Making Waves in Business: How Pablo Fernandez Alvarez Scaled Success from Sports to Startups

Pablo Fernandez Alvarez is a serial entrepreneur and former professional athlete who has seamlessly transitioned from excelling in the competitive sports arena to dominating the entrepreneurial world. 

 

Endeavor Entrepreneur the founder of Clidrive, a car financing platform that generated €10.6 million in revenue within its first year without external funding, Pablo illustrates the power of discipline and customer-centricity. 

 

Drawing on lessons from ventures like Clicars and his background in sports, Pablo approaches business with the same relentless focus and adaptability that made him a champion. In this interview, he shares insights into scaling companies, building resilient teams, and navigating the challenges of entrepreneurship.

 

From Clicars to Clidrive, you’ve successfully launched multiple ventures. What key lessons from your previous startups have you applied to Clidrive’s development?

First, you start with a customer problem and build everything backward—technology, infrastructure, and ideas. Then, start selling as soon as possible and launch the product as quickly as you can. Don’t spend too much time in the lab. If you’re a first-time entrepreneur, don’t go it alone; find a co-founder you trust to complement your skills. Go all in—this isn’t a part-time thing. You have to put in 100% of your effort, savings, and money.

Try not to raise too much money early on, before you’ve found real product-market fit. Don’t over-engineer your product—start with a landing page and perform all functionalities manually in the background to test your hypothesis if you have to. Be absolutely frugal in the beginning. Whenever possible, hire people who are better than you in certain areas, and incentivize them with equity so they feel ownership and accountability. Work more than 100 hours per week with no vacations for a couple of years. There’s no guarantee that following this approach will make you succeed, but it’s guaranteed that if you don’t do this, you won’t succeed.

How much feedback is enough feedback?

It depends on what you’re using it for. The faster the feedback loop, the quicker you can refine and release a real product to the market. It’s important to stay flexible and implement changes based on different feedback rounds. In the beginning, speed matters more than accuracy.

Starting Clidrive without external funding and achieving €10.6 million in revenue within the first year is impressive. What strategies did you employ to achieve such rapid growth and profitability?

I knew the industry because it’s car financing, and my first company was in car sales. I already had relationships with stakeholders, an initial team, and I invested $4 million of my own money, which reduced the pressure to seek external capital. That’s one of the advantages of starting a company when you already have talent, capital, and experience—but even that doesn’t guarantee success.

The biggest risk when you’ve done well in previous ventures is complacency or overconfidence. Past success doesn’t necessarily guarantee future results. You have to approach every venture as if it’s a brand-new business, starting with a “day-one” mindset. Even though I was generating revenue in the first few weeks—which is unusual—I remained obsessed with the possibility of failure. It’s important to constantly think about what could go wrong because the cemetery is full of very successful companies that didn’t obsess over making it work.

How do you stay agile in decision-making while growing a company?

It’s very difficult because your organizational structure—the levels and layers—dictates how communication flows within the company. The more complex the system, the slower the process.

One thing I’ve learned is to have as few meetings as possible. I eliminated one-on-ones to encourage open discussions, and I always sit with my team—whether it’s the call center or product team—to stay connected to what’s happening. I don’t delegate customer experience entirely to the product team. For example, I sold the first hundred cars myself in my first company, and I still sell today. Talking directly to customers provides more insight than anything else.

Creating a culture where people don’t wait for an all-hands meeting to voice concerns or ideas is also crucial. My constant goal is to have a culture where the best idea wins.

Who decides what the best idea is?

Ultimately, the owner of the company decides. That’s why it’s important for people to trust you and for you to have the humility to let others challenge you. We all say stupid things sometimes, and idea is letting others speak first so you don’t bias the discussion with your own views.

Companies aren’t democracies, but there’s a big difference between a culture of fear and a culture that allows people to openly challenge you.

How do you accomplish that culturally?

Open communication is key—everyone should feel they can talk about anything. I avoid one-on-ones and back channels to ensure transparency. I don’t micromanage, but I do ask questions about challenges and processes to stay informed.

I keep direct access to what’s happening without controlling the process myself. Encouraging people to speak up is vital. I also actively encourage people to speak up, and the marker of a good leader is how you react when you’re contradicted by people in your team. It’s important for people to feel safe and valued, even when you make the final decision. 

How do you know you’ve made the right decision?

You don’t. That’s why I encourage A/B testing. If someone comes to me with an idea, I ask them to test it and report back with results.

It’s better to fail small and learn quickly than to spend too much time overthinking. It’s also better to ask for forgiveness than for permission. As long as we fail small, I encourage people to take risks, and results speak for themselves.

What do successful founders have in common?

It’s different in different phases: 0 to 1, 1 to 10, and so on. Over a long period of time, successful founders are able to evolve as leaders to match the phase of their companies. From 100 to 1000 you’re not running the same company you were from 0 to 1. In the short term, being successful is focusing on quality, doing things by yourself and trying to get traction for the MVP. 

Once you’ve proven that you can deliver a solution at a profit, the question becomes how fast can you deliver it, and then it’s about selecting the right talent to take you to the next phase. 

This last one is tricky, because the talent that will help you scale is not the same talent that brought you to that point, and this applies to you as well – you need to be a different CEO than you were on day one. But it’s challenging to tell people who’ve gotten you this far that they can’t evolve as fast as your company. Because at first, you need people who can do everything and then you’re going to need specialists, and people can’t become specialists in six months, that takes years, so it’s challenging to also keep the culture of the company in the process. 

From my side, more than 72 former employees of mine started their own companies, and many of them are the ones who were with me in the beginning, and whom during the transition phase I supported to open their own business as an investor. 

In my first company, I tried to keep these people employed, because I had this romantic idea of the team that helped me succeed, but sometimes early hires don’t want to be executives, so you need to learn to proactively anticipate transitions and to help them do it in a way that’s also productive for them. 

Is it dangerous for the culture of a start-up to scale too fast?

Yes, it’s like driving too fast. You risk losing control, but if you don’t drive fast enough, you won’t win the race. The advantage is that you can control the speed.

Your journey sounds entirely accomplished from the outside, but I’m sure you’ve faced challenges and doubt along the way. Tell me about that.

Every day I feel doubt. As a founder, if you don’t feel doubt, that’s a bit concerning. Overconfidence is a key problem, because when you make progress is when you focus on the negatives and improve what’s going back. I had opened a business line and we only sold three cars instead of five in one day, and obsession about the process is something that comes with the territory. Because metrics are an output, and what you give to your business every day is the real input that defines the quality of your work that’s going to bring in the results. There are moments where you’ll go through challenges as an entrepreneur. I remember with my first business, we got an acquisition offer and we already had term sheets for another financing round. So I didn’t take the money from the VCs and I had to put all my personal money and take loans to pay for those months, and that was a risky business decision, but you have to take risks and bet on your business.   

How much of that was you betting on your business and how much was it betting on yourself?

It’s both because the business is an extension of you. For me, it’s a combination of confidence but also being aware that you might fail. There’s this idea that if I fail I know that I will always have a job, I’ll never starve. Same in this situation: if that deal wouldn’t have gone through, that might have affected my company’s valuation, but it wasn’t threatening its existence. 

You say success is the output and what matters is the input. How has your input changed from one venture to the next?

It hasn’t changed much. Most of my ventures have been B2C businesses, and the fundamentals are the same—gathering leads, signing customers, and focusing on the conditions for success.

It’s important to distinguish between important metrics and vanity metrics. I don’t like talking too much about sales; I focus instead on the processes that lead to sales. But you can test and make incremental improvements and those will lead to growth. And while I didn’t do anything different, this is something very important that I did the same – focusing on what I can change and the next small step I can make.  

Tech entrepreneurs tend to gravitate toward B2B. Why do you prefer B2C?

It’s not that I prefer B2C—it’s just where I found opportunities. As an investor, I’ve backed a lot of B2B businesses because they’re capital-efficient, and investors love them. I don’t think I picked the business, but I feel that I picked an opportunity. I like businesses where there’s a little more complexity because it’s important to work on something you’re passionate about. 

How did you transition from sports to tech entrepreneurship?

I don’t like the term “tech entrepreneurship.” Many entrepreneurs use technology without labeling themselves that way, because technology is only an enabler. For me, it wasn’t a transition. Being an entrepreneur is like being a professional athlete, it requires a disciplined approach: you make a plan, you get a coach, you get your steps in, you improve your routine. Whether you make it or not, the process of starting a business and training to be an athlete are similar. 

How do you stay motivated through incremental progress?

I’m not always motivated. No one is 100% motivated all the time. The key is discipline. For example, I swim at 6 AM even when I don’t feel like it, because I have a bigger goal.

Motivation has short-term and long-term components. Long-term success relies on discipline, which sustains you when motivation isn’t there.

You have to follow opportunities. But when do you know that you’re too in love with the business that you’re creating?

Personally, I’m in love with the entrepreneurial journey, and not the business itself. Businesses come and go, and there are lots of factors at play that are out of your control. A company is a high performance team, where people have a common goal and need to perform, and as an entrepreneur you’re their coach, and you have to perform, or the people will fire you. 

You can really like your business, but not love it, as that’s a bad thing. In my first business, I was the first one to come in the morning and the last one to leave in the afternoon, and I used to kiss the logo when I left. But it wasn’t the logo that I loved, but that I was able to pursue my dream. It’s important to be able to say: “what a great day”. 

Entrepreneurs often rush to scale globally. Is there value in pursuing that at all costs?

The short answer is no. There’s velocity in the sense of fast decision-making, and then there’s shooting everywhere. I prefer to shoot many times at the same target than to focus on everything all at once. I avoid doing too many things at the same time – too many products, too many markets, too much complexity. Successful companies have stayed in one market for a long time, and have used the success of that product to scale to other markets. You can conquer the world, but you should start with conquering one market, it’s how you win at war. 

Speaking of scaling, what’s your aspiration for Clidrive and beyond?

There’s always a beyond. If you ask me today, I think we’re doing great and there’s room for progress, but I don’t think too far in the future. The average success of the biggest companies in the world is 30 years. So you’re building the best business there is, and in 30 years it won’t be there anymore. So I work with quarterly OKRs, to create businesses that can adapt constantly and provide constant quality and grow.

Do you have any advice for entrepreneurs trying to scale into new markets?

Yes. One mistake that I made was thinking that expanding to another market is just replicating what you’ve got in the existing market. But it’s closer to starting to another company from scratch than it is to this, particularly if it’s another culture, with another language. If you’re doing it in the early days, one of the founders will have to go there to set it up for success. But I do have a preference for penetrating a market rather than scaling directly into it, because there are more companies out there dying from suicide than homicide. 

You leverage AI in your ventures. How do you think it’s going to impact the way we do entrepreneurship in the future?

AI democratizes entrepreneurship by reducing the need for capital and people in the early stages. It helps you learn faster, automate tasks, and scale efficiently.

Having said that, I think the basic principle is to not worry about what’s going to change in the next year, but  on what isn’t. The technology is not the product, because there aren’t any customers out there who want to buy blockchain. People want to buy a solution to a problem, so that’s what we have to be selling.