasn't online, etc., but I understood a lot about that market. I understood about the customer, the consumer, the need to learn English, what it gives in what it gives you in your life, like how to sell to a company. Like all these things were pieces right of that puzzle. So play to your strengths, I think, is is important. Play to your passion as well. Um, you know, in the past they would always tell us, like, hey, Alberto and Andreas, probably, you know, you just don't like our parents would, my parents are like, hey, don't worry about your passion. Like, you need to be an engineer or a doctor, right? You just need to, you know, a lawyer or something. Um, actually, you can you can do something that is very aligned with your passion, and hopefully you won't feel like you're working a day in your life, right? So once you've identified, if you do like uh some sort of chart where you can list you know the things that give you purpose that get you excited in the morning that you can do better than most others, because we're all different, right? There's things that you're gonna do really well that I'm gonna suck at, vice versa, or like, you know, let's pick the things that you're really good at. So then once once you're there, I think you start testing into ideas. And uh I now before the threshold, right, was like, hey, I can create a PowerPoint. That's no longer a good threshold. I think now is I have a working prototype that's generating revenue. And that sounds like a lot, but it it really isn't in the sense that now with AI you can create a lot of the code that goes into these applications, you can write your own business plan, you can test into it without a lot of money. You could spend $100 on Meta and run some ads and see if you know you could see what leads come and talk to those leads and figure out if they actually have the problem that you're describing. And and when you get to a product, it's a product that's already battle tested, right? That actually you understand it. Because I promise you, it doesn't matter like how much you think about a problem, until that car doesn't hit the road, it it's like a Formula One team, right? Like there's now the Cadillac team. I'm sure they spend a lot of time designing that car, but they're not having a good first season. Because until that car doesn't start running and doesn't start competing with other cars, you're not gonna find the 20 million things that are wrong with it. And so you have to get on the track. You gotta run it.

SPEAKER_01 36:49

Like you gotta run the car, and in your opinion, don't reach out to any don't don't reach out to the Andrezes of the world trying to prove an idea with a PowerPoint and say, one day I will build this.

SPEAKER_00 36:58

Just run the car, run the race. And then hey, if you tell me like, hey, you know what, I I didn't really invest into this, but I, you know, to take the the parallel of the car, like I actually ranked you know eighth in this race. I'm like, oh look, this guy like built the car and ranked eighth without anybody. Then you're willing to say, hey, that's interesting. You know, and and I think that translates into somebody sending me an Instagram message, like, hey, I'm generating $15,000 to $20,000 a month in my business. Um, I don't know how to take it to the next level necessarily, but but hey, I scaled it with it without a dollar to my name. And you know, that's like here's somebody that like, what are you doing? What what are you what have you come up with? Uh, what insight did you come up with? And those are always interesting conversations.

SPEAKER_01 37:34

So let's talk about creativity because one of the things that you guys always did really good with open English was to be very creative in terms of messaging, in terms of communication. You guys were definitely an outlier in the in the messaging. When open English started marketing itself, I was already living in the US. So I didn't have an opportunity in Venezuela to see upon the city.

SPEAKER_00 37:54

We weren't bombarded with our ads.

SPEAKER_01 37:56

Exactly. But Daniel, who works with me and is behind the scenes right now, I said open English. Daniel, what was that? What was the uh phrase that you just told me?

unknown 38:04

Repollo rechicken.

SPEAKER_01 38:05

Yeah. Repollo re chicken, right? I mean, he remembers that commercial and his his 20s. I mean, he says that people will talk about it in schools. So is there is there a playbook, is there a framework for standing out with creativity in your opinion?

SPEAKER_00 38:20

Yeah, it's an interesting story. So we we actually we spent two years developing this platform. We had raised about half a million dollars, and then we launched the thing. And as an entrepreneur, you think that creating the product is like your finish line, like, oh, I finished the product, I'm done, right? And you realize like that's just your ticket to start the marathon right now. So you haven't done it. You've been registered, my friend. Here's the other 10,000 people you're running up against, right? So we had the product, we launched it, nobody came to the party, right? Like nobody would show up. And and it was at a time where there wasn't any meta, actually. So you could how do you how would you drive interest in your business? It was like, you know, Google ads or like maybe banner ads that nobody believed in banner ads. I don't know if you ever bought anything on a banner ad, but like nobody I saw them everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 39:02

I never clicked on them, but never clicked on them, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 39:04

So we so so we said, you know, why don't we actually try to do TV ads? Because hey, at the time at least in Latin America, if you were on cable TV, there wasn't Netflix, there was no Prime, there was no Apple TV. So cable TV at 7 p.m. If you were on like before The Simpsons, like people were gonna see you. If you were on Fox, you were on TNT, you were on these, you were on e-entertainment, those are like big channels at the time, like people were gonna find out about you. And TV is an emotional medium, right? Like you get to see something for 30 seconds that has audio, that has video, that can generate an emotion. A banner ad doesn't do that. So we so we said, okay, perfect, let's you know, just create some TV ads. Of course, you know, A, we didn't have money to run TV ads, right? And B, we had never produced TV ads. So we went and talked to, you know, this is great about the naivete of the time. Uh you're so naive that you don't really like know that this is like not gonna work for you. Which can be a great thing. Which can be a great thing, right? So we went and met with all these TV networks, and they're all looking at us like, Why, you have what? But then one of them uh was just starting out, they're like, you know what? Fine, give us give us a couple ads, we'll run them, and then just give us a Rev share. And we're like, okay, perfect, sure. If we do that.

SPEAKER_01 40:08

Rev share meaning give us a percentage of whatever you make through the ads that we're gonna be placing for.

SPEAKER_00 40:13

And since we didn't really have any other media, we're like, sure, we'll give you like 30% of whatever we make, you know, for three months and just to test this thing, right? Um, and then of course, then we I got I got to the apartment, student apartment that we had, um, the dorm basically, and I was like, hey guys, we gotta produce these TV ads by Friday or whatever. And it was like Tuesday, so we need two ads. So then we basically wrote the scripts ourselves. I acted in the ads myself, that's why people recognized me all over Latin America. And you know, we thought, hey, eventually, like if this thing works, we'll get real actors and we'll do this thing like in a legit way. But uh, but so we did these ads. So the Repollo Rechican it was basically we said, okay, like let's create two characters. One of them is a character that learned English, English with open English, and he's like, you know, under he's comfortable in his skin. That was me. He's bilingual, speaks great English, Spanish. The other is like a proud Latino that like he's just so proud he's learning in a physical learning center, and the guy speaks horrible English and makes all the mistakes that we would we don't want to be in that position, right? Like the there's this moment of fear, right? Of this like getting up in public and speaking English, whether it be you're passing immigration or you're you know in a job interview. So we captured all those like high stress moments, made them funny.

SPEAKER_01 41:22

US embassy standing in line for hours, ready for the officer.

SPEAKER_00 41:26

Whatever it is, right? Or yeah, like having to speak to your to your colleagues in a in a meeting, right? Like all these moments, and then and then this guy, Wachu, was his was his name. You know, Wachu, who was an actor that we knew, a friend of ours, acted in this in the ads. He's he became a super celebrity in Latin America, by the way, you know, he acted, and then he started saying really funny things. So this this one ad, Repollo Re Chicken, was basically, you know, we I we just took a little kitchen table we had, we bought a pollo salo, we bought like a baked but baked chicken, um, and uh and you know, repollo is like cabbage or you know, repollo red chicken. You have to understand Spanish to know why this is. Oh, but it's very clear.

SPEAKER_01 41:59

I mean, you're saying repollo, and that's cabbage, but repollo is red chicken. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 42:03

Exactly. So repollo is like, oh, so repollo means it's red chicken. So, but that in Spanish is very funny, and the way he delivered it was really funny. That became viral before viral was a word because there was no social media at the time. And then we did a bunch of those. There was like maybe then you had to remember.

SPEAKER_01 42:20

That worked, that works.

SPEAKER_00 42:21

So that and we had to remember Éxito and remember Quemal Inglés, and we had all these different ads that were really funny. This is also. Everybody knew them by heart, right? Yeah, and they still to this day, like look, it's been 15 years. We still are one of the top 10 advertisers uh on cable TV and on digital now.

SPEAKER_01 42:39

So you still do TV.

SPEAKER_00 42:39

Oh, yeah, we still do TV. Oh, yeah, but this is like we're one of the top advertisers in 30 markets. So we do so we and whenever I'm like, you know, last night at dinner you get special treatment because you're like sitting here, you know, they're the the the folks in the restaurant were Colombian, and so like they grew up watching the ads, and it's like so. But it's cool being a CEO and being able to go through that because every interaction I have is so high quality. Like, you know, somebody like then yet I can sit down and be like, you know, what was your experience with the ads? Or maybe then you had was a student, and he's gonna tell me his experience with the platform. Maybe his mom or his brother took it, maybe his kids are now taking it. So it's really a nice thing that I think few CEOs can interact as much as I do with potential kids.

SPEAKER_01 43:15

But it's interesting because I mean you you had a massive impact, which is you know, obviously something that that you can speak to, but at the same time, I feel that this says a lot about the small entrepreneur that's only getting started that can not be afraid of being the face of the product. I mean, we're living in the era of the public CEO. You started that era way before the McDonald's CEO took a small bite and went viral because remember that that whole situation, you know, the golden arches, tiny little bite, everybody making fun of it, everybody reacting. And and one of the things that that I even you know teach as part of my consulting is that you have to be willing to put yourself out there and become the face of whatever you're you're building. And it seems to me like you know, 15, 20 years ago, you saw this. Coming and you capitalized on it. There are people that are probably watching us and they're they're thinking, okay, I will, you know, lean into my passion, lean into my talent, lean into my capacity, I will test the idea, I will go into AI, I will admit that I don't need $100,000 to start the idea, and I will try to make a sale, like you just said. You know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna think that Andres will finance and fund my entrepreneurship at some point, and he's told me that I better make $1,000 or $5,000 in in sales. But I feel that the marketing gets overlooked a lot.

SPEAKER_00 44:33

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 44:34

And and I think that there's such a cool opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 44:37

I completely agree. Yeah. And I think people don't think through how I'm gonna sell. So I get pitched on all these ideas about like, look, it's a great product, it's a great need, it's a real, but look, if the unit economics of that business don't work, your business is not gonna work. I mean, and the I I can tell you, many businesses that are not by the way, startups, businesses that are hundred, two hundred million dollars in revenue, when your unit economics don't work, your business doesn't work. Doesn't matter if you have the greatest product Define unit economics. Unit economics is basically that you don't spend when you add how much you spend on marketing per sale, okay, and how much you spend on selling per sale, and how much you spend on servicing your customer per sale. So let's say you sell something that's a thousand dollars, okay? Um let's let's pick a product. Let's say you're you're you're can you mentioned consulting, let's say that consulting uh and um and let's say that you know you you have to advertise, right, to get clients. Let's say that when you divide everything, you say you spent $10,000 on marketing a month, okay? And you got, you know, I don't know, let's say a thousand dollars, just to keep the math easy, and you get ten customers, so you spend a hundred dollars per customer, right, on Meta, right? Okay, so it's a hundred dollars and you sold a thousand dollar consulting. Oh, it's a hundred dollars there. And maybe you had to hire a salesperson to sell that for you. So maybe you had to pay that person another hundred dollars. You better have the commission and then you can't do it. The commission and the cost, right? And then maybe you had to actually hire a couple people to work for you to get the consulting uh going, right? So maybe those people cost you $200. So when you start adding all the costs, right? So you you build a thousand and you add up all your costs. If those costs are more than what you build, I mean that's a very simple concept, those are the unit economics. It's like it's not viable, right? Um and so and sometimes um the timing really matters, right? So let's say that you're selling something that's $299 a month, right? But that you'll never cancel, right? So maybe like in a hundred months, you're gonna have build $299. Maybe your cost of acquisition is $100. So like that works, right? And maybe your let's say your cost of delivery is zero, right? So you can you can net $199 out of that. But if that takes 30 months, you don't have enough money right now to pay the $50 to go acquire the person. Maybe you've you do for one, but if you want to multiply if you want to acquire a thousand people a month, you're not gonna have that that money. Um, so but unit economics are really important. That's the core of any business. And understanding not just the unit economics, but also the cash flow implications of that unit economics and how you float that business as you get that revenue.

SPEAKER_01 47:02

Because you could run out of cash before that's what happened with open English, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 47:05

The reason we raised $150 million, that that was it. We we sold a product that was basically $50 a month. It was a membership to Open English, all you can eat, English classes, live, etc. Um and you know, we it our CAC was about $200, $300, let's say $300. That's your acquisition cost. Acquisition cost and you add up marketing and sales, because you had to go through a call center, all these things. So divide $300 divided by $50, right? That's six. Which means that the first six months of your membership, all that that person is doing is making us even on our cost of acquisition.

SPEAKER_01 47:39

So you need to make sure that people actually last longer on the project.

SPEAKER_00 47:41

Right, by the way, and then you have to service them. Then there's a teaching and the instructions. Maybe that's another whatever, two, three months, whatever. So you didn't really make money till the end of the first year. Then if somebody stays two years, and of course you make money in the second year, that's where you get your profit. But how do you finance that first year, right? Um, and it's I mean, again, you can do it for one customer, like, okay, here's $300 and I get a customer, but now do that for, can you do that for a thousand customers a month? Do you have $300,000? Do you have a for a million customers? Million customers a month. You can't, right? Because you run out of money immediately, right? Uh and so and you're not gonna get that money until the second year. And by the way, if you're growing 100% a year and you're doubling your business year over year, you're just never gonna have enough money. So what we did at Open English is although the unit economics worked because it was a profitable business, the cash flow didn't work. So we actually started selling membered annual memberships instead of monthly memberships. And today, money in advance 85% of our business is up front. So which means that people rather get a discount, but they pay us up front, and that works for them because they get a discount, and it works for us because we can actually, you know, prepay the, we can get that money back from the cost of acquisition, right? So we can line up our cash flow with our spend. So but it's those, it's those things. Though that is the key, you know, there's in this world of AI of exceptional things that are being created, you still have to distribute it, right? You still have to like actually have workable unit economics.

SPEAKER_01 48:59

Yeah, and and it's interesting because I was actually looking today at a CRM, and I should probably look at Scala before I. But you know, the difference between paying monthly versus paying on a yearly basis was very, very significant. I want to wrap up this masterclass with a question that I think it's really important for people listening and watching right now, and that is when do I give up if it's not working? How do I know that it's just not it?

SPEAKER_00 49:26

Yeah, well, that's one of the hardest questions to answer. You know, for me, I am a pivoter at heart, so I've always pivoted to find the next opportunity, and I always seem to find a way to create value in that pivot. Pivoting, by the way, doesn't mean you're like jumping to something completely different. It means you're kind of leaving one foot on the ground and moving the other, right? You're finding an adjacency and trying to somehow use what you already have to find value. Um let me give you a quick example of what pivoting means. So at Escala, right, you mentioned Escala. Um, you know, Escala started, um, raised a good amount of money, the software is you know terrific, and uh, we were helping thousands of small and medium-sized businesses across the region, you know, scale their marketing and sales uh marketing and sales funnels. Uh but then you know the economics were tough because again, we had this challenge where people were not, if you sign up for a monthly membership, right? You're not, we would make money maybe the second year, but during the first year you would have to raise so much money to actually scale this thing. So we decided actually to verticalize Escala to fit specific industries. So the first industry that we decided to scale was was insurance. So we actually partner with the largest insurance company in Latin America with Suda, and we have verticalized an agentec platform now just for that, a specific customer, insurance agents. And we have just customized it to perfection, right? Where you walk in and tells you, Alberto, here are the five policies that you have to sell and renew, and this is what you do. So it's not like a CRM where you just store things, it's actually an agent that's helping you run your business, and it's customized, right, for the workflows for the insurance agent. The the magic of having such a specific product that really works is that then if you're an insurance agent anywhere in Latin America, people are gonna know that this is a better solution, right? So it's gonna be easier for you to market and sell to that to that vertical than not. Um but again, that was a that was a very important pivot because we could have continued being a horizontal, right, uh CRM. We decided to verticalize it to put AI agents. And and in doing that, because I don't know if you under just to sort of explain the magnitude, we went from the SaaS pocalypse, and maybe you've heard about this, right? Like every SaaS company is worthless all of a sudden.

SPEAKER_01 51:40

We're talking about software as a service.

SPEAKER_00 51:42

Yeah, software as a service, right? These are these are companies that were worth so much money, you know, three months ago, and then if you were you know trading them in the public markets, they were the most valuable companies in the world. And then Salesforce and all of a sudden the SaaS apocalypse happens, somebody realized, like, oh, AI has come in, these companies are worthless because you can just vive code a lot of these systems. Um, but if you actually verticalized it and you created an AI agent on top of it, that's actually really hard to disrupt because you're building in a in a system that's closed, you have specific workflows for insurance that are hard to copy. So, anyway, so we pivoted and we found value in that. And that actually made for we created a ton of enterprise value doing that. So I think you know, you by pivoting and being very thoughtful about your pivots, I think there's a lot you can accomplish. Having said all that, there is a time when you just have to, you know, just wave the white flag and and and it's enough. And you I think I think you'll know. I think there are and and and just to be clear, this isn't at the first uh at the first sign of uh of a challenge of failure, right? Because I think I want to make this very clear. Like being an entrepreneur is committing to climb the Mount Everest. And if you and I were to climb Mount Everest, what should our expectations be? Well, our expectations should be that your toes are gonna freeze off. You may come back with nine toes, and that's normal, you know. Like, you know, you may, you may, you know, you may run out of oxygen, you may feel free. You may feel horrible, you know. You may and uh and we still may make it to the top despite all those things and come back, but it won't be, we'll come back with nine toes, right? And that's okay. But that's the expectation. So it's not like, oh, my toe fell off like I can't make it. No, you're you can make it. But there are moments in that in that climb where you have to be smart and say, you know what? I just can't make it. If I if I keep going another thousand meters, like I will die, I'm not gonna make it down, or hey, there's a storm coming, and this storm is gonna freeze us and we're gonna die up here. And you have to be smart and you know what how to know, like if you should keep climbing or should come down. I think every climber needs to know and every entrepreneur needs to know. But uh again, it's not at the first sign of challenges, but it's when you think that the overwhelming odds are against you.

SPEAKER_01 53:47

And there's always the opportunity to pivot, as you well said. So we always wrap it up on this podcast with a question that has to do with visualizing for a moment. And we're going to imagine that we are at 100 years from now, we're going to assume that Google still exists, that they made it through the whole AI challenge, and that somebody Googles Andres Moreno. What would you like those top search results to say about you?

SPEAKER_00 54:10

That's a good question. Well, it's in a hundred years, right? And and a hundred years means I'm 43 right now, so hopefully I'm still alive, by the way. Longebo work. Um and uh and you know, we may very well be alive, which would be exciting that we can extend our life and see more of this, you know, exciting future, for better or for worse, right? And look, I I think even if you even if you ask me that question today, uh, if I get run over by a car leaving the studio, uh hopefully what people would say is that we built companies that, yeah, they were good companies, but they also added value and they had purpose. And if you look at what connects all the different businesses that I've started, you know, hey, if you learn English with open English, you can create new opportunities for yourself or your family, you can get ahead in the world. Uh I started Next University that was, you know, in open English for digital skills that open English acquired a few years ago. That was giving somebody a whole new career. Like you could go from Uber driver to a digital web developer, for example. Escala is helping you know small and medium-sized businesses grow and scalably grow, things that you wouldn't be able to do unless you were a big company. Longevo is helping you stay fit and healthy and not fall into chronic disease. So in different fields, right, education and entrepreneurship and health, you know, the idea is that you can do good, right, as you build as you build companies and uh and hopefully that impact, which now, as you said, hey, it's three million students at open English, you know, two million people now just in Costa Rica. Longevo is now gonna launch with the whole government itself, and that's gonna be four million users. You know, so these things I think are the ones that I think at the end of the day matter the most.

SPEAKER_01 55:40

Andres, I want to thank you for for joining us, but also I want to thank you for bringing entrepreneurship to everyone, because I really believe that the same way in which you brought English to so many people and to millions of users through your uh one of your first uh endeavors, I think that in this conversation you have shown everyone how entrepreneurship is possible, how we all have it a lot easier than you had it when you started. And and I love the concept of pivoting. And I feel that a lot of us give up because we see that first challenge, that first uh negative response, and and the fact that you have pivoted so many times within the realm of things that you dominate, the things that you know about, and that you really like investing your time into, just tells us that there's always an opportunity for successful entrepreneurship to enjoy the road and to realize that that when you pivot, you continue, and when you have good systems, you can definitely make anything happen in your life.

SPEAKER_00 56:41

And by the way, Alberto, you know what's interesting is that if you pivot, pivot, pivot, eventually you may catch some wind in your sales. Um like things that you wouldn't think possible. For example, open English, as I remember, going through a tough, challenging time. Like something that was so negative, like COVID actually helped it because you know we didn't we wouldn't have the business doubled over COVID because there was such a demand for digital services. Or all of a sudden, you know, AI comes along, and you know, Escala and other businesses now can, or even Open English now can create a digital AI agent that helps the teacher teach English and we can scale to two million people in Costa Rica. Like these things come along, and so challenges come along, but also opportunities come along. You just have to, you know, live long enough to see them through.

SPEAKER_01 57:19

Absolutely, and I appreciate the opportunity of having had you here. Appreciate the opportunity of having a few years.

SPEAKER_00 57:24

And I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for that. Thank you for the Reddit and great work taking these uh conversations for everyone in English.

SPEAKER_01 57:29

Thank you. We put very serious work into every guest, every question, every episode, and we give it all for free. Now, one thing keeps the show alive, and it's you subscribing. It takes two seconds, it costs you nothing, and it's the only reason we get to communicate.