A Mexican VC
I’ve been meaning to start a blog for quite some time now, but I always made up excuses not to start. Its not easy for me to write down my thoughts and share my learnings as a venture capitalist in Latin America, but I’ve decided to give it a shot. So you know who is writing and from what context, this first post is going to be a bit about me and a bit about the VC scene in Latin America, specifically in Mexico.
I am 36 years old, father of 3 boys, husband to a multi-tasking full time mother/entrepreneur, son of a businessman, and have had a passion for entrepreneurship since I can remember. I started my first business with my best friend when we were 18 and have not stopped for the past 18 years; I have started over 10 companies and successfully sold 3 of them. Although I’ve had many failures, (some of which I’ll blog about in future posts) I started all my companies because I detected a need in the market.
My most coveted “start-up”, and where I’ve worked for the past 7 years has been DILA Capital www.dilacapital.com , a venture capital firm I co-founded with Eduardo Clavé in 2012, after experiencing firsthand a strong need for early stage capital in Mexico. We were one of the first early stage funds in Mexico . . . in 2012!!! This tells you a lot about Mexico’s entrepreneurial ecosystem 7 years ago.
Without early stage capital, entrepreneurs struggle to grow their businesses and scale to become global enterprises. Most of the Latin-American businesses that are global today took decades to construct and moved slowly. That was fine before we lived in such a connected world. Today, we compete with business globally and we need to move fast and scale at faster speeds. Moreover, the businesses that could raise early stage money were more often those with the best contacts, and not necessarily those with the best ideas. Driven by this view, we raised our first fund in 2012 and started investing in early stage entrepreneurs in Latin America right away.
Fast forward 7 years and we’ve analyzed more than four thousand pitch decks and business plans, invested in 37 companies over three funds, co-invested with 19 funds from Latin America, Silicon Valley, family offices and corporate venture capital funds. We’ve sold 3 of our portfolio companies and we’ve written off 4 investments.
I’ll post my next blog shortly. If there is any particular topic you would like to suggest I write about please email me alejandro@dilacapital.com
