OpenEnglish.com on Vimeo.

Entrepreneurial stories often involve a good initial idea, long hours and a few rejections followed by several failures. But we all love good endings.

So Thursday evening, about 95 aspiring entrepreneurs came to hear Andrés Moreno, 31, co-founder and CEO of Open English. The online English school started in 2006 in his apartment in Caracas, Venezuela, with a few students and a couple of partners. Since then, it has grown into a global company with more than 150,000 students, seven offices spread throughout the Americas and 2,000 employees — 150 of them working at its Coconut Grove office.

In between, Moreno, who left college to pursue his business dreams, moved to Silicon Valley looking for investors, knocked on doors, slept on a friend’s couch and went broke a few times. Fast-forward to less than a decade later and Moreno, who moved to Miami in 2009, has since raised “probably more than $130 million.”

Moreno’s talk was the first in the speaker series presented in Miami by Tech Cocktail, a national media and events organization focused on entrepreneurs, startups and technology. Knight Foundation invested $150,000 to bring Tech Cocktail to South Florida.

An engaging speaker with a natural salesman’s ease, Moreno, in conversation with Frank Gruber, CEO and co-founder of Tech Cocktail, started by discussing his early days teaching English in Latin America to employees of Fortune 500 companies in a traditional brick-and-mortar school setting. Dealing with difficulties such as bringing teachers to Latin America led to the idea of teaching online. It was, by his own account, his third try at a grand business idea.

But, he “quickly realized that it was going to be a lot harder and it would take a lot more money and work than I had thought. I went through all my savings and I started out of my apartment and at some point I started paying my programmers with my suits and shoes.”

The angel investors and venture capital and private investment firms came later, sometimes in unexpected, improbable circumstances.

At one point, while in California, out of money and doors to knock on, someone suggested Moreno might as well take a break and go to a men’s retreat to which he had been invited.

Being out of reach for a few days at that critical low point was, as he put it, “counterintuitive.” But at the end of the weekend, an investor from Los Angeles who had been part of the group and had heard his story gave Moreno a ride home and a check for $50,000.

As investments bets go it might not sound like a lot, but it allowed him to continue.

“The question I’m asked the most is what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur,” Moreno said in a brief conversation after the talk. “And my answer is: Passion and perseverance.”

“Be passionate about what you do,” he had said in the talk. “At the end of the day, people are not investing in your company because of the financials … they’re investing in you.”

As for perseverance, he suggested that before a would-be entrepreneur starts the climb she needs to know that “Things won’t work the first time around, the second time around or the third time around and then, just staying alive is a testament to how good you are.”

Moreno is on the board of Endeavor Miami, part of a global nonprofit that mentors and supports entrepreneurs. (The Miami affiliate, Endeavor’s first in the United States, opened last year with the support of a $2 million investment over five years from Knight Foundation.) As part of his work with Endeavor, Moreno shares his experiences with would be entrepreneurs. Some lessons however, have to be learned on your own.

“Where do you pick up the knowledge [to be successful]? Failure,” he said. “I wish I could tell you there’s an easy way of being successful, but we’ve gone through running out of money, to not sleeping at night, not meeting payroll, making huge personal sacrifices in term of family, friends, and relationships. And then you do all that and [it] still doesn’t work.

You just have to try again.”

Fernando González writes about arts and culture. He’s based in Miami.

Drop by Knight Foundation’s booth at eMerge Americas Techweek on Tuesday at 1 p.m. to meet Moreno. The booth will be staffed with South Florida business leaders and entrepreneurs and Knight staff Monday and Tuesday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.