A New Take on the VC-Founder Relationship
episode
Startup Success: A Podcast for Founders & Investors
28 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 15 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Who is Ivan Montoya and how did his career lead to founding NuMundo Ventures?
Welcome to Startup Success, the podcast for startup founders and investors. Here you'll find stories of success from others in the trenches as they work to scale some of the fastest growing startups in the world. Stories that will help you in your own journey. Startup Success starts now.
Welcome to Startup Success. Today we have Ivan Montoya in studio who is the managing partner of Numundo Ventures. Welcome.
Hi, Kate. Nice to speak with you.
I'm looking forward to this because you have an interesting background and kind of an interesting philosophy about how you work with founders, which we'll get into later. But if you could just set the stage and kind of explain to us what led you to Numundo.
Yeah, so I'll for those of you old enough, I'll I'll uh give you the reader's digest version. So for people who understand that reference. Yeah, so I was born in Columbia. My parents were doctors. We moved to the US when I was very young. So it was in the early nineteen seventies, pants terrain between New York, New Jersey area, eventually ended up in Houston and grew up in in Houston, right near NASA. And go off to college and eventually make my way out to the Bay Area in 1995 to go to Stanford Business School. And um when I got here, it was literally the beginning of the internet. I think uh Netscape went public in August. I arrived in September of ninety-five. And now it's been thirty years since I've been here.
You know, after business school, I eventually started to get get involved in the world of technology and startups and I joke. I've seen the good, the bad and the ugly. You know, I've seen I've been at a startup that got sold for a billion. I've been at one that didn't make it and everything in between. About 10 years ago, I really was interested in angel investing, but didn't felt I really had an edge or anything different to offer for backing founders here in the Bay Area. Did a few trips back to Colombia and after a trip in 2018 thought, well, maybe I can do something different here. And in 2019, I did my first angel investment in a company in Latin America in Colombia. And then one thing led to another.
pandemic and a bunch of other stuff. And I end up investing in like 30 companies. And then about three years ago launched a proof of concept fund one called Numundo Ventures to invest more professionally in backing founders, primarily from Latin America. But that's that's the super abbreviated version of the story.
I love it. I love how you, you know, s had your startup experience, then got into investing and then launched a fun. I mean, what a great trajectory. You've really seen it all, which must be so helpful with the companies you work for. So tell us a little bit more about Namundo, like and why you're focusing on Latin America and your investment philosophy and those kind of things. It sounds super interesting.
Yeah, you know, there there's a lot of discussion or with founders around this idea of founder market fit, right? Yes. And, you know, why is it that you are best positioned to build a company? And I feel what I'm doing, you know, I'm a essentially a founder, right? This is a I'm not spinning out of some big group. I don't have a huge fund to begin with. This is a startup, right? And so for me, first I'll talk about the opportunity. There have been multiple generations of startups in Latin America. I would argue that Latin America, just to make this relevant for the folks here in the US, to me, it's like Silicon Valley of the 1970s, right? Oh. So So, you know, there was a generation before in the US, let's say in the VC world, but there was like the you know the
Early semiconductor companies, Fairchild semiconductor, and so on. They have exits, then they form the next set of companies. And by the time you get to the late 70s, you've got Steve Jobs, you've got Bill Gates, you've got all these folks, but it's still a very small community, right? You could probably put all of those founders in a bunch of restaurants in downtown Palo Alto, all the VCs and pretty much have that community.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Ivan Montoya and how did his career lead to founding NuMundo Ventures?
0:01–4:09
2
What is NuMundo Ventures’ investment thesis and why focus on Latin American founders?
4:09–8:27
3
How does NuMundo’s hands‑on approach differ from traditional VC support for pre‑seed startups?
8:27–12:09
4
What are the biggest opportunities and challenges in the current Latin American startup boom?
12:09–15:08
5
How does NuMundo help founders with fundraising, pitch decks, and go‑to‑market strategy?
15:08–18:44
6
What real‑world examples illustrate NuMundo’s deep founder support (e.g., DAPTA, Cachea, One Car Now)?
18:44–23:28
7
Why does Ivan compare the founder journey to surfing and what does the ‘wave’ metaphor mean for startups?
23:28–26:23
8
What final advice does Ivan give early‑stage founders struggling to gain traction?
26:23–28:09
Speakers
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