Luis Daniel Camejo contacted us via Facebook and he wanted to share his experience with others. Although his and his friend's company is based in USA, and "We Beat the Crisis" project focuses on Europe, we decided to write about them anyway. All in all, our main aim is to inspire others, no matter where you live and where you come from!
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| Luis (on the right) and Frankie, founders of Maslife |
Natalia: You own a company called Maslife. Can you explain what do you do?
Luis: We organise events for companies and private people, such as challenge team races, mud runs in South America, indoor soccer tournaments and much more. We are also in process of designing our first line of clothing. We opened the company in January. You can see our crazy ideas on www.maslife.co. Our main mission is to inspire, motivate, and make people wonder. With our blog, which is a part of the website, we want to let people see what others are doing and that it is not hard to go out and do stuff. Currently we are aimed towards variety but we want to get a little bit more into sports, personal health, healthy tips, music (mainly EDM), and events. By events I mean go out, share with young people, college kids, have fun with them, see what are they doing, what projects are they working on, what are their future goals, and what are they doing to overcome that.
N: Why did you decide to open your own company?
L: Frankie, my best friend and co-founder or Maslife and me always played sports. His sport was baseball, and mine was soccer. We both devoted our lives to sports, and after being around the world (in my case Spain, Italy and Venezuela, and Frankie in United States), we ended up in Florida, US with athletic scholarships in very good schools. We were always motivated by the power of positive thoughts and we somehow wanted to reach out to other people and make them believe that by thinking positively and having a great attitude towards life anything is possible. Our main example can be our own lives. We both grew up in a very difficult social environment, and with our effort and consistency we managed to receive great scholarships to complete our studies by doing what we love - play sports. I think that if everyone has good attitude towards their goals and their challenges, he will succeed. Maslife is the result of these thoughts. We wanted to bring our point of view to help at least a little bit.
N: What kind of experience did you have when you were looking for a job?
L: Not good. As an international student it is very hard to get a job in another country. They will always aim for locals. While studying, we can only work on campus, so our choices are very limited. After you graduate, you have a certain amount of time to get a job that can sponsor your visa, and if you don’t succeed, you have to go back to your country. The trick here is that we can’t look for jobs before we graduate. In my opinion that is a waste of time. We are tied, and we cannot get the experience that we need. So we though, if we can’t work, why don’t we create our own company? And so we did.
N: If you were to open the company now, would you change anything?
L: I wouldn't change anything. We are going slow, and for now slow is good. We are making sure we are doing our things right. This is a dream and we are working towards our goals. We love what we do every day and we are having fun doing it. We share our ideas with people, play sports and have fun! Why would we change anything (laugh)?
To find out more about Maslife, visit their page.
This is the first of a series of interviews with young people who decided to open their own companies. If you'd like to share your experience with others, write to us: webeatcrisis@gmail.com.
We're waiting for your stories!