🚀 State of Views #2 🚀
Experiencing growth as media founders, connecting with some of the best founders & VCs in the world, failing & learning, the importance of love
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), we recently reached our #20 post and we believe it is time to stop again, and share with you our views on how are we walking through this beautiful adventure.
More importantly, we believe it is a new good opportunity to write again a small thank you note to you, readers, and to all the great interviewees and supporters we had the pleasure to meet along the way. 🙏
Hope you like it !!
Best,
Pol & Gerard
Summary
📈 Update: growth, changes in our lives
💡 Interviews: Views’ views
❤️ Lessons: loving something before it is lovable
📈 Update
Growth
Our first post dates from Oct 27th 2020 and since then we are grateful to have continued to experience significant growth.
In 8 months we have achieved 180k+ total views and 1294%+ growth from Views #1 to Views #20 across different channels (Substack, Linkedin, Twitter) thanks to 20 incredible interviewees including formerly incarcerated people turned developers, founders with disability selling their company to global leading tech giants, diverse VCs with billions of dollars under management and entrepreneurs with multiple multi-million dollar exits.
And what is more important, having fun in a really beautiful experience, connecting with more amazing people, learning from them and sharing it with the world.
All within not just a co-founders relationship, but within a friendship, which feels very lucky for both of us.
Changes in our lives
But that’s just a small piece of the story here since our lives have changed significantly in the last few months!
Pol going from startup operator to VC
Pol was working as an early employee and Strategy and Finance Manager at Validated ID, (Barcelona-based B2B SaaS tech startup focused on e-signature and decentralized identity and backed by Caixa Capital Risc, Randstad, and Cuatrecasas).
Until 3 months ago when he announced in a pretty insightful post that after 4.5 years as startup operator and quite an underdog type of journey packed with setbacks, he fell in love with VC and broke into the industry, joining the great team of Kibo Ventures (European early-stage VC with €240M AUM, 55+ investments, 3 unicorns, and 1 IPO) as Investment Manager!
Gerard going from startup operator to Founder
Gerard was working in Strategy & Operations at CoverWallet (NY-based insurtech startup acquired by NYSE:AON after being backed by Union Square Ventures, Index Ventures, Foundation Capital and Two Sigma Ventures, among other investors).
Gerard has always been very entrepreneur and it was about time he decided to start something new. After +5 years of experience in M&A and Strategy & Operations, he felt ready to disrupt a traditionally opaque industry by creating a platform that helps SMEs connect with investors and/or advisors, trying to digitalize and scale one of the different sub-industries within the financial industry.
During the last couple of months, he has been working on the first version of the product, has closed a FFF round of ~€250k, and is expected to do the official launch after summer.
If you want to know more about it, you can reach out to him at gerard@deale.es
💡 Interviews
Views’ views
Instead of focusing too much on vanity metrics, we thought this time it could be more interesting to share a brief summary of our guests since they are the most important part of this and take the chance to throw more light into great people whilst saying thank you again for sharing so much with us.
#1 Iñaki Arrola. Founder of coches.com (cars marketplace sold to Santander Consumer Finance in January 2020) and Co-founder and Managing Partner of K Fund (Spanish early stage VC with +€285M AUM). Included VC supporter.
#2 Pavel Mucha. Founding Partner of ENERN and Kaya VC, VCs based in Central and Eastern Europe with €250M+ AUM including DocPlanner (world leading healthcare platform with $140M+ funding & 61M+ patients) and Rohlik (grocer delivery with $400M funding, $1B+ valuation and 750k+ customers). Included VC supporter.
#3 Laura Urquizu. 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. Top “50 SaaS CEOs of 2019” by The Software Report and “50 most influential women entrepreneurs and investors in European tech” by EU Startups.
#4 Itxaso del Palacio. Partner at Notion Capital, London-based early stage VC investing in European B2B SaaS and enterprise tech with $500M+ AUM and 60+ investments such as Tradeshift (B2B commerce platform, $661M funding) and GoCardless (B2B payments, $122M funding). Ex Partner at M12 (Microsoft’s Corporate VC). Included VC supporter.
#5 Nnamdi Iregbulem. Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, a multi-stage VC focused in Enterprise and Consumer sectors with $10.5B+ AUM and exits like Mulesoft (API platform acq by Salesforce for $6.5B) and SNAP (social network, IPOed and currently at $100B+ market cap). Ex Investor at Iconiq Capital, investment firm with $43B AUM and investments like Uber (mobility, IPOed and currently at $90B+ market cap).
#6 Srin Madipalli. Entrepreneur, investor and advisor. Founder & CEO of Accomable, accessible travel startup acquired by Airbnb. Former PM & Head of Accessibility at Airbnb. Included VC supporter.
#7 Pere Vallès. Tech entrepreneur and investor. CEO of Exoticca, travel tech startup with €20M+ funding. Former CEO of Scytl, e-voting startup with $129M+ funding.
#8 Chris Tottman. Co-founder and GP at Notion Capital, London-based early stage VC investing in European B2B SaaS and enterprise tech with $500M+ AUM. Co-founder of Included VC. Former CCO at MessageLabs ($700M exit).
#9 Mar Hershenson. Co-founder and Managing Partner at Pear Ventures, a Silicon Valley seed stage VC with $330M+ AUM and investments like DoorDash (IPOed, $60B+ market cap) and Gusto ($516M+ funding).
#10 Aly Tamboura. 1st Strategic Advisor at Justice Accelerator Fund ($350M org to accelerate criminal justice improvement). Ex Manager at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Formerly incarcerated for 12 years in San Quentin.
#11 Luis Serrano. Quantum AI Research Scientist at Zapata Computing (quantum computing co with $67M+ funding), Maths PhD. Ex Lead AI Educator at Apple, ex ML Lead at Udacity and ex ML Engineer at Google.
#12 Rebeca Minguela. Founder and CEO of Clarity, NY based B2B SaaS offering enterprise software for better social impact investing, with funding from investors like Kibo Ventures, Founders Fund and BlackRock.
#13 Howard Lindzon. Founder & GP of Social Leverage, early stage VC investor in cos like Robinhood ($40B valuation), eToro ($10B valuation) & AngelList. Co-founder of Stocktwits (financial social network, 5M+ members).
#14 Sonia Fernández. Partner at Kibo Ventures, European VC with €220M and recent top traction including 3 unicorns and 1 IPO filing. Ex Country Manager at Match.com ($38B+ valuation) and MercadoLibre ($75B+ valuation).
#15 Pere Mayol. Co-CEO & COO at AvatarCognition, an AI lab startup solving General Intelligence. Angel investor at companies like Wuaki.tv (acq by Rakuten), Glovo ($1.2B+ funding) & Wallapop ($840M+ valuation).
#16 Phillip Hui-Bon-Hoa. Partner at SLOPE (marketing agency), ex Co-Founder of Abacus Growth (TikTok viral marketing, acq by SLOPE in <2.5 years), ex Managing Partner at Dorm Room Fund (students' VC with $3B+ value created).
#17 Raúl Torres. Co-Founder and CEO of PLD Space, Spanish space tech with €32M+ funding providing launch solutions for commercial orbital and suborbital services targeting small payloads and satellites.
#18 Gary Stewart. Founder & CEO at FounderTribes, Advisor at Included VC. Ex employee #2 & Director at Wayra (Telefónica's innovation hub with 185+ investments & $1B+ total portfolio valuation).
#19 Gabby Cazeau. Principal at Harlem Capital, NY (US) early-stage VC with $174M AUM deeply committed to empowering diverse founders. Ex Program Manager at Microsoft, Ex Engineer at General Mills (NYSE:GIS).
#20 Dídac Lee. Serial entrepreneur & investor. Co-Founder of Galdana Ventures (VC Fund of Funds, $1B AUM, 25%+ of global unicorns including Coinbase, SpaceX and Stripe). Ex Board & Head of Digital at FC Barcelona.
❤️Lessons
Loving something before it is lovable
As we said above Views has grown, we met and learned from more outstanding people, we have been able to inspire more readers and, professionally speaking, we have experienced positive leaps forward.
However, as it is absolutely normal, we have also failed and struggled. And we want to share it because sometimes we feel there is a lack of transparency and honesty when talking about the less pretty and more dirty parts of “the hustle”, although they are one of the most important pieces configuring all progress.
We planned and tried to do weekly frequency and we couldn’t catch up with so much activity while balancing out with our new jobs, we wanted to close more partnerships but we didn’t find the right click with the right players, we were targeting to launch extra stuff (more content, new services) on top of our interview but didn’t have the time, we had some failed interviews that could have been very cool to do, keeping up with our commitment to diversity and inclusion has been difficult and not always possible, our professional changes have been a gift but required really hard work regarding adaptation, we went through big personal changes too and at some moments we felt psychologically drained …
And we learned something. Or better said, we re-confirmed it. At the end of the day we love what we are doing with Views and the opportunity of working on this as friends, we really do. And when that happens, when that concrete simple truth is there, all the other stuff just pales in comparison.
Sometimes it is about loving something before it is lovable.
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. 🙏🏼