He Raised $70 Million For His Furniture as a Service Company And Has Now Bootstrapped An AI-Driven Platform To Streamline IT Asset Management

Carlos N. Escutia’s entrepreneurial journey is an exciting story of experiences drawn from diverse roles across countries, industries, and business models. It is a fine example of adaptability, resilience, and strategic thinking.

Carlos grew up in a family of entrepreneurs and went on to make his mark in investment banking, co-founding one of Latin America’s largest green banks. In this exclusive interview, he talks about navigating the challenges of building a global tech startup,

Carlos also highlights bootstrapping his company, achieving the ideal product-market fit, raising funding from VCs, building a fully remote team, and adapting to the rapid changes in the market.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

A Legacy of Entrepreneurship

Carlos was born into a family deeply entrenched in the world of business, with roots in both the United States and Mexico. His father’s entrepreneurial endeavors in the textile industry provided Carlos with a front-row seat to the complexities of building a business and problem-solving

The experience was formative, exposing him to the highs and lows of entrepreneurship from a young age—Carlos’ family-owned manufacturing facilities in Mexico. When the Asian markets entered Latin America and caused prices to plummet, they opted for a strategic pivot.

They transitioned from manufacturing to trading, establishing new relationships in China to stay competitive. This early lesson in adaptability would prove invaluable throughout Carlos’ career.

The Wall Street Years: A Lesson in Complexity and Opportunity

After earning his MBA from NYU, Carlos stepped into the high-stakes world of investment banking in New York. Working with Fortune 500 companies, he was introduced to the intricate challenges of data security, complex processes, and large-scale problem-solving.

Carlos’ time on Wall Street honed his ability to recognize business success and failure patterns, teaching him that every company, regardless of size, business model, growth stage, and market share, faces its own evolving challenges. That factor also holds for publicly traded companies.

This experience broadened his perspective, showing him the vast opportunities across different markets and industries. Carlos realized that you simply need to be able to figure things out and work with people who have that mindset of problem-solving

Returning to Mexico: The Venture Fund and a Springboard to Entrepreneurship

Carlos’s journey took a significant turn when he returned to Mexico to help launch a corporate venture fund in Mexico City. This role allowed him to merge the financial expertise he had learned from working in an investment bank with his entrepreneurial experience.

Immersed in Mexico’s startup ecosystem, Carlos realized his true passion lay in building something from the ground up. He enjoyed being at the hub of things with a bunch of entrepreneurs looking to solve interesting problems.

This epiphany led Carlos to partner with a few people of Chilean origin to co-found Banverde, one of Latin America’s largest green banks, focused on providing financing solutions for large, renewable energy projects.

Banverde was a direct response to the need for financial infrastructure in the region’s emerging green energy market, particularly for small businesses looking to transition to solar power. Carlos saw that Mexico is unlike countries like the US, where financing and tax credits are readily available.

He recognized the opportunity to make an impact and help in that transition. That’s how Carlos launched the firm, raised some capital, and started providing funding to small businesses to install solar panels and help them lower their energy costs.

This way, the companies could accelerate their transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

The Roller Coaster of CasaOne: Scaling Fast and Pivoting in a Pandemic

Carlos’s entrepreneurial journey continued with his return to the United States to co-found CasaOne, a furniture rental platform catering to the short-term hospitality industry. The company grew rapidly, raising nearly $70 million in venture capital and serving major clients like Airbnb.

Carlos also served as head of operations for CasaOne and raised capital from Accel, Freestyle Capital, and other well-known investors. Soon, the company was furnishing entire buildings all over the US and scaling quickly.

The objective was to provide a SaaS-like solution for furniture. Instead of customers spending on furniture, particularly for short-term rentals, they could turn it into an operating expense by leasing it from CasaOne with a tech platform.

However, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic brought the hospitality industry to a standstill, forcing CasaOne and its competitors to pivot or shut down. Since the hospitality industry was its largest customer, the company found revenues dropping and hitting a wall.

The pandemic underscored the vulnerability of fast-scaling startups dependent on a single industry, a hard-learned lesson that would influence Carlos’s approach in future ventures. Another challenge Carlos faced was managing the workforce.

CasaOne had been hiring remote employees outside the Bay Area, San Francisco, and India. He had to work out how to continue operating when the key members were not in office. He also had to figure out how to take care of them and ensure that the company was up and running.

Carlos realized that many companies were doing the same–hiring remote workers from Asia, LatAm, and Europe since it was more cost-effective. The pandemic accelerated growth in remote and distributed work from years to months.

Everyone had to figure out how to work from home, deal with IT complexity, and manage, maintain, and deliver equipment.

GroWrk: A Strategic Pivot and a Sustainable Approach

Drawing from his experiences with CasaOne, Carlos founded GroWrk, an IT lifecycle asset management platform designed for the modern, distributed workforce. It caters to companies of all sizes–from startups to publicly traded companies with thousands of employees globally.

GroWrk helps companies automate everything from IT equipment procurement to delivering these devices and assets to their employees or contractors anywhere in the world in over 150 countries. It serves a growing need as more companies are going global.

GroWrk provides AI-powered 24/7 help and support, logistics solutions, retrieving, delivering, and storing devices, and managing end-of-life. All these services are available at the touch of a button through the GroWrk platform.

Unlike his previous ventures, Carlos took a more conservative approach to scaling GroWrk, focusing on sustainability and capital efficiency. He wanted to build a business that could sustain itself and did not depend on investor money or external capital to make it work.

Raising Funding for GroWrk

Carlos’ approach has allowed GroWrk to grow mostly organically, remaining cash-flow positive while serving a rapidly growing global client base. He chose to bootstrap GroWrk rather than pursue aggressive VC funding, a decision shaped by his previous experiences.

This strategy not only reduced the risks associated with over-leveraging but also positioned GroWrk to be more resilient in the face of market fluctuations. The company now has a 100+ team, is globally distributed, and is accelerating rapidly.

Carlos also recognized that the market had shifted radically from when he was trying to raise tens of millions of dollars for CasaOne. Raising capital is much more challenging unless the company is an AI and has a deep tech model.

However, GroWrk has many positive aspects. It has great unit economics and is capital-efficient. Establishing a conversation with a growth equity investor, venture fund, or strategic is easier since they can demonstrate what they’re building, the market size, and expansion potential.

Carlos talks about the risk factor that can be lethal when bootstrapping a company and the need to be super cautious. However, he reveals that GroWrk is not entirely bootstrapped. Although they have raised capital, they haven’t raised big rounds early.

Carlos has raised $250K to $500K tickets just to prove concepts and ensure they have a business that has value. His primary focus from day one has been to make money and spur organic growth.

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The GroWrk Business Model

At GroWrk, Carlos and his team are building a next-generation IT lifecycle asset management platform. Every company is shifting to a cloud solution to automate day-to-day processes as much as possible. They typically run these processes internally, which costs a lot and isn’t efficient.

GroWrk is building an AI-powered platform with the capability to predict what the user’s needs will be in the near future so they can optimize their IT capital expenses and be more efficient in scaling their company.

The platform provides a great onboarding and offboarding experience to any employee or contractor, regardless of where they’re working from. This efficiency is crucial for global companies today, and GrowWrk’s IT-driven solution gets them there.

GroWrk enables companies to have 100% control over every decision they make around their IT infrastructure without any gaps. For that to happen, they need all the data to make informed decisions and guide multi-million dollar investment decisions with the highest confidence.

Every customer GroWrk serves has IT budgets worth tens of millions of dollars. The platform makes a big difference in the trajectory of the user’s growth.

Building a Global, Fully Remote Team

One of the key differentiators of GroWrk is its entirely remote, globally distributed team. Carlos recognized the cost-effectiveness and talent advantages of hiring outside traditional tech hubs like San Francisco, a trend that the pandemic accelerated.

Hiring teams using the traditional method would cost companies hundreds of thousands of dollars for that same skill level. Organizations are empowered to use hybrid teams since the tools that exist today enable that to happen. GroWrk is part of that ecosystem–providing those tools.

The nature of work has shifted dramatically. Employees demand flexibility, and it makes sense from an economic standpoint for an organization to embrace that as well. It also accounts for the retention standpoint so companies can attract and retain top talent.

Managing a distributed team comes with challenges, particularly in ensuring employees are equipped with the necessary tools and support to be productive.

GroWrk addresses these challenges head-on, providing comprehensive IT asset management solutions that empower companies to scale their remote operations efficiently.

As Carlos sees it, companies must adapt to the changes in the market and be flexible. American companies are downsizing because their costs are significantly high, and they need to restructure them. The solution is to hire in lower-cost economies.

At the same time, to adapt to a new world, workers must have a skill level on par at a global scale to compete with the best of the best at that level, especially white-collar workers in the US. And remote work could be the solution.

Conclusion: Lessons in Adaptability and Strategic Growth

Carlos N. Escutia’s journey is a testament to the power of adaptability, strategic thinking, and the importance of learning from past experiences.

From his early days witnessing his family navigate the shifting tides of the textile industry to his current role as the CEO of GroWrk, Carlos has consistently demonstrated an ability to pivot in response to changing market conditions and business challenges.

His story inspires entrepreneurs everywhere, highlighting the value of resilience, the importance of sustainable growth, and the need always to be ready to seize new opportunities.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Growing up in a family of entrepreneurs in the textile industry shaped Carlos’ problem-solving mindset and adaptability.
• Carlos’ exposure to U.S. and Mexican markets provided a seamless cultural experience and business understanding.
• Working in investment banking taught Carlos the complexities of large-scale business problems and the importance of pattern recognition.
• Carlos transitioned from investment banking to entrepreneurship, co-founding Banverde, a green bank focused on renewable energy financing in Latin America.
• The COVID-19 pandemic forced Carlos’ company, CasaOne, to pivot dramatically, highlighting the importance of flexibility in business.
• Carlos emphasized the benefits of bootstrapping GroWrk, focusing on sustainable growth and self-sufficiency over rapid VC-driven expansion.
• GroWrk’s mission is to revolutionize IT lifecycle asset management, providing global companies with AI-powered tools for efficient and informed decision-making.

 

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