#12 Learning with AIV founders | Compilation
May 2021 | Practical content about venture capital investment and the startup ecosystem curated by and for entrepreneurs
We continue sharing the wisdom of the All Iron Ventures community! We have collected a wealth of knowledge from our newsletter guests over the last year, which we love to share with the startup ecosystem. For that, we have compiled their responses into two special newsletters: one that gathers the investors’ views (published recently) and another that collects the founders’ learnings.
This issue is a tribute to our “Learning with…” section, where entrepreneurs we have backed share some of their hits, mistakes, and learnings when building and scaling their companies. Priceless insights!
See here the previous investors’ compilation:
What is an average day like for you as CEO? How do you manage to lead your startup and still find a work-life balance?
Kirill Bigai, co-founder & CEO of Preply: My days are pretty structured and work intense, but I do try to create balance with my life outside of work. The flow of my day looks like this:
- Wake up at 8 am with a slow entrance into the workday. On my best mornings, I allow myself 1–1.5 hours to prepare and do a basic morning exercise routine: yoga, deep stretches, or meditation.
- I dedicate the first half of my day to focused work and rarely schedule meetings. During this time, I follow up on emails, Slack, internal comms, and other analyses of important projects and strategic planning.
- The second half of my day is mostly internal meetings until about 6–7 pm. These meetings range from 1:1s with my six direct reports to KPI progress meetings that we hold 3x per week or other critical project updates.
- 2–3x during the week, starting around 7:30 pm, I schedule time for sports activities which is how I relax and turn off from work mode. The weekdays, when I’m not practicing sports, I reserve this block of time for external meetings with potential partners, investors, advisors, personal therapists, and leadership coaches.
- On Fridays, I intend to join our LT meeting, where we discuss people topics and respective strategies and tactics.
- On the weekends, I disconnect from work as much as I can unless it’s something extremely urgent. I try to organize my weekends for efficiency too, so I maximize my time. Usually, this includes more sports, thermotherapy, meeting with friends, and other activities.
Pedro Torrecillas, co-founder & CEO of Circular: I try to wake up earlier than my family to clean my inbox every day. After breakfast, my day officially starts with a 15' daily with every operational team, where we review the last day’s results and prioritize work for the current day. After that, I usually have all meetings in the morning (mainly unblocking my team) and schedule focus time to get things done in the afternoon.
When I arrive home, my wife and I play with my kids (two and one-year-olds with a lot of energy!), then give them dinner and put them to sleep. Working is forbidden until the following day.
How would you define your leadership style? What are you good at? What do you need to improve? What has been your primary learning in this area?
Cristóbal Viedma, founder & CEO of Lingokids: According to internal surveys, our team values transparency greatly, which helps the company grow and have a good work environment. I share as much information as I can regarding goals, plans, or results across the company. Data information is essential to keep the product developing.
I’m a big advocate of autonomy and ownership of one’s work for individuals (myself included) and across different teams. I think it’s also essential to give and receive as much direct feedback as possible with sincerity and openness. Any points that our colleagues may have for improvement help the rest of the team and me grow and learn. For this reason, we recently launched a Performance Growth Cycle to help us collect data on what our employees are doing well and what they can improve, which has been very helpful.
While autonomy is something I strongly encourage, it sometimes leads to silos or can introduce some challenges for essential cross-team collaborations. I’ve learned that lines are not always black and white, and autonomy has to be perfectly combined with the right amount of teamwork to accomplish its goal correctly.
Andre Jordão, co-founder & CEO of Barkyn: I would say analytical in the first place… but also creative — I’m obsessed with our brand, for example. I stimulate the team to find a rationale and structure behind things, priorities, assumptions, and our execution methods. I tend to be very rational in measuring the cost-benefit of priorities and alternatives, and I think our leads tend to go in the same direction.
On the other hand, I like to be empathetic, especially about people’s issues and contexts. I’m good at seeing the high-level, more strategic direction and translating it into execution priorities. Maybe I would like to celebrate more our small wins and milestones; I think a founder tends to focus on the “what’s next” and sometimes forgets to savor every milestone of the journey.
What has been your roadmap to define your company’s strategic priorities over time when you have so much on the table?
Albert Nieto and Jorge Poyatos, co-founders & co-CEOs of Seedtag: being two founders and co-CEOs definitely helps at this point. How we divide the workload and set strategic priorities is a common question for us, but, at the end of the day, it’s easier for us to do it together than alone. It relieves some of the CEO pressure while allowing us to reflect on our next steps together, and we believe it prompts us to avoid making mistakes that one brain alone could make.
When setting the roadmap for Seedtag, there have been many different steps according to the various phases that the company has faced in the past. The common ground for Seedtag looking forward has been what we defined in the early days, which mainly got more ambitious and audacious over time. These were the main pillars of Seedtag itself: first, understand consumer interests (using the latest AI technology); second, contextual creatives that resonate with consumers; and third, integrate messages into the most premium publishers at scale. These three pillars drove over decisions when thinking of M&A opportunities, international expansion, or even hiring the talented people we needed to achieve our utter mission -to become the global contextual partner for brands and publishers.
Juan Urdiales, co-founder & co-CEO of Jobandtalent: at first, our company captured millions of users and thousands of companies and put them in an app that matched the CV and the job offer. The model worked, but it didn’t offer a differential value over competitors. We started to obsess about how we could improve that, and we thought about making it ‘transactional’: the worker had to be hired through the platform to get all the information that would allow us to know the ideal candidate for each company.
In 2016, we decided to move from being that job website that did matching to being a platform that not only recommends offers but also accompanies the worker throughout the process, including the employment contract, payroll collection, etc. It was a challenging moment because, as founders, we had to realize that we had to radically change what we had created if we wanted it to work.
We had to invest in the development of the platform and reorganize our resources to become the company we are today, with a very clear social purpose: to make it easier for people to find work safely and offer added value to workers and companies. Since we made this decision, we have not only strengthened the service and the added value we offer to companies and employees, but we have also grown as a company. Today we have more than 900 employees worldwide and 250 in Spain.
When did you decide to scale internationally? How did you define that process?
Oier Urrutia, founder & CEO of Lookiero: we decided pretty early to internationalize. Just a few months after we launched in Spain and saw that the unit economics were strong -signaling the existence of product market fit — we decided we should launch in the rest of Europe; Spain is a small e-commerce market and if you want to build something big in Europe, internationalization beyond your local market is a must.
We initially decided which country should be the first one for our European expansion and did some market research to back up our decision. Then we built a simple business plan and moved to execution mode, from hiring local talent to finding the right local partners -for example, couriers.
Asher Ismail and Piotr Pisarz, co-founders of Uncapped: we started to expand internationally very early. It’s important to start learning fast, as it takes time to get it right.
It’s always about the impact. We try to aim for things that will bring the company to the next level. Instead of aiming for 10% improvements, it’s about 10x growth, and setting priorities that allow this.
Building a great team is critical for any startup’s success. What has been your magic recipe to do that? What is the most outstanding challenge your company faces in this area?
Peter Windischhofer, co-founder & CEO of Refurbed: We are extremely picky and take only 0.5% of all applications we get. You can only afford to be that picky if you are very attractive to potential employees. That’s why we value employee happiness nearly as high as customer happiness.
Kalle Salmi, founder & CEO of Kodit: we have been putting a lot of effort into building a great culture that helps us to attract and retain top talent. When people find strong alignment with the vision and have a strong sense of ownership they tend to be quite happy and attract more talented people to join. As the team has grown rapidly the importance of a well-functioning people operations team has become very important. Our main challenge is to maintain our culture when the team is growing fast and is increasingly more distributed.
What main advice would you give to other entrepreneurs raising capital based on your learnings?
Oier Urrutia, Founder & CEO of Lookiero:
- Prepare well in advance: have a complete data room ready.
- Ensure you have enough money for the following 12 months
- Meet investors before starting any raising process. Investors invest in lines, not in dots.
- Create momentum: move all investors at a similar pace.
- Try to focus on fundraising as much as possible and delegate the business to your team. However, it’s important to find the right balance, since you need to make sure the business continues performing and it does not put the funding round at risk.
- Work on your resilience: there will be bumps on the road, so it’s vital to be ready.
Peter Windischhofer, co-founder & CEO of Refurbed: humans (and investors) want to hear great stories. Work on and refine your story as much as you can and adapt it to the investor. Practice your pitch over and over again but don’t make it sound as if you are selling something. Fundraising is like dating. You wouldn’t propose on the first date either.
Andre Jordão, co-founder & CEO of Barkyn: fundraising depends on a sum of a lot of details and that’s why it’s an art and difficult to summarize in a few bullet points. But if I would choose two short pieces of advice I would say:
- Storytelling is key — sell the sizzle and then the sausage, which means: sell the smell of a great growth story ahead and only then the rational benefits. Why you’re the best startup deal in your space?
- All comes down to retention and a defensibility strategy — iterate on this on your model before fundraising. Have your numbers solid around LTV and evidence of a strategic-driven roadmap.
Any other recommendations you have for current or aspiring entrepreneurs?
Asher Ismail and Piotr Pisarz, co-founders of Uncapped: remember that your start-up does not define you as a person, and find life other than work.
Kalle Salmi, Founder & CEO of Kodit: building a company is not a sprint but a marathon. So when you start a company make sure it is an idea you feel comfortable working on for a long period.
Pedro Torrecillas, cofounder & CEO of Circular: if you are ready to commit ten years of your life, don’t wait too much to get started!
🧡 Thanks for reading! If you have enjoyed this newsletter, spread the word! You can follow us at All Iron Ventures on Linkedin and Twitter.
💸 If you are fundraising and want to share your project with us, please use this Typeform (even better if you get to us through a mutual connection, though!).
