By IORCA CONSULTING - F.Z.E.
WE ARE DIFFERENT
Iván Ortiz Catalán
HOLI || MIDDLE EAST · CEO & Founder
We live in one of the most fascinating moments in history. Never before has it been so easy to access information, connect with people anywhere in the world or build a global business from a computer. Yet even though the world has changed radically, much of the education system still runs on a logic designed for a reality that no longer exists.
Millions of young people are still taught the same path: study for four or five years, earn a university degree and then go out into the job market hoping to find an opportunity.
I asked myself whether that path is the right one for those of us who dream of building companies, creating wealth and leaving a legacy.
If you want to become a business owner
Why does a professor teach entrepreneurship?
It has always seemed contradictory to me that much entrepreneurship education is taught by people who have never started a business. For years I've seen classrooms full of students learning how to build companies, develop business models, manage resources or lead teams, while those teaching the classes have never had to sell a product, make payroll, negotiate with a supplier or risk their own assets to get a project off the ground.
I question the value of academic knowledge. Theory provides what is based on hypotheses and reasoning, what is simple and basic, and it is limited. There is a huge difference between studying entrepreneurship and living it.
Real entrepreneurship involves uncertainty, pressure, mistakes, losses, tough negotiations and decisions with immediate consequences, something theory will never understand.
Today, at 40 and as a business owner, I've understood that there is something no success or fortune can buy: TIME. That's why I believe spending four years studying how to start a business, instead of starting a business while you study, is a model we must change.
You don't learn to get up if you've never fallen.
Are you willing to endure the process?
My name is Iván Ortiz Catalán and I was born in Mexico. My story is far from an overnight success story. Before building operations in the Middle East, before opening companies and before settling in Dubai, I was simply a Latin American entrepreneur trying to find his place in the world.
Like many others, I had projects that didn't work. I invested time and money in ideas that failed. I made costly mistakes and took decisions that, in hindsight, I would probably never take again. Yet each of those mistakes left me something invaluable: experience.
Over time I understood that the market has a very particular way of teaching you. It doesn't care about your GPA. It doesn't care how many books you've read or how many diplomas hang on your wall. The market simply answers one question:
Are you willing to endure the process?
That lesson stayed with me until 2022, the year I made one of the most important decisions of my life: leaving a company to pursue a legacy.
El Correo del Golfo
Many people ask me why Dubai. Some think it was for the buildings, the economic growth or the tax opportunities. The reality is much simpler. I chose Dubai because I understood that your environment has the power to transform a person's destiny.
When I arrived, I found something I had never seen anywhere else. Business owners from more than 200 nationalities living side by side in one city. People who had left the comfort of their countries to pursue a bigger vision. Individuals thinking about global markets while others were still thinking only about local ones.
I realized that Dubai's true value isn't in its buildings. It's in its people.
Because the people you spend time with end up shaping your aspirations. The conversations you hear end up broadening your vision. The opportunities you have access to end up defining the decisions you make.
It was precisely that experience that gave rise to IORCA BUSINESS DEGREE. We don't believe traditional education is the only path. For those who want to build a business, we believe there's another way to learn.
If a young person is willing to invest four years of their life building their future, those four years should produce much more than theoretical knowledge. They should produce real experience. They should produce contacts. They should produce clients. They should produce results. And creating a company is no longer enough; we have to go further: "A LEGACY".
COMPANIES DIE, LEGACIES DON'T
That's why we decided to build a model where learning happens inside the real market. Where students stop being spectators and become protagonists. Where mistakes have real consequences, but where successes also produce real results.
Our philosophy is simple: the best way to learn to build a business is by building one.
No simulator can replace a real negotiation. No exam can replace the pressure of closing a sale. No case study can replace the experience of building a company from scratch.