Learning Machine

Ever since Hi Ventures wrote its first check to back Jimena Pardo in 2012, we’ve invested in entrepreneurs at different stages of their careers.

In our perspective, most experienced founders have an edge over their younger peers in the short term. Particularly when it’s a relevant experience. Think of the former financial services operator building a fintech or former Meta sales VP building an adtech platform.

That edge, over time, disappears.

Over time, the new information yielded by operating a new startup outweighs the old information of any previous experience. More, I would argue that experience can even be seen as a liability for a first time founder. 

We’ve seen many young and inexperienced founder learn faster and more not because they’re smarter but because they knows they needs to learn everything about a problem and an industry.

An emptier hard drive can process new information better and faster.

Some would argue that experience is not only about having information or sector and function intuition. Work experience in high performance environments also help professionals better react in the face of a crisis or high stakes. 

Yes, but that can also be learned.

At the end of the day, the capacity to learn, adapt and grow is what matters. Andrea Campos dropped out of college to start Yana . Deepak Chhugani had only a couple of years of banking experience when he started Lobby, now Nuvocargo . Today, Andrea is one of the best product CEOs in the region and Deepak leads one of the most promising logistics startups. 

Today, it doesn’t matter how young they started.

For investors, this makes our job finding the next Cornershop or Nubank more interesting… and also harder. We don’t really need to project how technology, how consumers or how industries will evolve in the future. We need to project how human leaders will evolve as leaders.

For founders, whether you started in your fifties or dropped out of college to build in tech, you need to be a learning machine. How much experience you bring to a startup is irrelevant as long as you learn faster than the rest.

Be a learning machine.