Austin—Family lore holds that HO Maycotte’s great-grandfather shot off the leg of Pancho Villa, a Mexican revolutionary.
Maycotte, a serial entrepreneur based in Austin, grew up in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in a military-turned-entrepreneurial family. His family established the first hotel there as well as arts schools and a golf course. “It was an idyllic place to live,” he says.
He learned to speak English fluently in his teens when he moved to the United States to attend high school and later earned a computer science degree at the University of Texas at Austin. Today, Maycotte’s revolutionary fervor is confined to technology and founding startups such as fintech company RateGenius, Flightlock (purchased by Control Risks), Finetooth (a contract management company now doing business as Mumboe), data science company Umbel, and analytics startup Pilosa.
“Our time here is finite; we’ve got to do the most with what we have,” he says. “My ambition used to be from the outside in—to have a broad impact. Now, if I can make life for my employees better, support the next generation of entrepreneurs and founders in Austin, make my investors invest in more companies, that’s important.”
In this week’s “Five Questions For … ,” Maycotte speaks about living a paper-free existence, lessons from a grandfather, and how he misses working with his hands. Here is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
Xconomy: What’s the most embarrassing thing about yourself that you’re willing to admit publicly?
HO Maycotte: I don’t know how this will [come off] in print but I was on the golf team in high school and when I was at a golf tournament, no one could pronounce my name. An announcer called me “Ha-gina” [i.e., rhyming to a woman’s body part], that was pretty embarrassing. But it was probably the best golf shot of my life. I recovered really quickly. So I guess anybody’s welcome to call me the wrong name because it turned out well in the end.
I don’t think they’d ever heard of my name. Ever since I started coming to the States, it’s been like this. I’m Higinio the 7th. It’s an awesome name! I have two daughters so I didn’t get to pass it down.
X: What career advice do you give to new college graduates?
HO: Travel as much as you can while you can. Avoid overhead as much as you can. I think millennials do a good job of that. I think it’s really important early on to decide if you are individual contributor or if you want to do something more broad in terms of career path. A lot of people aren’t sure if they want to be managers in life, or if they want to do one thing really well. Obviously, if you have an entrepreneurial bug, the key is to dive into something that you can never turn back from. The key to making it really work is to have no choice but to make it work.
Even as I dive into new [startups] time and time again, I always put it
