1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Daniel Ibri of Mindset Ventures (Part 3)

Daniel Ibri: If you go to a retail shop, you can normally pay for your high end equipment in installments. It’s really common for the Brazilian market. These retailers end up giving credit, direct to consumers, out of their own balance sheet. The delinquency rate is really huge. It’s something around 30% to 50%. The startup’s mission is really meaningful. They [retailers] came with one of the founders. We took them to the C-levels of the biggest retailers, banks, and FinTechs in Brazil for partnerships.

It was really good. The people were all amazing and were willing to implement it. This was less than six months ago and they’re already starting to pilot here in Brazil.

Sramana Mitra: Would you say that you have special expertise to open up the Brazilian market for agtech or fintech? Where would you say you have this kind of relationships in?

Daniel Ibri: For anything inside these five sectors, we can be relevant. Most of our LPs are either high net worth individual or executives in almost all the big Brazilian corporations. We’ve done some work with cyber security companies and talking to big Brazilian banks and insurance companies as well. Nine companies in our portfolio are already working with Brazilian clients.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. What sized checks do you write normally?

Daniel Ibri: Normally we do an average of $500,000. We have gone a little bit up and a little bit down depending on the case, but the average is $500,000.

Sramana Mitra: Do you have preferred partners that you like to invest with typically in America or in Israel that has a specific interest in Latin America?

Daniel Ibri: In Israel, we do. We try not to choose the partners. We focus on the entrepreneurs. It’s a very good question. When we show some of our investors that we co-invest with Andreessen or Sequoia, people ask us, “How did you get into the deal? What was your pitch?”

I always say that we don’t pitch to Sequoia. We pitch to the entrepreneurs. I strongly believe that the founders are the ones who need to be convinced of our value to be on board and that we can really generate some smart money for them. Then they bring us on board.

Our job is more closer to the founders and entrepreneurs than to other VCs.

Sramana Mitra: What about finding the deals? You are in Brazil. How are you finding the entrepreneurs in Israel and the US?

Daniel Ibri: First of all, we have one partner based in San Francisco and one in Tel Aviv. We are close to almost all accelerators in both countries like YCombinator and TechStars. We are also connected to other VCs, especially in Israel.

They have been great in providing us opportunities to co-invest as well. One important point is that we have a global partnership with Microsoft. Before starting Mindset, I was running a corporate fund here in Brazil in which Microsoft was one of the LPs together with Qualcomm.

We have a very close relationship with Microsoft. When we started Mindset, we did a formal global partnership agreement in which Microsoft provides us with lots of deal flow in both countries. That’s a big source of companies for us.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Daniel Ibri of Mindset Ventures
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