Practical SaaS founders can win big without betting the farm, losing their health or family, or playing the all-or-nothing VC funding game.
This is possible around the world, not just in the US or in the biggest cities.
Bernardo Carvalho Wertheim is a worldly entrepreneur who grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and then moved to the UK to go to school and start his career in advertising.
He kept traveling and eventually settled in Santiago, Chile, where he started a tech startup and participated in a tech accelerator.
Bernie could move somewhere in the world, find work, plug into the local network, and figure out how to live there. That sounds pretty crazy to most of us.
He used his immigration and networking skills to start QiBit, a community and jobs platform connecting UX designers in Latin America to work at startups and agencies worldwide.
They expanded the services offerings and eventually grew to $10 million in revenue by helping to employ hundreds of high-skilled remote digital-creative professionals.
In 2023, The Bridge was acquired by Gi Group, a large Italian HR services conglomerate that wanted to expand its footprint in Latin America.
As he explained in this week’s Practical Founders Podcast interview, it was a crazy ride, but he was very practical about many things, including:
- Not quitting his day job until The Bridge had 10 employees
- Choosing not to raise big VC funding
- Living frugally and running the business profitably
- Staying focused on specific customers, problems, and regions
- Including some services if his customers needed it
- Selling the company for a practical valuation to the right partner
Bernie’s crazy adventure with The Bridge is an exciting story built on a lot of unsexy hard work and practical entrepreneurship.
Practical founders have our “crazy” founder side. We do things normal people don’t do.
But we also have a reasonable and practical side too. It’s not all crazy.
Practical Founder = Reasonably Crazy.
This reasonable-crazy dichotomy defines the successful practical founder.
You can hear Bernie’s practical success story here:
#practicalfounders
