What we didn't talk about on day one

Patricio vanished.

No email. No message. No meeting.

Years earlier he had pushed me to start a company. To believe we could actually make it. I respected him. I liked him. The kind of esteem that makes you say yes when you're still afraid.

(I'm calling him Patricio for this story. The name is dramatic on purpose. The wound isn't.)

If someone googles you looking for a partner, this is the question that actually matters. Not the stack. Not the résumé. What happened with a partnership that DIDN'T WORK.

This is mine.

I was interviewing at Yahoo

Software developer. The United States.

For a handful of reasons, it didn't happen. I didn't go.

And in that gap I understood something that changed my life: it was the chance to start in Mexico. To build something of my own.

The fear wasn't a poster that said "just start." It was leaving the job. Software. A paycheck. The known thing.

It was 2016. I was 27. I'm 37 now.

My son Elías was about to turn one.

That's the real fear: jumping from what's safe into what's unknown. With a small kid.

My main investor was my wife. She had a steady job while we watched the business grow. I have to thank her for that. In the hard stretches she helped. And she pushed me to grow. Not with a check. With the net that was actually there.

Patricio was one of the people who pushed me to believe we could pull it off. I have to thank him for that. Without that shove, I might be telling a different story.

We started.

Everything is honey. Until you have customers.

There were no AI agents. No copilot to build the module while you went for coffee.

There were long discussions. Messy ones. The kind that run past midnight: what we should build, what we shouldn't, what a real business could actually stand.

And then, to the code. Long nights. The kind of all-nighters a body in its twenties could still pay for.

That's how the first version of Actiun was born. An invoicing system. The first iteration.

Later it evolved to cover what growing Mexican companies actually need. Not the brochure. The day-to-day.

In Mexico people were still invoicing with QR codes. A few months later CFDI kicked in. We had to write it by hand, in the middle of a tax-regime change, when the SAT was not yet an API that "everybody already knows."

That feels epic when you remember it. In the moment it feels like fighting a PDF and a stamp that won't stick.

The first customers were the ones who let the business grow. Without them there is no origin. There's an expensive hobby.

And someone had to go sell.

That was me.

Door to door

I hired two people older than I was. Mrs. Patricia and Mrs. Irma.

They prospected the old-school way. Book the appointments. Open the doors. So I could show up and offer the software.

I got all of it.

Doors slammed in my face.

Thank-yous. (The kind of "thank you" that means no.)

And the good part too: learning what a customer actually wanted from admin software. And what they didn't. A course doesn't teach you that. Rejection does.

The learning was good. I took it. And together with Patricio we kept building the software as the business moved.

He built. I sold. Both of us pushed.

That sounds like roles. It wasn't.

We were both developers. I went door to door because SOMEONE had to. Not because the job was written down. The midnight arguments were both about the same thing: what to build. The hole — selling, collecting, operating — got covered by whoever lasted longer.

We rented an office. We started to grow. Everything seemed fine.

What you don't say on day one

The truth is we never talked about the hard things at the start.

We didn't talk about what would happen if one of us stopped working on the project.

We didn't talk about who did what. For real. With a name. Not "we both do everything."

We didn't talk salary versus partnership. What happens to the rent. What happens to payroll. What happens if one of us gets an opportunity that has nothing to do with the boat.

In the honeymoon that feels unnecessary. "Why get into the ugly stuff if we're just getting started?"

That's why.

Because a partnership doesn't break on the day of the fight. It breaks on the day you didn't write the rules.

Patricio stepped away

A few weeks. Personal stuff.

Like a decent partner, I told him not to worry. Take the time he needed. Come back when he had run what he had to run.

I would do that again. You give air to someone you care about.

The problem wasn't the air.

Inside that absence a strong opportunity showed up: capitalizing a refrigerator sale and some other deals. That's when everything changed. His focus left the business. It went somewhere else.

I stayed.

Moving. Working. Paying the rent. Payroll. Operating costs. Everything tied to the business. Including the place where there were supposed to be two of us.

I get it. Life hands you special chances. Sometimes you take them. I'm not going to lecture anyone for catching a lucky break.

The problem was something else.

He made so much money in a short sprint that he arrived at the uncomfortable conversation:

You know, I don't have to work for a while. I'll take a vacation. I don't see the need.

That's where things crack.

One of you feels he has to keep pushing the boat because it's his duty. And he understands — late — that his partner is no longer on the same channel.

The hard talk

Of course. Sooner or later it came.

Patricio's streak ended. The money was already something he was counting on. He came back. And he asked — demanded — that I pay him all the salaries that were "his." The months he hadn't been working.

That's when I had to draw the line.

I couldn't keep paying a salary if he wasn't actually going to help me scale the business.

That is not a partnership. That is one person working and the other outside, on other things, that don't belong to what we were supposed to be building.

I said it.

The lack of prior agreements is what actually broke the relationship. Not the refrigerators. Not the vacation. The gap. The "we'll see" from day one.

And Patricio made his decision.

Without saying anything. Without warning. Without an email. Without a message.

He just disappeared.

That hurts.

It's hard to have started a business with someone you admired. Someone you liked. Someone you held in high regard.

As the years went by, he lost his spark. His focus.

And we realized at the end: each of us had a very different idea of what it meant to build a company.

Not all entrepreneurs are the same

That's when what Daniel Marcos talks about started to matter a lot.

Not all entrepreneurs are the same.

Some of us are mountain climbers.

Some are craftsmen.

Some are freedom fighters.

And not all of them can share a rope.

A freedom fighter looks for the minimum required to keep his lifestyle and his comforts. He isn't lazy. It's a different game. A different scoreboard.

The mountain climber — that's how I tag myself — wants to build. Grow the business. Push the limits to the next level.

Neither one is "the good guy." The mistake is clipping into the same rope without saying which summit you're going to.

I was going to the mountain. Patricio, in that moment, was going to freedom.

With agreements, you can talk about that. Without them, it turns into a betrayal nobody planned.

What I took from it

Three things. The partnerships I started after this began here. Not with the honeymoon.

1. Clear agreements on day one

On one page. Before the office. Before the first customer.

What happens if one of you stops rowing. Salary. Equity. Time. A date.

Who pays the rent and payroll if the other steps away.

What counts as vacation when there are already customers and commitments.

Which summit each of you is climbing. Scale. Craft. Freedom. All three are valid. All three don't fit in the same boat if you don't say them out loud.

How you leave. With an email. With a meeting. With numbers. Not by vanishing.

If that doesn't fit on a page on day one, you don't have a partnership. You have a daydream with a tax ID.

I didn't write it down. I paid that invoice. In rent. In payroll. In silence. And in a disappearance that still hurts.

2. Each partner's job, in order

Not "we both do everything."

Who sells. Who builds. Who collects. Who decides when it's a tie.

In that partnership I went knocking on doors because someone had to. Not because the role was written down. That works for a while. Then the person doing the job nobody named gets tired. And so does the partnership.

A partner without a clear job is not a partner. It's a talented person sitting in the same room.

3. Someone who complements you

Patricio and I were both developers.

It sounds nice. "We speak the same language." Until the midnight arguments are both about the same problem: what to build. And the hole — sales, collections, operations — gets covered by whoever lasts longer.

A partner is not a twin. A partner covers what you don't have.

If both of you have the same profile, things get harder. Not because of talent. Because of redundancy. Two people rowing on the same side and the boat just spins.

The partnerships that have lasted for me have that: one builds where the other doesn't reach. Not two copies of the same craft.

Patricio pushed me to start. I won't take that away from him. The shove was real. The breakup was too. And the learning, more so.

💡 Ask it of your own company

If you're thinking about taking a partner, don't start with whether the product is good.

Ask yourself this:

Have you already talked about the exit? Who does what? Do you actually complement each other, or are you two copies of the same craft?

My mistake was not asking myself in time. We didn't talk about the exit. We didn't write down who did what. We were two developers rowing on the same side. I kept pushing. He found another summit. And the boat cannot hold two headings.

Take it with you. Before you pay the same invoice.

Have you already had that uncomfortable conversation? Or are you still in the honeymoon, with a partner who looks too much like you?

Write me at hola@jorgenajera.com or on LinkedIn. Tell me. It's always a pleasure to talk with someone about to get on a boat… or someone who already rowed one that split.

If you're building a partnership and you still haven't talked about the exit, the roles, or whether you actually complement each other, let's talk for a bit. That meeting is cheaper than the one I never had.