Cut The Check: There Hasn't Been a Better Time to Invest in Latam | Culture Matters, But Hard to Implement | Why Latam Founders are the hardest working | Samuel Veloso, Investor & Lara Lemann, Managing Partner of Maya Capital

Summary

In this conversation, Lara Lemann and Samuel Veloso, of Maya Capital, discuss the inception of Maya Capital, their investment thesis, the importance of courage and grit in entrepreneurship, and the challenges they faced during fundraising. The conversation also delves into the differences in startup ecosystems across Latin America, how Lara approaches fundraising as they prepare for Fund 3, why implementing culture is uniquely challenging in VC, and much more.

Chapters

00:00 The Inception of Maya Capital
03:49 Maya's Investment Thesis 
04:52 Value of "Boots on the Ground" & Gaining Conviction on an Investment
06:38 Maya's Mexican Investment Initiatives
07:55 Maya's Slogan: "Courage, Boldness, and True Grit"
09:36 Fundraising: "It's an Opportunity to Sit on the Other Side of the Table"
11:22 Balancing Investments in Brazil & Spanish-speaking Latam
15:26 Female Force: Empowering Women in Venture Capital
17:53 Cultural Differences in Latam's Startup Ecosystems
21:00 Maya's Approach to Portfolio Support
24:45 Maya's Portfolio Construction 
26:13 Preparing for Fund 3
27:13 The Growth of Maya's Team from Inception to Today
28:31 Implementing a Culture is hard in VC
30:12 Emerging Opportunities in Fintech
32:39 Reflections and Future Aspirations
34:24 Outro

Cut The Check w/ Mack Meyer is a podcast about venture capital, startups, and entrepreneurship in Latin America and beyond.

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Transcript

story of Maya Capital and how you guys came about to finding this thesis. If you guys want to give a little background and context on the firm, why you launched it, Lara and then kind of some personal experiences that shaped the mission of Maya Capital today.

Lara Lemann (00:23)
Well, first of all, thank you so much for having us. Super excited to be on here and excited to have another partner that's furthering interest in Latin America and in the Latin American ecosystem and venture entrepreneurship and so on. So first of all, I'm one of the co-founders of Maya, my co-founder, Monica and I started the fund in 2018. The idea originally came out of multiple conversations that we had between 2016 and 18.

where I was investing as an angel here in Brazil after a career that started first in the public sector, then migrated through a large corporation where I eventually met Samuel, was investing as an angel and Monica was starting a company during her MBA. And so we would exchange notes and basically what we started realizing is that me as an investor in Brazil at the time,

The companies that I had invested in as an angel didn't have a very obvious next funding step because there were no local investors. Meanwhile, Monica, who was going to start her company, a Brazilian company from the U.S. would have to stay in the U.S. because she was going to need to raise seed capital in the U.S. because there was no local investor. And so as we started comparing these realities, we realized that this was actually a really big opportunity as all problems are.

and decided to tackle it as our own entrepreneurial journey. And so since then now seven, eight years in, we've raised about a hundred, more than 150 million actually in AUM across two funds have deployed that now into 55 companies, sorry, 50 companies, roughly 12 sectors, six countries.

Mack (01:50)
you

Lara Lemann (02:14)
and have the privilege of working with a really exceptional team of which Samuel has now been a part of for two years.

Mack (02:19)
Yeah.

Amazing. And just some more context. So with your relationship with Monica, like there was not much of a prior long standing childhood friend or something like that. You essentially connected and said, well, shoot, let's launch a venture fund together.

Lara Lemann (02:36)
No, there was two years of co-founder dating while she was in her MBA. Yeah. So originally we were connected by mutual friends because I mean, I was here investing in Brazil as an angel and talking a lot about entrepreneurship in general. guess I was one of the few people talking about entrepreneurship in the region or at least in Brazil. And so was she. And a couple of people started getting tired of hearing us blab about that and was like, why don't you guys just talk to each other about it? So we did that for two years and then.

Mack (02:38)
Okay. Okay. Okay.

Lara Lemann (03:05)
That's where Maya was born.

Mack (03:07)
Yes, and as you kind of thought about the thesis and you mentioned you've invested now in over 50 companies or 50 companies, was it clear that it was going to be Spanish speaking Latam and Brazil or how did that thesis evolve and so forth?

Lara Lemann (03:23)
Yeah, that's always been our thesis. And the realization we had early on was that this gap that we had noticed in Brazil, it was a regional gap. And not only that, but if we were to consider the winners of the region, they would be pen regional. So if you take the winners thus far, New Bank is the New Bank of Mexico. Rappi of Columbia is the Rappi in Brazil. And so most of these winners, by the time that they become these massive companies,

Mack (03:47)
Mm-hmm.

Lara Lemann (03:52)
they naturally expand across the region. And so for us, the challenge always was how do we get into these winners? It doesn't matter if the winner is Brazilian or Mexican. We just need to make sure that we're in it in the seed stage and then help them grow so that they can get to that stage where they become pan-regional. And so since day one, we've been Spanish speaking and our second investment actually was, yeah, I think our second investment was already a Spanish speaking Latam.

company.

Mack (04:24)
And for you guys, if I understand correctly, you and Monica are both from Brazil and there's always been an emphasis from other investors like boots on the ground is like super important, right? In other countries for many reasons, but you know, some might say just to make sure you're seeing the best and understanding the beat of the ecosystem. And you just mentioned your first, one of your first investments was in Spanish speaking, Latam how did you make sure that was the correct move and how did you get conviction? And then we could kind of get in the team building and kind Samuel's role and so forth.

Lara Lemann (04:55)
Yeah, so our process has always been a lot more diligent than maybe a traditional seed fund. We sometimes get that as constructive feedback from founders, but I guess now they'll all know that we see it as very good feedback. We take it as a compliment. And so this analysis process has always been really important to us. And I agree with you. You need to have boots on the ground. You need to guarantee that you have all the information. Luckily, since the beginning, we constructed an LP base, a network.

that eventually became our LP base that was also pan regional. So we have family offices from Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, for sure. All of those as our investors. so initially we would leverage them to help us get introduction to experts or market leaders that could give us a little bit more context on the market. In some cases we would fly to the...

place and in not clo case, for example I flew for it. did a day trip to Santiago to try their products. In that case, there was a specific in that it was, it was actually a food product. so Sometimes we would go ourselves. Sometimes we would just leverage our, our networks, but it definitely is a challenge. think that's the big challenge of, of not only not having boots on the ground causes more difficulty in the investment.

But I think what's been really cool to see is that these experts that we leverage during our investment process, we can then leverage to also help support the company. which is also really important to our thesis. kind of building that network, whether before or throughout the investment process is really important.

Mack (06:34)
Mm-hmm.

And Samuel do you have anything to add to that on the investment process, the context? I know that you mentioned you're kind of spearheading some of your Mexico initiatives. Any thoughts to share on that?

Samuel Veloso (06:56)
Yeah, I think a Lara of was very fortunate to mention and to declare that we have to make it up for the fact that we're not there. And because we go this extra mile, we can view a better value creation plan because we come from this virgin mind. And in the end, we ended up using leveragin those fresh eyes to give new insight, but also to connect to the relevant people.

In the ecosystem, in the end, this one of our main revenue, main streams of driving growth for our portfolio, for those like, out I Latin America. But in the end, we challenge ourselves to be even more committed to the pipeline outside of, outside of Brazil. you know, If we

If we get to meet a founder that's not in Brazil, we would make everything to open our schedules, to meet the people, to get to know them, to get to learn more about the stories and about the problems they're solving because there's an education element to it, but there's also this humble attitude of not knowing everything about those regions. And in the end, think we benefit out of this mindset.

Mack (08:18)
And I think that segues nicely into kind of your guys' maybe ethos or thesis kind of around courage, boldness, and grit. I really do resonate with a lot of those words and that slogan. How did you guys land on this, Lara? and Monica? How did you guys come up with this with you and Monica?

Lara Lemann (08:40)
I think it was a natural consequence of kind of the market that we were facing when we were starting Maya in 2018. We weren't only kind of trying to create a market in terms of creating one of the first few. You guys are freezing. Can you hear me? Okay. If you weren't only trying to create this industry of early stage venture, create this ecosystem, create this community,

Mack (08:58)
Yeah, yeah, I can hear you.

Lara Lemann (09:09)
but we were also, you know, like two girls doing it. and so it, and I know you want to talk about that a little bit later, but that never actually crossed our mind. we just like saw this opportunity and wanted to go after it. And we realized that what we were doing needed to be bold and it needed to be gritty and we needed to be gritty. And as we started on this journey of our own entrepreneurial journey of building Maya, we realized that that is

Mack (09:18)
Yeah. Yeah.

Lara Lemann (09:38)
like the key thread that connects all entrepreneurs across the region. You're not going to be a founder period. If you're not courageous, you're not going to be a founder in Latin America. If you're not bold and you don't have grit. so that was kind of the type of person we wanted to attract to our, to our network and to our ecosystem. And I'm, I'm proud to say that I think it's still the common thread, not only among

Mack (09:49)
Yeah.

Lara Lemann (10:05)
our portfolio founders, but everyone that has passed through Maya or connects with Maya in some way or another.

Mack (10:10)
Yeah, and you mentioned, and I would say like now maybe two prominent female investors, maybe back then you didn't think of that. Was the first kind of like fundraising for you guys back in 2018, was it a very challenging experience? mean, you ended up fundraising quite a bit of money for a fund one. What was the experience like and how were maybe LP's receptive of your guys' thesis and your profiles?

Lara Lemann (10:38)
Yeah, fundraising has actually always been something that we like because it's like an opportunity to be on the other side of the table, to be learning a lot also from our investors, from the questions that they're asking us that make us come home and rethink, you know, our models, our theses and our approach and all these kinds of things. So it really opens our mind and it's a fun moment also, just usually Monica and I are traveling together and just kind of running around the world.

Mack (11:03)
Yeah.

Lara Lemann (11:08)
In that first fundraise, so first what I said is maybe we were, I don't think this is bold or courageous. Maybe we were just so crazy and so excited about the opportunity as I guess most entrepreneurs are that we were blind. Like we never, we never thought about being the first female led VC in Latin America. We were just like, let's build the best VC in the region.

Mack (11:27)
Yeah. Yeah.

Lara Lemann (11:32)
And then I remember the first PR came out and it was like, first female VC in the region, which it's actually not there. We have a couple, a couple of friends that are, yeah, false news. Um, but Monica and I were like, huh, that's true. Uh, um, and I think the fundraising ended up, ended up being successful. My theory is just that it was macro wise. It was a really great moment to be raising a VC fund because it was the lowest, historically the lowest interest rates in the region.

Mack (11:39)
Force. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Lara Lemann (11:59)
A lot of people were starting to talk about technology. Venture was definitely a thing in the US and something that Brazilians love to emulate is the US and Americans. And so I think our now LPs had started hearing about venture and started hearing about technology, knew it was an asset class that they needed to have exposure to, but didn't really understand it. And so when these two crazy girls walked into the room, they were just like,

Well, I don't get that either. So these are two things that I don't understand. So they must make sense somewhere. Yeah, exactly. That's my theory.

Mack (12:31)
Two negatives equal a positive. Yeah,

yeah, no, and by the way, side note, if it's ever like kind of choppy, it records locally in this amazing software, so then it works fine. But that's interesting you say that, so it seemed like there was macro tailwinds and then they were interested in the region and what venture was, so it seemed like it worked out just fine. And as you guys got into Fund two as I was doing some research on your guys's,

Lara Lemann (12:45)
Perfect.

Mack (12:59)
You guys really want to aim for this balance between Brazil and Spanish speaking Latam like this 50 50 split. How does that come about now? I don't know almost two and a half years later. Are you seeing more opportunity in the Spanish speaking market? Because from my understanding, it's a little bit less mature than Brazil. Please share your thoughts and Samuel you can jump into after.

Lara Lemann (13:20)
Yeah. So the way that we've always thought about it is that if Brazil is about five to 10 years behind the US in terms of the VC ecosystem, particularly Mexico, is also about five to 10 years behind Brazil. And then the way that venture capital dollars, and this is not only Maya, but in general is spread out across the region is that about 50 % of it flows into Brazil, 25 % Mexico.

about 12 % Colombia and then there's a long tail that's led by Chile.

Our Our distribution of Our capital distribution has actually followed historically quite well in those lines. Right now, our portfolio is 60 % Brazil, 40 % Spanish speaking Latin America, with the majority of that being in Mexico. And we still want more exposure to Mexico. We're always trying to be completely honest in this past year that I think the entire ecosystem has been a bit slower.

We particularly saw Mexico slow down. Argentina also in the past two years has been very slow. Mostly what we've seen coming out of there is crypto and blockchain. which is ironic to say given current events. yeah, and so the way that we think about it is, Brazil is the big, Brazil and Mexico are the big markets, but given that our thesis is pan regional, what are kind of the specialties of each region?

Mack (14:39)
Yeah.

Lara Lemann (14:55)
And so Brazil, course, is fintech. Mexico, we see a little bit of everything, but the proximity to the US, of course, anything that's cross border is really interesting. So we have Nuvocargo and Finkargo there. Chile has had really strong technical talent coming out of it and has up until the past few years been relatively stable economy. Argentina also really interesting from a blockchain crypto perspective. And then we have a couple other ones. Colombia, of course, because of Rappi's success, retail has been really interesting coming from there.

Mack (15:05)
Mm-hmm.

Lara Lemann (15:23)
we have one investment in Panama, which is a cross pan regional B2B SaaS software. So yeah, basically we're looking for great talent.

Mack (15:29)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

And Samuel for you, who's probably also like on the front end, looking for founders. Is there a difference between the profiles of some of these founders that are coming from maybe Brazil or, or Mexico or Colombia? or do you still see a common thread of like high intellect and high talent?

Samuel Veloso (15:53)
I think, know, in the end, they're pretty similar in terms of like background. What have we seen in Brazil? We've seen a couple of companies exiting and becoming this school for founders like Nubank Mercado Libre Argentina, has, you know, a large operation in Brazil. And that became a prime source of great founders in the region. And we believe that that will replicate to these other countries. For example, you know, the founders.

They're going to come out of Kavak They're going to come out of Clip in Mexico. So we do believe that this element of having had this experience of working for a company that was on the VC tracking route could be a great source for this for those other markets. And this compounds with time. We're going to have like the second wave, the third wave. And I think Brazil is a little ahead of the other countries.

Mack (16:42)
Mm-hmm.

Samuel Veloso (16:51)
So We're going to see that happening because in the end, they're pretty similar. A couple of them went to study abroad in US and Europe, worked abroad and came back to their regions to start something. So that's why it was super bullish. And in the end, we also see a couple of tailwinds that are going to play locally as Lara mentioned, like all the supply chain being

global supply chain being relocated to Mexico, all the industries that surround manufacturing in Mexico. So we do see that, know, a tailwind there that maybe is going to be similar with what happened in Brazil with financial services. So In Argentina, blockchain. So we know That there was a long answer to say, you know, that we do believe that the elements are going to be replicated there or they are still there. So We are

Mack (17:23)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Samuel Veloso (17:48)
Excited for the future. We're not gonna reach this balance very soon.

Mack (17:50)
Yeah.

Kind of Switching topics now, Lara, it's like this initiative you guys have with the female force. I know that's probably very close to you and Monica's kind of like drive and ethos. What's the mission behind this and kind of how does this become an addition or a benefit to the the to the fund but also how do you make sure that's not just like a distraction as well?

Lara Lemann (18:21)
Yeah, so Female Force was something that Monica and I started kind of as a side hustle just because well, basically based on our own experience when we were starting the fun, we started realizing that there was a lot of questions that we had that we wanted just like to benchmark on and to get a lot of different views. on And

every time we reached out to someone and we spoke to a mentor or anything, it was always a man. And that's fine because their experiences are incredible and everything. We started realizing that maybe there were some very specific things to being a woman. And then like going back to the fundraising aspect, like silly, but what do I wear to a fundraising meeting? Do I wear like a masculine outfit because that'll make me seem serious?

Or do I wear something as plain as possible? And it's just something that's like nuanced, but it does, we know that it has an impact having had experience. But we didn't have anyone to ask because there were no female GPs that we could easily access. And we thought that probably this is really similar experience for entrepreneurs. So why don't we create a network of women where basically we can reach out to each other and we can ask for help and we can mentor each other.

Mack (19:23)
Mm-hmm.

Lara Lemann (19:39)
And so that's how the idea was born. We did it kind of very artisanally at the beginning. It eventually started becoming this, this like a thing. Yeah. And we realized that we would need to dedicate more time, but as you can imagine, as good entrepreneurs, we have negative time to spend on anything. That's not our baby. That's not Maya. So what we ended up doing is we put together a group of really, really great volunteers that started out with the, the, the other.

Mack (19:46)
A thing.

Sure.

Lara Lemann (20:08)
women on Maya's team, but has now grown and it's now honestly an independent thing of its own. Monica and I have the privilege to participate sometimes we're mentors on the platform and we of course are, help them more strategically, but it's taken on a life of its own.

Mack (20:10)
Mm-hmm.

Nice. And has there been any like full stories or like full circle, like anybody you end up being a portfolio company or are we still waiting for the first?

Lara Lemann (20:36)
No, we're still waiting for that. But we did get a few of the teams from the last cohort to get like angel investments or one of them even got invested by a corporate. So yeah, there's some cool stories that are starting to come out of there.

Mack (20:37)
You

nice.

Nice. No, It's always interesting because like you start something and then you don't know like what does it become and then you realize like, my God, I created this monster. I don't have time for it. But it means it's working and there's some receptive to it. So kind of Going back to the thesis and for you guys just switching to the distinct ecosystems, right? Like I've always been told there's like this distinct difference between Brazil, Spanish speaking, Latam and I don't think there's probably many better people to speak to than you guys on this.

How do you guys see the startup culture differences, market opportunities? I know you mentioned already five to 10 years behind in Mexico. and so forth. But how does that play a role in your guys' thesis?

Lara Lemann (21:33)
Yeah, I can start. Samuel complement, please.

So first, think honestly, the biggest difference we see in terms of founders tackling big problems is market size when you're looking across the region, right? So I think Brazil and Mexico, for example, individually have their own large enough market. So you can build a unicorn in Mexico. You can build a unicorn solely in Brazil. All of the entrepreneurs that are building in the other regions,

They are from day one thinking about how they're either going to go into Mexico or how they're going to get into Brazil because that's how they target those larger markets. So that's kind of from the business aspect, the biggest difference, I think. Otherwise, I mean, we're talking about different countries, right? So these, all of them have different, different cultures. But at the end of the day, I think there's two main things that connect all companies in Latin America. The first is that the problems end up being relatively similar.

And when we're investing, we're looking mostly at founder. We look for founders that are obsessed with problems and not necessarily solutions. so whether the solution maybe needs to be tweaked a little bit, if you're solving a problem in Sao Paulo, if you're solving a problem in Mexico city, that's fine. But the underlying problem will probably be similar in that. It's like their whole region is lacking in infrastructure. It's lacking in financial systems. It's lacking in logistical systems.

And so the underlying problem we think is similar when you're solving a, whether you're solving a problem, you know, in Santiago or in Bogota or in Sao Paulo or in Buenos Aires. and The second thing is the founders that we see saw that you, you, it's like a great question that you made for Samuel you asked Samuel.

Honestly, we've spent a lot of time speaking to lot of founders from around the entire world and we via LP base have heard this as well and via our peers in the US. Latin founders are by far the hardest working. And in many cases it's just because we don't have alternatives. know, like in Brazil, for example, you can't be a founder whose company went under and then you use that as like a badge of success as you go raise your next round because

you will never be allowed to open another company in the country. And so There's just so many more barriers to being an entrepreneur, to starting a company that everyone who actually decides to go down that path takes it extremely seriously and kind of knows all the risks that are associated. So they're going to work 10 times as hard because they need to work 10 times as hard to get half as far as maybe a US, a founder in the US.

Mack (23:58)
Yeah.

Yeah. Mm

hmm. Yeah. And I was going to add there's a there's a quote that I've never forgot from one of the GPs here. Bridge Latam. He says, being a founder here is like playing on legendary mode Mack in a video game from day one. And I was like, that's a great. So do you have anything to add to that? Or we could kind of go on to some portfolio support. But if you have something to add, please share.

Samuel Veloso (24:46)
I have very little to add, I think there's one thing that because we have invested in over six countries now, we do help the founders to understand the opportunity is there, but you got to be very thoughtful on how to expand internationally, even though the problems they're...

they are similar, are nuances, they are important. And we do help them a lot with local expertise, like connected to the thing that we discussed before.

Mack (25:26)
Mm-hmm. No, and I think for you guys, know, Everybody always focuses on, you know, getting in early winners and so forth, but then there's like this whole port of like portfolio support. And I always don't think it's covered enough, especially from some of my research here. What do you guys do and how do you guys view portfolio support when it comes to the interactions or potential pilot opportunities with larger corporations, when it comes to regulatory challenges?

language barriers, cultural barriers, as you mentioned. Any thoughts on that?

Lara Lemann (26:04)
Yeah, so similar to the fact that we were we were looking across the region from day one, the fact that we were hands on with our portfolio or that we wanted to be hands on with our portfolio was also has since since the beginning been this intrinsic part of our thesis. Basically, the idea was that

If you want to start a company in Latin America, the gap that Monica and I noticed in 2016 through 18, it wasn't only capital, it was actually support for entrepreneurs. So like Something interesting is that we were the first ones to write content in Portuguese on how to structure a cap table, how to structure a term sheet, just because that didn't exist. So I think initially there was a lot of this work of like ecosystem creation.

We also had a little bit more time because we had less portfolio companies that were less demanding. Now, of course, with much more portfolio companies, we've had to structure our approach so that it doesn't become futile or superficial, basically. And so what we've committed to founders, to helping founders with is that we are going to be extremely present and extremely proactive in the pre-Series A because we think that as pre-seed and seed investors, that's our job to successfully get them to Series A.

Mack (27:09)
Yeah.

Lara Lemann (27:23)
What does a founder need to do to successfully raise a Series A? The founding team needs to hire a strong executive team. They need to successfully execute a go-to-market and then they need to fundraise. So these are the three fronts that we really focus on supporting them. And the go-to-market is exactly where we think that we can be specialists in. Hiring is much more just like hearing who they need and kind of leveraging our network to connect them with people. Fundraising same, we're constantly talking to our peers.

co-investing with them so we know who who's interested in what, but in go-to-market, it's very much helping them structure the go-to-market strategy. So, you know, like How many cl- how much, How much in ARR do they need to reach before they raise a series A, break that down into how many clients do they need, what types of clients, and then actually proactively go after these clients and make these introductions to them. and then having connections with like corporates or banks or

whoever could potentially be clients has been really helpful and has been really important, particularly for the B2B part of our portfolio, which is 70 % of our portfolio are B2B companies.

Mack (28:34)
Okay. Samuel anything to add? or we keep on moving?

Samuel Veloso (28:38)
Yeah, I know. I'll just add a little bit about, you know, the backstage of it. Lara, please don't kill me. We have this very light sports based culture. So whenever a founder bring us a challenge, we go there. Almost like competitive individually trying to solve the problem for the founder. So, you know, in the end, the founder has this team that goes there.

with a lot of energy to solve and help. Because everyone like, know, everyone bring this ethos of trying to help and being like super competitive and trying to score points with the founders. So, you know, In the end, if the founders ask us for help, it's almost 100 % sure he or he he he or she will get helped.

Mack (29:10)
Mm-hmm.

Not just from one, like from many.

Samuel Veloso (29:32)
For many, for many. And

not only like the people like covering or being like closer to the founders on the day to day.

Mack (29:36)
Yeah. Yeah,

great.

Lara Lemann (29:40)
What I said

was the theoretical, what Samuel put very well is the practical. Basically at the end of the day, we want to be partners with the founders. I've helped a founder get a social security number in Brazil, find an apartment in Brazil, find a therapist, that's always really important.

Mack (29:42)
You

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. And

It's like important to like these soft landings. Ivan talks about it from NuMundo. Like People are coming to new countries or certain companies are vulnerable. They need help and they don't always want to call their parents. But kind of Looking now into like before, know, kind of wrap up with a few more just portfolio construction. You guys really focus on this pre-seed seed stage really, I think leading the rounds. Do you guys have a follow on portion in your thesis and how does that come into play?

Lara Lemann (30:25)
Yeah, so we reserve 50 % of our portfolio of our sorry of our committed capital to follow ons. The idea is that we construct portfolios about of about 25 to 30 companies per fund. And then we double down into top performers. So we have capital to invest in up to the series B of the companies in our portfolio.

Mack (30:46)
And this is always a tough question. How do you decide a top performer at this like, so if you're at the fund, if you're in your fund life cycle, you're investing a pre-seed later in the fund, but you can't wait too long because there's some fund life. How are you guys assessing that? that There's like this classic qualitative and quantitative approach?

Lara Lemann (31:07)
Yeah, there's no real science behind it.

Sometimes it's some like the thing is of Latin America when we're investing in the pre-seeder seat, becomes relatively obvious, especially in the last few years, it becomes obvious relatively quickly, which ones are going to be the success cases and which ones aren't. And because we're so hands on with a portfolio and because whether we're going to do the follow on or not, we're still helping them raise around, we're still helping them hire talent.

Mack (31:29)
Mm-hmm.

Lara Lemann (31:42)
The follow on capital, it's usually more just kind of a bonus. And we also don't lead subsequent rounds. So for us, always depends first on, in addition to, you know, the performance of the founder, the performance of the company, it depends also on who's going to lead the follow on round, who are going to be, what is the syndicate look like? Is there space for us? That's always an issue also.

Mack (31:46)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Yeah.

And, you know, kind of going into Now you guys have raised fund one, you're in fund two, kind of as you guys look forward to potentially fund three, what's the strategy? Obviously, Is there anything that potentially you're looking to do differently? and so forth?

Lara Lemann (32:25)
Yeah, so usually when we're getting or as we get ready to raise another fund, what we have historically traditionally done is we basically map out the ecosystem, map out what we believe is going to happen in the next three to five years, which is when we'll be deploying that fund, and then model the fund based on how much capital do we need to execute our thesis of leading the first round of 25 to 30 companies.

As you can imagine, ecosystem, or As you know, the ecosystem has changed a lot since 2021 when we last did this. So we've been rethinking a lot of things. And I think also not only the ecosystem has changed, but also Maya has changed to me. When we raised our first fund, founders were betting on us as much as we were betting on them. So we often couldn't get as much ownership as we do now. So We've more than doubled our average ownership stakes between from fund one to fund two.

Mack (32:55)
Yeah

Yeah.

today.

Wow.

Lara Lemann (33:20)
And Now as we start thinking about Fund 3, we of course also have a much stronger brand in the ecosystem. We have a much stronger base of portfolio founders that can vouch for us. So things like ownership, like reserves are all kind of coming into conversation as we start thinking about Fund 3.

Mack (33:40)
And the team's grown substantially as well, right? Like a stronger team. So fund one, two, like what's the team growth look like? I'm sure at the beginning it was like you, Monica, and like maybe a couple people.

Lara Lemann (33:50)
No, for the first year it was Monica and I only and we would joke, we would joke that we did everything from...

Mack (33:52)
Wow.

Lara Lemann (33:58)
Deploying millions of dollars to washing the cups in our office, which was not an office, it was a room. And yeah, we really had the privilege to work with some really exceptional people. Now the team is seven people. We're actually looking to grow it this year. slightly.

But basically the way that we set up the team is we have one person that leads operations, which is a really beautiful way to say everything else. Yeah. Yeah. And then we have the investment team and the investment team, we organize ourselves into squads. So every time a deal comes into the pipeline, we'll allocate two to three people from the investment team to that deal. If that deal progresses and eventually becomes a portfolio company, that little squad then also becomes the team that will support that portfolio company.

Mack (34:30)
everything, figure it out.

Lara Lemann (34:52)
So every founder will or every member of the team is usually responsible for anywhere between 15 to 25 companies.

Mack (35:03)
Got it. And for you guys, As you've scaled from fund one to two, what has been some of the biggest learnings that you've had? I'm sure there's many, but like for you personally, and it could be from the investment side, but more maybe just building a team and like hiring the right people. think I'm starting to realize like working with people, like you have to really like them and it's important and they also have to be really smart. What are some things that you've come to realize?

Lara Lemann (35:31)
Yeah, I think that it's easy to say that like culture matters. That's cliche at this point, but I think it's way harder to implement. In VC, the most difficult thing is that it's like a really long cycle. It's a really long feedback loop.

And really somebody's only going to see returns if they're there for 10 years. so Monica and I have slowly started to realize that, or I mean, realize that relatively quickly that everyone we brought on needed to be on partner track because it didn't make sense to train someone who would then two years later decide that they wanted to start a company or, you know, preferred corporate or whatever. because for us, it would literally just have been.

like a waste of training of time and capital. So over time, we've just started hiring people that we not only want to work with now, but we think could eventually be our partners in the fund and have trained them very much in that line. And what that means is that

almost everyone at Maya participates in almost everything. So since we're a really small team, I think this is a benefit of being a really small team and having a hectic schedule and everyone doing a million things at the same time is that we often don't have time to sit down and download things. So it's much easier to just have everyone in the same room. So for example, in investment committee, the intern, we don't have an intern right now, but when we had interns, they would participate in the investment committee just because we needed people to like,

Mack (37:08)
Yeah, yeah.

Amazing.

Lara Lemann (37:19)
be able to react and as quickly as was required to close deals, right? Especially, mean, when we're talking about 2021 that we were like closing one to two deals a month.

Mack (37:25)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and you know, it's interesting you make that point that not everybody's that transparent. Like if we bring someone in, we want to see a future for them and not just like a short stint. It's a very intriguing point you make. Kind of Last two things and Samuel if you want to start with it, like what is something that you're most interested in like untapped, you know, and I think it's that could be cliche, like I say that, but something that's like maybe a flying under the radar that's in your eyes, like a super interesting vertical to look at.

within Latam or Brazil or a specific country.

Samuel Veloso (38:03)
I think that Yeah no, it's okay. It's okay. I'm ready I'm ready. I'm ready like I'm not up. I'm not up The first is claim is I'm not a crypto head This is for sure, but you know, I think now we have landed Some use cases they're real for blockchain and we are seeing them like

Mack (38:05)
put you on the spot. But you're ready. Yeah, of course.

Lara Lemann (38:07)
I'm so glad Samuel's getting the hard questions.

Samuel Veloso (38:32)
taking off. think the most logical ones are the first thing that you think is about financial services. So we do see a couple of opportunities emerging, like being international payment rails being the way that how financial markets are going to operate, like buying a stock is going to become buying a token. having those...

Mack (38:55)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Samuel Veloso (39:01)
use cases is something that we are really excited about. And we started to think of how we can position ourselves. A couple of them, they're there by the corner, but there are a couple of them, they're more futuristic, But we do see the real use case and the real value prop for it. This is the first one. And the second one is like, we're just in the beginning of the financial revolution here in Brazil. So the way how PIX

is going to evolve the compounds and being accelerator for a couple of new products really gets us pumped up to look for more solutions in the market. So we're do-believering just in the beginning of it. So those are the two things I know that come to mind.

Mack (39:49)
Lara, anything?

Lara Lemann (39:53)
When we're talking about Brazil, fintech is always interesting, particularly from the infrastructure perspective, is what Samuel was saying. We're super interested right now. We have a couple of great cases in our portfolio of vertical SaaS, embedded fintech, basically software that becomes fintechs, fintechs that becomes softwares. love those models models. You're targeting the, First of all, really hard to execute, but if you can execute it well.

It's like a fintech sized TAM with software like margins. So really a great case to be investing in. But I mean, I'm just excited to be investing in Latin America right now. think that Honestly, there hasn't ever been a better time to be investing here. A million problems to solve, great talent coming to the region. A capital cycle that's complete from the early stage to the growth.

Mack (40:22)
Yeah.

Lara Lemann (40:49)
Exit is kind of still the question mark that we have. But to me, it's somewhat of a no brainer, you know, like take 600 million people, majoritarily, like massively connected, the most connected in the world, majoritarily banked now, big companies will naturally come out of there.

Mack (41:05)
Yeah, and it's like one of those things too where it's like it only takes one and then it becomes obvious. But then sometimes once it's obvious, you've already missed the boat. So you have to kind of be like right before the inflection point. So I think you guys are right in line with that. Last question, I'm always very cautious you guys' time. This is sometimes difficult and it's really for you, Lara, is what's been the biggest regret you've had since launching Maya?

Lara Lemann (41:35)
Mmm.

Mack (41:40)
There's always a pause, don't worry. No one thinks of them. Okay. No, from, no, that's allowed. Yeah, that's totally allowed. Whatever you want. Is there anything like from the internal operation side or scaling a team or thesis wise?

Lara Lemann (41:43)
Not selling at the peak.

Is that allowed? Can I say that?

I think that this question is hard because you can always frame a regret regret as a learning and yeah. Yeah. And the way that we see it, mean, like not selling at the peak, we should have sold a lot of stakes in 2021. But of course, hindsight is 2020. We probably could have, you know, like raised more efficiently if we had known

Mack (42:07)
To a learning, yeah learning, that's why I don't ask learning.

Yeah.

Of course.

Mm-hmm.

Lara Lemann (42:29)
more about

Mack (42:29)
Yeah.

Lara Lemann (42:30)
fundraising before we went out to fundraise. We could have scaled our team in a way that would have been much less painful for them in particular, if we knew a little bit more about scaling teams in VC ecosystems. I think because we were just creating or co-creating with our peers this ecosystem, there were definitely a lot of things that could have been faster.

Mack (42:34)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Lara Lemann (42:58)
But I don't see any of them as regrets. Except for the selling one. I would have liked to...

Mack (43:00)
No. Yeah. I think

Theres many, many people that would say the same, but you don't know what you don't know at the time. What are you most excited for for the next two years with Maya?

Lara Lemann (43:15)
I I kind of said it. think this is the best time to be investing in Latin America. And I think Everything in venture is driven by the power law, including like VCs and how they're established. And I think that at Maya, we have everything in the palm of our hand to position Maya as one of the top tier leading early stage firms in Latin America. If we just keep working as hard as we do, keep building the team like we do.

Keep supporting our founders like we do. I'm making it sound a lot simpler than it actually is.

Mack (43:51)
But sometimes it's true,

simplicity works.

Lara Lemann (43:56)
Yeah, yeah, simplicity, blood, and tears.

Mack (43:58)
No, that's it. If you guys could wait like two minutes for the recording, but I'll stop it. But 44 minutes, five seconds, I'm always super cautious of you guys' time. I'll make sure I stop.