The tech entrepreneur's journey: lessons, failures, and resilience

Introduction

Tech entrepreneurship isn’t just about writing code or designing products. It’s a comprehensive journey that touches every aspect of your life: your mind, your relationships, your worldview. In this Aztecknology episode, Victor Rojas (CEO) and Jesús García (Chuy, Product Owner and Frontend Lead) share the hardest and most valuable lessons they’ve learned building tech products since 2017.

The team and their roles

Víctor Rojas leads from the technical side with an international background (worked on-site in two countries) and focuses on “making things happen” - executing, testing, iterating until it works. His approach: imagine things and make them real.

Jesús García (Chuy) came from a completely different world: Animation and Digital Art, visual effects for commercials and films. Four years ago, he made the complete jump to software development. Today, he’s the bridge between clients and product, translating business needs into real user experiences.

A key point they share: we are developers before entrepreneurs, before marketers. This has enormous advantages (cheap development, ability to test quickly) and equally large disadvantages (lack of focus on sales and marketing).

The true meaning of failure

One of the episode’s most powerful reflections:

“Failure is the currency you must pay to reach success. Failure doesn’t exist as a concept separate from success - they’re sides of the same coin.”

The paths analogy: Imagine you have a clear vision of where you want to go (your success). There are thousands of possible paths, but only 5-10% actually lead you to that destination. Since you don’t have complete information about the socioeconomic environment, the market, your team, you have to constantly test paths.

Each path that doesn’t work is what we call “failure,” but it’s not a real failure - it’s the price of not having complete information. It’s inevitable. It’s necessary.

The real objective of an entrepreneur

It’s not to avoid failure. It’s to:

Learn to jump between paths quickly and efficiently
Generate learning from each attempt
Reduce impact and accelerate the process

As Chuy says: “I stopped seeing things as failure. It’s the method, the moment you needed to learn to achieve something.”

Speed vs quality: there’s no right answer

One of the eternal startup debates: launch fast or wait for quality?

The uncomfortable truth: It depends completely on:

Your team’s characteristics
What you can do internally vs hire out
The type of product you’re building
Your access to resources

For Aztecknology, having a strong technical team means:

Development that would cost others $2 million costs them $100k
Ability to test multiple ideas in parallel
Incomparable iteration speed

But it also means:

Less initial focus on sales and marketing
Need to balance with commercial profiles

The danger of dogmas

Victor is blunt about this:

“It really bothers me when people come and say ‘you’re doing it wrong’. Shut up - you don’t have three products like this, a strong development team, you don’t have this. Development costs you $2 million, it costs us $100k with better quality.”

There’s no universal right path. Each entrepreneur must:

Know their real strengths
Bet on what they have
Trust their plan (while remaining adaptable)
Seek to complement their weaknesses

The entrepreneur’s toolbox

1. Document obsessively

Victor: “Write down EVERYTHING. In university I took notes and never read them again. But now that information is invaluable.”

Today they use:

Slack for communication (everything indexed)
Notion for documentation
Linear for project management
AI to index and search across all systems at once

Why is it critical? Because when you’re planning a new campaign, validating a hypothesis, or remembering what you’ve already tested, that information is pure gold.

2. Reduce, reduce, reduce

“A bootstrapped entrepreneur tries to reduce everything: risk, spending, communication gaps. You have to reduce everything… but maximize tests.”

The entrepreneur’s paradox:

Reduce spending on what’s not critical (zero outings, zero unnecessary licenses)
Invest aggressively in testing and iterating
The money you save from one side goes to the other

3. Change your environment if necessary

Chuy had a radical change: from 3D artist to full-time developer, from creating visual effects to leading product and clients.

Victor quotes a phrase that marked him: “Change cities, change jobs, change whatever, but get uncomfortable. That’s how you can grow.”

The CRITICAL importance of team

If Victor could change one thing from the past, it would be only one thing: the team.

Warning signs

People on the team who fought for:

Leaving the office early
“My personal time can’t be touched”
“My social security hours”
Rigid work rules

“A startup requires different things. It’s: let’s test this, let’s validate that. There can’t be as many rules as in traditional companies.”

The complete environment

It’s not just your work team. It’s:

Your family
Your partner
Your friends
Your social circle

Everyone must respect and understand what entrepreneurship means. If they don’t understand, they’ll drag you down with their limiting ideas.

As Chuy says: “Tell me who you hang out with and I’ll tell you who you are. Surround yourself with an environment where people really have the same mindset seeking similar things - you’ll always, always go further.”

If you can’t find the right team

The difficult but honest recommendation:

Stay alone rather than in bad company
Consume content that sustains you mentally (podcasts, conferences, books)
Seek online community if you don’t have it physically
Hire with clear expectations: if you know someone won’t give you 100%, that’s okay, but adjust your expectations

Victor shares that he had to cut many relationships. It was painful, but it was “one of the best things that could have happened” because those relationships didn’t allow the necessary growth.

Vision: your anchor in the storm

Both agree: you need a clear vision. Not to follow it dogmatically, but to have a north when everything is chaos.

Vision is complex

Victor explains it with a powerful analogy:

“Vision is like a 3D sculpture. From one angle with certain light, you see one shadow. From another angle with the same light, you see a completely different shadow. That’s vision - it touches your personal future, how you contribute to the community, the freedom you want to have.”

There’s no way to express your vision in words 100%. But you feel it. You know it. And depending on the question, you’ll answer from different angles of that complex vision.

Vision + Resilience

This is the critical combination:

Vision: Anchors you to something future, gives you direction
Resilience: Allows you to try multiple paths until you arrive

Without vision, you don’t know where you’re going. Without resilience, you give up at the first “failure”.

The experiment analogy: They threw 200 golf balls randomly at a hole - none went in. But one person trying one by one eventually made it. The difference is having a clear objective and persisting with method.

Entrepreneurship is a lifestyle

This phrase sums it all up:

“Entrepreneurship isn’t just business, it’s not just your own time. It’s something complete: even your mind, even your way of relating and your circles.”

Mental care

Chuy emphasizes something crucial that many ignore:

“The greatest exhaustion is mental. Working on your mind, going to a psychologist even when you feel you don’t need it, continuing to discover yourself - it’s super important.”

Burnouts in entrepreneurship are horrible because they’re not just work-related. They touch everything: your identity, your relationships, your purpose.

Both actively recommend psychological therapy, not as crisis response, but as preventive maintenance of your most important tool: your mind.

The balance between reality and vision

Today Aztecknology continues “bootstrapping” - doing consulting to survive while building their products (Nei Digital and XGuardia). Is it ideal? No. Is it their reality? Yes.

The lesson: We don’t all start from the same conditions.

When they met a founder who said “I would never invest in someone who doesn’t dedicate 100% to their startup,” they had to challenge that idea:

“How can I dedicate 100% if I can’t eat? If I don’t get money from somewhere else while I gain traction, how would I dedicate 100%? How would you invest in me then?”

It’s easy to say “dedicate 100%” when:

You already have investment
You have savings
You have a safety net

But the reality for many entrepreneurs is different. And that’s okay. What matters is:

Being honest about your situation
Optimizing within your constraints
Finding the balance that allows you to survive and advance
Not comparing yourself to paths different from yours

Conclusion: The double merit

Victor closes with this:

“Some people say that solo entrepreneurship has double merit: one for the simple fact of entrepreneurship, and another because you did it alone, without mentors, without support, without anything.”

The tech entrepreneur’s path has no shortcuts. It requires:

Mental resilience to bear the weight
Clear vision to not get lost
Right team or the strength to be alone
Ability to learn from each “failure”
Honesty about your strengths and weaknesses
Flexibility to change paths quickly

And above all: acceptance that failure is inevitable, necessary, and valuable.

Are you prepared to pay that price?

This episode is part of Aztecknology’s “Code with North” series, where we share unfiltered the real battles of building tech products from scratch.