We had the pleasure of speaking with Ana Clara Martins, a Partner at Atlantico, who was recently featured at Forbes 30 Under 30 for her phenomenal work investing across Latin America. She tells us about her career journey, talks about the importance of trust and patience, and opens up about her experience in the industry as a young woman.
A: Hello! I would love to start by hearing your story.
AC: So, at Stanford I studied Political Science and wanted to work in the public sector, because I am from Brazil and, a year before going to Stanford, I spent a gap year teaching at a public elementary school. I got really interested in the education and the economic development parts of it, so I focused on it in my Major, as well as getting my first internship in New York working, on the city’s economic development. It was really interesting, but even in the most progressive parts the sector was super bureaucratic and slow. My team also got shifted onto Amazon; do you remember our first year in Stanford when it was huge news that they were opening a second headquarters? New York was bidding for it and I was then shifted to source tech talent for the project. That’s when I got really interested in the tech world.
I was half-way through the degree when I met some people at the MBA who were starting a project called “Brazil at Silicon Valley” – a conference that connected 800 entrepreneurs and investors from Brazil with those from the Silicon Valley. It was 2018 – the first time Latin American tech companies IPOed, so there was a lot of interest. We ended up raising $2 million for it and getting some amazing speakers, including Vinod Khosla and Doug Leone from Sequoia. That went from being a hobby to feeling like a full-time job; and I loved it! It was like running a tiny company alongside going to class.
I was still figuring out what I wanted to do. I was even considering becoming a criminal lawyer, before realising I don’t have the stomach for it! Yet, through the conference I ended up meeting a lot of new people and networking my way around this world. I did an internship in banking that summer, still trying new things.
One of the people on our Board of Advisors (one of the early Brazilian entrepreneurs who founded a high-growth company similar to Groupon in 2011, attracting GA and Benchmark) was in the Valley at the time, being an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark. He was also analysing his returns after investing in both the US and Latin America, seeing that his US returns were 6x, whereas the Latin American portfolio was 17x. The idea (really well-explained in The Power Law book – best VC book ever!) was that, in a VC portfolio, 5-10% of your companies are responsible for all of the returns, so, when you are close to being top 1%, the difference between you and the top 10% is huge. He decided to come to Brazil to become top 1% there rather than top 10% and opened a fund called Atlantico, where I am now.
He wanted someone in my junior summer to do research, which I did not want to do, but it meant working with him, so I agreed. Even though he was not hiring for anyone junior, he did promise to help introduce me to the ecosystem. So, I started when we did not even have a fund, only a brand and my boss – Julio Vasconcellos. We then launched a report and it got a lot of buzz and traction amongst other investors. I started getting more involved with the investment side by jumping on his pitch calls and so on. That’s when I realised that I really loved it! I ended up staying another 3 months in my senior year during Covid, and then another 3 months, and then joining as the first employee back in 2020.
Ever since, we have been building the fund. We closed our first $80 million round and invested in 16-17 companies all over Latin America, with 70% of them in Brazil. We are very much a boutique fund with same-sized rounds, working very closely with our Latin American founders. I absolutely love the size and the dynamics, as I spend 30-40% of my time building the company, hiring people, expanding the brand, doing all of the back-office stuff. The rest of my time, I am an Investor: I find deals, talk to other investors, conduct due diligence and work with founders.
A: Amazing journey. And you were recently featured in Forbes 30 under 30.
AC: I had no idea, my boss signed me up! I got promoted to Partner in May, and he submitted the application on my behalf. It was really nice. Right before Christmas this guy called me for a quote, because they were launching it the next day.
A: That is wonderful and completely deserved! I would love to ask you about the skills that you need at work, since you are both growing the company and investing?
AC: Good question. I think VC is a very relationship-based job. I need to have and build strong relationships in the ecosystem. That also means being there for the founders when things are not going well, as you need to give them space and time to trust you. You also need to build trust with other investors in the region, as you want to be at the top of their mind if they have a good deal that they think you might like. The key, I think, is building these relationships in a non-transactional and authentic way, as well as giving back to the people helping you. That is seen as a nice-to-have in other industries, but you really cannot be a good investor without it.
Second of all, it is a very long-term game. If I bounce from job to job, I will never see the cycle of the companies I invested in and never learn how they progress. So, this is a job that requires you to be humble enough to not know if you are a good investor until these 10 years have passed. You just have to have a bit of faith and trust the people with experience who have already seen the cycles, because they have built the intuition. If you hang around with the right people, you just might build these skills earlier. For example, I have just started investing by myself, which was certainly aided by the knowledge passed down to me by those around me.
In terms of hard skills, you do need some analytical skills. We analyse companies who do more than $1 million in revenue, so you do have data and you need to know how to read financial statements, look at a loan book, do cohort analysis, evaluate their retention. It is all important, but you can’t forget about the bigger picture: you need to be analytical enough to see the micro, but a dreamer enough to see the macro. Hence why growth-stage investors are not good early-stage investors and vice versa.
A: Interesting. You have touched on the challenge of waiting to see if you are successful; are there any other challenges that you tend to face?
AC: My entire career, which is very short, has been in a boom market. So, the intuitions that I have gained are somewhat distorted. It was hard to see that at the time, as you cannot see the comparison with another market. Ever since the market crash, there has been less cash and a lot more struggle amidst the companies all over the world, here included. It was very difficult to turn that key. My job went from competing with so many other investors for exciting deals to really slowing down and helping our companies who are facing layoffs, extending runways, and so on. I have not made an investment since June; I am keen to invest, but the quality of the companies has gone down and you have to be really patient. And these have certainly been the months where I have learnt the most. Moreover, it is really challenging to build trust with the entrepreneurs when they know you have not been through it, so you have to leverage your network and showcase your knowledge of the experiences of others.
Another challenge – a bit cliché, but still very true – is being a young woman in the industry. For example, even though people in tech are very used to diversity, when you are fundraising, institutional LPs may have a defensive reaction when they see a 24-year-old girl on the other end of a call. I talk to my colleagues quite openly about ways of dealing with that: if a call did not go well, I will transparently raise it for someone else in our team to perhaps speak with them. One of my contacts told me: “you will always have three disadvantages – you are young, you are a woman and you have not built anything”. However, you just need to hack your way through it with people who back you and trust you by your side. I don’t think I could have done it completely on my own.
A: Thank you for your authenticity. I think there will be a lot of women our age building careers and going through the same things who will appreciate hearing it. Especially from someone who is already building such great successes despite facing all these challenges by finding ways to deal with it.
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