YouSaid · the spoken record

Julio Vasconcellos

lines on the record: 52
first: 2022-09-23
most recent: 2022-09-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I definitely think that the game that entrepreneurs and investors play around fundraising and valuations and that whole dance and the pretend, I think a lot of it wastes a lot of time. And I think that we could all just kind of be more objective and more practical about who do you want to work with and kind of come to a good deal and kind of get down to business and get down to building, just be a lot more efficient and a lot more pleasurable.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've had some amazing conversations with the folks at the Pan Endowment, I'm a PenalMum, so obviously I have a huge bias and one of my main mentors, Andy Rackcliffe is chairman of the Endowment there. And I've been able to learn a ton from Peter Ayman and David and everyone there on the team. And I would love to have them as LPs one day and be able to kind of give back also to my alma mater.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“LP management. I think I was definitely surprised at how much more time I spend with LPs than I expected. And I think a lot of those are these really amazing conversations where I can learn a lot from. And some of them are more just kind of straightforward reporting discussions. And had I known that I probably would have optimized more to have in my LP-based folks that are there for interesting debates where I can learn from, rather than more the types of LPs that are just looking to update numbers since you're going to end up spending the same amount of time with both of them.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Man, this is going to sound like I'm backtracking, right? But I was talking about being non consensus. And I think that in Latin America or in markets that are a little bit more risky and less familiar, sometimes you have to, in the spectrum of non-consensus to consensus, you might need to sacrifice a little bit of doing something that's not consensus in order to honestly just invest in founders that are backable. I think that means here founders that speak good English. And a lot of times they're more polished because I think international investors, they overvalue those attributes and being able to be fundable and be able to raise the next round is actually a pretty critical thing in new markets like Latin America.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say Sarah Smith from the Sarah Smith Fund in Silicon Valley. Sarah's a good friend that we overlapped at Facebook. She was an amazing sales and people leader, both at Facebook and then at Cora afterwards. And she's been sort of a huge inspiration to anyone that wants to build high performance teams and build great culture. And now she has her own”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The new thing by Michael Lewis, that story of Netscape and Jim Clark, it was what got me into tech and got me into investing was really about reading that Jim Clark adventure”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Teams can do even when compared to bigger teams. I think you're going to have better and even more output with less people. It's counterintuitive, but it's true. And I think it also hopefully gives some comfort to founders that are struggling with making tough decisions to cut investment, cut teams because they'll be able to make it through. You can make it through with less.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say rule number one be in the game and stay in the game. What that means is sometimes being a little bit more cautious. Maybe you should cut a little bit more than you think you need. I think a lot of founders, they err on the side of just cutting a little bit of the fat. I think it's healthy to cut through the fat and into the muscle because you can always undo that later if you are wrong. Maybe you cut a little bit too much. You might have to rehire people or you might have to reinvest in things that you reduce investment in. But if you cut too little and you end up being wrong and you run out of money, you can't undo that, right? and you're out of the game. So I would number one, over index on being more aggressive and having more runway and being more conservative in times of uncertainty like we have today. The other thing I learned, you can always do less with more. And your team and yourself, you're always going to think, look, if I cut 20% of my workforce or I reduce this investment, we're never going to be able to deliver this. And I guarantee that you're going to be surprised at how much smaller and more motivated.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An angel investor, I often took money off the table. That was probably 10 or 20% of the total position value. It was never sort of selling the entire position. So definitely kind of guaranteeing some returns and guaranteeing some of that money within the bank. And I think for the biggest investments I made, definitely we sold when there was an opportunity. And I think that we look back and we're happy about those decisions. As an investor, frankly, I would think about it in a similar way. If a company is a big enough position where selling 10% of it, maybe even 20% of the position might be able to return your fund, might be able to distribute to limited partners, that might be a good trade-off to guarantee some of the returns in the short term, but still leaving plenty of exposure for the upside cases because you want to make sure that you're going to be compensated for that huge risk that you're taking at the early stage. I would probably never sell an entire position before a final exit, but I would seriously consider taking maybe 10% off of a position off the table and guaranteeing some returns for limited partners.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's definitely a reduction in capital. What that's going to translate into is a greater mortality rate and a greater loss ratio in the next couple of years. I think that where we're going to be in the next couple of years is the normal. I think that where we were the last couple of years was atypical. You shouldn't have companies that are going sideways, being able to raise money forever. So a lot of companies that honestly should have probably died in the last couple of years are going to die now. That's healthy and that's normal and the reduction of capital is going to bring us to something that looks much more like I think the long-term averages of loss ratios and follow-ons than we had in the last couple of years.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't share your concern, and let me tell you why where you've seen a lot of the retrenching of growth capital has been with the crossover funds. A lot of crossover funds were investing very actively in Latin America over these last couple years. And they've retrenched and they started to put more and more in their focus on their public positions. But that's not a Latin America specific factor. That's something that we see around the world. You still have here the dedicated growth capital of great global funds that have local offices, local teams have been here for the long term, are not leaving. And those are names like General Atlantic, Riverwood. You have some of the sovereigns like GHC and Tamasek that have been here for a long time and they're not leaving. And honestly, the kinds of capital that those great blue chip investors bring is plenty for the size of the market we have today. Sure, that might be different once the market is much bigger in 10 years, but it definitely allows the great companies and the breakout companies to be funded all the way through to the public markets.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What happened in more developed countries like the US? So, really, the pandemic pushed us ahead three years into the future. And we didn't fall back down after that step function increase. That has persisted and that growth has continued in Latin America.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what's happened in the COVID boom when you look at the US is that you had this massive acceleration of digital adoption for everything from e-commerce, grocery delivery, your usage of your Peloton, what have you. And now that we're in a post-pandemic world, we're seeing a lot of these numbers just revert back to the long-term historical trends. It's very clear when you look at it in the data in the US. What's happened in Latin America is that you had a similar boom during the COVID period, but you didn't have the reversion to the long-term average. So if you look at just give you one example here, if you look at e-commerce penetration in Brazil to take one specific case, we're right now almost three years ahead of where we would have been in that historic growth curve because a lot of Brazilians were trying things out like e-commerce or telemedicine for the first time and they saw how much better it was than waiting in line at their bank branch or waiting in line at their doctor's office that they weren't going to go back to the old world. And that was a little bit different than I think.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Catch up to where India and China are today. And we're talking about a 10x increase in value there. And any of these kind of catch-up opportunities, we're talking about value creation that's measured in the trillions of dollars. So we talk about massive amounts of money. Obviously, they're not going to be created overnight. But over the next decade, that's ultimately why I decided to focus my career on Latin America. And that's the macro long-term picture.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's talk about the ecosystem and compare it, but then let's also talk about the COVID boom, as you mentioned. which is a little bit of this Mary Meeker's internet trends for Latin America. And one of the things that we publish every year in that report is something we call the Atlantico Digital Transformation Index, where we try to compare the level of tech penetration that exists in different markets around the world, obviously including Latin America. And what we see, and this is coming out in this year's report, is that when you look at that tech penetration index in a more developed country like the United States, that's around 52%. Even if you look at China, that number is 20%, you look at India, it's 15%. But when you look at what the tech penetration level is at Latin America, it's 1.5%. Even Brazil, which is more advanced, is at 3%. And I'm not here to say that Latin America is 1.5% is going to be the 50% that we see in the US, but I do think that it's very likely that it'll eventually...”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say the biggest miss I had was not investing at the seed round of Snapchat. Just to give you some context at the time, I used to invest with a bunch of friends from both Stanford and Facebook. And one of my friends had Evan as a student in his class and has sort of gotten a glimpse of Snapchat. And because some of our crew still worked at Facebook at the time, we had to run it by Facebook Conflicts Committee. And I remember Facebook Conflicts Committee said, oh, you guys can't invest this because it could potentially be competitive. And there were a couple ways we could have done this kind of, you know, sort of outside that or some of us could have done it individually. But we kind of just backed off from it. We said, oh, this whole like disappearing messages thing doesn't make any sense. Sure, like the numbers are kind of just off the charts, but let's forget about it. It's probably, you know, it's probably just a fad. And I think we didn't insist on it and we didn't insist on going in the deal once we had the sort of that no from the conflicts committee. And then obviously that probably would have been the best investment I would have ever made.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My biggest hit either an angel investment in Ipsy up in the US or in Quinto andar in Brazil. Both of those were probably around 100x returns, maybe even more than 100x returns, but they're massive returns. When you make those investments and eventually sort of that money hits your bank account, I think it really solidifies the importance of the power law inventure, right? And sort of these asymmetric returns that exist only in venture capital and only in the early stage. What it's done to me as an investor is to think about how do I get into these massive, massive category defining companies that are probably coming around in Latin America once every couple of years. I need to be able to get into those because that one hit, that one return is probably going to be more valuable than the sum of all the other investments that I'm going to make in that fund. And that's all that matters really to be successful in the early stage.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you really need to be able to be kind of a bottom up thinker. And I think you have to go into companies sometimes that no one else wants to go in that ultimately prove the world that they were right and you sort of by extension were right and end up being really massive returns that we're going to be able to see.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would describe myself much more as an independent thinker. So we aren't necessarily seeking the next hot deal just because the market is chasing it. And I think that sometimes that approach leads us to non-consensus investments, right? And from the outside, it may seem like it's a contrarian investment, but that's really a result of our process, not the goal of our process. But just to also get the hook that you left there, I am particularly happy when our process leads us to a non-consensus view because I do believe and maybe some people think this is outdated. I would disagree with them. I do think that the best returns still are those non-consensus and right investments, the Howard Marx 2x2 matrix. And I think I've heard a lot of times that, no, conventure, you might need to look for consensus investment because someone has to go in there and they have to follow you on and have to mark up your deal. That's a very short-term strategy if you want to have a lot of great paper markups and hot deals. But if you're investing for the long term and you're trying to build a company that's going to be massive in 10 years,”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goal is to be the number one venture capital fund in Latin America. And we've defined that by saying we're going to be the fund that's going to return the highest multiple on capital for our limited partners. And for you to be able to return the highest multiple on capital, something very similar, I think, to what Benchmark aims for, you need to concentrate a lot more capital on that first check. And you need to operate with thinner reserves than what is typical. So to give you an example, an early stage fund today probably reserves about half the fund, right, for follow-ons. It's probably a typical number you hear. In our case, we reserve 25% of the fund, right? So we're much, much thinner. We try to have more bets and we try to concentrate more on those bets once we have that level of confidence.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So everything is a balance. So, I'm definitely not advocating for you to have three positions that you go all in on and kind of really think that those are the ones. But I do think at the early stage, it's just so hard to pick the winners. I think it's so hard to say this company is going to be the next Mercado Libre. But I do think that you can narrow down that universe and say, look, I'm going to.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Andy's been a long time mentor of mine. And I think that what he's referring to was one of the early letters that I think I wrote something along the lines that our goal is to win, right? Our goal is really not to miss the next huge hit. And it's not to minimize losses. And I think some investors, especially some more traditional investors, kind of reacted a little negatively to that idea of not trying to minimize losses. And I remember having this conversation with Andy and him just saying how it could have just never ceases to amaze him. I think the number of people in venture that play not to lose and how you really can't win by playing not to lose. I think that really stuck to me. And I think it's something that I had a little bit of my gut instinct, right? That you have to play to win. You don't have to play not to lose. How did Andy react to that? I mean, Andy actually then at that point decided to kind of double down on his investment and kind of putting a pretty big check, at least for us into our new fund. So it was great to have his vote of confidence behind that strategy.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The main thing I would advise a new manager is just that there's no shortcuts of meetings and I think that's just the way it is. I don't think there's a shortcut to raising a fund magically. It requires hearing a lot of no's and trying to find honestly what the right product market fit is for your fund, right? Who are the people that want to back you and who want to back this strategy? And once you find them, just look for more people like them. I think start out with people that know you and that trust you and are willing to make a bet on you as a person and then try to have other people that think in a similar way than they do and kind of go and expand in that way rather than, I think, try to follow any formulaic way for getting a phone off the ground.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely hundreds of conversations. It took me a good maybe six months when I said, look, let's start raising this fund and first and did the first close. So yeah, it was very time intensive. It required meeting a lot of people. It required hearing a lot of no's before we eventually got the fund off the ground.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was slower than I expected when you're trying to get a first time fund off the ground. Things just moved slowly. I think people want to understand your strategy, want to understand what your edge is. And that requires, I think, more conversations than you would normally need to have once you already have a fund with an established track record. With that said, I think we were very lucky that I personally had a very strong track record as an investor prior to Atlantiku, and I had a pretty extensive operating background that I had met a lot of people. And I think a lot of people that were willing to make a bet on me as a person. Me as an investor. So we were able to get the fund off the ground, but it definitely took longer than I expected when I first sought out to go raise the money.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Viki has the empathy of being a founder that has seen a lot of success and he's also seen a lot of failure. So I think he really understands the life in the trenches. And I think that empathy for what it's like to run a business is critical and is probably one of the things that is most underrated and is probably least present out there when you talk to investors. And a lot of times what you need is psychological, right? You need to get the founder to have the right mindset to be thinking about how to break out of a particular rut or break through a particular challenge in their business. And that's much more of a mental game than a tactical game. And having been there and be able to empathize and kind of connect with a founder psychologically is critical and people like Mickey that have been there are really able to do that.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The right people to discuss the company's future together is important, but I don't think that needs to happen within the construct of a board.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my experience, having a moment where you bring in different investors and different advisors together to check in and talk about strategy and talk about direction, that conversation is valuable. Whether that has to happen at a board meeting and whether it has to happen sort of in the formal construct of a board of directors, I don't think so. I think a lot of the most valuable conversations I've had and strategy planning conversations I've had weren't in board meetings. I don't think that they are necessary elements of having those important strategic discussions and conversations that guide a firm. And that's a little bit of also why I think that being formally on a board or listening only to your board members isn't necessarily as important as I think a lot of investors make it out to be. As a founder, a lot of the people that helped me the most weren't on the board. You mentioned Mickey Malcolm. Mickey Malka started as an angel investor in Pedro Bano and is probably one of my greatest mentors. He eventually joined our board, but he probably added as much value before he was a board member as after he was a board member. I'm a believer that getting”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Transparent for you to be frank about that conversation and try to find something that's going to be the best for the company and ultimately all the shareholders.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question you definitely do at times have more confidence in the founder's ability and then that confidence goes low. But what happens when that confidence goes to zero? What is your responsibility as an investor is to have that honest conversation with the founder and tell them, look, I think that maybe you're not the best person for this company or maybe you're not the best person to kind of get to product market fit or sort of turn us around. You may not be the best CEO. You may not be the best executive. Hopefully through an objective and frank conversation the founder agrees with you and thinks that the best path for the company might be changing the executive team or changing the leadership team. And if ultimately he or she doesn't agree with you, you may just need to part ways whether or not you're able to replace the founder and bring someone else in is a separate topic. But if the founder doesn't want to hear you and you're not aggregating any value and you're not getting along well, it might make more sense for them to bring on some other investor onto the board and to bring on some other investors and advisor. But I think the importance is for you to be.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes it's just about giving feedback that the company is going down the wrong path. It's just about putting up a mirror in front of that founder and making it clear that they maybe don't have product market fit, that maybe what they think is working really isn't working and kind of bringing reality down. And I think that founders are optimistic by nature and they think things are going well and they're going to end up well. And sometimes you just have to say, look, this isn't working. You have to try something else. And maybe you have to make cuts. Maybe you have to pivot. Maybe you have to fire your co-founder. And making those decisions are tough. And sometimes when you're stuck in the data.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're not there to be a founder's friend, but you're there to help that founder win. And sometimes helping that founder win may be uncomfortable, right? It might involve giving sort of harsh but constructive feedback. And I think you need to be able to be a little bit more cutthroat to some extent in the way that you partner up with founders and help them be successful in a way that's not always pleasant for everyone, but it's the way that maximizes the return for your investors and ultimately maximizes the return and the outcome for that founder.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you're investing your own money, you have the luxury of investing in things just because you like them. Maybe it's off strategy, maybe it's not your focus, but you like the founder or you like the idea. And what changes when you're investing other people's money is that when you go out there and you raise a fund, you promise a particular strategy in a particular area of focus. And now it's your responsibility to deliver on what you sold, right? So you can't go off and say, I'm going to raise an early stage fund and start making growth investments or sort of seed stage investments. You really have to be able to deliver on what you sold. And I think that's important to LPs, the consistency in what you sell and what you deliver. So sticking to that strategy that you outlined. I think the other thing also is that as an angel, you have a lot more leeway to be a friend to the founders. And you can be a little bit more of a cheerleader. You can have a little bit more fun with them as people. But I think that once you're investing other people's money, you're really there to maximize returns.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I still have my own personal bias to like the scrappy founder that iterates and try things and sort of very numbers based. But I think today, especially after the experience with Prefer, I've gained a much, much higher appreciation for the craftsmanship. I think that Scott Belsky always advocated for. And maybe I was 10% craft and 90% scrappiness and iteration. And now I'm probably 60, 40, you know, a much more still on the scrappy side, still on the iterative side, but I still see the value of great design, great experiences, greatly crafted products being able to craft that early nut that is product market fit.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mindset, which I think had served companies like Facebook well, had served me well at Pebano. And I think Scott is much more of a craftsman, right, a much more of a product builder. And we ended up somewhere in that spectrum of move fast and break things and build sort of the most beautiful polished and crafted products. That was probably a little bit too much on the rough side. And we probably just didn't give enough time to some of the versions and some of the things that we tested, much counter to, I think, what Scott probably would have done. And I think that's probably what I would have done most differently if I were to do prefer again.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say the first thing is just how much I had underappreciated the fact that my two prior experiences at Facebook and then with Pedro Bano, how important product market fit had been there and how lucky I was to be in those places because finding true and amazing product market fit is so hard and it's quite rare. And I think I underestimated the difficulty of doing that in such a complex market as the one that we attacked. And I thought that I'm going to get together with Scott, get together with these other great co-founders, and we're going to kind of iterate and try a bunch of things and eventually get there. But we never did. We kind of hit our head against the wall for three years and tried a bunch of things until eventually ran out of steam. And I think one thing that Scott always pulled me to do, and I think that if I could do it over again, I probably would have listened more to him is just how much time we spent on each iteration of the product. I think I always had the mindset of try things out. If they don't work out, iterate, kind of throw away the product, just kind of this very rapid iteration, test and report.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of focus is knowing what you're good at and knowing what you're good at doesn't necessarily mean abiding by labels that the market has put out there, right? So just because something is called a seed today, but it used to be called a series A in the past, you have to be very clear to yourself and to your investors and to your founders. What's the stage of life of a company that you're most effective in? Benchmark has always been an early stage investor. And I think early stage in the past meant series A's and early stage today means seeds. And I think that's how they've evolved. They've been very true to the, I think the underlying nature of what they do and what they're good at as the market has shifted around they've shifted around with that market, but still continue to double down on what their edge is.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Term, I think really chips away at what you're doing. And I think that benchmark focus on the long term and that focus on being the best in the long term is something that really stuck with me.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say that there were probably two things that I took away from watching the best of the best kind of doing their thing at benchmark. And I think the first one that was really striking to me was just an incredible level of focus they had, right? They really stick to their knitting. They know that they're the best at the craft of early stage venture and investing in these great breakout companies and being sort of the supportive partner that these founders want. That focus and the ability to say no to many other things that might come up. They don't raise the opportunity funds and the growth funds. they don't do spaced. They're kind of just focus on what they do best. And they're the best at it in the world. And I think we at a lunch who have tried to steal a little bit of that playbook and try to be entirely focused on early stage and being the best at it. One of my mentors once said that greed is the number one enemy of returns. Being greedy and kind of expanding your fund or expanding your strategy into multiple different things that maybe you're not the best at probably is short-term profitable, but sort of long.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To give you one example, we had several fundraising and M&A conversations that were happening throughout our history. And at times we were just short staff to be able to handle all these requests and all these things that we needed. I remember very clearly that GA sent in a couple of analysts that they basically kind of lent us to come work with us for a couple months and help us organize sort of our finance team and a lot of our reporting. I think I remember also with T-O Price at the time it was Henry Allenbogan that was running the private investment team.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think we had really amazing partners at Pace Turbano, right? We raised our first round from benchmark capital. I went on to start another company and raise money from Benchmark Capital again. So I've definitely done that before. I think even our growth investors at General Atlantic and T-Ro, what was most important there is that not only were they helpful and supporting us when we were in hyper growth and we were doing excellent, but actually when the company was going through a lot of rough patches and was really in a lot of trouble, that's actually when they really leaned in and helped us out, right? And they're supportive to make sure that we did well”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great that you spoke to Enrique. He's a good friend. I think I met him when he was probably 16 or 17 starting his first company in Brazil. And it's a great question because I think that we made a lot of mistakes. I think some of the biggest mistakes we made were around focus was probably expanding into too many product lines. It was probably expanding into too many geographies too fast. All those things ultimately started to consume cash and probably more importantly started to consume management attention and management focus. We eventually had to pay that bill, right? that eventually arrived when the market as a whole. And I think sort of this was a global phenomenon show that that daily deal model wasn't as great and wasn't as sustainable, honestly, as the entire world had thought. And when that market started to fall from under us, we had a lot more fronts to have to fight on. We had a lot more fires to put out. And a lot of that was just because we had expanded and we had so much surface area that we were operating in that it was much harder to balance all those things and get the company back to profitability.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Means achieving a level of excellence and market share and barrier to entry that a new competitor can't easily come in and undermine you and sort of steal market share. Oftentimes it's about building those competitive moats, making sure that they're strong enough that no one can easily come in and sort of dethrone you. And a lot of times just getting to sort of the market share or getting the network effects to start kicking in in a way that sort of the acceleration curve is very clear that as you grow, that moat or that competitive advantage is only going to get greater and no one else is going to be able to come in there and reliably challenge you in a way that you should be worried about.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when we launched Pesurbano back to the question of the topic of vision, our vision was to build the ultimate local services company in Latin America. And we started with the groupon model for daily deals and then subsequently we launched a food delivery business, a restaurant reservation business, a local content business, kind of really executing on that overall vision of what we wanted to build. I think that what we got wrong is that we probably did that too early. What I would tell founders is that you have to pick one market and probably one market and one customer and you really have to nail it and you really have to win that market before you move on to the next one. I think trying to fight a multi-front war and trying to win multiple markets at once, especially in a hyper-competitive market like the one we had, is a recipe for disaster. So what we always tell our founders is, look, focus on one geography, one product, one customer, win that, and then go on and move on to the next one. Don't try to do everything in parallel. I think focus is probably one of the most”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back, clean that up, have a more permanent solution that can deliver the same kind of effectiveness at a much higher level of quality.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're growing that fast, you're bound to make a lot of mistakes. And I think it's important to grow fast and make mistakes because it's the only way that you can move so fast. But it's also important to just be cognizant that you're making those mistakes and you're going to have to clean things up. I think there's some types of mistakes that you really can't make, right? That you really can't compromise on. Can't compromise on culture, can't compromise on the people you hire and the way that you treat them and the way that they behave. But I think there's a lot of problems that you end up solving by just throwing more bodies at them. Those typically are the first kinds of problems or the first kinds of things that you break, processes that probably should have been optimized and you probably should have solved through software. But while you're building those software solutions, you probably ended up hiring 20 or 30 people to kind of keep pressing keys on a keyboard and solving them. And ultimately, when you have anything that so people heavy and so mission critical, it's bound to break, right? The site's going to go offline and it's your responsibility as the CEO and the founder to ultimately go.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would press refresh on our keyboards on the browser, and the number would go up by three and would go up by five and would go up by 10. These weren't cheap offers that we actually thought that there was a big bug. And I remember Alex kind of went in and thought, hey, we've been hacked, something is happening. But in reality, it was true. You know, kind of reminded me a lot of, I think, that early Amazon story of the bell ringing every time you made a sale. Ultimately, they had to turn off the bell. And I think we were in a similar situation where we ultimately had to stop pressing refresh and just believe we had landed on this model, which was the groupon model from abroad. It had this amazing product market fit and it could kind of just grow as fast as you would be able to pour fuel on it.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just to give you a sense of the breakneck speed that we were going with Peshurbano, I probably worked 100 hour weeks for two years straight, so it was both exhilarating to have that kind of growth and that kind of traction, but also exhausting, right? You're just sprinting a marathon and it tires you out. You have a lot of adrenaline to keep you going, but it definitely tires you out. And to give you a sense, we started myself and my co-founder, Alex, working out of his living room and his apartment in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. And fast forward two years later, we were over 1,200 employees present in six different countries across Latin America. The company was doing over $100 million a year in net revenues. Very large company in every sense of the word in a very short amount of time. One of the things that probably is most memorable for me was probably one of the first offers that we put live on the site. This is probably in the first or second month of the website, but we just started selling so many coupons of that particular offer.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my view, market comes first, and I think if you have the right model and the right product in that market, I think that's more important than ultimately the team. That's not to say that the team doesn't matter, right? I think in a lot of cases, you do have a lot of competitors. And actually the team's ability to navigate and try and eventually find”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably point number one is how dominant and important that kind of product market fit can be. I think that the other thing I learned, which I still carry to this day as investors, just the overwhelming importance of a founder's vision, Mark Zuckerberg, probably chief amongst many tech founders out there, is just an amazing, compelling founder with just a huge vision that helps serve to unite everyone and really sort of drive and motivate this amazing team that Facebook had created in the early days. And I think that that's probably the single most important thing a founder can have. And one of those things that anyone that's not a founder can never have is really have that authority to create and shape and communicate that vision in a way that drives the team.”
2022-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Greed is the #1 Enemy of Venture Returns, Why Not Enough VCs Play to Win and Lessons from Scaling to $100M and 1,200 Employees and Then Cratering with Julio Vasconcellos, Founder @ Atlantico · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source