Our Team
In mid 2016, Justis and I met through the Entrepreneurship Club at the University of Florida. At the time, I had been hosting mastermind sessions with some of the smartest people in my network. When we met, I learned that Justis had also been doing the same.
At the time, I had just won the UF Big Idea Competition, which landed me right on the homepage of UFL.edu, and got a free retail/office space at the student union. Justis would often bring founders to the space and we would all share ideas and brainstorm together.
We quickly became very close friends and began hosting networking events, roundtables and workshops for founders together. We also spent countless hours together watching videos on entrepreneurship. One day, the video we chose was Paul Graham's "Before the Startup", and we began absorbing every bit of content put out by YC Startup School. Our backgrounds are very different, but there are 3 important things we have in common.
We both come from modest means
We are both life-long learners
We were both put on this earth to help early founders succeed
Here are our stories:
Justis was born and raised on the west side of Cleveland. He grew up around gang violence, drug traffickers and drive-by shootings happening as often as one could imagine. Many of his childhood friends have been either gunned down or locked up in prison. His best friend even ended up on First 48 after being involved in the murder of a high-profile gang member they knew.
The gangs eventually started to come after Justis and he knew he had to get out to save his life. In 2014, he serendipitously met a business owner who lived in Gainesville, FL. After sharing his story and his desire to get away from all the violence, the man agreed to let Justis live in his closet for a couple of months while he got on his feet. That was when Justis's life changed forever. He started working for the business owner selling used cars, while taking classes at UF.
Justis always kept a ragged notebook with him, where he would take notes on every speaker we heard or video we listened to. It's actually incredible to look back on some of these: in 2019 he had written down a note to start an accelerator for early stage founders. Little did either of us know, only 3 years later we would have ran 5 cohorts of our accelerator and helped over 40 startups raises $13m+. Justis then started a startup called Qu Parking (airbnb for residential parking). The startup failed, but he took many lessons from it and went on to lead business development for a FinTech startup out of NY called Pinata. In late 2020, he left Pinata to focus 100% on OneSixOne Group.
Justis is one of the few people I've met at my age that is better at networking than I am. He applied to the Venture Capital program at UC Berkeley and after being told that they would not be able to offer him admission because it was at capacity, he called the admissions office multiple times until they finally let him in. He is now using the knowledge gained in the program to help prepare founders in our program for raising capital.
Pablo Casilimas
I was raised by 2 immigrant parents who always told me that I should strive to be a doctor, lawyer or engineer because those were the most secure jobs. I started as an engineering major in 2014 at UF. In late 2015, after experiencing my first internship, I realized I definitely didn't want to work corporate, I didn't want to work 9-5 and I didn't want to be an engineer.
I immediately started Rootex, a content marketing agency, and a year later I dropped out of UF. I was incredibly passionate about education and consider myself a life-long learner, but higher-ed felt like the wrong path since I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. My undying curiosity led me on a quest to understand what makes one business thrive and another fail. This was important because as a marketer, I had to educate my clients on how they should allocate their marketing dollars.
I created my own personalized educational track by convincing my mentor Marty Schaffel, who built and sold AVI-SPL for 9 figures (while being 100% share holder), to start a podcast with me. He invited guests to the show, and I got to sit down with many highly successful entrepreneurs (mostly with 8+ figures ARR and a few with exits of $100m+ all the way to $1b+). When COVID hit, I started a new show just 1 week after Gainesville shut down. In just 2 months, I had amassed over 10,000 views and had some incredible guests such as Jeff Hoffman, ex-CEO of Priceline and Lori Senecal, Global CEO of CP&B Group. I discontinued the show as soon as we launched the first accelerator cohort in June 2020.
I also published a 300-page coffee-table book known as INNOVATE® Gainesville, showcasing the top tech, startups, innovations and entrepreneurs in our region. This allowed me to build valuable relationships while continuing to learn from some of the most accomplished business leaders in the region. I shut down Rootex in 2021 to focus 100% on OneSixOne Ventures. However, a lot of what I learned about PR and content marketing at Rootex is part of the DNA of OneSixOne Ventures today.
Pablo, Justis & Son with mentor Mike Cottmeyer at his penthouse in Gainesville, FL, where we hosted some of our meetups between 2018-2020.
