What exactly are investors looking for? Founders in the early stages, usually first-timers, often tie the knot because they try to project the qualities that investors are expecting. In reality, few entrepreneurs have the acting skills to convince someone that they are patient, dedicated or hardworking.
Johann Brenner, a common partner of Creandam, was an early supporter of Clarna, Spotify and several European startups. Over the past two decades, he has identified five key features shared by the people who make up billion-dollar companies. “True Unicorn founders don’t have to have all these powers in one day, but they should be big enough to execute young people and show them how to scale an organization,” Brenner said.
Drawing from observations working with founders such as Spotify’s Daniel One, Klarner’s Sebastian Simiatkovsky and Izetel’s Jacob de Gir and Magnus Nielsen, Brenner explains where “VC Fomo” comes from and how it performs the contract. We’re continuing a series of posts that retrieve conversations from last week’s Virtual TC Mobility Conference, including an interview with Matthew Johnson of Retraction AI, see how Autonomous Distribution Startups are navigating the controlling and competitive landscape, and much more. Many more repetitions will come; Click here to find them all.
Founded in 2013 and headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil, NuBank serves more than 34 million customers, making it the largest newbank in Latin America. Reporters Marcela McCarthy spoke with CEO David Veliz about her efforts to connect with customers and overcome adversaries involved by established players who are friendly to regulators.
In the first of a series of stories for Nubank’s EC-1, he was interviewed about his initial fundraising efforts in the Valley. For a balanced perspective, he spoke with Sequoia, the largest venture fund in Latin America, and the early Nubank investors in Cassack Ventures on why they funded the startup while they were still pre-product. “There are some people you’ve met in your life that you know you want to work with in the first hours of meeting them,” said Doug Leon, a global managing partner at Sequoia, who hired Veliz after graduating from Grade School. At Stanford
Faced with such a long set of successes, Marcella also interviewed members of Nubank’s founding team to better understand why they decided to take the opportunity at startups. “I quit banking for five percent of my salary and then had an equity of about $5,000,” says Vitor Olivier, VP of operations and platform at Nubank.
