This is part 3 of a series of wild stories about building companies where trust is scarce. Part 1 covered Russia, part 2 covered a country that shall remain nameless. This one is about Bogotá, Colombia.
I was flying through traffic riding shotgun with one of my students. His father was a high-ranking officer in the Colombian military, which meant he drove an official military vehicle. It had lights, the kind that flash blue and tell everyone on the road to clear a path. They exist for emergencies. His emergency was getting us to lunch through rush hour traffic. So we ran the lights, weaving past everyone obeying the rules.
Lunch was great because of the juice—fruit juice in Colombia is absurdly good, wayyy better than what you get at Whole Foods for 15 bucks—and the conversation. The students were finally opening up to me. I had arrived in Bogotá two days earlier to run an entrepreneurship program. It had gotten off to a rough start. The university, known as the Yale of Colombia, had proudly told me how strong their students’ English was. An hour into the first lecture and I’d gotten zero discussion out of them. It finally clicked that they were not understanding a damn thing. That night I stayed up simplifying my slides, shoring up my spanish, and reminding myself to speak more slowly.
Those fixes took hold, and now they liked me enough to invite me to lunch. As we left the restaurant, Santiago, one of the quieter students, pulled me aside. Professor Houser, he said, this class isn’t really working for me.
I asked what he meant.
Honestly? I don’t see the point, he said. Why would I start anything?
I went into my usual spiel about how bringing a business idea to life is one of the most noble things you can do. About how the entrepreneurial path changes the trajectory of your life and opens up doors you didn’t even know existed. And why get a job you hate when you create your own job that you love?
“Santiago, does that not light you up? Does that—”
He cut me off. Man, you don’t know how things are down here. Look at the Colombian peso. Look at our institutions. Why would you build anything if everything around you keeps breaking? You don’t know if anything’s going to still be standing in five years.
I didn’t have a good answer, and part of the reason was the ride we’d just taken. We’d spent lunch getting driven through traffic by a kid using government power as a personal convenience.
The whole point of starting a company is to compound, to take risk now for an asset later that’s worth more than the risk. If you believe the asset could dissolve at any moment, the math breaks before you even start. If nothing you build can hold its value, why would you build anything at all? Effort stops being an investment and starts being a liability.
Santiago was nineteen, sharp, at the best university in his country, exactly the person an economy needs to start things. A big part of my work is lighting people up. After fifteen years of helping founders achieve big things, I always know what to say and when to say it. This was one of the first times I had nothing.
If I had the chance to chat with Santiago today, I’d tell him that building things is not about what you build. It’s about people—who you build with and who you build for. From this perspective, building things creates a byproduct: relationships. And relationships tend to be where your opportunities come from, no matter the state of your country or your company.
