#3 Laura Urquizu: scaling up a brand protection B2B SaaS to achieve 700+ clients, 250+ team and €64M+ funding
CEO of Red Points, Barcelona-based B2B SaaS providing state of the art online brand protection with +700 clients, +250 staff members and +$64M funding raised
We are Pol Fañanás and Gerard García, two friends passionate and curious about tech, startups and VC sharing bi-weekly high value views from people creating the future. Thanks for reading !
Laura Urquizu is the CEO of Red Points, B2B SaaS founded in Barcelona (Spain) focused on brand protection for companies. Red Points has +700 clients, +250 staff members and over $64M in funding by Mangrove Capital Partners ($1B+ AUM, investor in companies like Skype and Wix.com), Northzone ($1.5B+ AUM, investor in companies like Spotify and iZettle), Eight Roads Ventures ($6B AUM, investor in companies like Alibaba) and Summit Partners ($9.5B+ AUM, investor in companies like Uber). Laura has been recognized as one of the top “50 SaaS CEOs of 2019” by The Software Report and “50 most influential women entrepreneurs and investors in European tech” by EU Startups. Previously, she held executive and management positions at Arthur Andersen, Caja Navarra & CAN Corporation. Additionally, she acts as Board Member at Cercle d’Economia and is co-founder and chair of the Global Legal Tech Hub.
Summary
👤 Brief intro: global perspective and digital focus as key factors
🥇 Win: being a mom of 2, scaling from $1M to $10M ARR in 2 years
🚫 Fail and lesson: fast resolution of key team misalignments
🚀 Ideal founder: head in the clouds and feet on the ground
💸 Ideal investor: continuous help, do not interfere
📈 Markets: United States’ brand protection
🦄 3 startups: Pridatec, Micuento, Bigle Legal
👍 3 investors: Mangrove, Eight Roads, Northzone, Summit
📖 3 books: "Atlas Shrugged", "Steve Jobs", "La buena suerte"
And now, let’s take a closer look !
Could you give us a brief intro about you and your origins?
I am originally from Pamplona (Navarra, Spain), raised in a family that was very conscious of the global world I was going to be participating in. Providing that, I went to different international schools throughout my youth. For instance, having the chance to go to the United States when I was 17 years old and it was not very common to do, gave me a fantastic perspective of life, both personally and professionally speaking.
After that, I studied Economics but I must admit I did not enjoy that greatly. I was more into everything that had to do with digital transformation, I thought of it as a key driver to succeed.
During my early professional career, I held different executive positions within a banking group focusing on technology and organizational transformation. I remember back in those days that we already had some successful startups like eDreams, InfoJobs or Privalia but we were lacking the investor ecosystem that was needed. Providing that, at Caja Navarra we created one of the first investment vehicles in Spain focused on seed capital for tech startups from Barcelona and Madrid mainly. I would rather not speak about the ROI (ha!) of that fund but I feel very proud of having contributed to build part of the ecosystem early on.
Finally, that experience leads me to get in the entrepreneur world in 2014 joining the founding team of Red Points. My whole life is around Red Points now.
What would you say has been the biggest win in your life?
Personally, my two sons. I am very proud of their values and how they behave in their life. Becoming a parent does not come with a "how-to" book and, sometimes, is a very hard task.
Professionally, having always been really fearless when taking on new challenges and just keep moving forward. I have always created and launched new projects - when I was in the bank (intrapreneurship) and after in the startup/VC worlds. Focused on Red Points, I am very proud of having helped the company grow from $1M to $10M ARR (Annual Recurrent Revenue) in just 2 years. Fun fact, in the SaaS world we are always swimming through millions of data and metrics and there is one that shows that only 0.4% SaaS have achieved this.
Related to the above, and your biggest failure?
Linked to the strong growth of the company, one of the things that come to my mind is not having solved a collaboration and misalignment on time. In just one semester we had a communication breakdown between two C-level teammates and I really believed we could get over that using coaching or strategic planning. Thanks to Red Points being a strong company, the performance was not affected by it but I continue thinking I had to solve the issue faster than I did.
Within exponential growth companies, an issue like this can have a lot of impact. Think about an aircraft that gets its engine hit by a pigeon, as the plane is going so fast the impact can end up having significant consequences for the plane. Everything grows fast, both positive and negative. If you realize an issue and in 1-2 months it's not resolved yet, don't wait until the third or fourth month.
What is your ideal founder profile?
To me, the ideal founder would be defined by Didac Lee's caption on his Twitter profile "head in the clouds & feet on the ground". To be more specific, someone that has an ambitious vision together with great execution capabilities. Obsessed with execution and making things happen.
Sometimes you find visionaries without the ability to land their ideas or the other way around, people on the ground but without dreaming big enough.
What is your ideal investor profile?
For high growth companies like Red Points, the ideal investor is the one that continuously helping the CEO with their needs. Additionally, an ideal investors should assist in building the strategy using different benchmarks, insights and curated presentations to support his reasoning.
Ideal investors not only help their portfolio companies when things go well but also when things get tough. Finally, an investor that does not interfere with the day-to-day operations of the company will add substantially more value than the others.
What present and future markets are you most interested in?
United States represents ~52% of our consumer base but we are just scratching the surface there, we need to push further. As you know, we provide software to companies to defend their revenues by removing counterfeits and stopping piracy. If you think about the market with more consumption and spending, United States comes first. It's not necessarily the country where pain is higher but clearly where most companies suffer from them, the level of digital spending is brutal.
On a more inception level, we are also exploring the South Asian market as we consider it very attractive. We'll see how that plays out.
Could you share with us 3 startups you like and why?
I will share Spanish companies as I like to take national pride in what we are achieving as a country. I like all the founders because I believe they all have powerful visions and great execution capabilities.
First, Pridatect by David Casellas (co-founder and CEO). I was lucky to meet him during the early days of Red Points, where he helped build the commercial efforts. He left when the company started to get bigger and now is doing a tremendous job helping companies protect their data.
Second, Micuento by Muriel Burgois (co-founder and CEO). The firm is considered a digital startup currently developing storytelling, turning children into the main characters of the stories. I really enjoy the fact that you can customize tales and stories so that they learn through reading.
Third, Bigle Legal by Alejandro Esteve and Sergio Esteve, who are two amazing brothers! They are phenomenal. I know them personally and they are fascinating. Bigle Legal is an interesting company offering document automation with a lot of opportunities ahead that I am positive they will execute thanks to its knowledge, hard work, humility and ambitious vision.
I must say that after 13 years of being involved in this startup/VC world, I've seen it evolve and change over time but I've never seen so many entrepreneurs well prepared as we have today. The founder profile has changed significantly.
Could you share with us 3 investors you like and why?
Thanks to the growth we have experienced at Red Points, we have always been able to choose among different options so my favourite investors are 4 (not 3) we currently have that fulfill all the ideal profile mentioned before: Mangrove CP (especially Mark Tluszcz), Eight Roads (Davor Hebel has been very active networking outside the board), Northzone and Summit Partners.
All of them have the characteristics already described as preferred. They support us anyway we need them, we share where we envision the company to be and all of them network outside the board and continuously look for ways to add value, which we truly appreciate.
What are the 3 books you feel everyone should read and why?
"Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand is a fiction book about ambition, effort, entrepreneurship and management. Even though it’s written by a liberal philosopher and contains a lot of ideas of what she described as objectivism, it shares a lot of lessons for anyone running a company as it describes how to handle teams, different personalities within a company, or overcoming different adversities. In brief, it is about grit and greatness.
I enjoyed reading "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson as I learned how a genius like him executed his ambitious vision. If you read it you will notice that he had very positive traits as well as not so positive ones - it's good to understand what to mimic and what to avoid.
"La buena suerte" by Alex Rovira and Fernando Trias de Bes is a very short book written as a fable about how we are making our decisions, noting that it is not so much about focusing on luck but rather depends on what you want to do with what you have.
Big thanks Laura for sharing your views with us !
Big thanks to you, reader, for your time and interest !
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