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He’s got that great American story, of a guy who didn’t have the upbringing a lot of us had, but has turned it into a real positive life. He deserves everything he gets.Ed Tom, Bowl’s Director of Operations (2006)
Entrepreneurship is the ability of human beings to adapt creatively to any scenario and adversity. To be able to generate ideas, to turn dreams into tangible projects, in which crises are opportunities to build something different and unique.
Every entrepreneur is an individual who offers a good or service that has a direct impact on the development of the economy and society. He is, in short, a human being who seeks to positively impact the community in which he lives, always looking to transcend and go beyond to help others and thus provide them with a better quality of life.
This is the case of Maurice Vanegas, an American of Colombian origin, who at the age of 10 emigrated with his parents to the United States from Medellin, Colombia, in search of better opportunities.
Vanegas grew up in Glendale, where he attended Glendale High School.
After leaving school he got his first job at the age of 14, cleaning at the Hollywood Bowl. Since then he has not stopped working.
His vision of personal and professional growth, of an entrepreneur who wants to build something of his own, led him to study engineering at the University of California (UCLA) in Los Angeles, from which he is one of its graduates.
First business ventures
His college studies didn't stop him from pursuing his first business venture: in 1991, while still a sophomore at UCLA, Maurice Vanegas used his credit cards and scholarship money to finance the purchase of a second-hand bus at an auction, at the time he was only 21 years old. He quickly secured four more buses and a contract with the Hollywood Bowl.
This led him to create his first company in 1991, becoming president and owner of Transit Systems Unlimited Inc. a charter bus service.
Since the maintenance of his buses was a significant cost to him, he decided to create a company that would not only fulfill this function for his main transportation company, but also for other companies in the same line of business. Thus, in 1993, he created American Fleet Services, a medium and heavy-duty truck repair company. It was a riskier and more expensive venture than the first, but one that paid off in the long run.
With the passing of the years, a lot of effort, dedication and regardless of the day or the hour, Vanegas fully complied with the services offered by his companies, which is why he came to have a fleet of 50 buses, the result of the trust placed by customers in him and his company, but also of his hard work.
The entrepreneur with a social vision never stops!
His entrepreneurial vision has never stopped him, so he decided to get involved in other businesses, which is why he ventured into content production, advertising, technology, as well as fuel production. He has been involved in the financial markets and real estate. He even owned 225 apartment units in Lousiana. He has also obtained transportation contracts with California State University, Northridge, city, county and private schools in California. This is just to mention some of his business ventures.
Something that characterizes Vanegas is the work environment he creates from his humility, simplicity and dedication. This is evident in the way he treats his employees to help them fulfill their obligations, even going so far as to prepare and pack lunches for his drivers, thus avoiding unnecessary delays, which would otherwise break his company's transportation service schedule and lunchtime commitments.
On the other hand, he has involved his employees in his business by inviting them to participate as partners in a private company dedicated to buying foreclosed homes and reselling them at a profit. This is unusual and shows his vision as an entrepreneur with social impact.
People who have been associated with Maurice Vanegas say he has earned a reputation as a solid corporate citizen who reinvests his money back into the community.
“It’s grown, expanded, (and) he’s really done it with a community consciousness that’s rare,” said Roberto Barragan, president of the Valley Economic Development Center… “He’s got his family involved, he takes care of his drivers, he really sees this as a way to improve social consciousness…
Within this vision Vanegas believes that technology should be put at the service of people, for which he has had several innovative ideas such as converting an old transit bus into a fully wired classroom with wheels: wireless Internet access, 19-inch flat screen monitors and a sound system. This in order to use it for interactive tours of the Griffith Observatory and school groups.
He has even launched wide-ranging ideas, such as that the U.S. Postal Service should be disbanded in favor of electronic communication and private delivery services, to a plan to save the world using community investment and compound interest.
It is within the latter that Vanegas, as he came to know and understand better how money works, decided to set his sights on the decentralized digital economy with the use of blockchain technology. The ultimate intention: to decentralize liquidity and place the power of money in the hands of the people.
Entrepreneurship from the blockchain
This new universe has allowed him to enter a new and fascinating ecosystem full of challenges and opportunities.
After a long process of studying and understanding how the historically built fractional reserve economic system works, he decided to embark as executive producer on his next project: the 2013 documentary "Jekyll Island The Truth Behind The Federal Reserve".
This encouraged him to learn about, understand and dabble in the decentralized digital economy, starting with bitcoin, so his first steps in cryptoeconomics were mining this digital currency in 2016.
Gradually he began to attend various blockchain conferences, which allowed him to learn about Dan Larimer and Brendan Blumer's EOS project.
It is in this way that he came across other alternatives to create value in this new form of economy, so he decided to stop mining in order not to waste energy that can be used for other things. From this moment on he became fascinated with the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) system of the EOS blockchain, which he began to study in detail.
At this time he was also a basketball coach for children and being immersed in this stage of new learning, he was able to appreciate the potential of computer technology, and more specifically programming, so he decided to create an academy that would bring something more to the youth from a social point of view, in addition to sport. Given the aforementioned, this was a propitious opportunity for him and his children to also begin to study programming with a view to creating projects linked to EOS.
For Maurice Vanegas, EOS has an enormous potential, capable of changing the way we relate to the creation and management of value.
That is why he decided to take his first steps by acquiring EOS Royale in 2019, which is an automated betting system on a digital roulette based on the EOS blockchain. In other words, it is a dApp that uses a smart contract so that the whole process is anchored on trust, integrity and transparency of the game.
The main reason why he acquired this roulette is to have something already built that would allow him to study the code of this dApp on EOS, taking into account that since this was something so new there was not enough documentary information. This was the ideal occasion to combine the programming studies with this code, which allowed him and his children to have a better reference and point of comparison in relation to what they were developing as a project in EOS.
From here, between the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, he came up with the idea of undertaking another more ambitious project: to create a credit system that would generate less control and give more power to the people. The ultimate goal: to create liquidity for bussiness from producers to wholesalers and retailers, not forgetting the customers who are integrated into this ambitious and universal project, which is called EOS Microloan and EOS Market Place, the most recent great entrepreneurial adventure, but not the last.
EOS Microloan is a decentralized finance project (DeFi) that has had a significant impact on the development of local economies in Venezuela, a nation plunged into a deep economic crisis. Thus, the cities of San Jose de Guanipa, El Tigre (Anzoategui State), Ciudad Guayana (Bolivar State), Valencia (Carabobo State), and San Carlos (Cojedes State), have seen a boost to their businesses during the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic.
EOS Market Place is a directory where you can find all the businesses that accept EOS worldwide. Use a powerful search engine to find everything you need in terms of goods and services for everyday life.
EOS Market Place works in partnership with EOS Microloan. They are part of the same project.
Vanegas the entrepreneur
As can be seen, Vanegas has learned to adapt creatively and co-evolve with a sense of community to generate value with social impact.
This has allowed him to successfully project each of his business projects, always seeking to encourage each of those who know him to undertake, even more so in times of crisis, in order to create new forms of value that enhance the capabilities and talents of all human beings.
Maurice Vanegas is an example of life, in which entrepreneurship is a matter of will, not resources.
Daily News. (2006). Story of success borne in the USA. Daily News. Enlace: https://www.dailynews.com/2006/04/22/story-of-success-borne-in-the-usa/
Newman, M. (1998). Smallbiz. Los Angeles Business Journal. Enlace: https://labusinessjournal.com/news/1998/mar/09/smallbiz/
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Article originally published in Spanish on the EOS Microloan blog
