Astella Around The World: Recent Episodes
Astella Investimentos
An interview show by Laura Constantini and Carolina Pascowitch (Lully) from Brazilian Venture Capital Firm Astella, where they go “backpacking” around the world to meet with extraordinary VCs, LPs and tech thought leaders, exploring their backgrounds, views and perspectives on tech investing; while capturing their essence, inspirations and aspirations in life!
Hear Cindy Padnos’ extraordinary trajectory, her advocate for all things entrepreneurial and how she founded Illuminate Ventures and the successful exits.
Illuminate Ventures is a seed and early stage venture capital firm that invests exclusively in enterprise/B2B software companies. With three funds under management, Illuminate continues to invest in and support talented entrepreneurs that are reinventing how work gets done.
Join us for the last episode of Astella Around the World season one.
Daughter of Mexicans, raised in the US, Ambar Amleh is a Managing Partner at Palestine’s investment fund, Ibtikar Fund. For the past nine years, Ambar has been directly involved in supporting Palestinian entrepreneurs, as the program manager for Palestine for a New Beginning (PNB), a Palestinian non-profit company focused on entrepreneurial development.
''Being a VC in Palestine, or in a place like Palestine, where a conflict thrives, you have to be an optimistic, you have to believe so deeply in every single company, in every single founder that you are investing. And I think that definitely I am an optimistic. I definitely see that peace will come from these young men and women that are doing great things despite the conflict."
Join us for another episode of Astella Around the World to hear what Ambar has to share about promoting change through investments.
Born in Cartagena, Esteban Reyes moved to the US, and was inspired to lead his family's entrepreneurial path. In short, he spent 21 years building startups and the last 10 years investing in them. In his words: "I realized I wanted to combine financial with productive capital by becoming an investor" when joining his first VC over a decade ago. As a solo GP at Zenda, he shares how he equips himself with other key players. Join us to hear more about how he's seen the ecosystem in Miami develop throughout the years, and his view on humanity for the years to come.
"I wasn't looking to start a company, I was looking to solve a problem" is what Jenny shares with us as an "empath founder" - for her previous startups and as a fund manager.
As a prior Managing Director at Techstars, she has invested in hundreds of startups, including 3 unicorns.
Now as General Partner at The Fund, which is described as: by founders, for founders, first-check venture fund, she focuses on the power of the founder community to invest around the world; 170+ companies in the last 4 years and counting. We can't wait to watch these seeds grow.
Join us for another episode of Astella around the World to learn more about what moves Jenny and her outlook on the future of humanity.
Taylor Clauson shares with us how he taught himself to write code and become part of the hacker culture, which then led him to launch Abstraction Capital, a fund focused on tools fo developers. Join us for this episode to learn more about his inspiring story, and specifics, such as: how he manages his time as a solo VC, his impressions on his local tech community in Kansas City and some great fundraising tips and insights: "don't spend time convincing the non believers, focus on the true believers!"
Stay tuned till the end of the episode for some funny "behind the scenes"
In this episode, John Duong tells us how his early childhood guided his decision to impact investment - He was born in Cambodia, and fled to the USA with his family as survivors of the Khmer Rouge concentration camp. Education and opportunity being of high value to his family, John earned his BA degree in economics and East Asian studies from Yale University.
He diversified his career in many areas of banking, until reconnecting with his passion for impact at WK Kellogg Foundation. He was formerly the Managing Director and Founder of Lumina Impact Ventures, the $50M impact investing arm of Lumina Foundation, until spinning of to building an impact investing platform at Kind Capital.
Join us to learn more about how John looks at impact investing Vs. traditional philantropy and a sneak preview on the book he is self publishing very soon: "A Guide on Impact Investing" - a must for anyone who is interested in building an impact investing business or fund.
For this episode, we invited one of our fellow VCs in Brazil, Marcello Gonçalves, from Domo Invest as a co-host, to interview his friend, and Kauffman fellow, along with Laura, McKeever (Mac) Conwell, II.
Mac has one of the most inspiring and out of the box trajectories in VC; join us to learn why not following the rules, and showing up as your authentic self can be one of the best tools you can use.
From being homeless, with no formal college education, he's innovating "how to VC" in so many ways - tune in to learn how he founded Rarebreed Ventures, whats his "Why", how Twitter played an important role in his journey and what's next...
As a connector and a strategist, with an interesting background in actuarial science and business, Robbie Shattuck wrote briefings for president Obama before entering the world of tech. After working with some of the brightest minds and wealthiest individuals in tech at Iconiq Capital, Robbie decided it was time to become an entrepreneur himself, launching Athos, where he focuses on working and investing for the next generation of wealth creators. We think Robbie has the right mix of brains and heart to care for the wealth of the new trailblazers. Tune in to learn about Robbie's mission with Athos, his perspective on international markets and the future.
Beau Seil is a partner and Co-Founder at Patamar, SE Asia's leading impact VC firm. American born, with 10+ years investing in Asia, he has seen the evolution of the early-stage VC ecosystem in the region, as well as the rise of impact investing in backing visionary companies. Patamar backs impact-driven founders launching sector defining companies to serve the “mass market” of low and middle-income customers through financial services or tech-enabled distribution and aggregation platforms. Beau loves dreaming about the future and has a deep passion for helping founders develop leadership skills and maintain their mental health during the intense journey that accompanies the scaling of a start-up. Join us to learn what he shares on impact investing, the cultural differences between asian and american entrepreneurs, and his perspectives on the future.
Before his days focused on deep tech, Karthee was the Managing Director and VP of Qualcomm Ventures for over 10 years, where he accumulated experience investing in early stage in diverse sectors around the globe. He shares with us some of his memorable experiences from those days, such as his learnings as a board member at Waze.
Now, at MFV Partners, Karthee backs visionary deep tech entrepreneurs developing products and solutions that disrupt traditional verticals and ecosystems across automotive, manufactoring, retail, agriculture and knowlege services.
Join Laura and Carolina as they explore concepts such as 'tech market fit VS product market fit', capital and time to maturity in deep tech startups, the future of deep tech and autonomous biped humanoids !
From musician to VC seems to be quite a path these days; this was Gurdane's path while he completed his degree in Computer Science, Public Policy, and Economics from Duke University.
Gurdane shares how he learned the venture business "by doing" with at FundRx, a leading life sciences/healthcare investment and research marketplace he co-founded back in 2015. After 20 or so investments under the belt, they spun of the business to MBX Capital in July 2020.
Beyond any thesis, MBX's underlying purpose is beyong being a sustainable asset for LPs, but focuses on categories that are underlooked "diamonds in the rough". With 1K venture advisors as part of the community, they rely on many industry experts throughout the investment journey.
Tune in to learn about a couple of MBX's investments: Vaxxinity, which offers hope by developing disease altering vaccines and Contraline, inventing the future of male contracepting!
Meet Dima Kuzmin, founding partner at 4BIO Capital, where he invests, supports and grows early stage companies developing treatments in areas of highly unmet medical needs, with an ultimate goal of ensuring access to these potentially curative therapies for all patients. Prior to becoming a VC, Dima was in academia, focusing successively on structural biology, neurochemistry, systems neuroscience, brain-computer interfaces, and gene therapy. It was when doing his PHD that his VC friends would ask him for help with scientific reviews that he got introduced to the opportunities helping investors with their scientific portfolio, and later founding 4BIO. Tune in to learn why he says that “genetic disease are the ultimate chronic disease” and how Covid was able to capture resources that were going elsewhere and successfully approve a vaccine that would typically take 10 years, in 11 months!
"Proud Geek; Hacker turned VC" is what Lucas Nelson, Founding Partner at Lytical Ventures intitulates himself. In this weeks' episode, Lucas shared with us how he turned his experience and passion for hacking into his full time career, firstly as an operatior, then as a VC specialized in the corporate intelligence space: cybersecurity, data analytics, and AI.
He also shares with us how spending in cybersecurity is growing at a fast rate, as CEO's are getting more scared of breaches. Acording to Lucas, "Good and bad cyber security looks very simular until somebody pokes a whole in it".
Tune in to learn about how he sees cybersecurity ventures in the different ecosystems, and what he realized about the space in Brazil, many years ago, when he spent a sabbatical in Brazil, to learn capoeira.
Meet Christina, Founder of The One Health Company, and learn how she is revolutionizing how drugs and medical devices come to market by re-imagining how animal testing is done. From capital markets to venture, Chris spent a portion of her career specializing in emerging markets as an investor and lecturer. Diversifying her time between non profit boards, she has always been involved with exciting big issues that fuel her to wake up with energy every day! She shares with us about her experience living in Palo Alto, and tips on how to raise capital with prominent global funds, such as A16Z. Tune in to learn more about this mission driven Irish/Brazilian global citizen who is making a big impact with BioTech.
Meet Chang Xu, Partner at Basis Set Ventures, where she focuses on developer-led products. What most excites her are opportunities where founders build a thesis around "raising the ceiling, and lowering the floor", to ease complexity or democratize access. She previously was a Principal at Upfront Ventures, the oldest and largest SoCal-based early stage venture capital firm. Prior to joining Upfront, she was a founder and an operator. She was the first Product Manager at the Minerva Project, and she co-founded Onion Math, an ed-tech startup in China that has raised $90M to-date. If you are building something around scalable infrastructure, intelligent collaboration, automating workflow or autonomous machines, she invites you to apply to hypergrowth.network to access hundreds of mentors across GTM and engineering functions. She also invites you to access foundersuperpower.com to learn about concepts such as founder market fit. Tune in to learn more interesting data driven insights that can help you along your journey.
Meet Brian Hutchings, partner at global law firm Gunderson Dettmer, specialized in venture capital and tech in Latam. They currently represent over 150 companies and the leading VCs in the region with the purpose of setting up startups for success the same way they would in Silicon Valley. With an interesting view in Latam, he has been focused on the region since 2007, but curiously started his career as a musician then as an entertainment lawyer. Tune in to hear his thoughts on the similarities between the industries, learn about his perspective on Brazil and advice he has for entrepreneurs to tackle cultural differences.
Born in Brazil from parents who migrated from India, Amit moved to US for college and has been in California ever since. Post his education at Stanford and Harvard, he spent time as a product manager at Google and as a VC at Norwest Ventyre partners, fund with over $10Bi in AUM that has been around since 1961.
He is mission driven and health is the common denominator, in his words “it’s the foundation of everything”. At Tau Ventures, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, he invests in seed stage AI-first health and enterprise startups.
On top of it all, he is a 70.3 Ironman finisher, lives carbon neutral and has built a hospital in rural India. Listen in to hear more on the above and his positive outlook and lessons on life and the future.
Everyone has a different path to venture, but for Brock it basically started with an amazing experience in capital markets working for Paul Tutuor then setting up his group at Citi. Not long after, his friend Michael Makrs from Riverwood Capital invited him to invest in a private company, which we can refer to as his "lucky break" -- He invested in Sol Republic and 9 months later Monster Cable bought it for 3x. "These venture people act as its hard" lol, that's what he told us, but continued his sentence with: "since then, nothing ever happened like that, it's been 10 years of hard work...but it lit the spark and passion in me for venture" Today, Brock manages 3 pockets: Summit Action Fund, James River Capital,a Family Office, and angel investments; he believes they work well together. As a generalist, he shares the 5 skill sets he believes necessary in evaluating a company and a few companies in their portfolio, including Clover.
We loved our time getting to know more about Brocks professional experiences and life views, and I'm sure you will learn so much from him too. Enjoy!
Mark Roberge is the MD at Stage 2 Capital, Professor at Harvard Business School and former CRO at HubSpot, (NYSE: HUBS) where he scaled annualized revenue from $0 to $100 million and expanded his team from 1 to 450 employees. Mark shares with us how his engineering background helped him shape a scalable and predictable sales model at a time when SaaS was just a baby, and how that experience helped him design a GTM system that he shares in his book and classes at HBS. Tune in to be inspired by his buddhist-like approach to life and how responding to opportunities that excited him has led his path in a serendipitous way. In this episode you will also find out his promising view about the Brazilian Tech scene and what is currently most exciting (and scaring) him!
In this episode, Jonathan Nelson, Founder of Hack Fund and Hackers/Founders, the largest group of tech founders with 200,000 members worldwide, shares with us how growing up with missionary parents and spending the first part of his career as a trauma emergency room nurse helped him build his own "killer app" as a serial entrepreneur, software engineer and a VC. He also shares with us his view on the need for diversity and on the future of non Silicon Valley founders via IPO on the London Stock Exchange.
In our first episode of Astella around the World, our friends Chris and Jeff from Blitzcaling Ventures & Academy share with us a bit about how they brought the principles of Blitzscaling, the book Chris co-authored with Reid Hoffman, to support growth stage companies scale rapidly into winners-take-most markets.
An interview show by Laura Constantini and Carolina Pascowitch from Brazilian Venture Capital Firm Astella, where they zoom out from the local tech and VC ecosystem to explore other perspectives from extraordinary VCs, LPs and Thought Leaders from around the world; capturing their essence, inspiration, insights and best practices.