Interview with Linda Rottenberg, Endeavor's CEO and cofounder


GeraçãoE - What do you think are the potential fields for entrepreneurs in Brazil?
GeraçãoE - What do you think are the potential fields for entrepreneurs in Brazil?
Linda Rottenberg - What I love about Brazil is that it is such a melting pot—you see that reflected in both its entrepreneurial ecosystem and Endeavor Brazil’s own company portfolio. We select and support high-impact entrepreneurs with the potential to create the most revenue-generating, job-creating, growth-projecting businesses, which we find across all fields, both the ultra-traditional and the hyper-new. Endeavor Brazil has taken on every kind of company from Sieve, an innovative price and data intelligence tool, to Toys Talk, a developer of high-tech educational toys for kids (and grownups!), to TecVerde, a manufacturer of eco-friendly homes. Endeavor Brazil’s entrepreneurs are tackling issues that others won’t, like inadequate healthcare and insurance, which is perhaps why we find so many innovative medical companies in our portfolio. The latest such company to join is Dr.consulta which, in just four years, has treated 200,000 low-income patients in its high-quality yet affordable clinics.
With Brazil’s recent economic slowdown, many were predicting an equal hit to its entrepreneurial sector, but we have simply not found that to be the case. I often say that when economies turn down, entrepreneurs turn up! By their very nature, entrepreneurs see opportunities where others see obstacles, challenges where others see constraints, and possibilities where others see problems—that is why they are a country’s best hope for sustainable job creation and economic growth.
GE - What are the difficulties any entrepreneurs faces along the career?
Linda - I wrote my book, Crazy Is A Compliment: The Power of Zigging When Everyone Else Zags (coming out in Portuguese this November!) to address the difficulties that I have seen entrepreneurs face time and again in growing their businesses. I divide the entrepreneur’s journey into three stages: getting going, going big and going home.
The first and most critical problem occurs even before launching the business: Many entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs fail to give themselves permission to even go ahead with their crazy idea. They seek the approval of everyone else—family, friends, investors, therapists—when all they really need is their own. Had Leila Velez and her sister-in-law Zica, two of our most successful Endeavor Brazil Entrepreneurs, listened to the naysayers, their multimillion-dollar “hair clinics” for underserved women, which everyone said was doomed from the start, would never have taken off (and Brazil would have thousands of fewer jobs today!).
The difficulties encountered in the second phase – going big – require a tricky balance of focus and flexibility to navigate. This is the scale-up phase that Endeavor specializes in. My team and I often have to counsel our overzealous entrepreneurs to “close doors” and fight the temptation to go after the next “new, new thing.” Oftentimes, rather than seeking big solutions to big problems, the savviest entrepreneurs achieve success through “minnovations”– mini innovations that involve small pivots and incremental changes.
The difficulties that entrepreneurs face unfortunately do not end once their careers take off. Often the toughest lesson for ambitious entrepreneurs to learn is when to take a step back and break from the office. In lieu of the popular saying nowadays to “go big or go home,” I urge my colleagues to go big and go home, refusing to see the two as mutually exclusive. Beyond work-life balance, I seek work-life integration, which means putting out those family photos and talking about your kids freely at the office!
GE - How is Endeavor helping entrepreneurs in Brazil?
Linda - In the decade since it launched, Endeavor Brazil has helped over 150 high-impact entrepreneurs scale their businesses by providing the full suite of services that define the Endeavor Entrepreneur experience: access to mentors, advisors, talent, networks and smart capital. The power of Endeavor and the reason it is such a sustainable model for growth is that all the resources we provide reinforce and amplify each other. For example, our entrepreneurs are all given advisory boards when they first join with board members who mentor and occasionally invest in them, helping them to grow so that they too can become role models, mentors, investors and philanthropists to the next generation of entrepreneurs. Through this “multiplier effect,” a few high-impact entrepreneurs have the potential to shape entire ecosystems. The “magic of Endeavor” comes from picking entrepreneurs who have the mindset to not only grow BIG companies but also to give back to their communities and the world.
At our latest International Selection Panel (ISP), we welcomed into our network a brilliant Brazilian software integration platform called Zup, which has already received investments from the biggest ecommerce titans in Brazil and Argentina—who also happen to be members of the Endeavor Network. Romero Rodrigues of Buscape serves on the board of Endeavor Brazil while Hernan Kazah, cofounder of Mercado Libre and KaszeK Ventures, began as an Endeavor Entrepreneur and now serves as a mentor and frequent ISP panelist. Additionally, Hernan’s cofounder at KaszeK, Nico Szekazy, served as CFO of Mercado Libre before joining the Endeavor Global Board of Directors. This is a great example of successful entrepreneurs paying it forward to develop an even more robust entrepreneurial ecosystem in a region that Silicon Valley firms once scoffed at.
These cross-border networks and collaborations are transforming not just the ecommerce industry in Latin America, but a host of industries – high-tech and low-tech – across all 23 countries where Endeavor operates. By emphasizing a culture of give back, we are able to multiply our impact while empowering our entrepreneurs.
Perhaps no one embodies this culture more than Wilson Poit who has given back to the Network and to Brazil in a number of ways. With support, advice and introductions from Endeavor, Poit was able to scale and sell his energy company for $220 million. Since then he has given, in his words, “not only money but also my time and my story” to inspire other entrepreneurs to achieve similar levels of success, demonstrating the role model effect that we at Endeavor believe so strongly in.
GE - Some people are afraid of failing. What do you have to say about that?
Linda - Whenever you talk about starting a new business, people’s initial response is often to dish out the high failure rates of startups: Twenty percent don’t’ survive their first year and half don’t make it past 5 years. But business closure does not have to mean “failure”! What these statistics conceal is how many lessons were learned and secondary businesses formed as a result of these early setbacks. For example, two of Endeavor Brazil’s most impressive entrepreneurs, Mario Chady and Eduardo Ourivio, initially ran a conventional fine dining restaurant that flopped; but that gave them the restaurant experience and idea to found Spoleto, a now wildly popular fast-causal food chain with an unprecedented 3,200% job growth over the last 10 years! Wilson Poit also started two businesses that failed before he launched Poit Energia. What these examples illustrate is that failure is ultimately a matter of perception.
If anything, companies today need to encourage more “failure” as a way to motivate their employees to take more creative risks. One of my favorite executive strategies comes from Ratan Tata, India’s iconic business mogul, who awarded his employees prizes for the “best failed idea.” Tata saw failure as a “gold mine” of innovation rather than the sink pit of ambition it is usually chalked up to be.
GE - What is necessary to get ready to leave things behind, like a safe job, and bet at the dreams?
Linda - The central problem that I wrestle with in my book is how to take risks without risking it all or, put differently, how to “de-risk risk,” because entrepreneurship is after all an objectively risky business. It is predicated on undertaking something new, which inevitably means uncertainty and vulnerability. And yet the best entrepreneurs are not risk maximizers; they are risk minimizers!
Given the inherent uncertainty of a new venture, I recommend that entrepreneurs avoid unsettling the rest of their lives along with it. We think of entrepreneurs as swashbuckling mavericks who throw caution to the wind in blind pursuit of their vision, but the best of them, like Richard Branson of the Virgin empire, favor “contained disasters.” Many of our Brazilian entrepreneurs understand this, choosing to conservatively finance their growth by bringing investors in early and making sure they have a scalable business model in place before rapidly expanding.
Entrepreneurs can also be people working inside companies who launch new projects or innovative ideas. Some people call them “intrapreneurs,” but I find that word clunky and prefer to call them “skunks” – in part a reference to Lockheed Martin’s “Skunkworks” project, which furtively built fighter jets in the 1950s, and in part because corporate innovators by their very nature stink up the joint!
In seriousness, my friend Michael Dell told me that there are only two types of employees today: the quick and the dead. To be the former you must assume some measure of risk, but the greater risk is in fact to do nothing and risk being left behind.
For entrepreneurs launching new businesses, I sometimes recommend holding on to your day job just until your vision gains traction (but not after: Remember, the scale-up stage involves closing doors!) Sara Blakely, for example, sold fax machines for two years from nine to five and sold panty hose on the side until her passion project, Spanx, took off. Sara went onto become the youngest, female self-made billionaire!
Sometimes the way to achieve your daring dreams is through prudent steps. Instead of betting the whole farm on your crazy idea, you can start by wagering a few chickens.

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