When a kid from Aibonito went to Seattle

“It’s a funny story”, Jonathan would say when it comes to explaining how he ended up as an entrepreneur. Even Startup Weekend’s co-founder, Franck Nouyrigat, has a cameo. However, the comical aspect of it all has more to do with the irony of NOT growing up with Bill Gates as his hero, for he didn’t even know Microsoft’s story or Google’s for that matter. Let alone a single thing about Silicon Valley. Those narratives are still a long way from the place he calls home. Turns out a kid from Aibonito, Puerto Rico, can be as best and as bright as teenage prodigy CEOs from California. It just takes a little bit longer when all the resources are concentrated in the metropolitan areas, which is one of Jonathan’s harsh critics to most of the world’s startup ecosystems. The truth is if it hadn’t been for one visionary high school teacher he would’ve never gone on to study at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez, where he got recruited to work for Microsoft.

Seattle meant a whole new world and he loved it. But, after a chance meeting with Nouyrigat at a conference in The Emerald City, he discovered something that moved him more than his job: the idea of being an entrepreneur. And if he was going to hop on a crazy business adventure, he needed the perfect team, his pals back in Puerto Rico. That’s how Jonathan ended up back in his motherland to work on his first startup with a dream team at his leadership.

When he arrived in 2012, the ecosystem on the island was little to non-existent. He knew that Puerto Rico had an immense pool of talent working on small side projects with innovation at their core. What was missing for these entrepreneurs to take their hustles to the next level was proper business education and funding. By that time, he was one of the first founders whose startup’s Kickstarter campaign proved successful. And so he’s been an advocate and key figure for the local entrepreneurial community since then.

After hurricane Maria, Jonathan with that all-or-nothing mindset of his, took it upon himself to disrupt the way disaster aftermaths play-out for the insured. Because during an emergency, no one can afford to wait 365 days to get sustenance, he founded his second startup: Raincoat.