I'm originally from Mexico and I got a scholarship to come to the U S. the University of Pennsylvania. When I was there after my first year, the reason why I came to the U. S and went to the University of Pennsylvania was that I eventually wanted to start a technology company. While I was doing some work-study as part of my scholarship, I saw the opportunity to join a startup that was started by my co-founder. The idea was to start up payments company around remittances. So me being an immigrant and being from Mexico, which receives a lot of remittances, I thought it was a really kind of interesting idea and the reality is that I wanted to just get experience, to see how it was to do like a technology company. The opportunity came in and just decided to try it. So I started as an intern and then eventually started to get more involved and recently I am the part of the founding team of the company.

As I mentioned before us an intern, so my co-founder had the idea of starting the company and wants to send gift cards as a value remittance. When I joined first, I was helping with presentations and just applying for different programs that were being grants or these types of things, that was hard to get a little more involved, I have some connections back home from some of the partners that we wanted to talk to, so I started to talk with my co-founder and said that I wanted to get more involved. I started getting more involved in the project, I started reaching out to different friends or people that I knew, set up some meetings, and I started to show that I could provide more value, I can get more and more involved and it's been eight years now, so it's been a fun ride.

One of the hardest things for us was that we took a long time. There were some people that joined the company at the beginning, and then when things started to get off, they decided that they didn't want to kind of double down. So basically we had a founding team and we were raising a round from investors and then that round from investors didn't happen so people that wanted to do the jump in a safe manner if you wish, decided that they were pushing the people that wanted to do this and commit double down and I'll say that for Arcus, it was the first time we were doing this it was much harder because we didn't know what we're looking for and who will do what? Who was good at what? So we have changed roles, I started doing finance work then eventually now I do business development, I think now after it for some time, I know better what I'm good at and my partners know better what they are good at? These things take time to see what is it that you need to find in your partner?