Today's Entrepreneur: Ricardo Cuervo

Rewarding: positive impacting people around you - partners, employees, customers, society. 
Frustrating: when the status-quo is 'too entrenched' and people are not open to new paradigms.

Giving up on an idea too quickly... and as a corollary: getting excited about an idea too quickly.

perseverance matters.. the risk is clouding objectivity.

I am the founder of CEO of Genostyle, a B2B startup that we pivoted from a previous B2C startup: Best Fashion Friend ... and the pivoting came with a full bag of lessons learned. At Best Fashion Friend we developed a (back then) innovative fashion and styling social networking platform where users created mix-n-match looks, shared privately, asked friends for advise and searched for fashion items they wanted or needed.Think pinterest meets polyvore meets facebook, for fashion. It was designing the smartphone apps that we realized that we needed to find a way to prioritize thousands of recommendations from affiliate networks, to display the most relevant ones to each user, based on their own style preferences. Need was clear, Genostyle was born.

I have 15-years of experience in Management Consulting, specifially in IT & Operations transformation and cost restructuring, both independent (I founded my own boutique consultancy: Manacor Group, specialized in technology and telecom); and working for McKinsey and Mitchell Madison Group.

As a consultant, I have worked with global corporations across a variety of industries including financial services, insurance, media and entertainment, travel and hospitality, health care, oil and manufacturing, delivering cost reduction opportunities of over $800MM. 

I earned my MBA degree with distinction from NYU - Stern School of Business, graduating among the top ten percent of my class.  I also hold an M.Sc. in Engineering, a Graduate degree in Finance and a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering.

I authored a white paper on outsourcing of managed voice & data network and carrier services (when outsourcing was high in the priority of every CIO / CEO). I have served as assistant professor at the University of Los Andes (Colombia), teaching Fundamentals of Production and Supply Chain, Financial Accounting, Corporate Finance, Analysis of Investment Decisions and other engineering courses.

Gartner research has previously described the business leadership role of the “versatilist”: someone whose skills span deep subject matter expertise as well as cross-discipline business leadership. I believe my skills and experience demonstrate these characteristics.