Ernesto Doudchitzky sold Chattigo on a Thursday. The following Monday I was working as if nothing had happened. “We haven’t clicked yet,” he says of the deal that valued his company at more than $60 million.
It is not the first time that his calmness surprises those around him: his wife and co-founder often asks him how he manages to remain calm during the toughest moments of the business. His answer is always the same: tomorrow is another day, and you have to go out and fight it anyway.
Ernesto has been entrepreneurship since he was 17, he has founded ten businesses in his life, and he only worked as an employee for three years in his entire career. He defines himself as an incorrigible dreamer: when he was young he thought he would be a millionaire in two or three years; Today, after three decades of work, he says he has learned that things just take time.
He founded Chattigo with his wife, María Fernanda Vivas, and his brother-in-law Iván Vivas, and built the company under an uncommon conviction in the ecosystem: raising capital was never the plan, but rather the alternative.
From selling voice technology to founding Chattigo
Argentine by birth, Ernesto lived his childhood between Argentina and Venezuela, and in 1998 he settled in Chile, where the Chilean owners of the company where he worked offered him a move.
There he spent 15 years leading the commercial expansion of Merlín, a voice recognition technology company, throughout the Southern Cone. When he began to notice that this technology was losing relevance in the face of the rise of chat, and that it was not the focus of the company, he decided to build his own project.
- What did you learn in Merlin that combines today into what Chattigo is?
“I learned the importance of networking. When I arrived in Chile I had my father’s network of contacts, from his years as an expatriate in Venezuela, and that helped me a lot…
…I also learned that international expansion can be managed with few people: in Argentina, Uruguay and Peru we had one or two people per country, and we handled important clients.”
“That experience gives you the confidence that you can do better next time”
He entered the ImagineLab accelerator through a personal contact and accessed, at different stages, nearly 200 million Chilean pesos in seed capital from Corfo, key to building the minimum viable and scalable product.
They launched at the end of 2015 and in July 2016 they already had their first billing: the market, he says, was indeed needing what they offered.
Grow without depending on anyone
Chattigo grew, on average, 67% a year for a decade: from a first billing of $100,000 to almost $11 million in annual recurring revenue.
During that journey, it raised just two million dollars in two rounds, a low figure for the size it reached.
Part of that discipline, he says, comes from María Fernanda, his co-founder and wife, as averse to financial risk as he is prone to taking it.
- In an ecosystem where many startups prioritize growth at any cost, where does your philosophy of depending as little as possible on external capital come from?
“I had never raised money before in my ventures: the startup had to sell enough to pay itself, and if we wanted to hire more people, it had to sell more...
… That thought that the capital raising was a plan B, and not the plan, gave us peace of mind”
“If it worked out well, we had more money to spend and we could hire very good people; if it didn’t work out, we had to take it forward ourselves, and we did it, year after year”
The hardest moment of leading the company, he says, was a period of low growth in which they were still burning cash: part of the management team spent months without receiving a full salary to breathe life into the company.
Today, with a turnover of less than 2% annually, he attributes the team’s closeness to three pillars: working with cutting-edge technology, always keeping the doors open for any queries, and focusing on objectives rather than schedules.
The exit that took three years to arrive
Ernesto had been preparing Chattigo for a sale for between two and three years, auditing himself and organizing the company.
Along the way, four processes failed, including an attempted Series A round with ScaleX, before finding the right buyer in Capacity, a company also led by its founder.
The negotiation and due diligence took just three months, much less than usual for this type of operation.
- What would you recommend to other founders who are preparing for an acquisition process?
“Prepare on a financial and legal level, have everything in order. But don’t let that be the plan that defines you, because when you are very pressured to sell, you make bad decisions. As long as the company continues to grow, you can always say: if we don’t sell this year, we will sell next year, billing more”
“The important thing is not to focus on a single plan -raise capital or sell-, but to build a great company. With that, everything flows”
After the sale, Capacity asked them to continue managing Chattigo as they had done until now: the team remained complete and the company grew 80% this year.
The only thing the employees themselves asked for, he says with a laugh, was an English course.
One of the mistakes that he does recognize is having given too much of the company in an early negotiation. He says he learned, but that he would not change them: they are part of a story that, in general, he does not regret.
It hasn’t “clicked” yet, he repeats, but he doesn’t seem eager for that to happen. It is the same calmness with which he assures that he does not regret the three decades of attempts, errors and beginnings that brought him here: in short, he says, tomorrow is also going to be another day.
