Crash Course : A Founder's Journey to Saving Your Startup and Sanity

In Crash Course, Ricardo Jiménez recounts his personal startup failure so that other entrepreneurs and business founders may learn from his mistakes as they chase their own business dreams.

Nine times out of ten, the passionate, well-educated, semi-cocky entrepreneur with dreams of taking the market by storm . . . fails.

Whether it’s a quick crash and burn within the first year or a longer struggle over several years, the result is usually the same: an exhausted, confused, financially broke, and emotionally broken startup failure.

We love to hear stories of lean-and-mean startups that bootstrap their way to a hard-fought victory. But what about the other 90 percent? What about the startup founders who were chewed up and spit out by potential investors, dirty-dealing partners, and fickle customers? What about the ones who dared to give their dream wings . . . only to watch it crash on the runway?

Don’t we have as much or more to learn from them as we do the lucky few who actually make it?

In Crash Course, entrepreneur Ricardo Jiménez crawls out from under the wreckage of his failed startup and forces himself to explore how his best-laid plans went so terribly wrong. With surgical precision, Jiménez explores every decision, meeting, step, and misstep that turned his once-promising international toy company into an expensive lesson in how not to succeed in the highly competitive global marketplace.

Putting pride aside, Jiménez puts his whole story on display—the good, the bad, and the terrible—with the hope that the next generation of startup entrepreneurs can learn from his mistakes and take a pain-free shortcut to the important lessons he had to learn the hard way.

Ricardo Jiménez is a Spanish-born writer, entrepreneur, and active angel investor. Since 2014, he has performed direct investments in over thirty tech projects, including the Ethereum token launch.In most recent years, his investment scope broadened into other industries and geographies, such as investing in a gold mine in Paraguay, a logistics company in Pakistan, and a financial solution for Gen Z in the Middle East.

Jiménez holds an MBA from Duke and is fluent in Spanish, English, and conversational Indonesian. He has traveled to eighty countries, visited the Seven Wonders of the World, spent six months at a meditation retreat in Uruguay, and he continues to spend several months every year in the Isha meditation center in Mexico. He enjoys kite surfing in Puerto Rico and motorbike riding the Texas back roads. 

He is a founder supporter of Yo Elijo, a not-for-profit that supports children and families in socio-economic stress in Colombia in choosing a different path in their lives. 

It's from his personal experiences in entrepreneurship, investing, travel, meditation, and personal growth that he writes—not with the intention to teach but to be a companion to founders in the noble yet often overwhelming pursuit of their dreams.

Jiménez currently lives in Puerto Rico and Barcelona.