LATIN AMERICAN HACKERS | Jaime Restrepo | STARTING A BUSINESS in LATIN AMERICA

Sometimes you sit down and picture being your own boss, having your own thing, but the entrepreneurial road isn’t as pretty as it’s painted. To have someone who has walked it tell me about it, I sit down at Hackeroy with Jaime Restrepo, Colombian and CEO of DragonJAR.

Jaime started as a kid with a black-background website full of animated gifs that won a school contest. From that Dragon (his nick) plus his initials, Jaime Andrés Restrepo, came DragonJAR, first a personal site, then a forum and finally a reference community in Spanish since 2001. He set up a company almost by obligation, when a contract with Colombian intelligence required him to incorporate, and went from freelancer to businessman overnight. Today they’re six on staff, with an educational platform as a spin-off and a conference that’s been running for seven years. We talk about why it pays to specialise rather than be a generalist, about the SQL injections he still keeps finding in bug bounty and about his recent investment in EpicBounty. I asked him how much you make and he answered, very tongue in cheek, that he’s a millionaire, but in Colombian pesos.

His advice for anyone wanting to start a business is among the honest ones: don’t do it if you’re not passionate about it, learn about law and taxes and learn to rest, because the world doesn’t end just because you stop for a week.