Insight
Vasconcellos: Market and product fit matter more than the team
“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.”
Insight
Vasconcellos: Expanding fund strategy beyond core strengths harms long-term VC returns
“That greed is the number one enemy of returns and, you know, 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, you know, short-term profitable, but sort of long…”
Disclosure
Atlantico allocates only 25% of its fund to follow-on reserves
“In, in our case, we're reserved 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.”
Prediction Held up
Vasconcellos: Startup mortality rates in LATAM will rise over coming years
“What that's going to translate into is a greater mortality rate and a greater loss ratio in the next couple of years. But to be honest, I think that where we're going to be in the next couple of years is the normal.”
Insight
Founders must cut into muscle because running out of cash is fatal
“I think it's healthy sometimes to cut through the fat and into the muscle because you can always undo that later. If you were wrong, maybe you cut a little bit too much. You might have to rehire people or you might have to You know, reinvest in things that you…”
Insight
Vasconcellos: Institutional VCs are there to maximize returns, not be friends
“But I think that once you're investing other people's money, you're really there to maximize returns. So you're not there to be a founder's friend, but you help, you're there to help that founder win.”
Insight
Vasconcellos: Formal board meetings are unnecessary for strategic alignment
“In, in my experience, having a moment where you bring in different investors and different advisors together, you know, to check in and talk about strategy and talk about direction, that conversation is valuable. Whether that has to happen at a board meeting a…”
Disclosure
Vasconcellos passed on Snapchat's seed round due to Facebook conflict concerns
“I'd say the biggest miss I had was not investing at the seed round of Snapchat... Facebook conflicts committee said, oh, and you guys can't invest this because it could potentially be competitive... We said, oh, this whole like disappearing messages thing does…”
Insight
Vasconcellos: Winning multiple markets simultaneously is a recipe for startup disaster
“What I would tell founders is that you have to pick one market, right? 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…”
Disclosure
Vasconcellos generated 100x returns on angel investments in Ipsy and QuintoAndar
“I think my biggest hit was either an angel investment in Ipsy up in the US or in Quinto Andar in Brazil. You know, and both of those were probably around, you know, a hundred X returns, maybe even more than a hundred X returns”
Assertion Supported
LATAM tech penetration is 1.5% of GDP versus 52% in the US
“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, you know, China, that number is 20%. You look at India, it's 15%. But when you look at what the tech penetration level is a…”
Assertion Supported
Vasconcellos: COVID accelerated Brazilian e-commerce adoption by three years permanently
“If you look at e-commerce penetration in, in Brazil to take one specific case, we're right now about almost three years ahead of where we would have been in that historic growth curve.”
Opinion
Julio Vasconcellos names Sarah Smith as the most underrated angel investor
“I would say Sarah Smith from the Sarah Smith Fund in Silicon Valley. Sarah's a good friend and we overlapped at Facebook. You know, she was an amazing sales and people leader, both at Facebook and then at Quora afterwards. And she's been sort of a huge inspira…”
Assertion Partly supported
Facebook had 1M Brazil users vs Orkut's 35M in early 2010
“Facebook had something around a million users at that time in Brazil, ah, and our biggest competitor, which was Google's social network, Orkut, had over thirty five million users.”
Assertion Partly supported
Peixe Urbano hit $100M revenue and 1,200 employees in two years
“Myself and my co-founder Alex, working out of his living room in his apartment in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. And, you know, fast forward two years later, we were over 1200 employees present in six different countries across Latin America. The company was doing …”
Disclosure
Vasconcellos: Took 10% to 20% secondary liquidity as an angel investor
“As an angel investor, we often, I often took money off the table. And you know, that was probably 10 or 20% of the total position value. It was never sort of selling the entire position.”
