Building a High-Growth Startup From Brazil: Revelo CEO Lachlan de Crespigny (Part 1)

Lachlan has built a wonderful company from Brazil that has emerged as a pandemic beneficiary.
Read on for the nuances of his journey.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised and in what kind of background?

Lachlan de Crespigny: I’m Australian originally. I lived in Adelaide and Sydney. After university, I went to work at Boston Consulting Group. Then I transferred to Brazil and worked there for a while. Then I went up to New York City. After studying in New York City, I moved back down to Brazil to start a company with my co-founder and now spend most of my time in the United States working on Revelo.

Sramana Mitra: Is Revelo your first company?

Lachlan de Crespigny: It is.

Sramana Mitra: When did you start Revelo?

Lachlan de Crespigny: We started testing Revelo in mid-2014. Things started to get traction in mid-2015.

Sramana Mitra: What was the concept with which you started?

Lachlan de Crespigny: It’s very different from what we do today. At that time, we could see a large wave of demand for software developers was going to sweep across the US. Tech wasn’t as hot and sexy and all-dominant back then as it is today, but you could see that there was going to be a massive demand for software developers.

We knew that that would spread across the rest of the world. We knew that the technology that companies were using to recruit in Latin America was very basic and hadn’t been innovated for 15 to 20 years. So my co-founder and I thought it was an opportunity to bring technology into this industry and make it more efficient across Latin America.

Sramana Mitra: So it’s a recruiting portal?

Lachlan de Crespigny: When it first started, it was a platform for most Latin American companies to hire software developers. It was mostly for Sao Paulo. We knew, however, that the major market for recruiting software developers would be the United States. We built our platform thinking that it would come one day. What we didn’t foresee was the pandemic sped that up and brought forward 10 years what we thought was going to happen.

Sramana Mitra: In 2014 when you decided that this was what you were going to do, what did you start with? Did you self-finance?

Lachlan de Crespigny: There was no decent funding environment in Brazil at that time. I also didn’t have a visa for Brazil. My co-founder is born and raised in Brazil, but he was studying at Stanford at that time. There was no chance that we could have gotten funding at that point.

We had to bootstrap it ourselves. I had a little bit of savings, but I didn’t have enough savings to pay any software developers to hire. I learned how to do everything myself. I would try and sell the company during the day and then I would write code at night to build the platform. My co-founder was doing the same thing trying to attract candidates to the platform.

Sramana Mitra: You were both full-time?

Lachlan de Crespigny: We were both full-time. He wasn’t meant to be; he was meant to be studying. That was probably the most painful year of my professional life. You could see your savings burn out. If we didn’t generate cash flow by the time those savings got to zero, then that was it. I had to move back to Australia.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building a High-Growth Startup From Brazil: Revelo CEO Lachlan de Crespigny
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