Breaking into VC and Going back to Brazil after Stanford: Interview with Atlantico Partner and Forbes 30U30 Ana Martins
Originally from Brazil, Ana Clara Martins graduated Stanford in 2021 with a BA in Political Science and a minor in Management Science and Engineering. While at Stanford, Ana was a founding member of Brazil at Silicon Valley, a movement and conference spearheaded by students that aims to improve Brazil’s competitiveness through innovation and technology. Following her love for technology, investing, and building relationships with founders, she interned at Atlantico, a Venture Capital firm based in Brazil, after her Junior year of college. Her hard work earned her a full-time offer for after graduation and the rest is history; since then, Ana has been working as Investment Partner at Atlantico and was recently named Forbes 30 Under 30 in Finance. Follow along as we discuss going back to LatAm and breaking into VC right after undergrad!
To start our interview, could you first walk us through some highlights of your Stanford experience?
It is very hard to narrow down four years of Stanford… However, two very memorable things in college were the people I got to meet and building Brazil at Silicon Valley:
People
When I was at Stanford, I felt surrounded by people who wanted the same kinds of things that I did. Not only were we working towards the same kind of goals, but everyone was extremely supportive, which was a surprise at first; coming in, I assumed everyone was going to be competitive, but thankfully, this was not the case.
A great example was the first Computer Science (CS) class I took at Stanford: CS106A. It felt like everyone else had taken CS before college, while I went in completely blind– my high school didn’t have any offerings that were technology related. I remember, I couldn't figure my second assignment out. In response, one of my friends tutored me through it, and in the three hours he taught me, he never gave me the answer. He came down with a bag of candy, and created the robot square using candy on the table and walked me through every single part of the project until it was done.
That's when I realized I had an entire support system around me.
Building Brazil at Silicon Valley
After my freshman year experience doing a Stanford in Government Fellowship In New York, I realized I wanted to transition from the public sector to working in technology. It was coincidental that a group of Brazilians were getting together to start Brazil at Silicon Valley, with the motivation to share all the access that Stanford has to incredible people in the ecosystem.
Brazil at Silicon Valley became my full time job for two years; it was basically getting an entire project off the ground up. At that point, the team was two other undergrads around five MBA students; we all became really good friends. Over the two years, we raised almost $2 million for the conference, we registered it as a nonprofit, we got 800 people from Brazil to attend, and when Covid happened, we pivoted to digital. I was barely focusing on my classes, I just I did that all day long and I loved it.
This is how I got to know some of my best friends at Stanford and after, how I realized I wanted to move back to Brazil.
After I graduated, we passed over the baton to younger students at Stanford. This year, the conference was almost 1,000 people and we brought really amazing speakers. It feels cool to leave a little bit of a legacy.
On the topic of mentorship and passing the baton, I’d love to hear more about what mentorship means to you?
People talk about mentorship a lot right now; it seems like everyone’s advice is to find your mentors. But the truth is that mentorship is something really special and really hard to find. You can’t have twenty mentors; you're probably going to have a handful of mentors who know you, your story, and your career, because that's what allows them to give you the right guidance.
Mentorship is not just someone who's taking thirty minutes of their time to speak to me (which I also really appreciate), but it's someone who I know is constantly following up and giving me guidance through every step of the way, and that’s something that you build over the years.
Today, my biggest example of mentorship is my partner, Julio. He's the Managing Partner of Atlantico (and hence, also my boss) and from the moment he hired me it was clear that he was invested in my career. If he had dinner with an investor that he couldn't make but I was around, he would put me in front of that investor. He constantly puts me in situations where I might mess up so that, in a few years time, I can be the person who's responsible for that. If he doesn't put me in those situations, I would never learn how to do it.
We also do coaching sessions every month, where we walk through long term goals, things that I need to improve, etc. He knows me very well and is invested in my development.
I think one thing that is really important for students that are eventually thinking of going back to LatAm are the opportunities to intern at companies in the region while they’re still at school, which is something you did. Could you talk a little bit more about the role summer internships had on your early career decisions?
First internship: Stanford in Government Fellowship @ NYC
Learned that the public sector wasn't for me. Although I met extremely smart people, there was a lot of bureaucracy to get through, and with all the things I wanted to do, I felt really constrained.
Second internship: Investment Banking at BTG Pactual, @ São Paulo, Brazil
I originally chose this internship over working in public sector infrastructure at Goldman Sachs in NYC because I wanted to explore technology investments, and because I knew I would have more impact as an intern, as BTG Pactual was short-staffed at the time. At BTG, I was looking at everything, but particularly technology, since they were really starting to focus on building that side out. One of my favorite parts was going to visit the companies and meeting the founders (which is something a bank doesn’t usually do), and that was when it clicked for me that VC could be a really good path.
Third internship: VC @ Atlantico
My junior year summer led to my full time job today so this internship had a huge role in my career. (*We will talk about Ana’s work at Atlantico later in this interview!)
Did you always know you wanted to go back to Latin America? Specifically, did you have clarity on whether you wanted to return to Brazil or another market?
I thought I would never come back to Brazil. On the personal side, I had already lived abroad for my high school and college years; I had spent two years in London, three years in Switzerland, and four years in California. Also, my dad was an entrepreneur, and I got a taste from a very early age of how hard it can be to start an IT company in Brazil; there are still many challenges in terms of capital availability, finding talent and in terms of regulation. I felt like building something here and having to work twice as hard was not a very good idea since I’d had the opportunity to study abroad.
On the professional side, I always thought I would stay in the US for at least 3 years, like most international students do when they graduate. It was honestly very hard to say no to a steady job in the US, and earning really well as soon as I got out of college.
However, I know that I work really hard, and so I need to love my work. I'm not the type of person that can grind without any motivation and my motivation came from working with venture partners at Atlantico. I really enjoy the more informal work environment and the warmer culture; all of that made my job so much fun, while still working very hard.
The best advice that I got when I was deciding between staying in the US and coming back to Brazil was: it's not about the place that you live, it is about the opportunity that you have.
At the time, Atlantico was a brand new fund, I was the first employee, and there was so much to build with people I really respected and who I loved learning from. I might not have had this experience if I had gone to a bigger company or stayed in the US.
It gave me a very strong sense of purpose to have a job where I am both an investor and a builder in the sense that I have learned how to hire, how to fundraise, how to build a brand, and so many other things other than just analysis.
I'd love to talk about Atlantico. What's your focus, can you walk me through what the company does?
We’re a traditional early stage venture fund based in Brazil, so what that means is we do Series A through Series C, but our sweet spot is series A. We take a boutique approach to investment - fewer companies and higher conviction checks - we limit the size of our portfolios to about half of that of a traditional Series A fund, which allows us to be much closer to our founders. We invest all over Latin America and our core market is Brazil (about 60 to 70% of our portfolio companies are based in Brazil). Atlantico is focused on companies that have already started to scale, and are on the curve for hypergrowth.
Could you walk me through your role at Atlantico?
We’re only three people on the core investment team. I am an investment partner at the firm, so what that means is I look at everything. My job is to manage all our deal flow pipeline; build relationships, go after founders that we want to talk to, conduct the due diligence for companies, and do the quantitative side of the analysis. I write the investment memo, I go through the company's data, etc. All of this work we do as a team; the three of us are always working together on these things.
The second part of the job is portfolio management, being able to add value to founders we have invested in. We are there to solve some of the many challenges that a founder may face.
Finally, there's like 20% of my job that's everything else in the world: fundraising, recruiting, running events, building the brand and digital report, PR, everything!
So, I would say 60% of my job is being an investor and 40% is everything else.
If someone wanted to become a VC investor, what would you tell them?
I think this is a hard world to crack.
Especially if you're coming straight out of undergrad, you realize that it's really small. Even if I'm in Latin America, I know most of the funds in the US, Europe and Asia. It is a tight ecosystem and it's very global in nature. Relationships really matter; I think anyone who's coming into vc should read a book called The Power Law, which encapsulates the whole story of VC, how we got to where we are today, and what being a venture investor really means.
So, if someone wanted to break into VC, the first thing to do is start meeting people in this world, because it's really hard to understand from the outside. Until you're through the door, it's really hard to grasp the nuances of the dynamics of the market.
For this reason, I would always start by meeting as many people as you can that do this job: asking them what they do and how it is. As you move through those people, the questions get deeper and deeper. Throughout this process, you start understanding ecosystems and people start remembering you, so when there's a job opening they will look for you. The ability to create these kind of relationships is really important for a future investor.
Do you think there's an industry that is saturated and alternatively, is there a space that you think needs disruption?
I don't think there are any spaces that are saturated. I think we're so early on in the life story of tech, that there's still so much to be built. For example, on B2C, we have seen so much progress, like the banking of the underbanked population, access to credit etc. Now, we're seeing people building the infrastructure for those companies, helping with the payments journey and the user interface. So now there’s an entire second wave of fintech that is still coming; I think there is still a lot of space to grow.
In terms of where I would like to see more companies, I am really excited about the creator economy in Latin America. There's a huge gap between how much influence creators have and how much they're able to monetize on that. No one has been able to bridge that gap and monetize that space with a scalable product. If something like this is born in Latin America, it could be the best in the world because of the culture that we have in terms of social media usage.
The second space that I’d like to see more companies in is healthcare, both in terms of primary care and in terms of the back office for hospitals.
What do you hope for LatAm in the next 10 years?
I would hope that in 10 years time, we have a lot more institutional and long term capital coming to the region. I hope that entrepreneurs are drawn back to LatAm and we can stop the brain drain from the region, and that they see the region as a place where they can thrive.
I think we're on the early days of that.
Knowing what you know now, what will you tell your freshman self? How about your post-grad self?
I would tell my freshman self not to stress; in the end, I won’t remember the grade I got in a class or how many clubs I was a part of. Slow down and enjoy the time you have because it goes by so fast and there are so many opportunities it is overwhelming at times. Time flies by and when you realize, you haven’t slowed down to enjoy everything around you.
Then, I would tell my post-grad self that life after college is going to be hard but you will find your way. I was really shocked with how life after college played out; I felt like I had been acting like an adult for ages, paying my own bills, traveling everywhere… but it’s very different than college! You're no longer living with all your friends, the day to day is different… So it’s scary but you’ll figure it out.
Also, you still have so much time! Even if you don’t like your first job, you have so many years of your career left, and you’ll still be early if you decide to switch.
🔥 Rapid Fire:
First job: Teacher at a public school in my hometown
Favorite book: The Power Law for business and Thursday Murder Club for a fun read before bed
Favorite movie: Pulp Fiction
Favorite dish from your country: Pão de Queijo
Problem you're passionate about: Helping companies in LatAm grow!
Leader you admire: Oprah (seriously, if anyone has her digits, please tell her to hit me up, I’m a fan)
Ana, thank you so much for sharing your time and insights with us. We are so excited to catch up again soon!
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