PodKast de K Fund

In our first episode of European VC deep dives we chatted at length with Creandum.

In this occasion, our guests on the podKast are Dr. Florian Heinemann and Philipp Werner, General Partner and Partner, respectively, at Project A.

Founded in 2012, Project A is a leading early-stage VC firm investing all over Europe with offices in Berlin and London. The firm has more than €1b in AUM and is currently investing out of its 4th fund (€300m).

Project A is quite unique in Europe for various reasons. It defines itself as “the operational VC” because of the background of its founders and a big part of its partner team, but also because of the in-house platform of team of more than 100 full-time hands-on experts. Florian and Philipp will explain how the model works and how these experts collaborate with their portfolio companies.

We also chatted about their recently announced “Studio”, a pre-seed program to partner with entrepreneurs at the pre-idea stake, as well as the following topics:

• Their 4 core areas of interest: inancial technology, climate & energy, resilience and global supply chains
• How they’re organized internally and how they make investment decisions
• How the founding partners make sure that Project A exists for many years

Hope you enjoy it!

You can view and listen to our podKasts on:

• YouTube
• Apple podcasts
• Spotify
• Anchor.fm

This week's podKast is sponsored by Google Cloud Summit Madrid.

‍

In this week’s episode we had the privilege of chatting to Paulo Veras, co-founder of 99 Taxi, Brazil’s first unicorn.

Paulo has had a very interesting career and we went in-depth with him on both his personal and professional journey. He started coding as a teenager and founded his first company while still in university, which successfully raised funding from Goldman Sachs and later exited.

After that he co-founded daily deals site Imperdível and later served as the managing director of Endeavor, where he actually met Renato Freitas and Ariel Lambrecht, who would become his co-founders at 99 Taxi.

99 Taxi was a tremendous success in Brazil and fought in the now popular ride hailing battles against Uber, Didi and other well funded players in the mid 2010s. Did would end up acquiring 99 in early 2018 for $1 billion.

Paulo was super transparent during our conversation and shared all kinds of valuable details about his journey. Hope you enjoy it!

(0:00) Intro

(1:48) Paulo’s background, coding and first company (Tesla)

(20:07) The Endeavor experience

(26:12) Imperdível: daily deals debacle

(41:25) The story of 99 Taxi

(1:15:09) Fighting leukemia while being CEO (1:23:51)

(1:34:28) Selling 99 Taxi to Didi for $1 billion

(1:45:42) Life after 99 as a board member of traditional companies

You can view and listen to our podKasts on:

• YouTube
• Apple podcasts
• Spotify
• Anchor.fm

baby vc is an initiative run by students and young VCs that revolves around a 10-week venture capital bootcamp, surrounded by a community of passionate entrepreneurial talents from different backgrounds with the shared vision to democratise access to the European tech ecosystem, is coming to southern Europe and more specifically Iberia in 2024.

Since 2019, the program has already helped over 150 alumni secure positions in some of the most relevant European funds. It started off 5 years ago in France, expanded in the last 2 years to DACH and UK, and is now arriving in Iberia and Italy. The Iberian cohort will start in March 2024 and feature some of the most relevant funds in the region, such as Adara, Bynd, Kibo, JME, and ourselves at Kfund.

In this episode we chat with Ghita Benjelloun and Mehdi Benjelloun, co-founders of babyvc, and we're also joined by our own Jorge Campo.

You can view and listen to our podKasts on:

• YouTube
• Apple podcasts
• Spotify
• Anchor.fm

Miguel Carranza, cofundador de RevenueCat (RC), vuelve al podKast por cuarta vez.

Como en anteriores ocasiones, repasamos con Miguel su post anual de “My role as a founder CTO”, que publicó a principios de enero. Para entender bien la conversación y sacarle todo el partido posible es recomendable leer el artículo de Miguel antes de escuchar el podKast.

En la visita de Miguel de este año hablamos con él sobre todo lo ocurrido en RevenueCat en 2023: los retos de producto y tecnología a los que se han enfrentado, los cambios que han hecho a nivel organizativo y de procesos para adaptarse a la nueva realidad de la compañía, aprendizajes sobre hiring y cultura y muchos otros temas.

(0:00) Inicio (01:25) RC Fortress: la solución a los outages (06:35) Cómo mantener ritmo alto de delivery al escalar (14:15) Delegar demasiado (o no) la gestión de producto (17:11) Cambios en los equipos de diseño, producto e ingeniería (21:25) Contenido y comunicación para crear marca (25:28) Cultura de always be shipping y de velocidad (31:00) Por qué contrata, promociona y despide RC (34:10) Evolución del go-to-market de RC (37:56) Cómo construir y gestionar un board eficiente (43:33) Aprendizajes sobre hiring y cultura (59:59) Cuidarse mental y físicamente

¡Esperamos que os guste!

Puedes ver y escuchar nuestro podKast en:

• ⁠YouTube⁠
• ⁠Apple podcasts⁠
• ⁠Spotify⁠
• ⁠Anchor.fm⁠

‍

‍

En el episodio de esta semana hablamos con Fernando Cabello, cofundador de Devengo, y Sam Lown, cofundador de Invopop.

Fernando y Sam son dos personas que llevan involucradas en el sector fintech ya bastantes años. En el caso de Fernando, Devengo es ya su tercera o cuarta compañía fundada en el ámbito de los servicios financieros, tras su exitoso paso con Aplázame (comprada por Wizink).

Devengo comenzó como una solución de adelanto de nóminas y hoy en día se ha convertido en una empresa de infraestructura que permita pagos instantáneos a través de una API. Una API que, precisamente, vende a varios de sus antiguos competidores.

Tras su paso por Cabify como CTO y de haber fundado también Lana, una startup fintech en LatAm, Sam es ahora cofundador de Invopop, una empresa que ha desarrollado una API para automatizar el compliance con cualquier formato de factura electrónica en el mundo.

Como os podéis imaginar, el podKast de esta semana está lleno de detalles y conversaciones interesantes sobre el pasado, presente y futuro del sector fintech y, más concretamente, del mundo de los pagos online.

If you’re a fintech founder with global ambition and relevant traction, it’s more likely than not that you’ve heard or even talked to QED Investors.

QED was founded by Nigel Morris (founder of Capital One) with Frank Rotman and Caribou Honig in 2007 and has become the premier VC in the fintech space since then. With more than $3.6b in AUM, QED has backed well-known companies such as Credit Karma and Klarna.

The firm has also been active in LatAm since 2015, and this specifically the main topic of our conversation with this week’s guest, Mike Packer. Mike was also part of Capital One and joined QED in 2016 as principal, becoming partner in 2018.

Mike oversees QED’s activity in the region, which includes investments in the likes of Nubank, Creditas and Quinto Andar. In our conversation with Mike we chat about his professional career, the move to VC, what makes QED special, fintech in LatAm and many other topics.

Jonathan Sousa is a seasoned operator in the Customer Success space, and a profile we’re lucky to have working with the Kfund team in a Venture Partner capacity.

From his time in the early days of Dropbox, through building customer success functions at Scoop and Loom, to working with First Round and Andreessen Horowitz in advisory and scout capacities, Jonathan combines a deep understanding of tech and start-ups with unrivalled knowledge in delivering happy customers who retain and grow.

The podcast covered what customer success is and how it functions, how to integrate CS into a growing organisation, why net dollar retention is the purest metric for measuring customer success,and how it works alongside product/engineering to create a well oiled machine at scale.

Jonathan provided invaluable insights into how to make your first customer success hires, across profiles and segments, and what he has looked for as the go-to signs for a new organisation to join.

CS is perhaps one of the poorest understood functions within start-ups and scale-ups today, and this conversation is a fantastic start for anyone looking to improve their knowledge.

You can view and listen to our podKasts on:

• YouTube
• Apple podcasts
• Spotify
• Anchor.fm

‍

En el episodio de esta semana hablamos con Mario Cantero, cofundador de IMU Biosciences, empresa de nuestro portfolio que acaba de anunciar una ronda de financiación de £11.5 millones.

Mario ya estuvo en el podKast hace unos años para hablar de Melio, la compañía de la que surge IMU. Precisamente hablaremos con Mario de los orígenes de IMU y del pívot desde Melio: Melio era una compañía de salud B2C, que ofrecía a consumidores la posibilidad de monitorizar su salud de forma recurrente a través de análisis de sangre.

Sin embargo, y por los motivos que Mario cuenta en el podKast, ese modelo tuvo que ser aparcado y fue entonces cuando surgió IMU.

IMU Biosciences es ahora una compañía de biotech que busca revolucionar la medicina personalizada a partir de su plataforma de análisis del sistema inmunológico.

¡Esperemos que os guste!

You can view and listen to our podKasts on:

• YouTube
• Apple podcasts
• Spotify
• Anchor.fm

This week we welcomed Mitiga Solutions’ Alex (Alejandro) Marti to the Kfund Podkast.

Alex has had a highly varied career covering the intersection between climate risk and artificial intelligence - as CEO and co-founder of Mitiga, Chairman of the UN-ITU Focus Group on AI for Natural Hazards, a researcher within the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (from which Mitiga was spun out), as well as as a climate researcher at the UK’s Met Office, data lead at the State of New Jersey’s Research department, and a research fellow at Rutgers University.

We were fascinated to discuss how Mitiga brings a data heavy, physics led approach to climate risk, moving from traditional stochastic models to probabilistic models using machine learning, and the vital role of transition risk analysis will play in the coming years for businesses across sectors.

The discussion also covered the functioning of the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre and how it manages tech transfer into spin-out ventures, what Alejandro has learned about bringing in and retaining world class scientific talent in a commercial enterprise (+50% of the Mitiga team hold PhDs), the growth of the data-led risk analysis space, as well as Mitiga’s journey raising funding rounds and traversing the venture capital landscape over the past half decade as a deep-tech climate business.

A highly insightful hour - big thanks to Alejandro for taking the time to speak with us.

You can view and listen to our podKasts on:

• YouTube
• Apple podcasts
• Spotify
• Anchor.fm

This week’s guests were a special double bill - Gonzalo Úrculo and Juliette Simonin, co-founders of CrowdFarming, the Madrid-based farm-to-table fresh produce marketplace and Europe’s largest organic organic food marketplace as of 2023.

We were lucky enough to welcome them during the chaos of Clementine season, with Juliette in the office in Madrid and Gonzalo on site managing the picking of 8,000 boxes per day to be delivered to homes across Europe.

The conversation began with their co-founder story, and how the team built a tech company out of a family farm, into developing a full-scale ERP and supply chain set-up for organic farmers.

We discussed the “win win win” model - how Crowdfarming benefits not only customers, but also farmers and the environment, and the challenges the team has faced in educating a new generation of farmers on more environmentally friendly methods of producing.

This led into building trust with customers across Europe, especially around explaining the realities of a new type of business model, alongside the responsibility companies have in discussing and tackling the climate crisis (especially in Spain), and finally how all of this fits into building a business that also works alongside the venture capital funded model.

The biggest thanks to Gonzalo and Juliette for joining us - check out what they’re doing with crowdfarming at crowdfarming.com

En el episodio de esta semana hablamos con Javi López, cofundador de Magnific.

Magnific es un proyecto que Javi ha lanzado recientemente con Emilio Nicolás, con el que anteriormente había creado Erasmusu, una startup que posteriormente fue comprada por Spotahome. Hace años grabamos un podKast con Javi y Emilio sobre la historia de Erasmusu.

Desde la salida de Spotahome, Javi ha estado jugando y aprendiendo sobre Generative AI, hasta el punto de convertirse en uno de los principales referentes de España en la materia.

En esta conversación hablamos con Javi de cómo fueron sus primeros pasos con Generative AI, la defensibilidad (o no) de los diferentes productos y empresas que se están creando en el sector, de cómo surge Magnific y de los retos a los que se enfrentan.

¡Esperamos que os guste!

Puedes ver y escuchar nuestro podKast en:

• YouTube
• Apple podcasts
• Spotify
• Anchor.fm

En el episodio de esta semana hablamos con Ramiro Iglesias, cofundador y CEO de Crescenta.

Crescenta, que es una compañía en la que hemos invertido desde Kfund, ofrece a particulares la posibilidad de invertir en los mejores fondos de VC y PE de todo el mundo, a partir de tíckets de €10.000.

En este episodio hablaremos con Ramiro de su historia personal, su experiencia invirtiendo en bolsa y cómo eso le ha llevado a estar siempre ligado al sector financiero, de cuáles son los orígenes de Crescenta y de cómo funciona la plataforma.

¡Esperamos que os guste!

Puedes ver y escuchar nuestro podKast en:

• YouTube
• Apple podcasts
• Spotify
• Anchor.fm

En este diálogo con Toni de la Fuente, exploramos el ámbito de la seguridad en la nube y cómo Prowler, emergiendo de sus raíces como un proyecto de código abierto, se ha transformado en una herramienta clave para los desarrolladores en el sector de Security Cloud.

Este episodio forma parte de ⁠nuestro especial sobre ciberseguridad⁠.

Alfonso Muñoz (SandboxAQ), nos adentra en el apasionante mundo de la inteligencia artificial y la criptografía post-cuántica.

Analizamos cómo estas innovadoras tecnologías están transformando el panorama de la seguridad, tanto en oportunidades como en desafíos.

Exploramos las últimas tendencias y descubrimos hacia dónde se dirige el futuro de la protección de datos y sistemas.

Este episodio forma parte de nuestro especial sobre ciberseguridad.

En 2019 grabamos un podKast que funcionó muy bien y en el que contábamos, con mucho detalle, cómo funciona un fondo y cómo funciona K.

Por entonces, K tan sólo tenía 3 años como gestora y desde entonces han cambiado muchas cosas. Somos más personas, nuestro primer fondo tiene ya casi 8 años, gestionamos ya varios fondos y también más de €500m en activos y, por encima de todo, hemos aprendido mucho durante todo este tiempo.

En el podKast de esta semana hablaremos de los siguientes temas:

• Los resultados hasta la fecha de K1 y cómo son los años 3 a 8 de la vida de un fondo (decisiones de follow-on, métricas, etc)
• Nuestra evolución hacia una familia de fondos y cómo se complementan entre ellos
• Por qué creemos que tiene sentido invertir en alternativos/VC y también en España
• Qué es y qué queremos hacer con K3, nuestro nuevo fondo recién anunciado

Si estás interesado en conocer más detalles sobre K3, puedes escribirnos a [email protected]

¡Esperamos que os guste!

Martín Vigo (Apple, Meta, Salesforce, Triskel) nos ayuda a navegar con criterio el complejo mundo de la ciberseguridad, más allá de tópicos y falsas creencias.

Identificamos ideas preconcebidas sobre hackeos, privacidad digital o ransomware para separar la realidad de la ficción. Un recorrido ameno y revelador por los conceptos clave de la ciberseguridad.

Este episodio forma parte de nuestro especial sobre ciberseguridad.

Un recorrido a fondo por el estado actual de la ciberseguridad en nuestro país de la mano de Román Ramírez (RootedCON).

Hablamos de los retos a los que se enfrentan individuos, empresas y administraciones.

Analizamos la evolución en los últimos años y las perspectivas de futuro para la economía y la sociedad españolas. Este episodio forma parte de nuestro especial sobre ciberseguridad.

En el episodio de esta semana hablamos con Eduardo Navarro.

Eduardo tiene una amplia trayectoria tanto emprendiendo como invirtiendo en compañías. En el año 1999, pocos meses después de haber terminado la carrera, fundó consulta Improven, a la que estuvo vinculada durante casi 20 años.

Uno de los puntos álgidos de su carrera ha sido su participación en Sherpa Capital, un fondo de situaciones especiales y de PE con más de €250m bajo gestión, del que hoy todavía es presidente. Eduardo nos contará las diferentes entre un fondo de PE y un VC y cómo suelen funcionar este tipo de fondos.

Desde casi los inicios de K, nuestra relación con Eduardo es muy cercana porque es presidente tanto de Urbanitae como Crescenta, dos compañías de nuestro portfolio y que ayudan a cualquier persona a invertir mejor sus ahorros, tanto en el sector inmobiliario como en fondos de capital privado.

Si quieres conocer mejor la historia de Urbanitae, te recomendamos esta otra entrevista que hicimos con su CEO, Diego Bestard, hace unos meses.

¡Esperemos que os guste!

In this week’s episode we talk to Julio Vasconcelos, managing partner at Atlantico, a Brazilian early stage VC firm “backing bold founders seeking to define a better future in Latin America and beyond”.

Prior to becoming a VC, Julio had an extensive career as both a founder and operator. He was the first employee of Facebook in Brazil and soon after that he co-founded Peixe Urbano, a daily deals startup that became one of Brazil’s fastest growth stories to date, both on the way up and way down.

Following his entrepreneur in residence stint at legendary VC firm Benchmark, Julio co-founded Prefer and three years later became a full time VC.

Since 2019 he’s the managing partner and founder of Atlantico, a leading VC firm in the region that also publishes the popular “Latin America Digital Report 2023”.

In this episode, we talk to Julio about his journey and experience building, scaling and investing in tech companies.

This week’s guest was Michael Stothard, an early-stage VC investor at firstminute capital, a $400m seed fund investing across Europe backed by a network of 130+ unicorn founders. Before firstminute, Michael spent more than a decade as a journalist, most recently as founding editor of Sifted.eu, and before that as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times.

At Sifted, he helped scale the company from an idea to a media platform with a team of 70 journalists and engineers producing world-class, in-depth coverage of the European technology landscape. At the Financial Times, he was senior correspondent and bureau chief in Paris, Madrid, Stockholm and New York.

Having spent time on both sides of the fence, as both an investor and journalist, we were fascinated to understand Michael’s story building Sifted from the ground up, acting as the FT’s foreign correspondent in Spain during the turbulence of the Catalan independence movement, and how he works with companies in the firstminute portfolio on improving their messaging, and getting their stories heard. We also covered his thoughts on the Gen-AI space, and what he’s excited about for the months to come.

This week’s guest is Antoine Colaço, managing partner at Valor Capital Group, an investment firm with more than $2.6b in AUM and more than 100 portfolio companies.

Valor Capital was founded by Ambassador Clifford Sobel (former US ambassador to Brazil) and his son, Scott Sobel (who was part of the founding team of Net2Phone, which IPOed and was sold to AT&T for US$1.4b in 2000). The firm specializes in bridging the US and Latin America, and has invested in very well known companies such as Coinbase, Stone ($3.1b in market cap) and Satellogic, among many others.

Antoine joined Valor in 2012 after almost 9 years at Google, where he held various roles including COO of APAC and Latam for the search giant. He was one of the first 1,000 employees at Google and joined pre-IPO.

He has seen it all from both an operator and VC perspective, so in this conversation we went quite in-depth on his time at Google and also his learnings after almost 12 years as a professional VC at Valor.

For more episodes on pur LatAm VC series, check the following links:

• Mariano Amartino (Microsoft): "Una defensa de la relación Latam - España"
• Eric Acher (Monashees): one of the founding fathers of LatAm VC
• Benjamin Gleason (Kamino): the beginning of the Brazilian fintech revolution
• Carlos (CK) Kokron: the history of Qualcomm Ventures, one of the best CVCs in the world, and the evolution of the LatAm VC ecosystem
• Edson Rigonatti (Astella): From opening to Nirvana to chasing unicorns in Brazil
• Jimena Pardo (ALLVP): reflections on going from founder to big tech to VC in Latam
• Alejandro Diez (DILA Capital): Puente Mexico - España y cómo ayudan a startups a cruzar el charco

You can view and listen to our podKasts on:

• YouTube
• Apple podcasts
• Spotify
• Anchor.fm

‍

‍

In this week’s episode we chat with Jimena Pardo, managing partner at Mexico-based VC firm ALLVP.

Jimena has seen it all: in 2012 she co-founded Carrot Carsharing, one of the first carsharing startups in Mexico. Then spent 4 years at Facebook as a Product Growth Manager, and in 2022 she moved to the other side of the table to join ALLVP as a managing partner.

In our conversation we chat with Jimena about the following topics:

• Her experience as a founder and how that has shaped her role as a VC
• Operator VC or professional VC?
• ALLVP’s State of AI in Latin America report
• Latam’s role in the AI world
• And many more topics

En el episodio de esta semana hablamos con Omar Pera, Product Lead en Meta (Facebook).

Este episodio se grabó en julio, pocos días después de que Meta lanzase al mercado LLaMA2, la segunda versión de su LLM open source. Sobre este lanzamiento y temática girará la mayoría de la conversación, y aprovecharemos también para adentraremos también en la experiencia de Omar como emprendedor con Reply.ai, que precisamente fue una empresa en el ámbito de los chatbots y que en mayo de 2020 fue adquirida por Kustomer.

¡Esperamos que os guste!

La historia de Nima Pourshasb es diferente a muchas otras. Nació en Irán y al poco tiempo se mudó a España, donde vivió varios años.

Después de pasearse por medio mundo acabó en Mexico, donde está ahora y desde donde ha cofundado Minu, una startup fintech que ayuda a mejorar la salud financiera de personas y empresas.

En este episodio hablamos con Nima de su particular historia, de cómo llegó a Mexico después de haber pasado varios años en USA y de su experiencia trabajando en un corporate en Mexico (Banco Sabadell) y del propósito que le ha llevado a crear Minu, una de las principales empresas fintech del país.

Today we kick off a new series of podKasts in which we interview some of Europe’s best VCs and fund managers.

To start this series we had the pleasure of spending some time with Staffan Helgesson and Peter Specht of Creandum, one of Europe’s iconic firms with a portfolio that includes the likes of Spotify, iZettle, depop and many others.

Creandum has just turned 20 and we took a trip down memory lane with Staffan and Peter to understand the origin of the firm, which Staffan helped co-found, and its evolution over the years.

At Kfund we’ve gotten to know the firm pretty well since we’re co-investors in Factorial and Abacum, and we’re quite excited to finally release this episode, which was recorded in June.

In this episode, we talked to Staffan and Peter about the following topics:

- The ethos of Creandum and how the firm came to be

- Firm legacy: How they nurture talent and how they’ve expanded the team over the years

- How to manage the geo expansion of a firm: from Stockholm to multiple offices in 4 different countries

- How they make investment decisions

- How they think about liquidity: selling early, staying until IPO, secondaries, etc

- Why they’ve decided to stay true to seed and Series A instead of expanding to other investment stages

- Their thoughts on the Spanish startup ecosystem

- And many more topics 🅺 Web: https://www.kfund.vc/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Kfundvc PodKast: https://open.spotify.com/show/4fIVIKsz8V2jGDdZ8CTDBk

En el episodio de esta semana hablamos con Timo Buetefisch, cofundador y CEO de Cooltra.

Timo lleva 17 años al mando de Cooltra, una startup de Barcelona que hoy en día tiene más de 20.000 motos en más de 24 ciudades y 8 países. Hablamos con Timo de su longevidad en la empresa, de cómo se ha adaptado al crecimiento experimentado a lo largo de los años y de cómo ha cambiado su rol, de las ventajas y desventajas de operar una compañía que gestiona activos físicos y de muchos otros temas.

En el episodio de esta semana tenemos como invitada a Esther Paniagua, periodista especializada en ciencia y tecnología y autora del libro Error 404: ¿Preparados para un mundo sin internet?”.

Esther ha seguido muy de cerca la evolución de la futura regulación de la inteligencia artificial en España y Europa, y su impacto en la sociedad y en las compañías.

En este episodio nos acompaña para entender mejor esta regulación y cómo se sitúa en la intersección entre tecnología, sociedad y política, y sobre todo cómo repercutirá en las startups, indagando si podría ser un obstáculo o, en cambio, un catalizador para la innovación.

• La ley de inteligencia artificial de la Unión Europea entrará en vigor como muy tarde en 2026.
• Se aborda el momento actual de regulación de AI en Europa, su impacto en las startups y se compara con la de otros países.
• Comentamos específicamente el impacto en startups en España y qué ventajas e inconvenientes tiene la futura ley.
• También hablamos de AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) y posibles escenarios futuros en la evolución de la AI

¡Esperamos que os guste!

Puedes ver y escuchar nuestro podKast en:

• YouTube
• Apple podcasts
• Spotify
• Anchor.fm

‍

Alejandro Diez es el fundador de Dila Capital, un fondo early stage de $120M basado en Ciudad de México.

En este episodio hablamos con Alejandro sobre el ecosistema mexicano de startups e inversión, de la gran oportunidad que supone para startups europeas y de cómo DILA ayudan a su vez a las empresas mexicanas a venir a Europa de la mano de fondos como Kfund.

En las últimas semanas hemos publicado varios contenidos y entrevistas sobre LatAm, tanto con emprendedores como con inversores. Son estos:

• PodKast 177 - Mariano Amartino (Microsoft): "Una defensa de la relación Latam - España"
• PodKast 182 - Eric Acher (Monashees): one of the founding fathers of LatAm VC
• PodKast 183 - Benjamin Gleason (Kamino): the beginning of the Brazilian fintech revolution
• PodKast 188 - Carlos (CK) Kokron: the history of Qualcomm Ventures, one of the best CVCs in the world, and the evolution of the LatAm VC ecosystem
• PodKast 189 - Edson Rigonatti (Astella): From opening to Nirvana to chasing unicorns in Brazil

En el episodio de esta semana hablamos con Andrés Torrubia y Miguel Ángel Román, cofundadores del Instituto de Inteligencia Artificial y también de Lucentum, un nuevo proyecto que nace dentro del instituto y que pretende convertirse en una especie de co-pilot para los profesionales del derecho.

En esta conversación hablamos con Andrés y Miguel de los orígenes del Instituto y de por qué surge la institución, de por qué vieron una oportunidad dentro del ámbito legal para lanzar Lucentum y de muchos otros temas relacionados con emprendimiento e Inteligencia Artificial.

Puedes ver y escuchar nuestro podKast en:

• YouTube
• Apple podcasts
• Spotify
• Anchor.fm

GrowPro es una plataforma de experiencias internacionales para jóvenes.

Hablamos con su CEO, Goiko, sobre su experiencia creando y escalando la compañía y también sobre nuestra inversión desde Kfund.

‍

In this week's episode we talked to Edson Rigonatti, co-founder of Astella, a Brazilian early stage VC firm that's been around for almost 15 years.

Edson has an interesting background, starting his professional career in a very different field: music. As he discusses in the interview, he was part of one of the most popular Brazilian punk bands of the time, even opening for Nirvana on its Brazilian tour.

After that he spent some time working at the family business, before becoming VP of Sales of Lucent Technologies. At the beginning of 2008, along with Laura Constantini, he founded Astella, starting a pioneering cycle in the Brazilian VC market and experiencing its ups and downs through the years.

In this episode, we talked to Edson about his upbringing as a son of Italian immigrants, how coming from a family of entrepreneurs impacted his development, his short career as a musician and, most importantly, building and scaling Astella while seeing first-hand the development of the Brazilian tech ecosystem.

In this week’s episode we chat with Carlos (CK) Kokron, Head of Qualcomm Ventures' Americas investment teams.

Qualcomm Ventures is one of the oldest and best known CVCs (Corporate Venture Capital) firms in the world, with a portfolio that includes the likes of Cloudflare, Zoom, Waze, Xiomi and many others.

In the past few weeks we’ve been exploring the LatAm VC ecosystem, and with CK we wanted to explore the role that Qualcomm has played in the region and his own thoughts on the evolution of the market, which he’s seen first hand both at Qualcomm and previously at Intel.

In this episode we discuss the following topics:

• CK's experience at Intel, which he joined right before the dotcom bubble burst
• How experiencing the bust of the bubble has impacted his investing career
• How Qualcomm Ventures helps startups in its portfolio and how to structure CVCs so that companies can take advantage of the relationship
• The evolution of the LatAm startup and investing ecosystem
• And many others

For more episodes of opur LatAm VC series, check the following links:

• PodKast 177 - Mariano Amartino (Microsoft): "Una defensa de la relación Latam - España"
• PodKast 182 - Eric Acher (Monashees): one of the founding fathers of LatAm VC
• PodKast 183 - Benjamin Gleason (Kamino): the beginning of the Brazilian fintech revolution
  

In this week’s episode we chat with Christopher Cederskog, co-founder and CEO of Sunhero, a solar energy company based in Spain.

Christopher has a very interesting professional career. He was one of the first employees of Airbnb in Europe and he’s now transitioned to the energy sector with Sunhero, a company that has raised more than €13m to date from the likes of Speedinvest, All Iron, Planet A and others.

At Kfund we’ve been looking into the future of energy for a quite while, and in fact we’ve published several articles on the topic (you can find the links at the bottom). We were super interested in chatting to Christopher to understand his view of the market, where things might go in the next few years and the opportunities and challenges that the sector offers.

In the episode, we chat with him about the following topics:

• Christopher’s personal journey: Airbnb into solar. What prompted it, how did you observe the opportunity?
• Building the Sunhero business: software vs. ops vs. people. What has been easier than you expected, and where have been the challenges?
• Solar as an industry: supply chains. How these work, how green is the industry, where are the complications / where do you see ancillary opportunities in the market e.g. software plays, B2B plays / beyond installations, where do you see the areas of interest in the space / how do you see the market developing in the next 5-10 years / what regulatory changes are you seeing on the horizon
• Idiosyncrasies across markets in Europe: Germany vs. Spain vs. France vs. Other geographies. Where do these present opportunities, threats, complications etc. and how replicable is the business across borders?
• Fundraising: how was the fundraising process, what did you learn from the A vs. the Seed? What are you expecting for Series B?
• Climate entrepreneurs with “non traditional” VC friendly business models: how has this been for you, what advice would you give?

Additional content:

👉🏼 Climate tech: enabling technologies and the Spanish startup scene
👉🏼 🇪🇸 🔆 Solar in Spain: An Opportunity for Startups
👉🏼 The future of energy in Spain

You can view and listen to our podKasts on:

• YouTube
• Apple podcasts
• Spotify
• Anchor.fm

In this week’s episode we chat with Cai Linton, co-founder of Multus Biotechnology, a UK-based startup building an all-in-one solution for the cellular agriculture industry.

At Kfund we’ve been looking at foodtech for quite a while and building our internal thesis around the topic, with a special focus on enabling technologies applied to the food industry.

Multus is a perfect fit.

The costliness of growing cells has become a bottleneck for companies looking to innovate healthcare and food industries. The status-quo for growing these cells is to use animal-based growth media, which is expensive, unethical and also produces results of varied quality. Multus plans to tackle these problems by engineering a new growth medium that is both inexpensive and animal-free. And this podKast episode is about exactly that and the following topics:

• Cai’s professional career and what led him to build Multus
• Cai walks us through how the cultivation of lab grown meat: how does it work? how does the supply chain looks like?
• Why is the lab grown meat important and relevant for climate change?
• The two biggest bottlenecks in meat cultivation is time to market and price parity. Why is this the case? FBS has been around for many years, specially in the pharma industry, in the development of vaccines and biomedical research, yet it remains an extremely expensive, unsustainable and unethical medium for growth, so why have the incentives not been in place to find alternative solutions like Multus before?
• What are some of the efforts that have been done globally to address time to market and cost parity?
• Today what are current meat replacement methods out there, how do they differ from one another and where does Multus sit in this landscape?
• How does Cai think traditional meat companies perceive lab grown meat?
• From Cai’s perspective as a founder, what are his views on lab grown meat exit scenarios?

En el podKast de esta semana hablamos con Jimena Catalina, fundadora de Slides Carnival y diseñadora con muchos años de experiencia a sus espaldas.

Aunque la carrera de Jimena es muy amplia, esta conversación gira en torno a uno de sus side projects, Slides Carnival, que fue adquirido recientemente por el gigante australiano Canva.

Una vez superada la primera fase de lanzamiento de Slides, Jimena le dedicaba alrededor de 4 ó 5 horas al proyecto cada semana, llegando a facturar €85.000 mensuales en el pico más alto de facturación y €400.000 en su mejor año. Todo un hito.

En este podKast, hablamos con Jimena de los siguientes temas:

• Cómo surge la idea de crear Slides Carnival
• Cuánto tiempo le tuvo que dedicar al inicio y la elección de crear ella todas las plantillas de la web frente a permitir que otros lo hiciesen
• Crear un side project con el objetivo de monetización desde el primer momento
• Las cifras de Slides Carnival de usuarios y facturación
• Los pros y contras de la publicidad para monetizar frente a suscripciones
• La venta a Canva
• Y muchos otros temas!

Puedes ver y escuchar el podKast en:

• YouTube
• Apple podcasts
• Spotify
• Anchor.fm

‍

‍

En el episodio de esta semana hablamos con Cristóbal Valenzuela, chileno afincado en Nueva York que ha cofundado RunwayML, una empresa de inteligencia artificial que ha creado una suite de productos audiovisuales y creativos para “ayudar a cualquier persona a crear lo que quiera”.

En los últimos meses Runway se ha convertido en uno de los principales referentes en el movimiento de generative AI, gracias a herramientas como Gen-2 que permite crear vídeos a partir de imágenes o texto.

En este episodio, hablamos con Cristóbal de los siguientes temas:

• Su formación y cómo se adentró en el mundo de la IA
• Qué le llevó a cofundar Runway en 2018
• La suite de productos en que se ha convertido Runway
• ¿Runway permite democratizar el proceso creativo o puede acabar sustituyendo la creatividad humana?
• Por qué decidieron construir el end-to-end del stack y sus propios modelos, frente a utilizar modelos de IA de terceros
• Y muchos otros temas

Puedes ver y escuchar el podKast en:

• YouTube
• Apple podcasts
• Spotify
• Anchor.fm

‍

‍

In this week’s episode we chat with Benjamin Gleason, a key figure in the Brazilian and LatAm startup and tech ecosystem.

Born and raised in Missouri, Benjamin has spent the majority of his professional career in Brazil, across a wide variety of roles. His first tech role in the country was as the managing director and CFO of Groupon Brasil, at a time of incredible growth for the company.After that he co-founded GuiaBolso, one of the first fintech companies out of the region, which was sold to PicPay after raising $66m from notable funds such as Ribbit Capital, QED and others.

His last entrepreneurship endeavor is Kamino, another fintech play that aims to make it easy for Brazilians and founders to launch and manage their companies. This is the second appearance of one of Kamino’s co-founders on the podKast. We had Gonzalo Parejo a couple of months ago.

In this episode, we chat with Benjamin about the following topics

Brazil and LatAm:

• Landing in Brazil as a foreigner many years ago
• Launching a startup in the early days of LatAm startup ecosystem rising
• His view as an operator, but also as Endeavor mentor and investor for next 10 years in LatAm

Company building:

• Building everything cause there was nothing, and hiring talent
• Finding Product market fit and how he, as a founder with more experience, sees this process and deals with the discovery procedure

VC and investing:

• VCs back then and now and available infrastructure for growing business in LatAm
• How was the formation of your relationship with VC funds?
• How did you position yourself in the VC market to attract investors?
• And how was the process of selecting which VC managers fit best with your companies?

Life and motivations:

• Entrepreneurship and impact
• Involvement in NGOs

‍

Monashees is an iconic VC firm in LatAm. Founded in 2005 by Eric Acher and Fabio Igel, the firm has seen the evolution and explosion of the LatAm startup ecosystem firsthand. In this week’s episode we talked to Eric Acher about the following topics:

• His professional career until founding Monashees
• The McKinsey experience and how it has shaped his career
• How working at General Atlantic opened his eyes to Venture Capital and startup investing
• The post dotcom winter and what it felt like investing at the time in LatAm
• His thinking around technology cycles and how it affects startup investing
• The evolution of LatAm’s tech ecosystem
• The story of 99 and other LatAm unicorns
• And many other topics

In this week’s episode we chat with Steven Tey, senior developer advocate at Vercel.

Steven has been at Vercel for almost two years to help the company build and scale its developer relations function. In this conversation, you’ll be able to learn:

• What Vercel is and why its relationship with developers is important
• Steven’s journey into developer relations, and what led him to become a senior developer advocate at Vercel
• What is developer relations, and why is it important for companies that build developer tools and platforms?
• How does developer advocacy differ from traditional marketing or sales, and what unique value does it bring to developers and companies alike?
• How can developer advocates help spark communities of developers around a product, and what are some best practices for doing so effectively?
• How do you measure the impact of developer advocacy on the success of a product or company? What are the main KPIs that measure your success as a DevRel?
• How do stay up to date with the latest trends and technologies in the developer ecosystem, and what resources do you recommend for others who want to do the same?
• Steven’s side projects and how they complement what he does on a daily basis at Vercel

You find our podKast on:

• YouTube
• Apple podcasts
• Spotify
• Anchor.fm

‍

‍

En el episodio de esta semana hablamos con Iñaki Arriaga, cofundador de Acumbamail, una startup con sede en Ciudad Real que ha desarrollado un producto de email marketing con más de 4.000 clientes en España y Latam.

La historia de Acumba es “diferente” por varios motivos: 

• Es una empresa bootstrapped que ha alcanzado €2.4m de facturación anual
• Lo ha hecho sin levantar capital y con un equipo pequeño de 13 personas
• Se ha posicionado en un mercado muy competido, llegando a 4.000 clientes
• Fue vendida por primera vez a la italiana MailUp y recientemente ha formado parte de una nueva venta

Iñaki nos hablará del crecimiento de Acumba con mucha transparencia y también de sus aprendizajes después de haber pasado ya por varios procesos de venta.

¡Esperamos que os guste!

En el episodio de esta semana hablamos con Víctor Rodado, cofundador de Hackio. Víctor ya estuvo anteriormente en el podKast para hablar de Minmalism, otra startup cofundada por él.

Hace unos meses, Víctor publicó un post en LinkedIn en el que explicaba por qué creía que el marketing online había sufrido un cambio acelerado en los últimos dos años. En este podKast hablamos precisamente de esto, y de los nueve puntos que Víctor destacaba en su momento:

• El PPC (Social & Search) pierde cada día más peso, se multiplican x3 y x4 los CAC.
• El contenido orgánico manda, y sobre todo en vídeo
• Sin relato no hay contenido
• Sin estrategia de mail marketing estás muerto. Por eso han lanzado ahora Hackio Flow
• Antes dedicábamos la mayoría del tiempo a vender (performance), ahora el día se te va en crear audiencias con performance menores
• Debes estar en TikTok y esforzarte en aportar valor.
• Los equipos de marketing han pasado a estar partidos en 3: Contenido / CRO / Recurrencia
• Hay tantísimo ruido y competencia que la función del Copywritter es cada vez más relevante, en todas las fases del funnel
• El SEO: cada segundo que pasa hay menos oportunidades para captar tráfico en search orgánico

¡Esperamos que os guste!

In this week’s episode we chat with David Peterson, partner at Angular Ventures and also one of the first employees at Airtable.

David had an extensive career as an operator before joining Airtable, where he led the growth and partnership teams. He’s now moved to the other side of the table, joining Gil Dibner, another previous guest on this show, as partner of Angular.

In this episode, we chat with David about the following topics:

• How he got into tech with a non-tech background
• The importance of sales in any kind if job and he learned the craft at Google
• How he got to join Airtable as one of the first employees
• In a PLG product, the horizontal vs. vertical product
• When to listen to your users and when to follow intuition
• How to start thinking about monetisation and layering inside sales on top of PLG
• How partnerships can help a company grow
• His experience as a former operator turned investor

I’m joined in this podKast by Victoriano Izquierdo, co-founder of Graphext, one of our portfolio companies.

En el episodio de esta semana hablamos con Mariano Amartino, encargado de gestionar la relación de Microsoft con startups en las regiones de Canadá, USA y Latam.  

Mariano es una persona que lleva muchos años involucrada en el sector de la tecnología desde diferentes roles. Ávido escritor desde su blog Uberbin, antes de llegar a su puesto actual en Microsoft como Americas Managing Director fue también Director Global de Wayra, la aceleradora y brazo inversor de Telefónica.  

En este podKast, hablamos con Mariano de los siguientes temas: 

• Qué significa España y Madrid para Mariano
• Pudo o puede ser Madrid la capital de startups del mundo hispánico, ¿como parece que se ha posicionado Miami?
• El estado actual del ecosistema de startups de Latam y en concreto de países como Argentina y Brasil
• El renacer de Microsoft y la relación con startups
• Y muchos otros temas

¡Esperamos que os guste!

Humberto Ayres is the co-founder of Rows, a Porto and Berlin-based early stage startup that has created "the spreadsheet where data comes to life".

Prior to founding Rows, Humberto was already an Excel geek and former founder, having built two successful B2C companies out of Portugal. With Rows, the team has the goal of re-inventing the way spreadsheets work, by creating a product that not only allows users and businesses to build traditional spreadsheets, but also connect these to internal and external data.

In this episode, we chat with Humberto about the following topics:

• How coming out of a big family -he has 12 siblings- has influenced him from a personal and professional perspective
• In what kind of environment he was brought up and what impact that had in him
• His experience building B2C businesses before Rows
• The origin story of Rows
• How and why they plan to re-invent the way spreadsheets work
• The present and future of no-code
• Patient capital: choosing the right investors for a PLG company
• The vision for Rows and what's next

In this week's episode we chat with Gonzalo Parejo, CEO and co-founder of Kamino, a Sao Paulo-based startup that's reinventing the way startups and companies are set up from a financial standpoint in Brazil. Kamino has raised a pre-seed round of more than $6M, one of the largest in Brazil to date, from well-known funds such as QED, Propel, Global Founders Capital and others.

This is not Gonzalo's first entrepreneurial endeavor. Prior to co-founding Kamino, Gonzalo also co-founded Madrid-based Ontruck and spent several years in Brazil working for various startups, including an incredible stint at Groupon (if you listen to the podKast, you'll understand why it was such an interesting experience!).

If you want to improve your understanding of Brazil's large startup ecosystem and why there's such a large opportunity for Kamino, this is your episode.

• Web
• Twitter
• YouTube

In this week’s episode we chat with Antonio Molins, co-founder of Justos, a Brazilian insurtech company that’s changing the way car insurance is sold and priced in Brazil.

Justos has raised more than $38M in venture capital from top tier funds such as Kaszek, Ribbit Capital, Softbank and others.

Prior to co-founding Justos, Antonio studied at both MIT and Harvard where he got exposure to academic research in the fields of medicine and neuroscience. After that, he worked at Goldman Sachs with the goal of helping to change the financial services industry, and then he spent almost six years at Netflix, where he helped build the company’s recommendation system.

After more than 15 years in the US, Antonio moved back to Spain to serve as Chief Data Officer at Spanish startup Clarity, before finally embarking on the Justos journey.

Antonio has a ton of experience in AI, data science and related fields, so if you’re interested in those areas, this is a must listen.

Hope you enjoy it!

El podKast en el que entrevistamos a Iñaki hace ya un par de años para explicar cómo funciona un fondo fue uno de los que más reproducciones ha tenido hasta la fecha. 

En esta ocasión hablamos de nuevo con Iñaki y también con Carina Szpilka para conocer cómo ha evolucionado K desde entonces y el tipo de inversiones y empresas que buscamos hoy en día. Cuando K salió al mercado éramos un fondo que invertía entre €100K y €2M, pero hoy en día podemos hacer rondas desde €100K a €10M tanto en España como Sur de Europa y Latam.

¿Qué ha cambiado y qué sigue siendo igual que antes? 

Web: https://www.kfund.vc/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Kfundvc

In today's episode we interview Sançar Sahin, co-founder of Oliva, a startup that provides "proper mental health support for employees".

Prior to building Oliva, Sançar held several senior marketing roles at startups such as Typeform, Hotjar and Getapp. He also was the first marketing hire at Typeform, at a time when the company had only 30 employees and $500K in ARR, helping it build all the way to $30M in ARR by the time that he left.

In this episode we chat with Sançar about:

• His marketing experience as an operator
• The relevance and importance of brand building and content at an early stage startup
• How to combine content marketing with performance marketing
• His struggles as an operator and how that had an impact in his mental health
• The journey to founding Oliva
• What they mean when they say that they provide "proper" mental health
• And many other topics

Sançar's book recommendation is "The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fxck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life"