🚀 State of Views #3 🚀
Lessons from top founders and investors, consistent Views growth, getting surprised by tier 1 readers, blessed are the hungry
We are Pol Fañanás and Gerard García, two friends passionate and curious about tech, startups and VC sharing weekly high-value views from people creating the future. Thanks for reading !
Hi everyone !!
We are Pol and Gerard (VIEWS co-founders), after reaching our #30 post we believe it’s time for a new State of Views moment in order to reflect on the experience of the last 10 interviews.
Even though due to both professional and personal reasons (some of which we will share below) we reduced our posting frequency, we still believe that the vision to openly share singular curated access to some of the best entrepreneurs and investors in the world is a worthy endeavour and we are happy to continue having the blessing of building such exceptional relationships and learnings along the way.
Thank you to all readers and guests for making this possible as well as the constant heartfelt support you make us feel!
Best,
Pol & Gerard
Summary
📈 Pol & Gerard: a year of relevant evolution for us
💡 Update: Views growth, getting some cool references
❤️ Lessons: learning from the best founders and investors
📈 Pol & Gerard
Pol learning as VC investor
The last few years have been quite an exciting period to be in VC, with learning opportunities mixing some great success cases, and a few of the most relevant global paradigm shifts in more than a decade.

And Kibo Ventures is maybe the leading example in Spain and one of the most exciting cases in Southern Europe, which helped Pol have exposure as an Investment Manager to over €150m+ raised in 2 new oversubscribed funds, 4 new unicorns in portfolio, 6+ exits, 1st NASDAQ IPO from Spanish origins, $1.5bn raised by portfolio companies, selling Fund I to an $80bn investment firm, and closing 14+ new investments.
Gerard building something that matters
And then comes Gerard, who made the bold decision to leave his role in the NY based Strategy & Operations team of Coverwallet after NYSE:AON acquisition and go back to Barcelona to launch a new fintech adventure envisioning the creation of a new solution to the significant lack of fairness and efficiency that he experienced first-hand in SMEs M&A scene.

So what happened during the last months? Going from nothing to >€30k MRR, >1.2k business users, >1.3k investors users, 3 SME M&A deals closed, 24 FTEs, and €1.5m+ from top investors like Nortia Capital and Tekpolio.
📈 Update
KPIs
We have continued our growth since the last State of Views, reaching 1m+ total views and 550%+ growth across our target channels (substack, linkedin, twitter):
Our #30 guests allowed us to further expand Views network and increase our access to some of the best players in the world:
Getting some cool references
But not just that, we also had the blessing of receiving some surprising really cool references from readers such as Keith Rabois (GP at Founders Fund, CEO at OpenStore), Josh Wolfe (Co-founder and Managing Partner of Lux Capital), and the University of Oxford:
❤️Lessons
The power of hunger
As you know, there is a question that we ask ourselves a lot and that we got ask a lot: lessons from Views. We don’t mean this as an essay but more as an easy way to share some golden nuggets of stuff that clearly caught our attention when having the chance to connect with extraordinary guests.
We talked about the importance of loving something before it is lovable in our previous State of Views. We believe now could be the time to talk about another ingredient, specially remarkable in the current period of macro challenges we seem to be experiencing lately.
Probably like the vast majority of you, we spend a lot of time trying to learn from the best and implement it in our journeys, or using it to predict and influence positive outcomes that can be valuable.
During years, we have come across factors such as pedigree or intelligence as predictors of success. It seems everyone likes to believe that the logos you accumulate in your CV are the key, maybe because it is a signal easier to monitor and keeps the status quo wheel going. Or that it’s more about natural raw brain power, maybe because it makes a better and cleaner story to be spread. And while factors like these certainly help, they doesn’t seem to be the deciding element.
In our Views guests, we repeatedly see a different ingredient as more relevant: Hunger. It’s not negatively deterministic if you are an outsider, if you are not appropriate, if you are from the margins. A disciplined strong-willed hunger focused in the direction of good will move the needle. Having a vision of good and pursuing it fiercely no matter what. Through fire if it comes (and it will come).
Thank you interviewees, for sharing your views with us!
Thank you readers, for your great support!
If you enjoyed it, share & subscribe and we’ll be back with you in September for a new season. 🙏🏼