Big businessmen say that undertaking is like getting on a roller coaster. The history of Victoria Suárez proves it.
In five years, the current CEO of Codiversity went from feeling on top of the world to barely being able to speak in meetings and suffering from imposter syndrome, and now she finds herself trying again in a new venture that aims to be the platform for leading labor restructuring in Latin America. Behind this objective, Codiversity is already closing its seed round (seed) that will allow it to finance its expansion and already has the support of impact angel investor Virginia Suárez. But the history of the businesswoman as an entrepreneur goes back to neither more nor less than her childhood.
“As a child, I used to pretend that I had my own company,” Suárez confesses, who set up offices with keyboards and mice discarded by adults, while selling drawings of her own authorship.
Over the years, these passions were reflected in his present. Having painting as a hobby, he dedicated himself to entrepreneurship and his first formal experience came with the strength of countless press articles, mentions on the radio and television appearances, it was ReservaTelo, an application created in 2016 by three women –among them, Suárez– that made it possible to reserve rooms in hotels with high turnover.
The idea was all the rage in the media, and it left him a long list of lessons: “Sometimes I went into meetings and I didn’t understand the words of the things they said to me and I wrote them down so that when I left, I could investigate and study,” he says. . In turn, they had some unexpected mishaps such as not being supported by a technical team or making themselves known very early. “We became very visible and before we launched, competition began to come out,” she points out, so this visibility without having the finished product yet hurt them.
However, the idea turned out and even escalated towards the regionalization of the application, but Victoria Suárez preferred to leave ReservaTelo behind at the end of 2016. “I arranged my departure, sold my part and connected with my purpose,” he describes.
It was precisely in the Global Entrepreneurship Summer of 2016 that the young woman had the opportunity to travel to Silicon Valley, meet the then President of the United States, Barack Obama, and the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg. “On that trip I came up with the idea for my second startup, Sparkids, which I merged with.”
feel like an impostor
With the Sparkids platform, Suárez aimed to accompany children with high abilities. However, the undertaking did not work and left wounds that were difficult to heal. “We had a timing issue, basically we arrived very early on the market, we wanted to promote education through games and artificial intelligence, but it was 2017, we had not yet had a pandemic that accelerated all the technological processes related to education”, recognizes Suárez with the perspective that gives the passage of time and the wisdom of having gone through failure learning from it.
“It was very difficult for me to realize (that it wasn’t working), I became obsessed with it,” says the businesswoman while acknowledging that several investors warned her that despite being a good project, it was not the right time to carry it out. “A mentor once told me: ‘It’s as terrible to arrive early as it is to arrive late and that’s when I realized that I had arrived early,'” recalls Suárez, who had already invested all the money from his departure from ReservaTelo and more in the second company. of the. “I melted. I had to put my arms back and go back to my parents’ house. I put my entire apartment in my parents’ garage and I went with my son to start from scratch, ”she recalls, and although that sore has already healed, the lessons learned at that time were marked on her by fire.
“It was very difficult for me, I had experienced all the success of ReservaTelo and Silicon Valley, and suddenly I had no money to pay for my son’s school.” Asking for help from her family and friends also brought her back to reality. “After that I felt like an impostor,” Suárez says. It is that the impostor syndrome took its toll on her and caused her to not even be able to speak naturally in meetings as she did before her –and does today– or that she had to spend an hour looking at an email before to send it.
Recovering from failure took time and forced her to act against her own instincts. “Your instinct says keep yourself, protect yourself and don’t go out because you are a failure.” She until one day she decided that she had to get out of that sad (dis) comfort zone in order to escape from the emotional and financial pit. “Many times we don’t know what are the instruments we have to cope with those moments as an entrepreneur, there is a matter of access to financing and financial education”, she analyzes in retrospect.
The businesswoman needed to get out of the local ecosystem. That is why she accepted the recommendation of her friend, and also an entrepreneur, Carolina Bañales to go to work in Buenos Aires. “I exchanged the miles for the ticket, I really didn’t have the money to pay for a ticket to Buenos Aires,” she recalls. In addition, in the financial agreement for this new job, Suárez did not provide for her accommodation, which led her to not having a place to stay during her early days on the other side of the pond. “I was very ashamed, if I couldn’t speak in meetings, I was much less encouraged to tell my referent that I had made a mistake when negotiating.”
It was at that moment that he remembered his trip to Stanford in 2016 in which he turned to the couchsurfing to cover a few days of your stay. This experience platform for travelers offers accommodation to those looking for a place to sleep. I wrote through couchsurfing because I couldn’t really afford the accommodation and I ended up with one of the founders of Wolox” who answered his request in a few minutes. She wrote him a letter telling her story as an entrepreneur and the businessman and her partners received it and also ended up offering her a job at the technology company. “I led the education area of that company for two years.”
After the pandemic, the businesswoman stopped working at Wolox and, after a few interviews in the corporate world, she realized that she was ready to resume her passion for entrepreneurship. “The first times I started a business, I was obsessed with it and time was running out on that, now I live it with a different balance,” Suárez says that she knew how to create support networks with family and friends to experience the venture in a different way.
With this new mentality, Codiversity was born in 2020 as a software factory for the development of digital products for clients. Although in the beginning they had also worked on the development of services, they finally decided on a product that would allow company employees to be trained in a personalized way in digital and social skills, with emphasis also on socio-labour training for people in situations of vulnerability.
This venture was validated, and Victoria Suárez, along with her partners, are thinking about their internationalization as they are in the middle of raising their first seed capital. Codiversity is already in Uruguay and Argentina, and its next steps for 2023 are to bet on expansion through the landing of its product in Mexico and Colombia.
Now, the Uruguayan entrepreneurial ecosystem once again has Victoria Suárez as one of its brand new representatives and, in her vision, it is a more than opportune moment for more entrepreneurs –especially women– to dare to take the same step: “I advise that They are encouraged to undertake, to say that they want to be businesswomen, and that they are encouraged to talk about money”. “It must be said that I have the right to be where I deserve to be,” she says, encouraging more and more women to get involved in the business world, to which she added the importance of forming diverse teams in new companies “to that the products we generate are really for everyone”.
