Best 15 VC Insights From 4 Top Texas & LatAm Based VCs
By: Adolfo Díaz Gramont | LvlUp Venture Scout
The main goal of a pitch deck is to generate enough interest to start a conversation. High-level investors receive many proposals every day and, on average, spend only 50 seconds reviewing each pitch deck. With that in mind, the content is crucial, but so is how efficiently and clearly you communicate your message in just a few seconds.
In addition to the classic slides, you should ideally include one about your competitive advantage, how your startup stands out against both direct and indirect competitors, positioning it as the ideal solution to the problem for your target segment.
Also, it’s important to speak the investor’s language. Use the main takeaways of each slide as headlines, not just simple titles like “The Problem” or “The Solution,” to ensure efficient and effective communication.
Mariano González Vasconcelos (Texas, USA based): General Partner at MGV Capital, Board Member at Alamo Angels, Tech Bloc, Angel Investor at Angel Hub Ventures, Limited Partner at Seven Seven Six, 500 LatAm & Behind Genius Ventures.
A very common mistake is reporting financials incorrectly, but the most frequent one is spending too much time on overly complex financial models at early stages.
Detailed discounted cash flow (DCF) models carry less weight for investors in early stages, who tend to prioritize the strength of the team, industry knowledge, competitive advantage, and the value of the market, problem and technology.
It’s important to have a basic financial model to show understanding of the business. You should do things properly from the start, but not at a Series A or B level of depth.
Reaching PMF is the fundamental goal in the early years of a startup. It’s defined as market validation that creates overwhelming demand and forces you to grow.
It’s a constant pursuit, and don’t fool yourself into thinking you’ve already achieved it if you haven’t, investing heavily in marketing and distribution without PMF is one of the most common ways to destroy a startup.
It’s extremely important to understand the founders’ true motivations, their definition of success, and what they truly want to build and why. This provides key insights into their long-term commitment.
With today’s technology (especially AI), it’s possible to build a sufficiently functional MVP within a couple of weeks without needing a large team. This allows you to validate one of the first questions investors ask: whether there is a market willing to pay for your solution.
Validating these hypotheses quickly and cost-effectively saves a great deal of stress, time, and money for everyone involved.
Damaris Mendoza Loera (México based): Partner at 500 Global, Advisory Board en START Global, Member of WeInvest Latam y Global Women in VC.
Before doing broad outreach, it’s important to have a few initial or “warm-up” conversations with trusted and close contacts. They can provide valuable feedback, recommendations, and suggestions to help you refine your message, which will better prepare you for a wider reach-out afterward.
The most common and most serious mistake is failing to realize how truly challenging fundraising is, assuming it’s something simple. You need to dedicate many hours of work, from preparing your materials to mentally and physically preparing yourself to hear a large number of “no’s.”
The human body isn’t built to handle that much rejection, and it’s tough to end a 9–10 hour day of calls without a single “yes.” If you’re not mentally ready, it can really bring you down.
An entrepreneur who sends consistent reports to their investors, experiences a much smoother fundraising process. If investors have been following your challenges, progress, and concerns quarterly, it becomes much easier for them to make an investment decision in something they already know.
These reports shouldn’t only highlight successes, but also mistakes, failures, and learnings. The things that don’t go well form a long list of lessons that redirect you toward success and reduce the likelihood of repeating the same mistake multiple times.
This is personal, I like to see a CFO involved since Pre-Series A stage. I pay close attention to the financial model, not only the past performance and traction, but also the projections.
It may sound crazy, but I ask Pre-Series A and Series A founders for five-year projections. What are the chances those projections will actually come true? I recognize they’re low, but to me, the model reveals a lot about how the founders think and where the business is headed. It also brings clarity to unit economics, which for us is extremely important.
Federico Gómez Romero (México based): Head of Cathay Latam, part of Cathay Capital & Cathay Innovation, global private equity and venture capital funds.
We’re quite intense with our due diligence. It’s essential to have a data room ready before starting the fundraising process. Organize your main folders by section: market, team, financials with the model, historical financials, and clients.
For us, it’s crucial to interview employees, former employees, clients, and potential clients. We always do that, it’s one of the areas where we gain the most valuable insights before investing.
Having all of that ready beforehand makes the process much smoother and faster.
One more important detail: if I’m in a diligence process and a founder doesn’t reply to an email within 3–4 days, it gives me an early indication of what working together might be like later on.
We conduct a lot of cohort analysis. For example, in B2B SaaS sales, we look at how the cohorts of larger or B2B clients have performed. I pay close attention to net dollar retention, how much you’ve upsold those clients, because it gives me an indication that they like the product and truly need it.
It’s pure fantasy, because projecting the future in an environment full of innovation and risk is simply unrealistic. If it were that predictable, it wouldn’t be a startup — it wouldn’t be innovation.
What you can think about and communicate at the pre-seed stage are the goals you aim to achieve over the next few weeks, or perhaps up to four months — for example, when you plan to launch the product. But the day you launch the product, your financial projections change completely.
Of course, an investor wants to invest in a startup with large-scale potential and a big market, but that doesn’t need to be justified with a 12–24 month financial model at the pre-seed stage.
Claudio Barahona (Chile based): General Partner at CVC Latam, Ex-Alaya Capital y Wayra. Founder of comolevantarcapital.com (howtoraisecapital.com), +1000 startup entrepreneurs supported), startups Board Member, +100 startup investments.
Ideally, there should be someone focused on business, someone technical, and someone in operations.
It’s also crucial that they have the ability to execute, that they’re true operators and move fast.
To understand this better, it’s key to analyze not only what they’ve executed before, but also how they’ve executed it.
Which is THE number, your North Star, the heartbeat you need to track constantly? It’s not about revenue, number of customers, or downloads.
For example, at Tinder, it might be the number of matches. At Instagram, the time users spend scrolling. At Mercado Libre, probably the number of sales and maybe the average ticket size.
And I always say this, in fact, Facebook used to do it: If you had to imagine an office and you could hang a giant sign from the ceiling showing just one number, so that everyone on the team was constantly paying attention to it, which KPI would go there?
When you go into meetings with investors, try not to speak for more than 10 minutes if the meeting lasts half an hour, or more than 20 minutes if it’s a one-hour meeting. Long monologues don’t go over well.
Prioritize listening and understanding the investors’ concerns, because that will help you prepare better for the next meeting, for your next pitch with the following investor.
The 15 VC insights on top are from top Texas & LatAm venture capital leaders which Adolfo Díaz Gramont, recent venture scout at LvlUp ventures, interviewed in his “InspirAcción” (InspireAction) Startup Podcast (Podcast & Newsletter Website, in Spanish). The podcast is in Spanish, insights especially translated for this article. Full interviews at YouTube allow English captions.
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