From Goldman and Bain to Chief of Staff at Draftea: Eleonora Pinto on Early Career Decisions
Becoming Chief of Staff at the first DFS platform in the Spanish-speaking world
After finishing her degrees in Management Science & Engineering and Data Science at Stanford, Eleonora Pinto went on to work at Goldman Sachs and Bain & Company in New York City. Due to the expiration of her work Visa in the U.S., Eleonora transferred to the Mexico Bain office, where she started looking for a startup that would further accelerate her learning. Now, she’s working as Chief of Staff at Draftea, the first daily fantasy sports platform in Spanish-speaking Latin America. Join us as we discuss early career decisions and optimizing for happiness and learning through each job.
Can you give us a Bird’s Eye View of your Stanford experience?
Hands down, the best four years of my life. My favorite things that I got from Stanford and my college experience can be summarized in four points:
Friends. I had the opportunity to meet people from around the world, and then travel and get to experience their hometowns; even though many of my friends were raised in a completely different culture, they became family. I am still very close to all of my friends and they’re very ambitious people, who I admire a ton.
Widespread desire to craft your own path. It felt like everyone was heading crosscurrent; people at Stanford do what they know is right and they take risks without fear. When I first did my summer internship at Goldman, I received a lot of pushback from my friends: Why would you want to work somewhere so old-school and with no tech component? Why work so many hours for a salary similar to that which you could be getting in tech? I loved the lack of inertia in doing what you are passionate about.
A passion for technology. When I was there, Stanford was Rome in the Roman Empire. It was THE place to be: so many startups were being born, it was where everything was happening. One of my coolest experiences was a trip to China in 2017 where we visited 12 of the biggest Chinese startups: TenCent, AliBaba, BGI, etc. We traveled all across China with the Engineering School, it was amazing.
I LOVED my major. I studied Management Science & Engineering and minored in Data Science. I went to Stanford because I knew I loved what I was going to study, and I declared my major my first quarter there. I always participated in class, I attended student-led Socratic Circles to improve the major; I was a FAN. I also cultivated very close relationships with some of my professors.
After graduation, you went off to NYC to work at Goldman Sachs and Bain & Company. You mentioned the pushback from your peers back at Stanford. How was it making that decision?
My rationale to do my Sophomore and Junior year internships at the LatAm Investment Banking division at Goldman Sachs was threefold:
1) I didn’t know anything about Finance. I didn’t want to take Finance classes in college because I knew I could learn that anywhere, and Goldman was the perfect opportunity to do so.
2) I wanted to learn more about Latin America. At Stanford I didn't really have many professors from or classes about LatAm, so I wanted to learn how the region worked.
3) I loved NYC. Working at Goldman was the perfect combination of learning about Finance, being a part of a prestigious organization in NY, and learning more about Latam. I LOVED my summers there, I learned a lot.
Having said that, at Stanford I felt a lot of pressure to go into tech and I was curious about what working for a startup would be like. I took a quarter off from Stanford my Junior year to work at a FinTech startup in San Francisco and loved it.
Having both offers (startup and Goldman) on the table, I chose to work at Goldman because if it hadn’t been for my summers there, I wouldn’t have been able to learn many of the basics that made me successful at the startup job. I also wanted to start my career at a place with more structured learning opportunities and mentorship, since I knew I learned best in these environments. After spending some time learning, I could then look for a startup job in LatAm: objective that had always been my north star.
That was the story of how I ended up working at Goldman.
How did you exit Goldman and enter Bain?
I was in the Latin America Capital Markets division, meaning my work was thinking about debt. After a while, I realized I wasn’t passionate about that area; I wanted work that was more well-rounded, strategy-related and data-driven. I also didn’t love the culture at Goldman.
I began exploring jobs. I talked to all my friends at Stanford asking about what they were doing, and what they liked and disliked about their current jobs. After a lot of soul searching, I ultimately landed a job at Bain. Bain allowed me to have the structured learning opportunities that I wanted from Goldman, and was a better transition to the future job I wanted at a tech company. I loved every second at Bain, and am very grateful to the firm still.
What lessons did you learn from both GS and Bain while you where there?
Goldman: I developed a very strong work ethic and learned the basics around workplace communication, feedback etc. I also learned how LatAm worked; Costa Rica is very small so it was hard to extrapolate.
Bain: I learned to how to approach a variety of different problems and to be very hypothesis-driven. Both of these have changed the way I live my life and approach issues that come up.
How was the transition between corporate and startup?
I loved it. Because I had worked for startups and for accelerators in the past, I knew what I was getting myself into. In reality, my transition from the NYC Bain office to the Mexico Bain office felt more akin to moving from a big company to a startup. Mexico was less structured and I had a lot of responsibilities, interacting directly with very senior people. I already felt like I was at a startup in the sense that I felt like I had a lot of responsibilities over my parts of the project and my managers trusted me; I had a lot more ownership over my projects.
I was so eager to learn when I got on Draftea; I really wanted to get my hands dirty. I knew going in that structured processes wouldn’t exist, and that a lot of the work was going to come from my own initiative.
I also loved having more flexibility, I was really longing for that. Places like Goldman and Bain are 9AM-midnight nonstop. Moving to a startup where I can have dinner with friends on weekdays is life-changing to me.
*Note on work-life balance: having time to learn things outside your job, pursue your hobbies, and prioritize your mental and physical health is SO important, and often forgotten about when you are a career-driven person. However, you should never sacrifice your well-being for a job.
How did you join Draftea?
Once my 3 year OPT Work visa expired and I couldn’t continue working in the U.S., I asked Bain to move me to Mexico. Bain’s idea was to bring me back to the U.S. in a year, but I knew I wanted to move back to LatAm and join to a startup.
I loved Bain Mexico, but there was a point where my learning curve plateaued and I knew it was time to move on.
In January 2021, I began exploring the startup scene in Mexico City. I talked to 30+ founders, friends, VCs in the region, etc. Among the people I talked to was a partner at Founders Fund (who happens to be married to one of my associates at Goldman), and he introduced me to Alán, Draftea’s CEO.
The day that Draftea launched their Beta, their team was in Mexico City. (While still working at Bain,) I went to theAirBnB where they were staying and sat down to work with them; they were launching the app while I was making consulting decks. At the end of the day, I felt incredibly energized and immediately knew I would LOVE working with them.
When making the decision, TEAM was my #1 priority, and everyone in the leadership team was amazing at Draftea. Priority #2 was potential; I knew Draftea could be huge because there was a lot of white space in the market. #3 was investors: once I saw Sequoia and Kaszek as investors, the decision to join Draftea became a no-brainer.
What is Draftea?
Draftea is a daily fantasy sports (DFS) platform, and we aim to be the leaders of fantasy sports in Spanish-speaking LatAm. Fantasy sports entail building virtual teams of real sports players, and winning prizes based on the statistical performance of those players in actual games. It’s a way to engage sports fans and increase their passion for sports. In the long term, there’s a lot to do in the field and related ones; our goal is to become LatAm’s sports entertainment platform in Web 2 and Web 3.
What does it look like to be CoS at a Latam startup?
At the beginning, I was reluctant to move from BizOps to Chief of Staff because I had heard the role was more of a “glorified notetaker”. However, it turned out to be very different.
My role is two-fold: I’m Alán’s quarterback, who tackles ad-hoc challenges to keep his back free, and a strategic partner, who takes ownership over some priority projects. I know about and have stakes in most things going on at the company. This month, I’ve been working a lot with the data team, structuring our dashboards and the data organization. The day to day varies a lot based on priorities. I get bored very easily, so working on 15 things at the same time is perfect for me. Alán and I complement each other very well, and it feels more like a partnership. I have never felt like a “glorified notetaker” as Chief of Staff at Draftea.
What are your hopes for the LatAm tech scene over the next ten years?
1. Right now, a very low percentage of LatAm’s GDP is comprised of tech (3-5%, as opposed to China, ~30%). I would want to see a LatAm where technology is a much larger part of the economy.
2. A banked society with 100% access to smartphones. This would unlock a huge market, and therefore a deeper set of problems to solve.
3. Tech literacy. In general, we need better engineering and coding schools, and we need to start educating kids in technology education from very early on.
4. Gender inclusiveness in tech and STEM: I want to see women more in leadership positions.
5. Powerful funds with bigger teams dedicated to LatAm: You can tell the difference in the quality of their investments and the relationships with their portfolio companies when funds have LatAm teams that are specialized.
6. More LatAm companies going public (!!!)
Knowing what you know now, what would be your advice for your freshman and post grad self?
Post Grad: “Keep reevaluating what you want to be doing andkeep striving to be happy, no matter what change that implies. Who cares if I left Goldman after only a year of being there full time? Definitely not the people I want to be working for. I want to optimize for happiness and learning in my career. Life is too short to be unhappy. Changing jobs is natural: just do it, chill out”.
Freshman: “Take more Computer Science classes. I would like to understand the architecture of systems more holistically”. But overall, no regrets: I enjoyed every second of my Stanford experience.
🔥 Rapid fire
First job: Carao Ventures (Senior year of high school)
Fav movie: Any and all movies by Pedro Almodóvar
Fav book: On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
Fav hometown food: Arreglados
Problem you’re passionate about: Solving e-commerce in LatAm
Leader you admire: Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
Eleonora, thank you so much for sharing your time and insights with us. We can’t wait to see all the big things you continue to accomplish.
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