Jose and Adela Montoya Brañez—a sibling duo studying entrepreneurial management at the BYU Marriott School of Business—have developed a deep appreciation for the lessons only failure can teach. But it’s not just the learning opportunities that fuel the siblings’ passion for entrepreneurship: It’s the chance to serve others.
As enthusiastic as the siblings from Springville, Utah, are now about entrepreneurship, neither one initially knew they wanted to be an entrepreneur. Jose was several years into the civil engineering program at Brigham Young University when he realized that the career wasn’t for him. Instead, he started exploring classes at BYU Marriott, and when he discovered the entrepreneurship program, he felt he’d found his calling. “I was really fascinated with the way entrepreneurship works,” he says.
Jose’s decision to study entrepreneurship proved influential for his younger sister. Adela had planned on studying law, but after returning from a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 2023, she didn’t feel a legal career was right for her. She was initially skeptical when Jose suggested trying entrepreneurship. “I didn’t know the word entrepreneur was a thing, honestly,” she laughs. Yet, watching Jose’s example piqued her curiosity, and after joining the Creators student association and taking an introductory entrepreneurship course, she knew entrepreneurship was the major for her.
Adela took her interest a step further by applying to BYU Marriott’s Sandbox, a program run by the Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology that helps students develop skills while building technology startups. After working through an extensive application process, Adela was accepted and began the program in the fall 2024 semester. “I want to go all in,” she says. She is most excited about how the program will give her the chance to focus all her energy on building a business over the course of the next academic year.
Both siblings have found that a positive attitude about failure has been critical to their growth as entrepreneurs. Jose explains that learning to fail efficiently—or using failure to change his next attempt—helped him learn from several failed businesses before successfully launching his first profitable company with his wife. “I just tried everything. I wasn’t afraid of failure,” he says. “When I first failed, I was actually really excited, because I learned something that I didn’t know beforehand.”
Adela echoes the sentiment, saying, “If I’m taking a risk, it’s okay if I fail. I will learn something from it, and it’ll be better next time.”
While the siblings are currently working on different entrepreneurial projects, both are motivated by a desire to serve others. The potential for service is part of what drew Adela to the major: Her first entrepreneurship class described how building businesses is a way to solve people’s needs in innovative, interesting ways. “That was really stimulating for me,” Adela explains. “Entrepreneurship is a way for me to help people.”
Jose’s desire to help others through entrepreneurship began after visiting Peru when he was 17. While there, Jose saw children younger than himself working on the streets to help support their families rather than attending school. It was a stark contrast to his own life, causing him to realize that not everyone has the same opportunities. Later on the trip, Jose helped deliver Christmas gifts to several impoverished families who expressed gratitude for the support. These experiences led Jose to a powerful realization: “I realized I wanted to bridge the gap. I wanted to do something to help people.”
Jose’s current business project, an athletic apparel company named Otishi, pulls directly from those experiences and represents his goal to build a profitable business designed to give back. Jose and his business partners have donated profits to support various humanitarian efforts, such as the building of a school cafeteria and funding education for girls in trade schools in Guatemala, and they plan to expand Otishi’s support of educational opportunities for youth in Latin America in the coming years.
As Jose continues to work on Otishi, and as Adela delves further into the BYU Marriott Sandbox program, both are optimistic about the future. “I’m excited to fail and to be humbled,” Adela says. “And I’m excited to build something that will help people and that will resonate with me at the same time.”
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Written by Katie Brimhall
