Podcast: One on one with Fairplay CEO Manolo Atala

In this episode of Fintech Thought Leaders, QED's Head of Early Stage Investments Bill Cilluffo speaks with Fairplay CEO Manolo Atala.

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.

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Manolo Atala has built several high-impact companies in the e-commerce ecosystem, as well as SaaS. Prior to Fairplay, Manolo was Partner & COO for Mountain Nazca, a Venture Capital firm based in Mexico with focus on high-impact investments through Latin America & abroad. He was Co-founder of Pulpomatic, the first Fleet Management Technology company in Latin America and Europe. Manolo also launched Cornershop (Acquired by Uber in 2019) in Mexico along with the founders. He served as Managing Director in Groupon México, which later took the operation of its subsidiary in Puerto Rico, remaining as Regional SVP – North Latam. He is an active angel investor in 30+ companies like Cornershop, Ridian, Justo, Kavak, Nowports, among others.

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About Fairplay

Fairplay is the leading revenue-based financing platform in Latin America. The company provides financial and technological solutions for e-commerce businesses and marketplace sellers in Mexico. Fairplay's mission is to empower entrepreneurs' growth, fairly by providing fast, flexible and fair financing options to a high-growth and underserved market in the country.

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Full Transcript

Bill Cilluffo:

Today on the podcast, I'm excited to be joined by Manolo Atala, CEO and co-founder of Fairplay in Mexico City. Hey Manolo, welcome to the podcast.

Manolo Atala:

Bill, thank you very, very much for inviting me.

Bill Cilluffo:

It's super exciting to have you. I've got to say right off the bat, that you're one of my favorite people in fintech. I think it's fair to say that the entire QED team absolutely loves working with you and we're super excited to have you on.

I think if I were to pick out one thing that you're so beloved among the QED team, it's your infectious energy. Where does that all come from? I've got to hear the story of all this.

Manolo Atala:

Amazing. No, thank you very much. First of all, I need to say that I love all the QED team back. This contagious energy, I think that's my personality. I love to connect with people, it's one of my favorite things.

I generally love to meet different people, diversity, so I feel energized every time I do that, so that's why probably it's something that looks infectious.

Bill Cilluffo:

That makes tons of sense. It's one of the things that I love so much about this industry is just meeting people from all geographies, all cultures, all walks of life. It's fascinating. Well, look, we'll get back to your energy later on when we talk about your team and leadership, but for now I'd love to share with our listeners a little bit about your background.

If I understand, you started your first company when you were 21 years old, starting an ad agency. You went on to be a sales leader at Yahoo, and then ultimately in that part of your career, CEO of Groupon Mexico. It's a pretty amazing ride in your early 20s. Can you take us through that and how all that came to be?

Manolo Atala:

Yeah. A little bit of that background, I started that company, the advertising company, when I was 21. It was not my idea, actually it was a copycat from the UK. But it was really interesting business model where you basically put advertising in student's college car, and you basically give them like $100, and then you charge probably Coca-Cola or whatever other brand like $300 or $400. It was a really interesting model, because of regulation, I needed to shut down the business.

Then I started to work for some companies, CIE, ING as well. Then something happened and suddenly I was at Yahoo Mexico, which it was a really interesting company to be in at that specific moment in time. It was Yahoo were billing millions of dollars of advertising when there was something. Then I received an invitation to join Groupon Latin America. It was not just to join, it was like, "No, you need to run Mexico." Then after that, I started to run Central America, which it was Puerto Rico basically.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah.

Manolo Atala:

All the change from the startup to big companies, and then Yahoo and then Groupon, it was a really interesting path where it changed my career. It changed basically from one day to another, it changed.

Bill Cilluffo:

What was the biggest, moving from an important role at Yahoo, but running your own thing with Groupon, what was the major lesson from making that jump?

Manolo Atala:

I think that something that Yahoo helped me. Before Yahoo, I had never had people on my watch. I had never a team and I had two people in Yahoo and they were awesome. That helped me before I jumped to Groupon, to have hundreds of people to manage at least two, and to know the dynamics and to understand what kind of leader I could be.

I think that specific and short moment at Yahoo helped me to build my leadership mentality at the very beginning, so that helped me a lot. That was my very first lesson at Yahoo, you need to take this more seriously, so that helped me. I had a really interesting lesson of being a leader of two people and then jumped to have hundreds.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah. It's definitely different when you have people that are counting on you. You can do some different things when it's only yourself relying on yourself, right?

Manolo Atala:

Totally.

Bill Cilluffo:

No, that makes sense. Later on in the journey, we had a chance to speak to your friend, Evaristo, who you co-founded a fleet management company with. He talked about how impressed he was at how you navigated all of that.

I'd love to hear your experiences with starting that company, I guess your second company, if I'm not mistaken, very different than the ad agency. Love to hear about that journey and what your main learnings were from that.

Manolo Atala:

Amazing and amazing that you talked to Evaristo. The transition, it was really weird for me. It was weird and at the same time, super exciting. I'm going to go back to the advertising agency, but I'm going back to CIE. CIE is the biggest entertainment and advertising company in, I would say, Latin America because they own all the concerts. They are partnered with Live Nation and Ticketmaster and everything.

They are super big and I used to work there. There I learned a lot of things, but not the obvious ones. I learned what not to do as a leader. I remember the transition from CIE to Yahoo, it was another shock for me. It was another shock for me because it was a digital company with this culture, not Silicon Valley culture. They were in Sunnyvale.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah, basically in the Valley.

Manolo Atala:

Yeah, exactly. Tech company culture and the dynamics were totally different. I had actually a boss that I admired. Something cracked in my head when I changed from CIE to Yahoo. But then the biggest crash, it was in Groupon. That transition suddenly, as you mentioned before, suddenly I was at Yahoo, and then managing a lot of people in Groupon. I think the transition was super smooth and I never noticed till years after, that transition changed my career and my path because I didn't have time to think about that.

I changed from Yahoo to Groupon really fast. There was one month that I was working for the two companies, because I was giving my responsibilities to somebody else at Yahoo. At the same time, Groupon needed to launch really fast and hire more people and stuff like that. I started to work in early mornings at Groupon, then at Yahoo, and then at Groupon again in the night. I think I realized all this transition and everything when we IPO at Groupon, where I had a 150 people team.

I didn't need to do everything there. It was a big team doing a lot of stuff. Then it sinked in and I realized that something changed two years after.

Bill Cilluffo:

Did you find the bigger impact was this notion of going from no people, to two people, to 100 people? Or do you find it was going from not the tech world to the tech world and the tech culture, or is it really hard to say?

Manolo Atala:

I think both are equally important and still, actually I'm going to tell you something about the other day. I don't know if you know, but we are more than 100 people now at Fairplay. I just sent a message to Andrew saying, "Hey man, now we are more than 100, I have vertigo."

In the past I had bigger teams, bigger than 100, but the 100 mark, it's an important one for me because the dynamics change, the culture. You need to hold on to the culture and everything. I think changing from Yahoo to Groupon or from CIE to Yahoo, that cultural change, it was an important hit like positive impact. Then from two to 150, it was another big hit as well.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah. They say roughly at 100 is when you stop being able to know everyone's name, so it's definitely a big moment. I've certainly found that to be roughly a good breaking point as well.

Manolo Atala:

Totally.

Bill Cilluffo:

Well, hey, now that you've mentioned Fairplay, let me switch gears a little bit from your background, and start talking a little bit about Fairplay and what you're doing now.

I know the founding story of Fairplay is quite interesting. You're working at a local venture firm in Mexico City, Mountain Nazca. How did the kernel of Fairplay come to be while you were at Nazca?

Manolo Atala:

Well, it was really interesting. One of the things that we used to do like Hector and myself, was to look for really interesting business models that nobody were exploring and doing in Latin America. We found that this company in the US, Clearco, formerly Clearbanc, I think. We saw that business model, nobody were doing this that way for e-commerce companies, advertising, et cetera, because revenue-based financing is not a new kid on the block.

It's not a really old business model, but they are revenue based stuff back in the '80s. Then we started to analyze the model and to crunch the numbers. It was super interesting to see the assumptions of unit economics that we had at that moment. The assumptions of the growth and the size of the market and the needs that these SMEs or e-commerce and marketplace sellers could have, but the numbers looked really good.

Bill Cilluffo:

Can you just spend a sentence or two describing what revenue-based financing is and what your main offering is at Fairplay?

Manolo Atala:

Sure thing. Fairplay is the first revenue-based financing platform for e-commerce SMEs, like it could be D2C companies or marketplace sellers. We help these companies to invest more or heavily in inventory, more inventory to spend more in marketing online. Basically, we fund the cost of an e-commerce. That's our main focus. We help you if you're an e-commerce founder, we help you to have these cashflow efficiencies, helping you buying more inventory or more logistics costs.

Let's say if you are growing faster, you need to pay more logistics or more marketing. For a founder to avoid this hard question of, "Should I keep growing or should I stay the same way because I don't have the money either to buy more inventory or marketing?" We help you in that sense, and we have a technology product that helps you concentrating all your metrics in one place like your Google, Facebook metrics, Amazon, delivery, et cetera. We help you with that, with our tech product and with the lending product.

But going back to that, when I started to crunch the numbers with Hector, we decided to invite someone. By this minute I was at Nazca, I was a COO at Nazca. I had no plans to launch a company. We start to see that model and then we say, "Okay, we need to invite someone that has the capabilities to run this company, and would be willing to invest a million dollars there." The first person that came to my mind was Andrew, because he was a perfect mix to have revenue-based financing for e-commerce.

He was the best person to do it. We invited him and he said like, "Hey, yes, I'm going to do that. I love the model. I'd love to work with you guys as investors." Then a few days after that, I was like, "Holy shit, I get to do that with Andrew." Being a BC, it's super fun, but I need to be super hands-on doing something. It was super clear for me at that moment, that I needed to partner with Andrew and I resigned to the firm four days after we invited Andrew.

Bill Cilluffo:

Hopefully resigned with a million dollar seed check.

Manolo Atala:

Made a million dollars, of course. I really appreciate the support that I had from Hector at that moment, and all the rest is history. We started there in 2019 at the very end.

Bill Cilluffo:

That's awesome. It sounds like you've known Andrew for 30 years. Sounds like you've got an interesting story on how you met him. Is this something you're able to share with the group?

Manolo Atala:

Yeah. Yeah. Actually, we met in middle school. Actually, Andrew went to the primary school. It could be the one before.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah.

Manolo Atala:

Hector from Nazca and Andrew were together since kindergarten. Then when we were 12 years old, Andrew moved to my school. At the very beginning, we were not that close and we started to be really close friends in high school. We had a lot of fun back in high school and then we split in our life. He became super serious and he became a paramedic.

He was so in love with the paramedic thing, and he became super responsible and he started to run a lot of different parts of their family business, which is a big company. I started to play music and running an advertising agency, so totally different paths. It's really interesting to see how life put us together many years after, with our really complimentary personalities and skills.

Bill Cilluffo:

That's awesome. Well, speaking of a little bit random occurrences in meeting people, sounds like you met QED in a pretty bizarre, random way as well. How did that all come to be?

Manolo Atala:

When I was at Nazca, Andrew and I were starting the analysis of doing the business. We didn't have an investment deck or anything. We just had a name that actually it was from Hector, not from us. We just had that and a domain, getfairplay.com, that was it, and a big Excel sheet with tons of numbers and assumptions and stuff like that. Then one day, I saw people in a meeting room and suddenly, Hector came out from the meeting room and said, "Hey guys, you need to pitch these guys. These guys are the best for fintech, the best VC for fintech companies."

We were like, "Hector, we don't even have a deck." He said like, "Man, you can do this." We went into the meeting room and I remember it was Matt Burton at that meeting room, and it was Amias from the UK and we started to pitch. I'm a really straightforward person, so I said like, "Hey guys, I'm very sorry. We are not going to pitch you with a really fancy deck because we don't have it. We don't have one. I'd love for you to be comfortable with just with this face and this other bold face as well."

We started to pitch there and they really liked the model. Matt were super interested in keep talking to us about that. Actually, I feel that I'm a really grateful person. All the serendipity that we are talking, it's really Matt helped me to build the investment deck to pitch you guys.

Bill Cilluffo:

I'm glad it succeeded because if Matt built a deck that did not succeed in pitching us, then we would've had to have a different conversation.

Manolo Atala:

I will be really grateful with Matt forever for doing that, and yet we met in the statistics. You need to pitch to 40 funds or 30 funds in order for you to close at least one term sheet and then another one and that's it.

Our statistics were way much better than that because we pitched to you guys and you say yes. We started to work together and we already had a million dollars committed. It was super fun, that seed round. For me, it was till now, I think, it was a weird or a different seed round because it was serendipity here.

Bill Cilluffo:

I assume you've probably heard, QED was already studying the same Clearco and already thinking of the idea. Serendipity on our end as well, that we happened to meet someone already thinking of an idea we were thinking of. It was a great, great confluence of events.

I don't want to do a deep dive necessarily into all things Fairplay, but what's one thing that you would point out that's maybe gone better and easier, and back to that original deck, way beyond what you thought? Then what's one thing that's been way harder and a much bigger challenge than you thought?

Manolo Atala:

The thing that becomes a little bit easier is that for some reason, I think we're good to hire really talented people. Even though that it's hard how Fairplay operates, it's difficult, it has a lot of processes and everything because we are handling money. Every place you look, you find a really interesting and talented person running the show.

They're super responsible, they're super accountable, so I can forget about things and I know everything's going to happen. I don't need to be micromanaging anyone. I don't need to be supervising anyone so I trust them enough to let them run the show.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah.

Manolo Atala:

Every time becomes easier, right? The hard thing about three years later and about being more than 100 people now, is to maintain the culture. We made a mistake before becoming a 100 headcount company, because we prepare everything, job descriptions, which kind of people do you need to hire here? What would be their responsibilities and everything?

But the hardest thing was to integrate these new people with the old people, to integrate those personalities, responsibilities, accountability, culture, everything, I think that was really, really hard. We are still working on that because as everybody knows, culture is the main driver for a company's success. To handle that and to blend all these different personalities and responsibilities, it's a really, really difficult part.

More than I thought, way much more than I thought. That's, I think, the things that are getting harder and not easier, is to maintain the culture and try to understand how to integrate everything.

Bill Cilluffo:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Now that you're at this notion of 100 people, I don't know if you still know the name of everyone on the team or if there's some people, you may not know the team.

But I understand you're amazing at figuring out how to still relate to people, even though maybe you don't know them all as well as you did when the company was 10 people, for example. Talk to me about how you go about doing that and how you go about thinking about it.

Manolo Atala:

It's amazing. I'm not comfortable saying that I know everyone's name now because we hired, I think the last 30 people, we hired them in the last six weeks, 30 or 25 people. Those people, I'm trying to meet everyone now. We had a tech summit a month ago, I think, or three weeks ago, so I met a bunch of the new guys as well but I'm trying to remember all their names and everything. I try to remember specific stuff about people, probably not their names at the very beginning.

But I know if they like blues music because they introduce themselves in a video. The first Wednesday of every month, we do an all hands and if there's new people coming in before that Wednesday, they introduce themselves in a video. I tend to remember all these details so when I talk to people, I try to start from another place and not their job, or their job description or whatever.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah. No, it's a great way to make relationships personal. I'd probably resonate with that. I struggle with people's names all the time. I struggle with company names all the time.

It's tough in this business, but it's a lot easier for me to remember something like that. If you're in the US, what football team do you root for? What are your hobbies? Winds up sticking for me a lot better as well.

Manolo Atala:

Totally. I always try to use the dude, because if I forgot the names, I use the dude and hey. Yeah, but down the road I end up remembering everything.

Bill Cilluffo:

Manolo, you remember The Blues Band and you remember all the music. I think there's a very important reason why you resonate so much with music, we've got to hear this. Bassist in a rock band, is that right?

Manolo Atala:

Yeah, that's right.

Bill Cilluffo:

Tell us about this band and do you still play?

Manolo Atala:

I don't play any more like that. Live music, I don't play anymore. I have all my instruments here in the back, and I try to play the guitar sometimes. When I'm a bit stressed I try to play the guitar, the acoustic guitar, because playing bass, it's boring to do it alone sometimes. If I'm not creating a song, it's sometimes boring to play the bass just like that. I prefer to play the guitar. The rock band, I started again, serendipity happening to me.

I had a lot of friends in the music industry and musicians, and really young musicians when we were really, really young and they were not professional musicians yet. I have this bunch of friends playing the drums and playing bass, and guitar and their parents used to play in that house and et cetera. I remember when I was like 22, my best friend was a lead singer and bass player of a band. He said like, "Hey, I don't like to sing and play the bass at the same time."

I said, "What about if I play the bass?" He laughed, of course, he laughed. I was like, "No, no, no, I can learn. I can learn and I can play the bass." He was like, "No, man, it's really difficult. We have been playing for 10 years. You're not going to be able to learn and play in two months for 2,000 people, or a bar or whatever, or in the garage, not even the garage." I was like, my proud Manolo said, "What, I can't do this? Of course I can."

I asked the guitar player of the band, "Hey man, can you show me the exact songs of the band? I don't care about music theory, I don't care about melody, anything. I need to know how to move my fingers to show this guy that I can do this." He showed me and I learned by memory the songs of the band. One day I said like, "Hey, can I play in a rehearsal?" He was like, "No, man, it's impossible." I play five songs really, really bad, but I play them.

He was like, "Holy shit, you really learned the songs and you made it." They invited me to join the band and then that was my first band. Then I changed band to a more hard rock band. Then I started to play in big gigs, like Deep Purple kind of thing, opening the concert to Deep Purple and playing in big festivals and stuff. It was super fun. My first gig with the first band was like 2,000 people in the Bulldog. I remember that because it was my favorite club.

All my favorite bands played there, used to play there. Then the first gig that I had with my first band was there and it was super excited. Hey, I never played in a garage. I just kept everything, I just kept everything and I'm just playing in the Bulldog. It was a really interesting phase of my life.

Bill Cilluffo:

That's incredible. Opened for Deep Purple, that's pretty fantastic. I'm going to have to go play Smoke on the Water later on today.

Manolo Atala:

Actually, I play Smoke on the Water with John Avery.

Bill Cilluffo:

Holy cow.

Manolo Atala:

Yeah. I didn't realize that he was behind in his keyboards, and I just started to play. Then he followed me with the keyboards and I was like, "Holy shit, this is really cool."

Bill Cilluffo:

That song's probably a bassist dream, right? That's perfect.

Manolo Atala:

That was perfect, exactly.

Bill Cilluffo:

That's awesome. You've got all this rock band in you, I know you're an active artist, so creativity is part of your bones. Connecting these conversations, you've got this company with 100 people in it. You now trust your people to do a lot of the work that maybe you used to do.

You spend a lot of your time in the culture. How do you bring that creativity still into the workplace every day? Or is that something that's more creative outside of work and more or less so in work? How do you blend those things together?

Manolo Atala:

I try to be creative, not super creative, but I use creativity till now, even though that there are a lot of people doing a lot of stuff, different stuff. I think creativity works are a really interesting place now at Fairplay. Because for both Andrew and myself, we are in charge of the vision, the mission and everything, the strategy of the company. You need to be not just creative, but you need to get super deep in what you're doing in order for you to understand the path that you're going to take in the next 12 months, 18 months, three years, five years, whatever.

Not just to build a budget or to build a projection to show QED. You need to build a path where everything makes sense. When I said everything makes sense, you need to put a lot of pieces together and it's like a puzzle. It's like we are doing right now, we are doing lending, but we are creating this tech platform. But then the needs of the clients are probably are going to be bank accounts or credit cards or whatever. How can we mix all these paths from zero to one, and from one to 10 and from 10 to 30?

Without creativity, it's impossible to build a company that lasts. Because you need to reinvent everything every once in a while, keeping the mission and the vision like super sharp. But you need to be super creative in order for you to handle all the market dynamics and the changes and everything. You need to put all those pieces together and you need to be super creative to do that. I love to use creativity to solve these problems and in a different way, so I use creativity a lot.

Bill Cilluffo:

No, that's awesome. Probably one of the more creative things that many CEOs, probably yourself included, do is really set the vision for the company. It's one thing to share kind of, "Hey, what were our numbers last week and what's this new offering?" But the future vision's all in your head, it's all made up at some level in thinking about the future.

As your team has grown, as you've gotten more investors, as you've gotten more constituencies, how do you think about sharing your vision? Do you think about doing that differently inside the company versus outside the company? Do you try to have one consistent vision?

As the list gets larger and larger, how do you think about evangelizing and sharing that vision on a regular basis?

Manolo Atala:

You start to talk about my favorite topic because vision for me, it's the one thing that I enjoy more just to think about. I love to do this exercise of going back and forth in time. I try to go five years in the future or seven years in the future, and come back and to see then the short term, the next 12 months. To see if there's a huge gap or huge delta from what I'm thinking right now, to do right now, to execute in the next 12 months, and the things needed to be done in the next five, seven, whatever years.

I love to do that. I tend to do that every once in a while to get super deep. To set up the vision internally, it's for me, more difficult to set up the vision for investors. To set up the vision for investors, well, I'm grateful enough to know almost everyone in the neighborhood. I know exactly what Bill likes, what Hector likes, what Mike Packer likes. And not what they like, but how to handle, how to pitch the vision for every single one of the investors, because everyone has a special interest in some sense.

But to set up the vision internally, for me it's harder because you need to convince people that what they are doing now is not going to work tomorrow. All the work and all the effort that they are putting to build something today, probably we're going to crash all that work, we're going to throw that work to the garbage and then we need to build something different. That's really, really extremely difficult to maintain culture, to maintain motivation, to maintain everything internally.

Most of it when you're changing, not the vision, but the execution around the vision. Your execution tends to go to the right and you need to change direction a little bit. The machine has started to cringe and it's sometimes for me, it's harder to set up vision internally. Because for investors, your focus, your ambitions and everything, it's way much easier to tell. Sometimes they ask you how you're going to scale this or how you're going to met this goal, or how you're going to build this. It's easier to explain that.

But to go internally to a team and say, "Hey, we need to do it A, B, C, D, like whatever," it's way much harder and it's more interesting at the same time. For investors for me, it's like every day it's easy for me to talk to investors on the vision, but internally I make big presentations of the vision every year. It's not that I like wars, but most of the times I try to put some war strategies around the presentation. I think the first year it was, I don't remember the first year, which war it was.

But last year it was the D-Day where the English and the US get into these five beaches in Normandy, and take the market by surprise and all these similarities that you can take from a war strategy. I think this year it's going to be, I don't know if you know this, I learned from this from the CFO for [inaudible 00:30:11], a deep science tech company in San Francisco. It's the Marius reforms where they basically change from a republic to be an empire.

All those changes they needed to work on in order for them to scale their army and the empire, and to become an empire. This year for us, we are a lot of people now. We need a lot of processes, we need governance as well. This year is going to be super interesting to show everyone a little bit of history, the Marius reforms, and to let them know that we need to scale this company now that we are more than 100 people.

Bill Cilluffo:

No, that's awesome, Manolo. I had the chance to go to Normandy this summer. I had an amazing time touring, everything. We were only there for one day, could have spent a lot longer.

But pretty impressive to just think through what all these 18-year-old kids went through. It was definitely a humbling experience with the kids this summer. I can certainly relate to that analogy.

Manolo Atala:

Amazing, amazing.

Bill Cilluffo:

Well look, Manolo, it's been amazing having you on the show. I would love to just end with a couple very quick wrap-up questions for you, if that's okay?

Manolo Atala:

Sure.

Bill Cilluffo:

If you had to share one key tip with young entrepreneurs, what would that be? I know you do a lot of mentoring of young entrepreneurs, so this is probably a question you get asked all the time.

Manolo Atala:

Most of the times I say, if you have the opportunity to do things, just do it, right? But I want to get a little bit deeper here because when you talk to young entrepreneurs sometimes, a lot of the fears that you see or that you feel from them is that they can't do things, or if something is really difficult to do or to accomplish. What I would say to a younger entrepreneur right now, is don't be afraid to do new things.

Don't underestimate your capabilities, because there's a lot of things that you can do that you don't know now that you can do it. We tend to underestimate our power to the things, our capabilities. Most of the things that I've seen throughout my life is just ask. Most of the people are afraid to ask for a lot of things. It's really known that I'm not a shy person, so I don't mind to ask for a lot of things to try different things. Because my worst case scenario, it's I'm going to receive a no.

I'm a salesperson, I used to receive nos all the time so that's another thing. Another tip I think is that become a salesperson because you need to sell a lot of things. If you want to raise capital, you need to sell your company to build for, you need to sell to your team as well. When you're hiring, you're selling your company for talent to join your team. You are selling all the time.

If you acquire all those skills and you get used to be a salesperson all the time, it's a fantastic skillset that you can use for all your entrepreneurial life.

Bill Cilluffo:

Yeah, it's fascinating. When I set out of university for my business career, I said, "Look, I'm willing to do any job except sales."

What's funny is I think you realize throughout your career as you advance, every job is all about sales almost no matter what you do. It is definitely a skillset that the sooner you can learn it, the more effective you'll be.

Manolo Atala:

Even in a romantic relationship, you're selling yourself. Don't sell bullshit please, but you need to sell yourself to investors, to different people throughout your life. It's an amazing skillset that you can have.

Bill Cilluffo:

No, that's awesome. That's awesome. Manolo, as we wrap one final question, I think just love to hear about Fairplay. You've talked about how important purpose is. You've talked about how important creativity is, your time as a musician and artist, et cetera, and the desire to do that, to provide lasting value to the world.

As you think about Fairplay, when people write the book 20 years from now on Fairplay, what do you want that lasting value to be, that the impact that Fairplay had on the world?

Manolo Atala:

This is really interesting how you put it and how you asked the question, because right now we are reshaping our value prop. Cherry-picking really interesting stuff that we had three years ago, and now we need to rewrite all those things or rephrase them, because we are adding a lot of different features or our vision increased a little bit more. I think most of the things ends up in value creation. I don't know if you saw this post, that it was a bit controversial post that I wrote in LinkedIn, that create value not valuation.

It was controversial because most people these days, well, not these days we're in 2022, for people's context. But in 2021, everyone was focused on valuation. I think that creating value tend to be really difficult because you need to put a lot of creativity and to build products that really works, that really work for people, for entrepreneurs, in our case, to SMEs in the e-commerce ecosystem. You need to hear a lot, you need to make a lot of research. You need to understand your target market.

You need to be willing to create products that really make a difference in their day-to-day operations, in their experience or resolving any pain or need that your target market have. I think if I see a book in 20 years from now, what I want to see is that people remembering like Fairplay helped me to build or to scale my business, or to help me have more efficient cashflows. Or they bring a set of tools, technological tools that help me build my business instead of hustling with all this shit that I need to do on my daily basis work.

Bring value can come in different shapes and flavors. I think in our case, it's just to help entrepreneurs to build and scale their businesses more efficiently, more fairly, and with a lot of simplicity. We hate complex products. If they remember us 20 years from now like this, I would be more than glad.

Bill Cilluffo:

That's fantastic. Thanks so much for listening everyone, and until next time, take care.

Manolo Atala:

Thank you very much, Bill, for the invitation. It was a total pleasure to speak with you.