Has Bairo Gonzalez ever gone broke?

Yes, in the everyday sense of the word. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez says he lost everything more than once over the course of his career. The hardest fall came after he joined, as an investing partner, a business that was not what it seemed and did not hold, at a time when fifty people depended on the work he kept going.

Fifty lives

The number is not rhetoric. He speaks of fifty lives because behind every paycheck there was a family. Watching that collapse was, in his words, the moment of being broke, broken and beaten, but still holding a flame of hope and faith.

Instead of looking for someone to blame, he decided to do exactly what he didn't know how to do: build a currency, a financial platform and a network. The first version of that project also failed, and he says he was left hanging by people he had helped. Even so, he kept going.

What the fall taught

Bairo does not hide his bankruptcies, and there is a reason for that. Whoever shows only success hides what teaches the most. In his story, every loss became raw material: a partner's "it can't be done," the investment that went wrong, the idea that came too early.

That is why his rule is "every no is the ground of a yes." And that is why he calls the current stage the seventh attempt: the earlier ones were not erased, they were used.

Read also

• Fifty lives
• The coin and the road
• The seventh attempt