EKMH Innovators Interview Series
An interview series spotlighting global tech influencers, disruptors, visionaries, and of course, innovators.
Readers, I hope this latest interview finds you and your loved ones healthy and well. Continuous gratitude to those in the medical and medtech professions. We cannot thank you enough.
Fintual, a robo-advisor backed by PayPal, BlackRock and CitiBanamex, helps people make investments based on their individual interests and backgrounds. The fintech startup was selected as the first Chilean startup to participate in the final selection round in San Francisco for the highly-prestigious Y Combinator. Last year, Fintual was recognized by Village Capital as the best Latin American fintech company.
According to the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio in an article regarding deposits made during the crisis, Fintual is one of the only funds' managers in Chile reporting deposits during March. At the end of April Fintual is co-organizing Fintech Remote Summit, a remote event designed to talk about how the Fintech industry in the region will front the world after COVID-19.
I had the pleasure to connect with Fintual CEO and Co-Founder Pedro Pineda via email to discuss a variety of topics, including the pandemic, working from home, expansion plans and career advice. Our interview follows.
EKMH: Congratulations on your recent expansion into Mexico and partnership with investment fund manager Invermerica. Please share more about Fintual’s roadmap for future growth. Into which other countries do you plan to expand?
Pedro Pineda: Our main goal is always to build a product wanted by people in Latin America. But we also want to manage USD10B from now to 5-7 years, and we're looking to achieve this by opening in other markets in the region such as Mexico, Colombia and Peru. Mexico is a large market in itself, but we also are interested in targeting Colombia and Peru due to their regulatory framework and market volume.
EKMH: In 2016 you co-founded Fintual with Agustín Feuerhake, Omar Larré, and Andrés Marinkovic. What advice do you have for building and leading successful teams?
Pedro Pineda: Embark on the journey with people who you admire (who are hopefully more intelligent than you), who are reliable and who have the abilities that you lack. We are all the average of the people around us.
Another bit of advice is choosing your battles. Don’t argue every decision. 20% is a good figure for the number of battles fought; hand over the other 80%.
EKMH: How do you engage and lead teams who are now working from home?
Pedro Pineda: I think we were the first Latin American startup working from home in the COVID-19 emergency. Since the beginning we have taken the pandemic very seriously. (And even though some people were not convinced, now they are thankful for our caution).
At Fintual there has always been the option to work remotely, so we haven't had to do anything else to engage the team. But during these times we really miss each other because our workplace environment is difficult to beat!
EKMH: Throughout your career you have been an active mentor, and then you joined the Y Combinator class YCS18. How do these experiences enrich and inform your business decisions?
Pedro Pineda: Not a lot being a mentor. I don’t feel comfortable yet saying to an entrepreneur what to do. Nevertheless, I do try to give my perspective and relate what I did when I faced similar challenges.
YC transformed my focus and way of working. We have to do things people want us to do, starting with not-scalable actions and looking for 100 client fans from our solution rather than 10,000 that barely know us. That’s one of YC’s mantras. Following this mantra has made the difference!
In order to understand my role as CEO, I need to have money in the bank and shape the culture of the company. No one else can take care of that.
EKMH: Readers can find economics and business classes via Fintual.EDU. How does your academic background as an Economics professor at the Universidad de Chile benefit you outside the classroom?
Pedro Pineda: Being a teacher helps me to organize my ideas and experiences better at Fintual; conveying both simply is always an interesting challenge. On the other hand, being simultaneously an entrepreneur and teacher forces me to be more direct and interesting in the classroom for my students.
EKMH: What led you to join the Board at Netexplo, a UNESCO global observatory? Please share a few thrilling technological and social innovations!
Pedro Pineda: The experience was an invitation from a global think tank that gathers every year at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, to talk about innovative technologies worldwide. An invitation that I couldn’t refuse!
One of the most surprising (and also disturbing) things for me at Netexplo, were some robots trying to pass an university application test in Japan. The work of a Norwegian researcher who was teaching a robot how to self-print parts of itself to overcome terrain obstacles while it moved was also fascinating.
EKMH: As a career mentor and student, having recently finished mentoring at the Stanford Ignite Program and completing a degree at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo en Universidad de Chile, why is continuing education essential?
Pedro Pineda: I feel joyful when I learn from others' lives studying History. There are so many people who have done many interesting things and sometimes we don’t even know them. Discovering them generates amazement and admiration. We have been thinking and feeling the same things for centuries and it is good to see how others have solved or coped. I think that to be creative you need to connect with very different fields of knowledge in original ways.
EKMH: Which books are on your "Must Read" list?
Pedro Pineda: A Little History of the World (Little Histories), E. H. Gombrich. You learn a lot with this, and you don’t even notice it. It’s a jewel!
Decisive Moments in History, Stefan Zweig. Any book by him is highly recommended.
Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman. It helps you to understand human behaviour with hard and replicable data.
The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair, Joel Dicker. To be amused.
I also recommend anything written by Christopher Hitchens, one of the best argumentative thinkers ever born.
Lastly, I have a blog where I summarize what I read. I started writing summaries because my friends always asked me for book recommendations and I often forget what I read.