Podcast: From economics to finance, helping the country of the future reach its highest potential

In this episode of Fintech Thought Leaders, QED's Head of Early Stage Investments Bill Cilluffo speaks with Camila Vieira, Principal at QED.

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Show notes

Bios

Bill Cilluffo joined QED as a Special Advisor in the fall of 2014 and became a Partner in 2015. He is currently Head of Early Stage Investments after six years as Head of International, leading QED’s Investment teams in Latin America, Europe and Asia.

Prior to joining QED, Bill spent nearly 20 years at Capital One, spanning several roles and leading several businesses. He spent the first 6 years of his career leading Marketing, product development and credit policy for Capital One’s subprime credit card business; ultimately having overall P&L responsibility, and growing the business to become the most significant player in the market. He moved on to spend 2 years in various new business development roles, spanning the telecom, medical finance and small business finance industries. Bill spent 3 years as Deputy Chief Credit Officer for the bank, playing nearly every role there was to play in the central credit function, after helping build the department from scratch in 2002.

Bill then pivoted his career to general management, leading Capital One’s Canadian, and ultimately International businesses, over the course of 6 years. Profitability of the business grew significantly under Bill’s leadership, through new product and channel introductions, acquisitions, and significant cost take out. During Bill’s last 3 years at Capital One, he led its Co-Brand and Private Label credit card business, building the business nearly from scratch to one of the top few players in the US market, through a series of acquisitions, most notably including leading the acquisition and post-merger integration of HSBC’s US credit card business, which closed in May 2012.

Bill graduated with a BA in economics from the University of Michigan, and competed the SEP program at Stanford GSB.

Bill Cilluffo:

You are listening to the Fintech Thought Leaders podcast from QED Investors, your deep dive into the world of venture capital and financial services with today's digital disruptors. QED is a global venture capital firm focused on investing in fintech companies all the way from pre-seed to IPO. Fintech Thought Leaders brings together the most talented entrepreneurs tackling today's biggest problems. If you're looking to learn more about what motivates our founders and team members to succeed you're in the right place.

Hello, and welcome to the Fintech Thought Leaders podcast. I'm Bill Cilluffo, head of early stage investments at QED Investors. Today on the podcast I'm very excited to be joined by colleague and QED principal focused on investing in LatAm, Camila Vieira. Cami, welcome to the podcast.

Camila Vieira:

Thank you for having me.

Bill Cilluffo:

Cami, we're very excited to have you on the podcast today for lots of reasons, but one of which is I always love getting to revisit my early days at QED, when I spent most of my time thinking about Latin America, so this will be a wonderful blast to the past. We're thrilled to have you on the ground in Sao Paulo, which is a huge advantage we did not have in the early days, so that's great. But I wonder if, for starting us off, if you could give us a little bit of an elevator speech on your background and how you came to QED?

Camila Vieira:

Sounds good. So for those that don't know me, I'm from Brazil. I'm from the south of Brazil. My family as a whole has lived everywhere from Brasilia, which is the capital of Brazil, but LA, Florida, Vienna, Milan, Beijing, New York, West Virginia, Canada, Minnesota. We've been around, but I did go to high school and college in New York, studied economics and math. After that worked at the Ministry of Finance in Brazil for a bit before heading back to the US, where I joined Moody's.

That's where I got my credit in accounting 101 training, also a huge nerd job that I loved. After Moody's, I joined Goldman Sachs. That was in between when I was doing business school at night and weekends. I do not recommend that for most people.

But as part of Goldman, I joined the team that was credit risk, both covering sovereign risk but also technology companies. Kind of got both my economics and finance hats on, which I liked. Very different jobs.

But part of the credit underwriting team, I was responsible for the complicated credit structures, which we now call them preferreds, but at that point they were instruments that we were trying to figure it out whether or not to put on equity paper or debt paper, whether or not to have cash components or not. And that got me very close to the companies that were doing those structures at the beginning, which no surprise, were tech companies. And that pushed me to go from the credit side of Goldman to the equity side of Goldman when those clients were preparing to go public, when they were doing even more complicated structures than we initially thought were possible. As part of the equity team, I worked on helping those companies raise funds. Now we call them pre-IPO rounds. At that point they were not called that, but also assisting them to go public in the live post IPO once they were trading in the stock market.

During that process, I ended up taking one company public. That was called Ceridian. It's an HR software company that had the dream of going from a Canadian and US company to being multiple countries. And to me that was very exciting. So I ended up leaving Goldman, joining Ceridian, helping them both on the international strategy and corporate development. So what that means is that I was doing a lot of the should we buy, build, invest, partner, and mapping out what those companies were across the globe. And honestly, that's when I learned how to do, hey, this is what operating looks like, because banking is very different than operating and investing is very different than operating.

After Ceridian, I got a call from my husband who decided to move back to Brazil and I had to learn a little bit of what was happening in the Brazil ecosystem at that point. Ended up getting very close to QuintoAndar and Hotmart, which are both unicorns here in Brazil. Ended up choosing the Hotmart route. Joined Hotmart as director of finance, strategy operations and investor relations, but stay very close to the QuintoAndar team, which as some of our listeners will know, are part of the QED portfolio as well in LatAm. And QED, if I kind of take a step back, the story in LatAm has always been extremely impressive, what you guys built here. But in some ways, if you think about my background, a mix of operating, credit, investing, both experience in Brazil and the US, it felt a little bit like the role was written for me, and the more we started talking, it was hard to not see a fit.

When I left Hotmart, I was not ready to leave. I felt like I left with my job unfinished. My best was not done yet, but you really felt the right match for where I was in my life and what was ahead for me for QED and I'm excited to be here and be able to build on a platform that's already amazing.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah, well look, I feel bad for Hotmart, but absolutely thrilled for us that you made that decision. And if I'm not mistaken, it was Dave Sherry, former CFO of QuintoAndar, that helped connect us. We owe him a great debt of gratitude as well.

Camila Vieira:

So do I.

Bill Cilluffo:

It sounds like you lived in about 78 different cities and countries around the world. What was your favorite?

Camila Vieira:

I think between Beijing, New York and Sao Paulo would probably be the top three for work. Quality of life, I would say Minneapolis is there, and Sao Paulo happens to be a little bit of Minneapolis, a little bit of Beijing and a little bit of New York all in one city. So it's probably why I'm here now and why I'm happy to be home.

Bill Cilluffo:

Makes sense. What's funny is we've actually got two folks at QED living in Minneapolis, which is not common for the venture world, but one who's there and one who's there for the summer. So it's been a long time since I've been there. I'll have to go visit. So Cami, your major was economics, and originally you thought you'd want to be an economist. You eventually changed your mind, went and studied finance, and the rest is history. What attracted you originally to the idea of being an economist and what caused the shift?

Camila Vieira:

It's easy to have hindsight, right? But when I chose economics, there were two things that really drove my decision. One is Brazil is always the country of the future is what we've been hearing, and it's what I've been hearing since I was a kid. But in reality, I was always surrounded by inequality, lack of access of education, resources, and I wanted to understand how poor economics decisions were driving the country of the future to never reach that potential. And I thought that studying economics would drive me to learn how to help.

The second part is I was always obsessed about learning how the behavior side of it happens. So how do people make decisions? What drives those decisions? If some way we could understand the collective way of how people make decisions, then maybe we could change it and improve it. I think both the inequality and the behavior side of things really got me excited.

Bill Cilluffo:

Had behavioral economics existed when I went to school, I think I would've loved studying that. I was just regular old economics myself because it didn't exist, but I think the behavioral side's pretty fun.

Camila Vieira:

But the reality, though, governments don't work that way. The politics is what drives how decisions get made, and that's a little bit of what drove my shift from economics more to finance, feeling like we talk about equity decisions, debt decisions, corporate decisions, the teams. At the end of the day, we are impacting employees. That's a more direct way of impacting change in the world versus let me stay here for 12 hours in a dark room, do a bunch of data analysis that the government will never take into consideration to make decisions. It didn't feel like, one, my pace of personality, but also how I wanted to make an impact on the world.

Bill Cilluffo:

I mean, you talk about one of the motivators being kind, this disconnect between the potential of Brazil and what the actuality is. So you spent some time in finance in Brazil. How would you say that from then to what you're doing now, Brazil has changed or not changed over that period?

Camila Vieira:

We definitely see more companies around today. We see more employees starting new companies. So at that point, you were extremely lucky to get into [inaudible 00:08:12] Brazil. Everybody went to college, did the entry exam for Bank of Brazil. That was the dream job. That is exactly why my dad did. And that was very successful career path, where today you see a lot of the folks that went through those many years of traditional banking, traditional law jobs, starting startups. And then we've had the first phase of those startups, and now employees that were part of the first phase are starting the second phase of startups.

So I definitely see an expansion of talent starting new companies. The government has also incentivized a lot of those changes. So from a regulatory standpoint, from a capital standpoint, the openness of the government helped more funds join the ecosystem, and that starts to drive what we need to see. We have talent. We have capital. We have an open market. That leads into more innovation. So I definitely see, both from a finance standpoint, from a corporate standpoint and startup, we're years ahead. I wouldn't say that we're there in our full potential quite yet. Hopefully we will be able to do much more, as we still see a lot of inequality and things to improve, but it's way better than it was back then.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah, I mean your comment about the career path of Itaú and Bank to Brazil rings so true. I mean, in the early days when we started investing in Brazil, companies had such a hard time convincing people from Itaú to leave their jobs and come work for startups. And it was stunning to see the change, back to the boom years of '19, '20, '21 of how there was such a flood of people coming into startups and how different that was from the US, right? In the US it wasn't that hard to convince people to go from banks to startups. It's a really interesting cultural shift, as you lay out there.

So obviously, you spent time in the US educationally, high school, college, started your career in Brazil, and then decided to come back. I mean it sounds like that wasn't necessarily the smoothest transition, I mean coming there without your family and starting the career here in the States. I wonder if you can talk about that transition and some of the challenges and opportunities that you saw.

Camila Vieira:

Yeah, no, I definitely think that what people say about the US being the country of opportunities, that rang true for me. When I "gave up" on my economist career, it was clear to me I had to go to business school. And it was clear to me that, although I really liked math, the finance math looked very different. So when I moved to the US, I started as a part-time at Moody's, had to convince them to turn me to full-time, which they did later. At the same time, I was doing business school and trying to figure out what to do next.

I remember ordering my mattress online, moving to East Village into a very tiny apartment, and as soon as business school ended, I immediately went into Goldman. There was no transition, which again, not a great work-life balance decision. And at Goldman, I kept thinking about my family in the countryside of Brazil, my dad that had left that city to give us better opportunity, irrespective of the many hours at Goldman or the amount of red eyes that we had to take.

I felt the luckiest person alive to be there. But I was also a very Brazilian and [inaudible 00:11:26] woman at Goldman Sachs. And for a long time that was something that I had to tame. I had to figure out how to fit in, to not have an accent or to have the least amount of accent I should say, and focus on blending in, which is surprisingly very different than I think what I do today. A little bit of that is me feeling comfortable with where I am in my career and what I know and who I am, but at that time was you're an alone in a country. You have the best opportunity that anyone in your family has ever had. It does not matter if it's 2:00 AM or 4:00 AM. Shut up, get work done, blend in and do your absolutely best and then wake up the next day and do it better.

And I think for a long time that was all I knew. There are benefits to that, but there's also downsides to it, right? The beauty of taking breaks, the beauty of being able to take a step back, I think when I did that in my career was when I made bigger jumps and became a better version of myself. But yeah, moving to a new country, starting at Goldman while doing business school, I don't recommend it.

Bill Cilluffo:

That had to be pretty stressful.

Camila Vieira:

Yeah, it sounds more romantic than it sounds. It was not fun.

Bill Cilluffo:

So you spent time doing a number of things related to finance, whether more of an economist role or banking or credit, et cetera. You then went into a couple operating roles, and now if you look at QED, we are definitely a blend. We're all investors now, but a bunch of us have pretty sizable operating experience. A big part of the value proposition is how that helps us. How would you say that your time as an operator has helped you now that you've moved back into the world of investing?

Camila Vieira:

When you're in banking consulting, post-business school, it's very easy to go around the narrative of what it should be, and what happens in reality is very different than what it should be. And understanding that, I think being, one, empathetic to the founders and entrepreneurs that are in the journey, that goes a long way. But also different things to task.

A little bit of the operating role is building pattern recognition over time. What are things that work? What are things that don't work and why they don't work? What are tasks that you have done? Who has done other tasks and why has worked for them versus not for us? So the operating role just gives you an open eye of what is possible versus what sounds good. And in some ways that's good and in other ways it makes us more skeptical, right? In some ways we almost have to take out the operating hand and say, "Hey, if everybody thought it was obvious, then maybe it wouldn't be called innovation." So I think it's a mix of being able to do both, but definitely think operating helps us become more realistic of what's possible and also be better partners to those that are in the journey.

Bill Cilluffo:

One of the things as a global fintech firm that we try to do is learn from one market, try to apply those learnings where we can to another market. But I think we've all learned, when it comes to emerging markets generally, Latin American specifically, cutting and pasting is pretty unlikely to really pay off. You're in a great position having worked in both countries, having done multiple roles in both countries. I'd love your perspective on how that can get done successfully. How can you learn from models in the US and apply those learnings in Latin America while recognizing why is it so difficult that you really can't cut and paste models from one country to the next?

Camila Vieira:

We've heard sometimes Brazil is five years behind the US. Columbia is maybe a tiny bit closer to Brazil and similar to Mexico. And so that gives us the benefit of seeing models that have worked. And the first phase of innovation in LatAm as a whole has been the, "I am going to be the Uber of Columbia. I'm going to be the WeWork of Mexico," whatever it is. So we have seen a lot of the copycats of the world happen in working LatAm.

As we enter the second phase, it's where we're seeing some of those models not work, and that's when I think having the local expertise adds a lot of value because, for example, we see a lot of the B2B CFO tools in the US able to get significant market share. They may end up still being the mid-market, but significant enough in size, where in Brazil, if you look at the options of CFO tools that companies have, the majority of companies in Brazil are small businesses, similar to Mexico, similar to Columbia, and the options that they have are horrible but are extremely cheap.

Where in the US you may have a cheap product growth strategy for that theme and it works very well, you're able to get market share, where in Columbia, Mexico and Brazil, not so much. We've seen companies that build amazing products in the space, and having been able to get significant revenue. And a lot of that it's because of how fragmented it is, how cheap alternative are, but also just the relationship and how to sell. And if you don't know those nuances of fragmentation, geographical split, prices, just willingness to switch from existing solutions, the US model won't work.

So I do think there are a lot of things that we have benefited and we'll continue to learn from the US models, but as we look through Mexico, Brazil, Columbia, I do believe that the biggest moats and the hardest companies to build will be the ones that can adjust to those local nuances.

Bill Cilluffo:

And it is interesting to look even at QED's portfolio, how some really successful companies were clearly inspired by the US but are nowhere near direct cut and paste. I mean Nubank's a good example. I think the first PowerPoint that David put together was the Building the Capital One of Brazil. But if you look at Nubank now, it barely resembles Capital One, right? There's so many differences. You see other models, QuintoAndar, just to revisit one we talked about. I don't see how that model would work at all in the US and it's been a wonderful success, so truly a kind of business model inspired by unique local conditions and solving those problems. So I mean I think that's been a nice learning institutionally over the years, but I'm not sure I've seen, at least within fintech, any true cut and paste models get a whole lot of traction.

Cami, you've described memories when you were younger of sitting around the dinner table and having your whole family talk about how much money did you bring in that day, making sure all of your bills are going to be covered, some situations that many people listening to this podcast may not really have much experience with. How does that background influence how you think about investing today, how you look at the markets today? How has that perspective been helpful for you?

Camila Vieira:

For background, my broader family owns many small businesses. And when I mean small, I really mean small. And what that means is they know every supplier. They've been with the same supplier for 30, 40 years. They negotiate payment dates for every single product they buy. They know every client. Buy now, pay later for them is pen and pencil. X person came in, bought this much, and they will pay me when they can, not through a fancy platform, which all sounds complicated when I say it like that, but it is very much the normal and typical story of Brazilian SMEs. The majority of them are working class. They're the first ones to be there to open the store, the last ones to leave, are working week by week trying to get the right cashflow to work. And they've been doing that for 30, 40 years and the generation before them did exactly the same thing.

So even as I see a lot of our portfolio companies, or companies that we're talking to, innovating in the B2B space, my aunts and uncles, who are not that old, are doing exactly what my grandparents did, even though we have had Stone in Brazil for years, even though we've had solutions that solve some of those problems for years.

So I mean in one part that's sad to see that we haven't had a lot of jumps, even though more technology is available, but from our position is extremely exciting that we still have a lot to do. Fintech has not touched the majority of Brazil, but that gets me to really think about willingness to adopt. I think I mentioned early on the B2B example. Why is it that we have some of this technology available but we're not able to penetrate smaller cities and multiple segments? And how do we do when price is not the only thing? We have trust. We have relationship. We have other barriers that fintech hasn't yet figured out how to do that in LatAm.

So all of those things, to me, are exciting and opportunities and it keeps me focused on the things that we have yet to solve. Once you leave the Sao Paulo bubble, those things become very obvious, right? If you're only in Sao Paulo, you may have the, "Hey, fintech is saturated. We've done what we can here." But the reality is the majority of Brazilians don't live in Sao Paulo. We have many, many other gigantic cities and smaller cities where pen and pencil continue to be the way to do it. So I think we have lots of work to do still.

Bill Cilluffo:

You mentioned trust. I think this probably isn't something that most Americans think that deeply of when it comes to financial services. Maybe the weekend where SVB had their issues was kind of a reminder that trust is still really important in the banking system. But when you go into Latin America and Brazil, probably even more so in Mexico, there's such an inherent distrust of financial services and banks. How do you see that playing into fintech's rise and some unique challenges and things that founders in Latin America need to overcome?

Camila Vieira:

This is a trillion-dollar question, right? We really haven't figured out yet a way to do it everywhere. The one way I think about is we see a lot of fraud in Latin America, and the players that were here before, our fintech portfolio companies, were the big banks. And the big banks told everybody, "Don't give your information to anybody. Don't send your money to anybody that you don't know." And then here we come, the fintechs and the open banking regulation and everything saying, "Hey, press a button and give me all of your information. I'm here to give you more money and more access to financial access."

So in some ways, we are undoing the right work that big banks did for years of teaching people how to protect for fraud and protect their data. So the way I think about it is, from our standpoint, we try to help our portfolio companies on the risk and fraud side be good agents.

If we have more fintechs doing good and doing the right thing, then that, with time, will build more trust in the system. But there are things there. We try to help our portfolio companies not fight the curve. So the curve, what I mean is access to information really is how digitalized the country is, access to mobile information, how much education that geography has. If you play that forward, as we see more and more people having access to internet, having access to phone, they're consuming more information online, they're trusting the people that they don't see in front of them. In Brazil, we see a lot of that already. We see the impact. In Mexico, there are a lot of places where that isn't true yet, where that penetration of information hasn't happened. So we see a lot of Mexico companies that have in-person sales strategies, versus Brazil you may have more digitalized sales approaches.

So we have companies in Mexico saying, "Hey, instead of buying this milk at the supermarket, open a bank account with me and I'll give you a card right now, and then you can swipe the card right now and then you see that it works instead of just paying with cash, or, "Hey, you should open a foreign bank account closer to the border and I'm with you there in person."

So I think the fintechs have had to come up with creative ways to build trust. It is our job to make sure we continue to invest in good agents, but at the end of the day, it's a progress and we can skip the curve. In some ways we need to respect it and hopefully help accelerate it as we can, but part of having the local knowledge is not investing at the wrong time of the curve, right? We've heard multiple times, "Oh this business five years from now would have thrived." So how do we now get into, then, we understand where we're in the curve is important.

Bill Cilluffo:

We've been fortunate to be one of the early investors as the fintech ecosystem was creating a number of great companies, whether Nubank or QuintoAndar or Creditas or Kavak that have come out. But you obviously work with many of our companies. I think we have 40 some odd investments in Latin America. I wonder if you could talk about a couple of the more recent breakouts, a couple of companies that we've seen that really seem to be hitting their stride right now.

Camila Vieira:

It's always hard to pick what we see happening this quarter. So we have a proximity bias. One I would mention is Cobre. So Cobre is based in Columbia. For those that don't know, Cobre enables other companies in Columbia to connect their accounts and banks and centralize all of their treasury needs into one platform. The beauty of what Cobre is doing is they really follow the customer and he started with one specific solution within treasury and, with time, listened to the clients who were asking for more ways to optimize collections, reconciliation and really do everything that treasury touches.

And we see now that the team was able to listen to that quickly, adapt the roadmap quickly. The numbers are reflecting. What they are selling to the market is very much resonating. We tend to see more of Cobre in the future, I think, both penetrating the market they're in, but expanding now the platform and what the platform can do. But to us, I think comparing to Cobre this year and last year, it was the team's ability to listen, adapt and execute that really got them to, I think, being in this breakout list for us this year. So good job Cobre team.

Bill Cilluffo:

As with many successful Colombian companies, they also have their eyes set on Mexico, if I'm not mistaken. Pretty common transition there. We see companies jumping from one to the next.

Camila Vieira:

For sure. I think the other one to mention, and it's one that I'm spending more time with lately, is Warren. Warren is starting in Brazil as a way to help Brazilians invest better according to their goals instead of really buying products that the banks were selling to them because those products were paying higher commission to those that were selling. In the past that was super obvious of a thesis, but in the past year, so many of the regulatory changes are helping Warren because now there's transparency that will kick in. So Brazilians will actually know more how absurd the commissions that they were paying before were, where before it was Warren telling them, "Hey, just so you know, this is absurd."

So I think that that helps a lot, right? You have more Brazilians in the past five, 10 years that have mobile access. That have more digital access. We have more Brazilians entering the stock market than ever. And with this change in regulatory to give visibility to commission and really the lack of alignment between who sells your products and to those who buy in, that should also continue to help Warren. So very excited to spend more time with Warren in the next couple of months, and always good when the market changes are aligned with what the company's building.

Bill Cilluffo:

Well, let me highlight maybe our most recent investment that I know you were instrumental in working on a company called Mottu. That again is another example of a business model. This would never exist in the US but a company that's been incredibly successful in Brazil. I wonder if you can lay out a little bit of what they do and what got us so excited about the company.

Camila Vieira:

Absolutely. So Mottu helps Brazilians be able to rent a motorcycle, and as soon as they rent, they can start working with a motorcycle both on e-commerce deliveries and other types of deliveries, and with that, really empower that person to, as soon as they rent a motorcycle, have a job. The beauty of this business is, as we think about banking in fintech in Brazil, for those that don't know, your credit score is not driven by a FICO score or a specific range of outcomes. Here we have a concept that's pretty binary, like you either have good credit or you don't, which we call the [Portuguese 00:27:02]. A large part of the society are under [Portuguese 00:27:05] bucket. For reference, if you are a [Portuguese 00:27:07], you don't get a loan from Nubank for instance, or a traditional bank, which means you don't have access to credit. A lot of jobs won't accept you if you're part of the [Portuguese 00:27:16] bucket. So Mottu focuses on that part of the country.

So for me. That was very exciting because you have a large part of society that have daily needs, daily spends, families to feed in a recurring basis but don't have a lot of access to credit. MOTU enables them a work, and that really is something that they will do every week, they would do every month, because that's how they feed their families and that's how they feed their way out of the [Portuguese 00:27:43] bucket. So for me, it is a very Brazil specific problem, lack of credit access to a large part of society. And they've built a very complex business because part of the rental, they also guarantee maintenance. They guarantee the ability that that bike will continue to work. So if anything happens from a license standpoint, from a maintenance standpoint, it's part of the rental price.

So it's extremely complex to build. It's even harder to do it in a profitable way in multiple cities. As I mentioned, going into outside of Sao Paulo's extremely hard. Most companies are not able to do it. To have a CapEx intensive business do it profitably is very rare. So when we looked at Mottu, their moats were very clear. It's hard to build something like this today where capital is not as available. Their numbers were showing to us not only how the product resonated, but the way to build it is kind of what made it successful. So very excited to partner with them. We led their series that just closed, we just recently announced, and hopefully we'll be able to get into even more cities in Brazil, but also expand to Mexico. Lack of credit and ability to empower the very low base of the economy is not unique to Brazil only, but it is very hard to build if you don't know how to. And I think the relationship Mottu has built in the past couple of years will help them succeed in Mexico as well.

Bill Cilluffo:

That's fantastic. And I think we've got some statistics, how much we've been able to help some of these people increase their earnings. You can describe it as a motorbike leasing company. While that is the product that facilitates it, that's not the end goal, right? The end goal is employment.

Camila Vieira:

I do think the interesting part of the Mottu business is that every other company that's in that segment typically forces the customer into you only deliver food for this company or there's a lot of exclusivity into how it works. And the beauty of Mottu is you can use the bike for mobility. You can use the bike for delivery. You get as much as you produce, and how you produce is up to you. So it very much is empowering as you think about it, going from having no work to now having flexibility into when you work and how you work.

Bill Cilluffo:

What are a couple of the trends that you're seeing now and things that are really exciting you as you look to make potential new investments?

Camila Vieira:

I continue to look at B2B CFO tools. I have not given up. We have a lot to do and even though the go-to-market is not easy, someone will be able to break through and figure out a way to do it. And maybe that's doing it by vertical. Maybe that's doing more of what Cobre is doing, very specific to one part of the solution. We have a couple of bets in the QED portfolio in the segment already, but I continue to look at this theme, especially because with open banking, Columbia and Mexico and Brazil, we tend to see both the B2C and the B2B get benefits from having more data and data that we didn't have access to before. So following the open banking, anything that really has been impacted by regulatory lately, I've been going deeper. And that's both insurance, marketplaces, anything that benefits from additional data compared to the United States, insurance penetration in Mexico, Brazil and Columbia is extremely low, and a lot of it is price and a lot of it's also willingness to pay.

How do we break those problems and get more Brazilians, Colombians and Mexicans access to insurance? It's something that we have yet to also figure out how to do at scale. But overall, everything that touches energy, solar, we continue to be very interested in that. How do I spend capital markets for... Our fintech companies, continue to leverage the capital markets. So it's a problem that we feel very close to home, how to continue to expand the capital markets, add more financial products into LatAM that are not available yet, or at least are not available at accessible prices. So anything that touches regulatory, data, and B2B has been very much how I've been spending my time, but always open to new models as well.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah, I mean the regulatory side's fascinating. I tell just about everyone that I think the most impressive regulators in the world sit in Brazil and India. The amount of progressive changes to the market is impressive, whether it's the advent of picks, the advent of open banking, the advent of the receivables registry, just moving so many things digital and being able to then create a bunch of businesses on top of that is fascinating to watch. Now, I'm sure with any regulators, there's also things coming out that we may not agree with, but as a general rule, it's nice to see them backing innovation so aggressively.

Camila Vieira:

It definitely is. And I do think that the beauty of the QED local presence helps a lot. So I'll give an example. If you read the newspapers with open banking in Brazil, Columbia, and Mexico, you get one picture, right? Things are progressing. Things are moving. Everything's going well. And into perspective, they are. They are moving and things are progressing and we have lots of good things happening.

When you are on the WhatsApp groups with the operators implementing those changes, you realize how far we are yet from implementation, from scaling those technologies, from seeing the real impact that they still have yet to have. So from a VC standpoint, I think that's very powerful. So again, you understand where we are in the curve of adoption and where we are in the curve of the technology so that we're not only investing from what you read in the newspaper, but you are closer to the product team, closer to what actually is possible. So those are things we are passionately watching, but also keeping a cautious look to not jump before we can walk.

Bill Cilluffo:

Makes sense. Well let me move to our last segment here, a little bit about you and maybe some lessons that our audience could take away. So let me ask you a couple of twin questions. How would you describe your superpower? And conversely, what's one thing that you wish you were better at that you're working on?

Camila Vieira:

Superpower? I would say I like to go very deep into a topic. That drives me and keeps me excited. What I wish I would do better is that I could not go deeper, so I could come up with the same outcome without needing to go as deep, which I think it's something I've gotten better over time, but it is a progress.

Bill Cilluffo:

I'm the exact inverse, right? So I think people kind of refer to me as MR 80-20 rule and really good at figuring out how to get the most bang for the minimum work, maybe because I was crazy lazy when I was a kid. So for me it's been the opposite of when do you know that, look, you need to go really deep to understand something and really drive yourself to go deep. So I can very much relate to the tension between those, having come at it from kind of the inverse point of view. There's no one right style for every situation. That's for sure.

Camila Vieira:

It's probably good for our team structure, though, that we work together.

Bill Cilluffo:

Definitely, definitely. Now we did poll some of the team members about what your superpower is and Mike, our head of LatAm said, ironically, he thinks your biggest superpower is just that you're unbelievably helpful, just you're willing to pitch in and help founders. You're willing to do anything to kind of help them figure out with introductions or helping them do sales or helping them with strategy or what have you. It's just kind of the orientation around doing whatever it takes is, I think, at least the thing that he likes most and that resonates, too, I mean I think just the ability to step in and really help companies. VC definitely gets a bad rep at times of, "Hey, here's a bunch of money," and people say they're going to help, but they don't really help. I think we try hard to not live that, and I think you're a great example of that. So anyways, not exactly the one you pointed out for yourself, but good to hear from the team. If you had to share one tip with young entrepreneurs, what would that be?

Camila Vieira:

Going off of what we talked about Mottu, focus on what is difficult to build, very hard to replicate, but most importantly, why are you the right person to do it and why do it now? The combination of those things, it's what really makes the powerful company stands out and having economics that are hard to replicate and have a market share that's hard to steal. So that would be, I think, a little bit the combination of business model, and then personally why they're the right people to build.

Bill Cilluffo:

So if anyone's listening here and wants to pitch you, how do they get in touch and what should they know?

Camila Vieira:

Email it is camillavieira@qeedinvestors.com. Very hard to spell. So I would say go to the QED website and click on my name. What they should know is that I am quick on the feedback. I guess it's something that not all VCs do. That can be seen as positive or negative, but I think as QED, we try to be empathetic to the founders and give feedback. So always happy to, even if you think QED is not a good fit, always happy to brainstorm and give how we would think about it.

Bill Cilluffo:

And last question, and probably the most important question of this entire podcast, you are about to become a first time mother. Talk about your emotions as you lead up to that amazing event here in just a couple of weeks.

Camila Vieira:

It is terrifying and very exciting. We spent a lot of time talking about the opportunities in the world. I think that gives me excitement to have new people and my daughter come into the world to help build and benefit from those enhancements. But at the same time, we have very crazy timing in the world with lots of unfortunate conflicts happening. So it is terrifying to put a new child in the world, but also very exciting. From a career standpoint, it was the right time for me, so I'm excited. Looking forward to it.

Bill Cilluffo:

Absolutely. Well, we are all very excited on your behalf. It looks like I'm going to get down to Brazil a little bit too late, probably miss you while you're out. But I love Brazil as a market for QED. You've been an awesome addition to the team in the last year or so, and we definitely wish you the best on maternity leave and we'll be rooting for the day when we get you back.

Camila Vieira:

Don't worry, Bill. If you come to Brazil, I'll give you the address of the hospital and you're happy to come help me so I can nap. I'll take that any day.

Bill Cilluffo:

I would love to. We're going to put Nigel on babysitting duty. That's going to be fantastic.

Camila Vieira:

Sounds good. Sounds good.

Bill Cilluffo:

Awesome. Well thanks for joining Cami, and to all of our listeners, as always, thanks for listening and take care.

This has been the Fintech Thought Leaders podcast, your window into the world of venture capital and financial services with today's digital disruptors. QED is proud to provide the best fintech advice you can get. To learn more or to read the full show notes from today's episode, check out qedinvestors.com and be sure to also follow QED on Twitter and LinkedIn at QED Investors. Thanks for listening.