I am joining Flex Capital!
Big news — I am joining Flex Capital to work alongside Jeff Lu, Tod Sacerdoti, and Auren Hoffman and help them reinvent the tech investing business. I am incredibly excited for this new opportunity and I cannot wait for what we’ll build over the next few years. 🚀
A quick backstory on how this all happened:
After spending the last few years working across SaaS companies and leading GTM teams, I felt ready for a new adventure. People who know me well wouldn’t hesitate to say that I have multiple interests — a forever generalist how I like to define myself.
Of course, being a generalist in 2021 requires much expertise — one must avoid being in situations where knowing a bit of everything is perceived as superficial or lazy. Still, I always try to balance my width and depth of knowledge in a way that allows me to retain what’s truly useful while enabling me to look at things from a broad set of lenses, almost like a photographer exploring the world through different objectives.
Zooming in and out of what captures my interest is what enables me to keep an elastic mind while building a dense pattern recognition system. I am a big believer that correlation is one of the most useful skills one can have — it’s not simply connecting the dots but more so being able to apply critical thinking on the basis of “Deja Vu” which makes the entire process much faster. Of course, this can cause a lot of impulsivity, so it needs to be counterbalanced with one’s ability to challenge their own assumptions and contextualize information on the basis of the new situation being evaluated.
“Everyone needs habits of mind that allow them to dance across disciplines.” (David Epstein, Range)
Amongst the million things I like, there’s meeting new CEOs — something I started doing more and more after having launched 6NINE26— an investment syndicate I run alongside some of my best friends.
Launching the syndicate and meeting several great startups made me realize that what I truly enjoyed about leading GTM teams in tech companies was the opportunity to work closely with CEOs and have an influence on the overall company strategy.
Combine this with my innate curiosity and my newly discovered passion for the investing business, and suddenly I found myself reflecting on my aspirations in life, questioning what it was that I really wanted to spend my time on…
Besides my growing interest in venture capital due to my side hustle, I came to the conclusion that what I really wanted was to be part of an environment where not only I could learn tonnes about different stuff, but where’d be surrounded by inspiring operators that have dedicated their lives to building incredible ventures and that are now helping others do the same thing.
A friend recommended I read Range by David Epstein — and a passage of the book really stuck with me:
“You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in thinking or reasoning.”
At that point — all became clear. I wrote myself a mission statement:
“I want to spend my time training my ability to think and reason, fulfilling my ambitions by knowing the most I can about a selected sub-set of disciplines that I can cross-reference and combine to build myself an unfair advantage that will push me to be the best I can in whatever I chose do and focus my attention on.”
It’s always fascinating to look at how the cosmos works — while thinking about all of this, John Lafleur, founder of Airbyte, reached out to me telling me that a VC fund was looking for someone like me to join their team. What? someone like me? That must be a sign. (For context, Airbyte is one of my most successful angel investments to date — not that I did many, but still taught me a lot about what meeting new founders can bring to your life. I’ll be forever grateful to John & Michel for their support — they’re great!)
Little I knew that after a call with Jeff Lu and a bunch of chats with Auren Hoffman and Tod Sacerdoti — they’d ask me to join the team to help them build something different in the VC world. I mean, something truly different.
While I know that a lot of VCs say they’re different just for the sake of it and there is a lot of fuff in the industry, something Jeff said during our first call really made me click and realize that if there was one thing I wanted to do, that thing was working with people like him, Auren and Tod.
“Imagine you’re a CEO…We want to build a VC that’s like an API layer to your company, where capital gives you access to other CEOs that have been there, done that. CEOs are usually the best co-founders you can’t hire.”
To quote Nir Eyal— “I was hooked”.
Wait, what? You’re telling me — a technical marketer from the dev-tools world — that you’re building a VC that's like an API layer? And that you’d want me to join the ride? Hell yeah!
It was immediately clear to me that that was the right thing to do, not that I didn’t go back and forth a million times with my decision thinking about the ins and outs of my choice — but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was the one call I had to answer.
The most difficult part in all of this was that I knew I’d have to have a very difficult conversation with Samy Pessé and tell him I was about to leave GitBook. Some of the people I spoke with told me I was crazy doing such a thing. GitBook is in fact a true rocket ship ready for take-off. A company with insane organic traction, built to solve a very impactful problem, with a very large target market and a pretty unique viral loop that represents an unfair distribution advantage. This, of course, didn’t make my decision any easier…
Samy — as the great leader he is — Immediately understood my motivations and what has driven me towards this change, highlighting that he firmly believed this was the right thing for me and showing his full support. (Besides being pissed because he now had to go off replace me…)
I am not gonna lie, I am incredibly excited for this opportunity and I cannot wait to see what we’ll build at Flex over the next few years. I feel incredibly lucky to be surrounded by people that not only want to do things differently and challenge the status quo, but that could be incredibly successful in just playing the same game as everyone else and yet feel that it would be too easy and challenge themselves to do more.
I have put a lot of thought into this decision, mostly because I was starting to feel very safe in doing what I’ve done since my very first day at work. Getting out of your comfort zone is not always the easiest in these cases— especially after spending an entire year working from your couch— but I interpreted that safety as a sign that I probably wasn’t learning as much as I should have, and that I probably wasn’t challenging myself enough either, and if I wasn’t challenging myself enough, I was probably not challenging others as much as I should have.
Reflection: Being part of a team, of a business is not only a privilege, it’s an oath to be the best version of yourself because other people count on you. Some people think that careers decisions should be taken selfishly, and for the most part, this might as well be true — but who’s more selfish? someone that spends their time in mediocrity and causes others to be mediocre, or someone that realizes this might happen and tries to avoid it at all costs?
It’s all for now — but I’ve been told VCs publish more content than marketers, so you’ll probably hear again from me very soon…
Special thanks to Pietro Invernizzi and Sylvain Giuliani for their continuous support, patience, and help during the last few months, to Jeff Lu, Auren Hoffman, and Tod Sacerdoti for the incredible opportunity, and to John Lafleur and Michel Tricot for believing in me since the moment we met. (I should tag my girlfriend Jessica too — but she’s not on Medium…)
Ps. you can reach me at mario@flexcapital.com and follow me on Twitter. 👋
