"There are usually many different ways of solving a problem. Different points of view will enable you to tackle the same issue from different angles and be more creative and efficient."
Meet Pablo Garnica – a first-time founder at ArexTech, in charge of the financial and product strategy areas. ArexTech is a Canadian Proptech backed by Techstars that operates internationally looking to empower institutional real estate investors to make better investments using data they wouldn’t otherwise capture.
Prior to embarking on this venture, he was working at Goldman Sachs in London in the Investment Management division as a cross-asset class investor and portfolio manager. He started his career as a Strategy Consultant at MonitorDeloitte in Spain, where he specialized in payments and financial institution PMI consulting and implementation.
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Thank you so much for giving us your time! Before we begin, could you introduce yourself to our readers and take us through what exactly your company does and what your vision is for its future?
Pablo Garnica: I’m a founder of Arex Technologies (Arextech), a prop-tech business recently established in Canada in 2019 after joining Techstars’Proptech Accelerator program in Toronto. At ArexTech, my job is to inform and guide our product strategy and act as Chief Financial Officer.
At ArexTech, our goal is to provide real estate investors with the tools that will enable them to make the best real estate investments. By leveraging data network effects. To do so, we are constantly improving our cloud-based platform, which is designed to capture data, analyze and share quality data that would otherwise be lost,
Over the past couple of years, our team has also built software in North America and Europe for real estate deal management, portfolio appraisal optimization, and a network for residential brokers.
NO child ever says I want to be a CEO/entrepreneur when I grow up. What did you want to be and how did you get where you are today?
Pablo Garnica: Childhood is a time for discovering, experimenting, and experiencing new things. I probably wanted to be many things at different stages. I remember a time where I wanted to be a writer because I liked reading so much. During another phase, I wanted to be a boxer after watching a few movies on the subject. My family has always had many ties to the financial sector and as I got older I defaulted to finance, a field I still am very much interested in and working with (even if just tangentially).
In retrospect, I always wanted to be many things and was always looking for a challenge. After a few years at it, I think that could be an apt (reverse-engineered) definition of an entrepreneur: Someone that does many different things (out of necessity) always in the context of a challenge. In many ways, it’s about being a child again.
Tell us something about yourself that others in your organization might be surprised to know.
Pablo Garnica: As a baby, I appeared as a prop (?) in multiple Mexican soap operas.
Many readers may wonder how to become an entrepreneur but what is an entrepreneur? How would you define it?
Pablo Garnica: An entrepreneur (as underwhelming as it may sound) is a problem-solver, a means to an end. I never really had the ambition of becoming an entrepreneur until I stumbled on a problem that I thought needed solving. If you aren’t solving a big enough problem (measured either in how many people have that problem or how much someone is willing to pay to have that problem solved), it is unlikely you’ll be able to get your venture off the ground and become a successful entrepreneur. The problem is at the core, the rest follows.
What is the importance of having a supportive and inclusive culture?
Pablo Garnica: It’s everything. There are many times where, as a small company or bootstrapping venture, that is all you have. There are usually many different ways of solving a problem. Different points of view will enable you to tackle the same issue from different angles and be more creative and efficient.
How can a leader be disruptive in the post covid world?
Pablo Garnica: The best way of being disruptive, in my opinion, is to be acutely aware of the reality of the current situation around you. To do so, one mustn’t be complacent and (constantly) ask the right questions. Disruption should be a continuous process of solving problems, old and new. In a post covid world, focus on what hasn’t changed as much as on what’s changed. Then ask yourself: why is that?
If a 5-year-old asked you to describe your job, what would you tell them?
Pablo Garnica: I give people who buy big buildings the tools not to screw up and show off how smart they are.
Share with us one of the most difficult decisions you had to make for your company that benefited your employees or customers. What made this decision so difficult and what were the positive impacts?
Pablo Garnica: When the global health crisis broke out in early 2020, the founding team decided to waive their wages to make sure we could still keep paying our developers and tech support in the face of extreme uncertainty (and a very early stage of the business) so our services would not be interrupted when clients were struggling with their own businesses.
We were able to help our clients complete landmark investments and keep our team’s job security despite the pandemic.
Leaders are usually asked about their most useful qualities but let’s change things up a bit. What is your most useless talent?
Pablo Garnica: Multi-lingual puns.
Thank you so much for your time but before we finish things off, we do have one more question. If you wrote a book about your life until today, what would the title be?
Pablo Garnica: ‘Lost & Founder’
Mike Weiss, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Pablo Garnica for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Pablo Garnica or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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