Jeffery: Okay we’ll get started right away. we’re right into this. So let’s make it happen. so welcome to the Supporters Fund Ask An Angel. i’m your host, Jeffery Potvin and let’s welcome our investor for today which is Daniel Marcos. Welcome.
Daniel: Hey, how are you, Joffrey?
Jeffery: happy. very good. Thank you very much for joining us today. Well, I’m going to say that I’m pretty excited about our conversation. I know we’ve chatted in the past but the reason I’m excited is because, man, you’ve got a lot of great content that you’ve put out and I think we could actually talk for days, maybe even weeks on how much stuff you’ve done. all the great content that you have out there. And I know we’re gonna talk about something that’s probably really special and dear to your heart that you’re getting ready to launch, which is your book and all this time is kind of pent up for this excitement. but before we dive into that, why don’t we start off by, if you could share a little bit about yourself, kind of some of your past. all the way from your mba to the companies that you’ve worked in. just a little bit of a touch point on it and then we’ll drive in a few other things after that. but while you’re talking about your history, can you also share one thing about you that nobody would know?
Daniel: So I’ll start with that. So, recently there’s a race called the world toughest race, the eco challenge. So I participated in the first eco challenge 1996 British Columbia and I was disqualified from the race because one of my team members broke a rule. and Let me just tell the backstory because it’s important. The guy, the producer of the series, is called Mark Brunell, australian producer. He produced trump: the apprentice and he’s the one that came with your fire thing with trump. so i was fired by him like three years before the apprentice or four years before the apprentice in national tv.
Jeffery: That’s awesome. That’s very unique. That’s pretty cool.
Daniel: if you go to the discovery channel or on youtube, you can see when I was fired.
Jeffery: Well I’m sure there was a lot of good learning from that and I will look that up. I did see him speak at a conference back in 2005. he came to toronto and did a big talk and it was pretty fascinating. He is a brilliant producer.
Daniel: Yes, he’s very, very good. pretty amazing.
Jeffery: Well, let’s circle back. so maybe we can share a little bit again about your past because it’s pretty exciting on the things you’ve done but at least touch base on some from the schooling all the way through because you’ve done a lot of great things. So I worked for three or four small companies when I was a kid. indeed my first one when i was like eight or nine. I built an aquarium, and broke my parents’ garage in half and half of it was an aquarium, half of it was storage. So I started pretty early because I realized very early the difference between being an entrepreneur, a business owner, and an employee. Let me tell you a quick story because it’s really important. one day i was in christmas with all my cousins and nephews and we’re all together in a ranch in san benito texas of an uncle and christmas morning like 9 10 a.m. we’re opening the presents and having all the fun and i see my father coming out of the room dressed in a suit and i was like, why are you dressing the suit? and said, well i got called by my boss and they need to go to work and then he had to fly to mexico city. and i was like what do you mean you have to go to work, it’s Christmas. i said, well there’s this emergency my father was a high government official at that moment. Mexico had that evaluation and it got tough so he had to fly back and I remember I was crying and having a tough time with my mom. i was probably seven or eight and i told my mom, hey why my father has to go and all my uncles are here? and my mom said, well your uncles are entrepreneurs. they’re business owners and they have their own time and rules. your father has a boss that has to go back and i was like, what do you mean like for me, all that’s going to work right? That was it. No, it was very different and that was the first time I understood. So I started doing companies and it was a disaster because I did not have any discipline. And then during college, I did four and a half year college in Mexico and after a year and a half, I wanted to start another company. and my father was worried that I was going to be losing track. so he called my older brother and said, hey get your little brother a job if not he’s gonna open the company. it’s gonna be bad. So my brother helped me get a job in a brokerage house and I worked three years in the brokerage house and the issue of having to go to a desk every day and help me with my homework and all that did bearing on college. but i had three years of trading experience, i was on the desk trading stocks all morning for three years. So by the time I finished college, I had a huge experience of understanding how the world moved in stocks and IPOs and all these kinds of things and it really gave me a huge view on understanding companies even before I left college and not just putting roofs or working in the restaurant. I was really into analyst calls and doing analysis of balance sheets and stuff so after that, I got a job in the Mexican consulate in Hong Kong as a financial attache. in exactly that year, Hong Kong was going from England to China and I was there to do the liaison between the Mexican and Chinese governments as part of that. So I lived in Hong Kong for a couple of years and one day, I was done. I said dad, I called my parents.. Hey just to let you know, I just got assigned to my job and I was probably 24. I was making like five to six thousand dollars after taxes in Hong Kong .So living alone, I was making a good income on that and I told my parents. i just resigned and they were like, what do you think you just resigned? i’m going back and i went back indeed. I went back to my parent’s house and started my first company and I knew back then it was stocks. That’s what I knew the best and at that moment e-trade was already a huge boom in the u.s. so i said, hey i’m going to bring it right to mexico and i tried to bring it to mexico and i got a meeting with their business development guy in the u.s. in new york and the guy said, hey, Mexico, it’s on the list but it’s got it’s country number 30. so we’re going to open Mexico in 10 years, not today. Then I went back to Mexico and tried to get a brokerage license to have my own brokerage house. At that moment, all brokerage licenses were national and there were like 14 or 15 in the whole country. and they said you’re 24 years old. you’re never going to get a brokerage license. So I said okay, what can I do ? This was a discussion with my father and a friend. What can I do with my resources and my knowledge? So when e-trade wanted to come to Mexico, they needed to acquire me and the solution was they needed two things, a group of employees or a team that could run that. and by the way, imagine in mexico in 1999, who could program stock trading and platforms like that in mexico online? no one there had experience of that. and the second is a group of potential clients that want to buy and sell stocks online. So we built that and very soon after, we built it, less than a year later, we sold it to an argentinian company. and the argentinian company had gone to jpmorgan new york saying, hey, want to be the leaders in latin America? help us raise all this really big round. and jp morgan said, if you don’t have Mexico in Brazil, you don’t have anything in Latin America. Mexico and Brazil are really big economies compared to the rest of the countries. so JP Morgan said bring me operations in Mexico and Brazil, and we’ll help you raise a big round of financing. so he acquired me, the best entrepreneur in brazil. Next week, we flew to New York and said, okay he had Argentina and Venezuela. this guy had brazil. I went to Mexico. altogether now let’s raise the financing. We raised 53 million dollars from Goldman, JP, Telmix, Intel and Microsoft. amazing investors. Raised 53. and we took the company in eight months from 100 employees that we were at that time to 1200 employees in nine countries. We opened three banks, seven brokerage houses and off to the races. so i saw a really big scale at a very young age indeed. I left after we even sold it to Santander for 705 million dollars and I stayed working for them for two years. So when I was like 28 or 29, I left and went to do my MBA because I thought I needed to go back to school and learn the real stuff. but, by the way, that will be a different story. But when I was in my 20s, we were able to see how to scale a company to a valuation of 700,000. so say a hundred million dollars. so it was a great view on how to scale companies fast. and all the drama that it creates. like i was working 18 hours a day for like three years. It was really tough. and all the issues that it creates with your team, with your partner, your kids and everything around. So, that’s kind of where I learned my MBA in Bobson. Before that, I took like a year and a half off and I traveled the world. I went to Australia for six months and just ran the world ticket and then landed in Bobson with my MBA. I really wanted to hav