What’s the inspiration behind NUOVO?
NUOVO started out as an accident. When my brother and I moved to Miami and started looking for how to be disrupters in the real estate industry we saw the incredible rise of Airbnb. Keep in mind, this was early 2015, and Airbnb/short term rentals were just starting to become a household name. We decided to rent a unit, furnish it and sub rent it out. We were faced with the property manager’s objection to rent to a minimum of five. We went with it, and started growing. We literally received our first guests while we were finishing setting up our first unit with my wife. I'll never forget them, a pair of co-founders visiting Miami from Mexico for a two month long accelerator! Great guys!
This is not your first time founding a company—what do you think is the most important skill founders need to succeed?
Persistence, self awareness, and resilience.
You need to be persistent in your beliefs. Per 99 no-s there is 1 yes. And that is all you need to get started. If you are not persistent you will never get past the first 2 no-s.
Self awareness is key in knowing yourself, especially when you are acting emotionally. I find that recognizing a weakness is one of the most difficult things a founder can encounter.
Resilience is key. I like to make the analogy that an entrepreneur's life or day to day is very similar to the price index of Bitcoin. It is a highly volatile way of life. We
need to be strong enough to manage the ups and downs but never lose sight of the graph zoomed out.How did you meet your co-founder? How do you work together?
I met him the day I was born! He’s my older brother. Jokes aside, he was my first boss right after college and my mentor. I learned a lot from him, most importantly my work ethic. We are super well balanced, he’s more analytical and I’m more impulsive. He's creative and helps put into shape my wildest dreams. I have a personality that learns more towards the sales side of things and very people driven, he’s more into the numbers and keeps more to himself. I believe we make a hell of a team!
How do you handle risk and competition?
I welcome it. I am a firm believer that competition brings the most out of us as founders and helps us grow. If we are not threatened our creative juices stop pouring and we’ll be stuck in irrelevance. Regarding risk, I consider myself a risk taker but we are balanced out in which my brother and co-founder is more conservative and plays devil’s advocate for many situations. Most of the time, we manage to reach compromises and find a solution with the company’s best interest in sight!
How are you approaching the business challenges presented by our worldwide health crisis? Do you think the industry will look different in one year, or five?
1,000%! Our industry was shaken. This is what I mean by resilience. A bunch of companies in our sector were wiped out of existence. If we were not resilient and persistent we wouldn't be here today telling you this story. With the current crisis, everything changes by the second. We would have obviously liked for it not to happen, but it did and we are making the most out of it. It has opened a way to be more creative, detailed and bold in our decision making and strategy.
What is the most common misconception around your business, or the Short Term Rental industry in general?
This is a fun one, most people summarize our business in “Oh, so you do Airbnb”. Depending on the mood, I’ll either clarify and go into a 25 minute deep dive as to why it's “not just Airbnb” but that usually ends in “Oh ok, so Airbnb”.
We are at the intersection of real estate, hospitality and tech. Through proprietarily developed technology tools, we find and underwrite the markets and properties where we grow and enter into revenue share, leases, or management agreements. After that, we manage the hospitality business, but with a twist. We leverage technology to cut the fat from the traditional hotel business. We facilitate our guests’ experience by leveraging and replacing traditional hotel loss generating operations with modern day tools. For example: we replaced the front desk with remote access locks and a 24/7 cxp team and we replaced the room service with Uber eats.
Have you learned anything new or surprising about yourself through this process?
So much! As I mentioned, the self awareness trip one goes into when starting their own business is massively underestimated. I’d say the most important quality about myself that I’ve learned so far is the capacity to reflect on previous actions, double down when proven right and look to improve and learn from mistakes and find a way to understand why I made the decision I made and identify what I was missing.
Why did you decide to raise from the crowd via Republic?
I was at a crossroads. We were ready and had actually just started to raise a Series A privately when Covid hit. At this point, I dropped all my fundraising efforts and focused exclusively on crisis control and reevaluating our entire strategy in the new normal.
Fast forward a couple of months, and we realized we still needed to raise some capital. I came across Republic through an investor friend and I found it to be the perfect combination of being able to turn happy customers into investors and investors into happy customers with a less time consuming strategy.What’s your team culture like?
I would summarize it in a fun but hard working environment. We are a group of like minded and diverse individuals with a common goal. Early on, I made it my objective to have a team of people that could relate to my vision and make it their own by embracing it and contributing in a positive way.
What is your superpower?
My superpower? That’s a tough one! I wouldn't consider myself to have a superpower. What I can say is that I do a good job of getting to know my team, on a personal and professional level. This helps me understand what their life goals are and allows me to either set forth a proper development plan for them within our company or have truthfully transparent conversations with them if I believe we are not aligned. This helps me maximize our team member’s efforts and get the most out of our most important asset at NUOVO, our people!
What’s your kryptonite?
There is nothing that can turn me off the most than a bad attitude and not giving your best. I can recognize when we make mistakes, but I cannot tolerate when people have bad attitudes and don’t give their utmost best.
Do you have any unusual routines or habits?
I always like to pause for a couple of seconds and take a deep breath and put on a smile before entering the office on any given day. That has turned into a pre zoom routine now but still works! If I’m having an off or hectic morning this helps me reset and brings good energies to whoever sees my face first.
What do you like to do in your spare time?
My hobby time is primarily consumed by my 2 boys, who are 8 and 3. However, I try to always make some time to play tennis or soccer. Apart from that we try to always come up with a new activity involving the kids during the weekends, riding our bikes, going for Sunday brunch at a nearby coffee shop and going to the park.
Are there any apps or gadgets that you can’t live without?
Notion. This tool helped me get organized and straight when I felt completely and utterly overwhelmed this past year. Through Notion, I created a planner that is now my bible and cannot come close to imagining my life without it. It is the first thing I go towards in the morning after my workout and the last before I go to bed. It keeps me on track, focused and aligned with my personal and professional goals and objectives.
If you could give yourself one piece of advice 5 years ago, what would it be?
Don’t get blinded by the lights and don’t get knocked down when things get tough. I guess that’s 2 pieces of advice right there!
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received?
Never be the smartest person in the room, always find yourself constantly learning from others.
Do you have a(ny) mentor(s)? If so, what have they taught you?
I’d say I have a couple and probably some of them don’t even know that I look at them as mentors. If I could summarize everything I learned I’d say it would be to learn to value honesty, transparency and hard work.
Nico Ortega