Martim Velez recently announced his departure from his role as
director of programs for scaleups & international growth in Unicorn Factory Lisboa to start his own startup. We talked to Martim about the motivation and misconception of people about startups.
Hi Martim, could you please present yourself and your background?
— Hi, my background is already kind of long. I started in banking, from retail banking to corporate banking, corporate banking to private banking, jumping from Portugal to Poland, Romania, and then I spent quite a few years in Switzerland, where I was working in private banking. After this, I had my first entrepreneurial experience, with a non for profit type of startup, with a philanthropic twist from a set of Swiss investors, where we were creating organic seeds. After, I came back to my dear financial sector and specifically within the financial technology space, where I was immersed in innovation. Then I went back to Portugal, where I joined Unicorn Factory Lisboa, as the director of programs for scaleups and international development. Finally, a month ago, I launched my new project and now am a cofounder of a startup in the Welltech vertical.
Very interesting and why did you make a choice for Welltech?
— It’s more one of those projects that starts with friends coming together and discussing interesting topics. So in parallel with my regular job, I’ve always been a sporty person, I was also interested in how exercise influences our lives. I’ve always tried to work with my teams wherever I was living, independently of where I was working, to find a way to engage with people via physical activity. And I found that this is very interesting, because people feel really well, more engaged and better performers overall. On the other hand, the experience of the other co-founders fits like a glove into the all concept. People need engagement, community driven initiatives. Mental health is definitely a topic within corporate roles in every other company. So you need support. And the idea for us now is to provide this “wellbeing” support to companies, by proposing our tech solutions. But that’s, for now, still a secret:)
Martim, what motivated you to leave your job and start your own business?
— I think you need to have this drive for building something new, and being able to steer things from the beginning. It’s your project. Is your vision, your mission, you define it. And that’s just different from being, you know, following a given structure, right? It’s the opportunity that you have to make your own decisions, to develop your own goals. It might not work, but you need to believe that there is a future product market fit. You need to analyze the competition, see what’s working, what’s not. I always believe that it’s either you have a blue ocean and you’re making something completely new, or you’re just seeing what’s out there, and you find an angle to improve it by developing a better solution.
What do you think are misconceptions that people have about startups, creating startups, being in a startup?
— I’ve been in startups with 20 people, scaling it to 80 plus, closing seed rounds to series A, etc. And typically when people join startups, especially after some significant round was closed, they are not aware of what it takes to join a startup. You need to be very open-minded. You’re growing, and if it holds, you’re able to continue your growth. If not, it’s going to be challenging times ahead of you. It’s always a curve. It’s not new, right? And people think it’s always, you know, you have to have the best benefits, have a super high salary, and work a lot of hours. That doesn’t have to be like that, right? But you need to be aware that a startup is a company that is taking its initial steps. It might be that it goes off, and especially if it’s VC driven, it might be that you need to slow down things. On the other hand, you have the opportunity to develop new processes to really contribute to the vision, to be hands-on, to influence the product, to influence the company. And very, very rarely do you have that, so fast, in a big corporation, where you need to follow more structured processes.
What was difficult for you to transition from employee status to entrepreneur? What was new, what was difficult, what was better?
— Well, I think it’s obviously a financial risk, right? You need to find a way to maintain yourself for a few months, to deliver on your strategy and make the effort of raising some capital. Apart from that, there’s always the risk that it doesn’t work. But that’s actually also an upside. Because you are learning as you go. The faster you fail, the faster you can pivot. If you do so in three months, maybe you have the opportunity to improve, and then off you go again. So it’s really the iteration process that needs to be fast.
Why did you choose to create a startup, like a tech startup, and not, for example, a traditional business – shop or cafe?
— There’s definitely a difference between a tech startup than a traditional business, right? And, and that’s the scalability effect. Tech can scale. We can sell it here in the US, Spain, as long as the client is there. The scalability effect tends to be infinite, as long as you have the computational power. That’s the beauty of a Tech product.
Talking about Portugal and the Portuguese startup ecosystem. How would you describe it, where it will go, etc?
— There’s definitely been a big development in the Portuguese ecosystem for the last 10 years. Startup Portugal, Startup Lisboa, Unicorn Factory Lisboa had been playing a very pivotal role in getting the ecosystem out there and becoming a more internationally exposed ecosystem. That’s also a very good job of our City Council, Eng. Carlos Moedas, to “transform” Lisbon into the European Capital of Innovation, as we know today. Portugal has a very strong VC ecosystem, startups are participating in big international rounds, as we just saw with Sword Health last week. The beauty of the Portuguese Ecosystem is that it continues to scale.