Venture Everywhere Podcast: Amanda Jacobson with Scott Hartley
Amanda Jacobson, CRO of Radar, chats with Scott Hartley, co-founder and managing partner of Everywhere Ventures on episode 49: Staying On Radar.
Listen on Apple & Spotify!
Episode 49 of Venture Everywhere is hosted by Scott Harley, Co-founder and managing director of Everywhere VC. He chats with Amanda Jacobson, CRO of Radar, an enterprise-focused CFO suite offering treasury management services that specialize in payment reconciliation, disbursement, and collections in LatAm. Amanda shares her journey as a startup leader and experiences in social enterprise, fintech, and operations across markets in Mexico and Chile. Amanda also discussed fintech's evolution in LatAm and how Radar is solving complex financial reconciliation issues for enterprises.
In this episode, you will hear:
Radar’s suite of products focused on treasury management and financial operations.
Success with clients like GNP and challenges of complex data reconciliation.
Regulatory and systemic risks in emerging markets like Mexico and Chile.
Achieving product-market fit and adapting to market differences.
Listening to clients and adapting Radar’s offerings for specific reconciliation needs.
Collaboration with established financial institutions to manage risk and drive innovation in fintech.
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere Podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:22 Scott: Hi, everybody. I'm Scott Hartley, co-founder and managing partner of Everywhere Ventures. And I'm super excited to be here today with Amanda Jacobson, who's the CRO of Radar, which is an enterprise-focused CFO suite, revenue reconciliation, all things finance-related based out of Santiago, Chile and Mexico City. Amanda, welcome to the podcast.
00:00:45 Amanda: Thank you so much for having me here, Scott.
00:00:47 Scott: Amazing. So first question, how did you end up in Mexico City? You're living the dream, building a startup in Mexico City. I know you grew up in Los Angeles, I believe, went to college in the US, and then, I know found your way into the president of being the salsa club, and then found your way into LatAm, and suddenly a decade later, you're running a company in Mexico City. Tell us a little bit about that journey getting into this world. I think you're living a lifestyle that a lot of people dream of.
00:01:12 Amanda: Yeah, thank you. And I am, really am, and I appreciate it. So my background, as you mentioned, from LA, I studied business and psychology, double major undergrad at Emory University. And basically when you study business, at least in the US, your options are either working in a consulting firm, working in Wall Street or being an accountant.
00:01:32 Amanda: I was terrible with accounting. Wall Street lifestyle didn't sound right. And I couldn't get into any of the consulting firms that really excited me. So I was really lucky that there were mentors in social enterprise at Emory. And they dedicated time and they helped me find a fellowship in social enterprise. So basically for-profit business for good in India.
00:01:52 Amanda: So straight out of college, I went to Mumbai for six months, learned crash course, the VC perspective, traveling around the country, doing pipeline development, really just being a call center to call up startups and tell them to apply to this program, but I learned a ton in that six months.
00:02:09 Amanda: Also felt like I didn't connect squarely with the culture in India as I would with LatAm or the US where I grew up and where I have a much stronger network. So I decided to come back to US but really, inspired to learn more about the startup world. Struggled like none other to find a job. Applied literally to 100 jobs.
00:02:29 Amanda: Google would fly me out, Deloitte would fly me out, no one would hire me. So I started doing any gig economy job that you could do as a millennial. So, drove for Lyft, drove for Sidecar. My car was too old for Uber. oDesk, before it was called oDesk, just all that stuff you could do.
00:02:44 Amanda: And I was lucky to be connected through my university college center or the career center with Village Capital, which was an accelerator and VC fund focused on social enterprise, doing a program for health entrepreneurs in Boston. And basically they gave me part-time work to move to Boston and buy pizza for entrepreneurs, really just crash course learning.
00:03:06 Amanda: I already did the pipeline side, now learning more on the workshop side and how to work with entrepreneurs, mentors, how the world all fits together. And I worked hard, I paid attention just as the entrepreneurs would in all the lessons, I learned a ton. And at that time, they got their first sponsorship to launch Mexico.
00:03:22 Amanda: So I applied internally and I had good enough Spanish. So they gave me an opportunity when I was just 23 to launch their operations in Mexico. Did our first program in 2014 for financial inclusion entrepreneurs, fintech companies like Billpocket, which was acquired by Kushki, probably the best known one.
00:03:42 Amanda: And from there, they just gave me the opportunity to continue to build. So found new opportunities within the company, started doing business development in the sense of getting new sponsors for the program, really. Expanded from Mexico to Colombia, Argentina, Chile at that time, after, it was a bit more stable.
00:03:59 Amanda: There's a bank called Compartamos Banco. It's the largest microfinance institution in Latin America. They invited me to come run their VC fund. So for me, it was from doing this little pipeline stuff in India to doing workshops in Boston and really building my way, couldn't say no. It was amazing opportunity. It had a portfolio of nine companies in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil.
00:04:21 Amanda: And after a couple of years, I got that itch of, how am I going to be a world-class investor if I have no experience operating? I really want to get my hands more dirty. So I met Vilash and Gabo, the co-founders of Oyster, which is a neo-bank for SMBs in Mexico. They were previously the co-founders of Clip, like the square reader of Mexico.
00:04:43 Amanda: So amazing opportunity to work with really seasoned professionals, global perspective. I became chief of staff at Oyster. We grew the company to almost a hundred thousand clients. Acquired by Yaydoo, which was acquired by Paystand, and jumped out, did a sabbatical. Well, I was stealing the mic too much, but that's how I got into Radar. Yeah.
00:05:05 Scott: Amazing. It reminds me a lot of my graduation speech from undergrad was the Steve Jobs talk where he talked about, “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” But one of the other lines in that talk was about how the dots don't make sense going forward, but they often only connect going backwards. And it's interesting to look back at my own career or any of our careers and connect the dots backwards and they start to make sense.
00:05:25 Scott: But certainly going forwards, it's not always clairvoyance and going in a uniformly singular direction. But tell us now where you are with Radar, obviously on the heels of Oyster and the acquisition, I guess the observations about the changes in the fintech ecosystem in LatAm and what was maybe missing and how you got together with the founders of Radar to build what you guys are doing now.
00:05:49 Amanda: Yeah. So many things just came together at the right time. I guess to start with how I met my co-founders, I left Oyster after it was acquired, went on my little sabbatical, traveled Europe, backpacking the whole thing, because it just sounds like that's what you should do.
00:06:04 Amanda: And I was thinking, like, “Do I wanna stay in fintech? Do I wanna address other problems?” There's so many interesting things in health and climate and AI. Where do I wanna dedicate this next stage in my career? And in Barcelona, I went to the Picasso Museum and it's very cool because it's all Picasso from his first little drawing in a pub when he was 13 to doing squiggles when he's 90.
00:06:26 Amanda: And you could realize when you stay and do one thing and stay focused for so long, he was just doing art all his life more and more and more. And he was able to make such a big impact in the art world. And that inspired me that, what I've been doing the last 10 years is fintech in LatAm. Why move things? If I know what I'm doing and I'm building a network and I'm learning so much, go deeper. This is how you really make change.
00:06:50 Amanda: So I was interested in starting something in fintech. Hayden at Rally Cap, another VC fund, had recently made an angel investment or a seed investment in Radar. I spoke with Hayden, understanding what is he seeing in the pre-seed stage? If there's any companies that would make sense for me to join as a co-founder.
00:07:08 Amanda: Introduced me to the Radar co-founders, my three co-founders, Gabo, Herbert, Rafa. And they had already launched a product in payouts. And coming from my background, being in fintech, that was a really exciting space being with a company that already has revenues, super focused.
00:07:25 Amanda: Everybody on the team had experience, either on the corporate side, understanding the enterprise needs or having built startups before, scaling products, amazing team. Just like all those with my investor hat, it was all these little elements of what I would look for as an investor were there. And this sounds like an amazing place where I could also compliment the team, bring in a lot of my skills on the commercial side from Oyster.
00:07:48 Amanda: Also, bring in all my knowledge and my network from Mexico being that my co-founders are all in Chile. They were ready to expand to Mexico. So it all kind of came together. They invited me to their team retreat in Chile, basically locked ourselves in a house for 10 days. Amazing opportunity, like reality show to get to know everybody.
00:08:05 Amanda: But that's how you really get to know people. When you're with them 24 hours a day, you get into the really interesting conversations like why are we here and what are we really building? What's everybody's motives and what are people excited about? And so really jived in terms of values.
00:08:20 Amanda: But then you also asked a bit product side and why this product and why get into the treasury management suite and the financial operations suite, what I've seen in Latin America being that often in technology, we can be 10, 20 years behind other more developed markets like the US or Europe and many things.
00:08:38 Amanda: When I look back at the history, for example, of Compartamos Banco, where I used to work, this story, they were founded in 1990. They started giving out microloans and these microloans were given out on checks sent by fax machines that were in lock boxes because their biggest asset was a fax machine.
00:08:56 Amanda: And you fast forward to today, we've been able to jump from physical payments in cash and check to digital payments. We've been able to improve a lot in how data moves behind that. What kind of data are you understanding? The tax IDs, the movement IDs, different transactional data behind that money. But now there's this huge gap in what you do with all that data.
00:09:17 Amanda: So then you come into these corporations that have gone through digital transformation, and now they have so many different digital channels to acquire clients, to acquire payments, to do innovative things in how they're funding different payments with different kinds of loans.
00:09:31 Amanda: They have this world of data, but they really don't know their cash flows. They don't know where the money is today. So that's where the team we grew from just doing payouts in Chile to moving towards a financial operations automation suite, now doing products like automated reconciliation.
00:09:48 Scott: It's amazing. A couple of things resonated with what you said there. First of all, shout out to Hayden and Kyane at Rally Cap. We love those guys and do a lot of different emerging market fintech investing with them. But to your point of staying on the path and committing to one thing and doing it repeatedly over a long period of time, there's a great 2004 graduation speech by a Finnish photographer, this guy named Arno Minkkinen.
00:10:11 Scott: And he talks about this concept of the Helsinki bus theory, where all the buses in Helsinki originate from one bus station. And then for the first number of stops, they go to the same places. And then only if you stay on the bus for long enough, does one go to the mountain and one goes to the countryside and one goes to the ocean, but you have to stay on the bus long enough to actually know the differences and where it goes.
00:10:32 Scott: And what so many people, I think make the mistake of, is they get on one bus and then they hop off and they get on another bus and they hop off. And the truth is the first 10 stops are all the same, no matter what bus you're on. And so I love that concept of really doubling down on the expertise that you had developed, diving deep into fintech and specifically in LatAm.
00:10:49 Scott: And I think obviously you guys are only on the precipice now of building what can be a really formative, huge company in Radar. And to talk a little bit about that big data problem, we see this across a number of different industries, but big data is one thing to collect it, but then to know which elements of data to pay attention to is actually a pretty human led endeavor, right?
00:11:10 Scott: It takes some core expertise of a CFO to say, well, out of all this data we collected, here are the five signals that stand out from the noise. So as you guys built the team, it's one thing to be a big data company, but how do you figure out on the product side what signals to pay attention to or how to build product, how to prioritize certain things? Is it interviewing a lot of CFOs or how have you guys gone through that product discovery process?
00:11:34 Amanda: Exactly. It's all starting from what the need is and not jumping ahead of ourselves on the technology and how exciting AI and all these different things that we could apply, but really understanding what are the clients saying that they need, enter through that door. And once we have the door open, there's a world of different, really interesting things we could do.
00:11:51 Amanda: I think that's the interesting moment we are in LatAm right now, that everybody with different kinds of plays, we all just wanna know cash flows. We wanna know SMB cash flows, enterprise cash flows. We wanna know where the money is. And so some people are coming in through payments because they wanna see where the money's moving. Others go in through loans, thinking that if loans are the biggest needs, then I could build trust and build out the suite.
00:12:12 Amanda: Where we're coming with our enterprise clients is that our businesses say, we have complicated systems, we have SAP, we have all these different kinds of tools already implemented. There's these huge sunk costs. We don't want to reinvent the wheel, but we have gaps that there's all these different band-aids that we need to put in different parts of the product or of their workflow.
00:12:33 Amanda: So what we do is we come in with our clients and for example, with the reconciliation product. One of the biggest problems that we solve, for example, right now we're working with GNP, it's Mexico's largest insurer. They have $5 billion in policies, in primes, and they have like 12% of the market, huge company. And one of the biggest problems is that they have very extensive channels. They work with tons of brokers.
00:12:57 Amanda: And the reports that go from these brokers about the policies sold to the company to be able to actually apply from an order to an actual policy that's been activated so that when the client calls, they have a policy to actually act on or to use, there's a huge gap in that chain of information.
00:13:16 Amanda: So we've started with that specific data point of understanding, where is the money, why is it where it is, and understanding the mapping of all the very complex small cases that could exist. For example, a client makes a partial payment. They needed to pay 100 pesos and they made two payments of 50, but they paid 50 pesos and then 60 pesos. It doesn't even match up. Maybe their user or their ID that they put in the reference isn't correct, or they made a typo.
00:13:43 Amanda: In Mexico, it's the actual policyholder that needs to make the payment. What if their dad or their husband paid? So then you come into all these edge cases that make the process really manual. And so what it looks like today with this reconciliation between insurers and their brokers, there's an army, a whole floor full of people who are manually receiving emails, looking at one system, looking at another, putting it into Google Sheets, putting it into other systems, and understanding where is the money today.
00:14:12 Amanda: The problem is that, that means that sometimes clients are marked not as paid when they should have paid or problem for the company, they're marked as paid when they haven't paid, so they're not optimizing their collections. And that just becomes a whole chain of different problems with auditing, with cash flows, with understanding where their money is.
00:14:30 Amanda: So the data that we’re really starting with is all of that reporting that happens between a broker and an insurer to be able to understand where the money is and make sure that the clients get their policies applied correctly.
00:14:43 Scott: It's such a, you think about a basic challenge, but so it's one that we even face internally as a fund, right? Accounts receivable, accounts payable, reconciliation at the end of the month or the end of the quarter or the end of the year. And as you guys have processed, I think it's around 600 million across about 5 million transactions. Is that roughly on the payout side?
00:15:04 Amanda: A little more now, but yeah, By the end of the year, I'm sure we'll hit a billion.
00:15:08 Scott: A billion. Yeah, just the sheer scale of payment volumes. And this obviously speaks to the need, again, back to big data and the attribution and how you guys apply that within the company. Have you seen over your last five, 10 years in this space, in this market, in LatAm? What are the things that have changed or what are the infrastructure layers that you guys now rely on that maybe weren't there five, 10 years ago?
00:15:31 Scott: And then obviously you guys yourselves are building a core infrastructure layer that allows other businesses to level up within the ecosystem. But what have been some of your observations over this last decade in LatAm Fintech?
00:15:44 Amanda: Yeah, I think that a lot of innovation has happened on the B2C side where you're getting better products, more specific to more specific markets, better ways to do underwriting, better ways to avoid fraud. But enterprise clients have been very ignored.
00:15:59 Amanda: I think that where we've improved a lot of the way that money moves on the B2C side, just now you're starting to see more complex use cases in terms of how can software help, in our case, reconcile, or how it can help you build reports, make better projections, make better investments, understand markets.
00:16:19 Amanda: All that is still on this new wave of technology that's coming and an emerging CFO suite. In the US and Europe, I see a lot, talking about the CFO suite of solutions for treasurers, accountants, financial planning. None of that exists here. I can count on two hands all the startups that I know that actually do something for CFOs in Mexico.
00:16:39 Scott: Yeah, even in the US, I mean, until a few years ago around the emergence of more financial planning and analysis and forward forecasting. I feel like there were a lot of expense management tools and adjacent CFO suite tools, but not so much on the projections or the real-time analytics around the pure, simple question of where is my cash right now, today? What's my balance and what's my burn and where am I going as a business?
00:17:03 Scott: But as you kind of allude to, it's a rather complex solution to build this out. So as you're thinking about one question as putting your investor hat back on and as now a CRO at a high growth startup, one of the points of feedback that we often receive investing in emerging markets, quote unquote, like Mexico or across LatAm or the world is how do you guys think about regulatory risk or currency risk or geo exposure risk?
00:17:29 Scott: Are there any elements that you, guys, keep you up at night around the Mexican fintech regulatory ecosystem or elections or anything on those fronts? Because those are typically the questions that we receive from pure investors of, wow, if you guys are investing in Mexico or Chile or wherever, how do you guys think about systemic risk from the underlying ecosystem?
00:17:50 Amanda: Yeah, I think that this is where, another trend is the really exciting wave of new tools in terms of fraud, in terms of understanding how to better measure data, track data, understand when there's abnormal patterns. For us, it's been super important to work really closely with our bank partners to be able to be on top of these trends.
00:18:12 Amanda: So understanding what are their compliance risks, what are their concerns, and being able to match that on our side so that our operations are completely aligned and making sure that nobody gets any surprises because they want us to be successful, which I think is one of the interesting things often you see head to head, the banks versus the fintechs.
00:18:30 Amanda: The banks are making money off of us. And I think that that's like this new wave also of fintech companies that are collaborating better with banks. Our banking partners in Chile, BCI, Security, Itaú, the more transactions we have, the more money they make. But on all sides of this, they're more regulated than us and we can't give them that kind of risk. So we need to make sure that we're using all the right tools and we have all the right internal operations to cover those different risks.
00:18:54 Scott: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, on that point, do you have any advice or how can fintech startups, peers to Radar and established financial institutions better collaborate? Or do you think that there's more opportunity for this collaboration around innovation and inclusion in emerging markets?
00:19:11 Amanda: I think the financial inclusion is a super interesting piece and happy to dive into that, but in terms of the collaboration between corporates or fintechs and financial institutions, to me, it's been very clear that the most successful cases have been when the bank or the financial institution is the one who is reliable, trusted by the client, trusted by the government, has the license. Basically, they de-risk. And the innovator, the startup is the one who can move fast, try new things, and add risk.
00:19:43 Amanda: So being able to separate these two different incentives so that a startup can move at the pace that we need to try new things and experiment, while the bank could kind of put on the brakes and tell us when something's maybe not safe enough or maybe not ready to expand. Maybe we need to start in a smaller pilot and see what the data comes out of.
00:20:00 Amanda: And there you see really exciting examples. Like in Mexico, there's been a ton of acquisitions where Ualá acquired Apollo Multiple, Fondeadora with ABC; on the investment side, Fintual con Capitalize, where you could see that the license is coming together with the technology or staying separate, like Rappi having their Rappi Card backed by Banorte.
00:20:21 Amanda: So to me, that's the perfect balance where you have Banorte, the clients could say, “I don't know if I trust Rappi, it's a startup. I've never heard of it before. My parents didn't use that, but Banorte, I trust them.” You get over that trust barrier, both for the regulators and the clients, but in terms of the actual user experience and what we're bringing to the table, a player like Rappi can move way faster and bring a better product.
00:20:43 Scott: Yeah, absolutely. It's true not just in emerging markets, but in the US and established markets equally, I think. You know, going back to products and implementation with some of your larger enterprise clients, as you guys gear up into larger LatAm venture capital rounds, moving into bigger enterprise type of clients, like the one you mentioned in insurance, are there any success stories or any anecdotes you can tell about when you really knew, “Oh my gosh, we're hitting product market fit” or we're really building the product that the clients love when they give us this feedback.
00:21:15 Amanda: Yeah, I think that's a great case. Another case we're working with, ControlExpert, which is a company basically became a unicorn, was acquired by Grupo Allianz, the Allianz Insurance Group, global insurer. And one of the problems that we found with them is that in this B2B reconciliation case, so ControlExpert sells technology products to other insurance companies.
00:21:40 Amanda: And because it's B2B, the way that they negotiate with each of their clients could be very complex with different sets of rules. Maybe with one insurer, they pay them for every incident and every time they use the technology. With another one, maybe it's monthly. With another one, it could be something even more creative.
00:21:57 Amanda: And so what we found is that we could map all the complexity of all the different groups of rules for different kinds of deals that they make with their clients and make sure that they're never missing a peso, that if, when their clients ask, “Have I paid up? Can you sign here on paper that I owe you no debts?”
00:22:16 Amanda: They could be completely certain that they've charged everything or they could audit their history and see in the last two years who actually hasn't paid and make sure that more money is coming into the bank.
00:22:26 Scott: Yeah, makes sense. With all businesses as you guys can market, were there any naysayers? I'm sure that there were, or folks that you fundamentally disagreed with. I think one of the big markers to me of big opportunities and the right timing is to be contrarian and right. And so obviously to be contrarian, you've got to disagree with consensus or with the status quo of what's out there.
00:22:48 Scott: As you guys started building Radar, what were the pushbacks that you received from investors or what were the commonly established norms or ideas that you guys were disagreeing with to go build this company?
00:23:01 Amanda: Yeah, it's an interesting question because the examples that come to my mind, more than being contrarian, I think that we're really good listeners. I think that we've been able to learn a lot about, I mean, just of quick history of Radar. We launched payouts first in Chile.
00:23:18 Amanda: A lot of investors were concerned that that was a transactional product, that it didn't have other aspects that, no moat, that it would be very easy for the margins to go down. And in the short term, it's been an amazing business and none of that has been validated yet, but we understand that in the long term, those are real concerns.
00:23:34 Amanda: And that's where we went in and spoke with our clients and understood, Beyond these payouts, what other problems do you have? Reconciliation. So we go to Mexico and we start understanding, speaking with potential clients. Is there a problem in payouts? Is there a problem in reconciliation?
00:23:49 Amanda: And we learned that there's a huge difference in the payments ecosystem in a larger market like Mexico versus a smaller market like Chile. Or just the way that people are connected or companies are connected directly to banks, directly to intermediaries like a dLocal or an EBANX.
00:24:07 Amanda: The entire ecosystem is different. It didn't make sense for us to launch payouts first in Mexico. So we kept payouts strong in Chile and the first product we launched in Mexico was conciliation. Then again, speaking with a lot of mentors, investors, one of the things that came to head was, “We're an early stage startup. We can't do reconciliation for everybody.”
00:24:26 Amanda: Yeah, enterprise is a really big category. There's a difference between enterprise and middle market. Where is our focus? Which niche do we want to get into? Just the balance of how do you focus on something that's niche while making it scalable and applicable to other sectors? And that's where speaking with clients and validating with the market, we found that there's a huge opportunity in insurance companies.
00:24:47 Amanda: Even with only 160 insurance companies between Mexico and Chile, that's a multimillion dollar opportunity. From there, we could grow into insurance companies. In other countries, we grow into other similar sectors like hospitals, clinics, even on the auto side, brokers, becomes this huge ecosystem around this first use case.
00:25:08 Amanda: So we're finding that the more that we focus, we're able to break into that niche and then build on top of it. And that's all from different advice that we've heard along the way.
00:25:18 Scott: Yeah, it's so tricky with these go-to-markets to think about your cross-country, cross-regulatory environment, cross-sector potentially, cross-product line and feeling out in the market. Where do we focus on a particular go-to-market, with product versus industry? And I think where you guys have landed obviously is with two core products, but then enabling that to scale across industries in a country like Mexico, which is obviously an enormous market.
00:25:44 Scott: Do you see in any sort of short run the ability to expand into other Latin countries, or do you feel like Chile and Mexico for the time being is, sufficiently large to stay focused?
00:25:55 Amanda: From here to the series A, we really want to stay focused. With just two markets, there's a ton we could do. And maybe at a quick high level, you hear 160 companies and it doesn't sound like a lot, but when you think of the enterprise case, there's so much depth and upsell that we could do with each of these clients in terms of increasing the ticket, understanding their needs, working with their ecosystem of providers.
00:26:16 Amanda: So it's not just the insurance, but there's their counterpart on the broker side, their counterpart on the medical side. And how do we really penetrate that entire system? I think that if we could prove that we have the sales machine to acquire these clients, sell multiple products, move into Mexico and Chile, and have the upsell with just those clients, we'll be very successful in the short term.
00:26:41 Amanda: And then we'll definitely look into other markets. And that's the beauty of the reconciliation side is that the only thing that really changes is what do you call an invoice? Do you use commas or do you use dots?
00:26:52 Amanda: Reconciliation is a universal challenge, even though we're focusing on more of the mid-market and enterprise side, is the same problem for SMBs. It's the same problem in Asia. And so that's where we see that across emerging markets, this is the tool that doesn't exist, but that could be quickly applicable across markets in the long term.
00:27:10 Scott: Amazing. Well, as we shift gears here to the lightning round, the speed round, I want to ask you, do you have in your roles over the last years, do you have a superpower or the thing that you are most known for? What would that be?
00:27:24 Amanda: One thing that I've really discovered about myself working with my co-founders at Radar is that one of my superpowers is being superstructured. I'm very good at explaining to my team— What are we focusing on, what are the objectives?, aligning teams across objectives and using that to be able to empower people.
00:27:41 Scott: Yeah, that's an amazing one. One that we all could use a little more of. So is there a book that you're reading or a podcast you're currently enjoying?
00:27:50 Amanda: Yeah, I think especially anybody who's interested in the business market in Mexico, Whitepaper. They're a news outlet, but they also have a really great podcast. And it's interesting because they go into deep, well-investigated case studies about some startups, but also about a lot of traditional businesses in Mexico to understand how businesses have evolved over time here.
00:28:13 Scott: That's fascinating. So if you could live anywhere else in the world, not Mexico City, because we know that it's awesome, where would that be? Where would you choose to live?
00:28:22 Amanda: Trick answer, because I love Latin America, but I'd be really interested in Brazil, being that it's part of Latin America. There's a lot in common, but it's such a different world. And also as somebody in business, I'd love to live there and be able to understand the problems, what's the same, what's different.
00:28:37 Scott: Yeah. It's people often joke that startups that originate in Brazil, they go to Mexico to die or vice versa because–
00:28:43 Amanda: Exactly.
00:28:44 Scott: They're seen to be adjacent, but they're actually so fundamentally different and culturally different and all those things. So I think it counts as another place you could live. Do you have a favorite productivity hack or something that you do as part of the superpower in the way that you structure your day, the way that you structure how you work with your teams? What's one of those go-to productivity hacks?
00:29:04 Amanda: Yeah. I'm super strict about time blocking. My Google calendar is just completely booked with different tasks and activities. And that helps me make sure that I don't push anything off, that I don't forget anything. If something's important, it's in my calendar. And if I can't do it today, I find exactly what day, at what time I'm going to be able to get to it.
00:29:23 Scott: Amazing. And where can listeners find you?
00:29:25 Amanda: On LinkedIn, Amanda Jacobson. I'm probably the only Amanda Jacobson in Latin America, maybe at least in Mexico, but I'd love to connect with your listeners. Thank you so much.
00:29:35 Scott: I love it. Well, I'm really looking forward to seeing you in person in Mexico City in a couple of weeks. We'll all be down there for Mexico Tech Week. That's the end of October and excited to spend some time in person. And thank you so much for sharing your journey and a little bit about Radar with the Venture Everywhere podcast.
00:29:53 Amanda: Yeah, thank you so much.
00:29:56 Scott: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We're a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators, and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we'll catch you on the next episode.