Martín Escobari

I was set out by these three guys to go and find great entrepreneurial companies and invest $500 million in 20 companies.

You got 18 months, go.

In month three- That was your mission.

That was the specific- That was my mission.

That was mission number one out of business school.

Now that I was speaking Portuguese, I could go.

And by month three-

I remember talking to a buddy of mine, because we were benchmarking different models, and a buddy of mine had taken a job in the U.S., a company that went public in the dot-com era, clearly a bubble, being valued at 20 times revenue, which sounds quaint by today's standards, but by 1998 standards.

And I said, Dennis, it's a bubble.

So very quickly left the fund.

And within, I think, three months, we had raised $80 million to launch Subarina.com, which was the e-commerce, Amazon.com merged with Alibaba to take on Brazil.

And that happened very, very quickly.

A second time after we sold my business during the GFC, I was working for another fund briefly and looking to buy the sort of a fixed income exchange in Brazil.

It's a dominant platform, 80% EBITDA margin business, a lot of competition.

And then all of a sudden the GFC happened and everyone dropped out.

Everyone.

And I was like, no, double down.

And we were able to buy a market-dominant, high-margin business that's six times EBITDA.

And we did it in two months.

And people were like, what do you mean you're doing something with the GFC?