🚀 State of VIEWS 🚀
How two friends passionate about tech, startups and VC, leveraged decentralization and creator economy to launch a new high growth media publication
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, and since we just reached out #10 post, we thought it was a great opportunity to reflect and share with you a little bit of the insights into this fun adventure we are enjoying.
More importantly, we believe it is a good chance to write a small thank you note to you, readers, and to all the great interviewees and supporters we had the pleasure to meet during the last few months. 🙏
Hope you like it !!
Best,
Pol & Gerard
Summary
👤 Who are we?: friendship, drive, startup & VC worlds
👀 Why VIEWS?: need, doing better media, learn, share, network
🚀 Exciting growth: 75k+ views, $13B+ AUM, $700M exit value
🙏 Fails and lessons: learning by doing, thank you, apologies
Who are we?
Friendship
We are both originally from Sabadell, a city outside Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain), and we met 7 years ago while studying in the same class at University of Barcelona.
At that moment, still far away from the flashing lights of the startup & VC scene, we clicked mainly because sharing a mix of positive curiosity, hunger, and ambition to learn and grow more while trying to help others.
From there on, after finishing our degree at University of Barcelona, we followed different paths while still keeping in touch. Having each other to share our drive helped us to really keep the🔥 alive.
Pol went on to become one of the early employees and Strategy & Finance lead at a high growth VC backed startup from Barcelona:
Gerard joined the leading investment bank in Iberia, which just recently created an M&A team focused on Financial Institutions transactions, before being part of the startup world in New York sometime later:
Backgrounds
Pol is an early employee and Strategy and Finance Manager at Validated ID, a Barcelona-based B2B SaaS tech startup focused on e-signature and decentralized identity and backed by Caixa Capital Risc, Randstad, and Cuatrecasas.
Additionally, he is a Teaching Assistant at ESADE University (top 10 best European business schools ) and an Included VC Fellow (VC fellowship focused on empowering outliers with potential of having significant professional and social impact in VC and startups through education and insider access to tier 1 VCs like Creandum, Notion Capital and Seedcamp). Previously, he worked in consulting at EY and at fintech startups Kantox and Loanbook.
Personally, it is very important for Pol to be able to learn how to better help those left behind and take action accordingly. Through Catholic Church communities and different social projects he has found a way to walk that led him to help with the Missionaries of Charity in Nepal, in an Orphanage in Palestine and in the Spanish prison system, among other initiatives.
Gerard is currently working in Strategy & Operations at CoverWallet(New York), insurtech startup recently acquired by Aon (NYSE:AON) after being backed by Union Square Ventures, Index Ventures, Foundation Capital and Two Sigma Ventures, among other investors.
Previously, he worked in Investment Banking (M&A) specializing in financial institutions transactions at Arcano Partners (Madrid) where he participated in numerous deals involving leading financial institutions like Allfunds, Banco Popular, EVO Banco or Bankia in Spain as well as global private equity houses like Apollo, Hellman & Friedman or GIC. Gerard kicked-off his career in Auditing at KPMG (Barcelona) where he was engaged in different projects and sectors.
He has always been very involved with local organizations promoting civil, social and economic thinking across generations. Since going to university, Gerard has been a member of Cercle d’Economia and an active participant in Foro de Foros and Barcelona Global, all three are private non-profit associations made up of leading companies, research centers, entrepreneurs and professionals. He is leading efforts to reduce the gap between these organizations and young talented people. Also, Gerard loves to swim, cycle, read and travel.
Why VIEWS?
Need
When you are from outside the tech, startup, VC or any type of cool positive world, with zero network nor any close influence to help you flourish towards it, searching, finding, collecting, and absorbing high-quality info of trusted sources can be a major need in your personal and professional path. It really has the potential to move the needle. However, that need is not always satisfied.
We are two friends passionate about technology, startups and VC. Thanks to our different professional and personal experiences, we have had the chance to see first-hand the tremendous positive impact these areas can have in the world and we are incredibly grateful to have met some outstanding people succeeding in them, so we wanted to continue learning, growing and helping spread this knowledge widely.
Problem
However, on the journey, one thing got stuck with us. Yes, every now and then you can find high-value insights but we thought that a significant number of tech, startup, and VC info sources tended to be:
Camouflaged ads. A VC partner or a startup founder using fundraising to make PR stunts.
Too niche & widely fragmented. You need to follow 20 podcasts/newsletters from different market verticals to get a small % of the actual value we were looking for.
Too random and hard to digest. We wanted to be able to find quickly the valuable input without having to listen for 2+ hours a piece hoping to eventually find the minute that is worthy or being forced to look through bad transcriptions with awful UX.
Too exclusive. Top views are usually acquired in petit comité from offline conversations with high-flying profiles that are difficult to access.
New media opportunity
We are not reinventing the wheel. It is well known that in an increasing noisy world, people are more hungry for high quality content from new sources.
Additionally, new tools have emerged focusing on empowering individual creators, giving birth to new trends such as the recently hyped Creator Economy.
But there is something else. We believe we are experiencing such a cultural shock due to multiple macro factors like COVID, lockdowns, global political inefficiency, constant tech conquest or the crypto boom, that pillars of society itself like trust in centralized sources are changing as we know them. We think this shift can bring (and it is, in fact, already bringing) multiple interesting opportunities and new types of media creators leveraging decentralization is one of them.
Solution
This mix of macro and micro factors took us to the decision of creating VIEWS, because we are interested in improving access and reduce barriers to what we find to be brilliant insights on how present and future are being created, we want to learn and share more high-value views directly from the people actually doing it and we thought it could be fun to build relationships with amazing individuals along the way.
VIEWS is a media project initially based on bi-weekly interviews with interesting people doing cool stuff in tech, startup, and VC worlds. And we are, honestly, having great fun doing it.
Exciting growth
Traction
Since the launch of the #1 post on 27th October 2020, we have been publishing for over 4 months and we have launched 10 interviews.
Some highlights:
75k+ total views across different channels (Substack, LinkedIn, Twitter)
$13B+ total AUM from VC interviewees
190+ total exits from VC interviewees
$200M+ total fundraising from startup interviewees
$700M+ total exit value from startup interviewees
On info quality:
16 new market trends insights
32 exclusive startup selections
33 unique investor recommendations
36 high value books shared (that you can find here)
After been highlighted by some of our interviewees as their top 3 startups, some of the mentioned went on to raise $245M+ in total
Micuento (platform to create stories for kids), recommended by Laura Urquizu, raised €2.5M by Impact Partners
Omnipresent (HR stack for remote work), recommended by Srin Madipalli, raised $15.8M by Playfair Capital, Episode 1, and TrueSight Ventures
Rohlik (grocery delivery), recommended by Pavel Mucha, raised $230M by Partech Ventures, Index Ventures and Enern, among other investors
On interviewees diversity:
40% White male (including Spanish)
30% White women (including Spanish)
30% Black male or other ethnicity
As additional angles, we would like to mention a 10% disability diversity and 10% formerly incarcerated diversity. We are aware we still have a better effort to do in this area, it is important for us and we are working on it.
Mentions
Our content has been highlighted by University of Oxford (one of the top 10 best universities in the world), Included VC (leading VC Fellowship for underrepresented outliers backed by some of the best VC firms in the industry), tech.eu (leading European tech media), Notion Capital (London-based early stage VC investing in European B2B SaaS and enterprise tech with $500M AUM and portfolio cos like Tradeshift and GoCardless), Pear VC (Silicon Valley seed stage VC with $330M+ AUM and investments like the recently IPOed DoorDash), Red Points (Barcelona-based B2B SaaS providing state of the art online brand protection with +$64M funding raised) and dealflow.es (leading startup & VC newsletter in Spain), among other references.
Moving forward
We believe there are multiple ways to do new media, we are aware we have a long way to go in order to improve and we are committed to doing so. Even though a big part of that is still in process, we wanted to share a piece of it. Due to over expected traction we are getting from both readers demand and also great quality interviewees supply, we will move from bi-weekly to weekly frequency and we will also start including more junior profiles (rather than focusing only in VC partners and/or startup founders), thus providing views of superior range and diversity.
Additionally, we are starting to consider partnerships. Being the first one with tech.eu, a leading European tech publication founded by Robin Wauters, a top tech journalist formerly with TechCrunch and The Next Web. Tech.eu will be starting to share some of our content every now and then. Why? Because we believe it is interesting to explore options to grow, Robin has been open, supportive and fast, and we really like the work that the tech.eu team is doing.
We will continue looking into the best ways to do better media and always having at the center of everything we do maximum value, respect and appreciation for our incredible interviewees and providing top valuable views for our great readers.
In case you are reading this and would like to discuss any type of collaboration, please feel free to contact us at views.substack@gmail.com, we will love to explore it!
Fails and lessons
Learning while doing
One of the questions we like to ask our interviewees is biggest fail and lesson, because we think that angle is the one that a lot of times helps you really understand who someone is, instead of the shiny pretty face everyone kind of tries to push in public, especially in the professional world. And we believe we should do that for our work in VIEWS too. So here it comes.
Questions. We started with the idea of doing a series of varied standard questions with wide range to all of the interviewees. The main goal? Having a complete overview of the interviewee while ensuring an easily digestible high value to the reader, going straight forward to key insights while avoiding falling into traps such as the above-mentioned camouflaged ads, random content, etc. The fail? It meant we were potentially leaving behind views from the interviewee that are more personal and do not fall into one of the standard questions. Thanks to the feedback received from Nnamdi Iregbulem (Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners), we understood the importance of diving deeper into the specifics of each person. From that moment on, we included our wildcard question that focuses on something particular to our interviewee.
Timings. As has been mentioned, from both the interviewee and the readers’ side, our growth expectations have been significantly exceeded. If it is true that this is a positive factor, we have to say that it implied some failures too. We have not been able to provide content as fast as our readers were demanding and we have been forced to keep on hold some of our interviewees for a period longer than expected.
That being said, we wanted to apologize.
To our readers, for not being able to always meet the high frequency you prefer or/and missing some key questions in our approach.
To our interviewees, for keeping you on hold longer than expected in some cases or/and, in general, if you believe the experience could have been improved.
BIG THANK YOU !
And finally, the most important part.
Thank you Iñaki, Pavel, Laura, Itxaso, Nnamdi, Srin, Pere, Chris, Mar and Aly. Thank you for being so open and helpful. Thank you for sharing your great views. Thank you for your priceless advice.
Thank you to you, reader. Thank you for allocating some time and interest into us. Thank you for your constant demand that helps us to push harder. Thank you for your support.
And thank you to big inspirations for creating VIEWS such as Included VC, that also embodies our ethos of improving access to the best views while learning and building a community of great people to share the journey with, and whose members have been supporters from the beginning.
We deeply appreciate it.
Let’s get some more views !!
If you enjoyed it, subscribe and we’ll be back with you next week. 🙏🏼