The Sure Shot Entrepreneur

Sell to Investors Authentically

Episode Summary

Nuno Gonçalves Pedro, founder and managing partner at Chamaeleon, talks about founding his new VC firm and how they’re using technology to manage investment processes. Nuno reiterates the importance of entrepreneurs spending more time to know investors before meeting them. He also shares useful dialogue tips for founders to continually improve how they communicate with investors.

Episode Notes

Nuno Gonçalves Pedro, founder and managing partner at Chamaeleon, talks about founding his  new VC firm and how they’re using technology to manage investment processes. Nuno reiterates the importance of entrepreneurs spending more time to know investors before meeting them. He also shares useful dialogue tips for founders to continually improve how they communicate with investors.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

[5:31] How due diligence in a technology-augmented VC firm looks like

[15:58] Know more about whoever you are meeting with on the investor’s side.

[19:48] Stop talking only about your product; have a fun human-to-human dialogue with investors.

Non-profit organization that Nuno is passionate about: West to West, Partnership for Children & Youth


About Guest Speaker

Nuno Gonçalves Pedro is the founder and managing partner at Chamaeleon. He focuses on consumer software, consumer hardware and horizontal SaaS. Formerly, he was the founder and managing partner at Strive Capital, the first ever early-stage VC quant firm and fund in the US, and senior expert and member of Asia-Pacific TMT leadership team at McKinsey & Co. He co-hosts Tech DECIPHERED, a podcast that deciphers the meaning of entrepreneur and investor views on big tech, VC and start-up news.


About Chamaeleon

Chamaeleon is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that invests globally in product-led early-stage startups offering consumer software/hardware, SaaS, PaaS, Blockchain, and deep & frontier tech. Chamaeleon partners have invested in companies like Gusto, Rubrik, App Annie, Enish, Virta Health, DraftKings, RobinHood, Advertio, Bepro, jscrambler, AI Spera, keepsafe, mindprober, and others. 

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Episode Transcription

Nuno Gonçalves Pedro: "The presentation's too good. You need to improve your communication skills." And I was like, I've been in consulting before. I've been a product manager. I've been..."No, you're crap at communicating." And that was the moment where I was like, Oh my God!. And he's like, "the issue, and this happens with a lot of consulting firms and consultants, is when you talk about something, you're talking about something you're showing the slide, you're talking about something. You're not talking to someone. And the whole objective of whatever meeting is happening is that you're talking to someone. It's a dialogue."

Gopi Rangan: You are listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur, a podcast for founders with ambitious ideas. Venture capital investors and other early believers tell you relatable, insightful, and authentic stories to help you realize your vision. 

Welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. Today's guest is Nuno Gonçalves Pedro. He's the founder and managing partner at Chamaeleon. Nuno, welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. 

Nuno Gonçalves Pedro: Hi Gopi. Thank you for having me. 

Gopi Rangan: You have a very interesting background. You've started venture capital firms before. You've been a consultant and you've been an entrepreneur as well. You started your own IT outsourcing company. But I want to start the story with you, with who you are. You grew up in Lisbon, Portugal. Right? Tell me about yourself, starting with your childhood. 

Nuno Gonçalves Pedro: I was born and raised in Portugal, was there until I was 23. I had a couple of stints in Paris and Madrid, went back to Portugal, and then finally left when I was 26 and haven't been back since then, in terms of basically living in Portugal. I do spend easily one to two months a year in Portugal at Chamaeleon. We have an office there. Our headquarters is here in the San Francisco bay area but we have an office in Portugal. So I get to go back quite often to my home country, which is an amazing country, just sometimes a little bit of a complex country to work in, if we were to do things like we do, which is to be venture capitalists. 

I have a master's in science and computer engineering, engineering manager, product manager, so that the classic move of a non-10X developer became a manager within engineering, and then a product manager. At heart, I'm still a product manager as we will discuss later. And there's a lot of things about what we do at Chamaeleon that comes a little bit from that DNA of product management, which is pretty spread out in our team. Then, the second step in my career was really mostly outside of Portugal as what I would call a growth operator or in strategy product corporate development and business development deals. I have a little bit of a strange head in that, on the one hand, very creative and very hackerish type. But on the other hand, I'm also someone who is very much a systems thinker and process thinker. So I have these things that I'm always competing with. Those experiences as a growth operator were great for me. I had a little bit of an intermezzo with McKinsey in the Asia Pacific for six years. I was based in Beijing and I was a leader with the Asia Pacific telecom media and technology team there. I had a lot of fun. The first year was tough, just getting used to the culture of the firm. And then finally the most masochistic thing imaginable, which is to start my own venture capital firm. Being an entrepreneur is difficult and it's painful. Being an entrepreneur in venture capital, I think is extra difficult and extra painful, almost masochistic. 

I founded and was the managing partner at Strive Capital. We did two funds out of that, invested in companies like DraftKings, Robinhood, App Annie, Gusto, Rubric, and a few others. I've just launched my second VC firm and my third fund earlier last year, called Chamaeleon; very similar thesis to what I was doing before- the belief that technology shouldn't just be the area that we invest in, but also should be a quantum tech-augmented as VC firms in early stage where there hasn't been a ton of innovation.

So our quantum tech team is a significant part of our team, actually larger than our deal team. And the second piece, that it's still a people business. There's still a lot of instincts and analysis and bringing value to the table. We are creating a very significant network of people around us that have worked with us through the years that we will make available not only to ourselves, in terms of due diligence and deal flow, but also to our entrepreneurs, to our portfolio companies, and to our limited partners, to our own investors. So, I decided to embark on my next journey with Chamaeleon and I'm having a lot of fun as I go through it. 

Gopi Rangan: I want to understand the Genesis of this. You started two VC firms. It's hard enough to start one and now you're embarking on the second firm in your journey. Let's dial back a little bit. You've been in Silicon Valley for nine-plus years. What brought you to Silicon Valley? 

Nuno Gonçalves Pedro: Yeah, I actually just turned 10 years in Silicon Valley a couple of days ago. What brought me here was something very natural. Just before I moved to Asia with McKinsey, I started working with startups in Europe. Actually, in particular, one Israeli startup in Europe. I took an advisory board position there.T hen over time, I helped that company exit a little bit by accident. As you know, some of these exits are a little bit of luck and I got lucky. I helped them exit to a NASDAQ quoted company, and I was sort of addicted to it. There was a pace to it that was phenomenal. And at McKinsey, I worked with a lot of truly great companies, but where speed is very difficult. Acceleration is tremendously difficult.

I started coming to Silicon Valley in 2007 to basically two months a year spending time here in Silicon Valley. Out of that, I took a few advisory board positions with startups and I was sort of hooked. I was like, I need to do something with startups. I need to help them somehow. Strive capital was created around 2011 and we did our first investment actually before that in 2010. It was organic. I and another partner wanted to do something different. We want it to take it to the next level. And I really wanted to work with startups. That led ultimately to me leaving McKinsey, moving to the Bay Area in 2012, and the rest is sort of history as they say.

Gopi Rangan: Okay. So how is Chamaeleon different from other VC firms? What's your vision? 

Nuno Gonçalves Pedro: First and foremost, we are highly technology augmented. So we have several analytics engines that help us in the entire process of managing a VC firm, including workflow automation, which is the more basic, how do I interact with entrepreneurs? How do I make sure that I don't lose track of entrepreneurs, that I get notifications to track them, et cetera, but also around the classic funnel management of deal sourcing, due diligence, post-investment management. So, basically, we have an in-house team. We do use third-party software for a variety of things where we don't believe it makes sense for us to develop it from scratch. But we have an internal team that helps us develop all these engines. Basically, engines that are proprietary to us. 

Now, what we do with those engines is we use them not only for our activities in venture capital, but we also use them to share that information in certain views, obviously in limited views, with our portfolio companies and with our investors and our limited partners.

What do I mean by limited views? Obviously, we receive a deck from a company that might be competitive to an existing portfolio company that we have. We can't share that deck with our portfolio company. We have to create boundary conditions on what's accessible in our data, versus what's not accessible.

That said if we collect data on 30 companies in that market that our portfolio company is in, we can actually show our company what good looks like in terms of benchmark for that space. Maybe they're not in the right space at that moment in time, or they are actually very well positioned in that space.

That's one key distinctive aspect of what we do. The second piece is if you look at the partner team, we're all entrepreneurs. We are all investors for a long time and we've been co-investing together for a very long time.

The third and most important piece is we are all operators. We've scaled up companies. And that's sometimes the missing piece in venture capital. Either you have high-level operators that go to venture capital but who are not entrepreneurs, or you have entrepreneurs that never really got to scale from, let's say a hundred to a thousand or a hundred to 10,000, but they actually took their company to 50 people or a hundred and then exited.

And so, that's relatively unique, with a very international angle to this. We're all people that have worked across the world. I've worked in 35 countries at last count. My co-managing partners worked in several countries in Europe, US, and obviously, she's originally from Asia. And then my third partner, Alex is based in Europe, but he's also worked in a variety of countries, a very multicultural aspect. We're all very different. The first thing that we actually wrote together was our value system, which is on our website. This is what we stand for. This is what our team stands for. We're all super different. Some of us are more introverted. Some of us are more extroverted. A few of us are experts in one area. Others are more experts than others. I focus a lot more on consumer SaaS. COVID has taught me that I'm not only an extrovert, I'm actually an extreme extrovert and an extreme introvert. I'm both. So COVID has been in some ways, despite all the tragedy, really a blessing for me in terms of productivity, focusing on what I'm doing, and focusing my time on my own work.

We have other characteristics about Chamaeleon, but everyone would say that we have access to a bunch of amazing networks. We have thought leadership that we put out there. I have a podcast that I do with the chairman of one of my portfolio companies prior to Chameleon. We all do a lot of things that we think are aligned with how we stand in the market in terms of branding, thought leadership; how we reach out to entrepreneurs to know more about us, but at the same time, and rewinding a little bit, I would say the core aspects of our distinctiveness are the quantum tech engine, the network, it's a pretty open network that we make available also to our portfolio companies and LPs. And finally, the three partners that really come together with a very unique set of skills and what we can bring to the table when we help our portfolio companies. 

Gopi Rangan: The quantum tech engine, and your network, and the people, it's a great combination. I see values on your website. And I see the value of having fun. I've never seen that that rarely gets spoken about to be serious about work, but don't take yourself too seriously. 

Nuno Gonçalves Pedro: To be honest, it's the most important piece. As any VC, I'm can have moments of extreme intensity, and over the years I've heard a lot of people that work with me telling me when you smile, it's so much better, right. Even if you're saying something tough when you smile or make a joke it's so I'm, I'm still working on it, but it's a little bit like that we should be having fun together. It's not just having fun within Chamaeleon, it's having also with our portfolio companies and with our LPs. Life is tough as it is. We're all very driven and very intense. So, we should be having fun. 

Gopi Rangan: Absolutely. Let's talk about startups. You gave a little bit of hint on what kind of startups you'd like to invest in. Can we take an example of a company that you recently invested? What got you excited about the company? 

Nuno Gonçalves Pedro: We've now invested in two companies. We're about to announce our third investment. Maybe I'll start with Let's Enhance. They do a product called Claid. So they basically do image batch processing, adding an optimization at a large scale, for example, for marketplaces. Companies like DoorDash and a few others are or could be potential clients to them. They use deep learning. The problem that they're solving is a problem that doesn't initially sound like a really big problem, but once you deep dive into it, you figure out the market. The first thing that's exciting about this company to us was the market. What happens today is a lot of these marketplaces have these photos taken by people that are likely amateurs, like owners of restaurants, you know, owners of Airbnb, et cetera. The photos they take normally have two characteristics. They're not very good and they're very heavy, they occupy a lot of space. The ability to turn them into photos that look better to the human eye that gets fixed in some way, but also generates traffic for the marketplace owner is something that's very powerful. And the only way to do this at scale is using artificial intelligence. At the end of the day, you can't do it just manually. Basically, that's what led us to figure out, okay, this market can be significant. It can scale. It's really interesting. 

The second piece where we spent a lot of time was around the product and technology piece. We test all our products, even if they're B2B. That's one of the core conditions for us to invest in. And so, our tech lead actually tested access to their API and tested a couple of photos and a couple of things on their platform. We looked at their tech, we had deep technology due diligence calls, also using experts from our side, not just us as a team but also bringing in experts that are in our network. And we got convinced that what they have is pretty unique right now is relatively ahead of the market.

That was piece number one of the product and tech assessment. The second piece of products and technology assessment for us is what we call the cheat sheet around product-market fit. Are there any early signals of product-market fit in the company? When we looked, they had significant traction. When the round was announced, they had already announced that there were above a million ARR. So they already have a great amount of traction without having raised almost any money, which is always very special.

For us, that combo of very early signals of product-market fit and great and distinctive product and technology, we did user feedback, talked to customers. It was very funny because I was talking to the founder, Sofi, and she was saying, this was the most detailed DD she's ever seen in her life. And we're known for that. We're early stage but we do deep due diligence and we're normally very fast and how we do those DDs because we know in early-stage, time is obviously of the essence, but that's something we're quite thoughtful about. We want to make sure that as investors, we're thoughtful about the capital we deploy and we assess all the risks that we're looking at.

That was the second angle of the product to market. And then the final angle is everyone knows is the team. You can't make the call just on the team, but this team was exceptional. The founder, Sofi, who was the CEO, is a young founder, but exceptional in anything that relates to business, her ability to sell, her ability to think through go-to-market, her ability to strike partnerships is incredible, very diligent with a really amazing eye on everything that's revenue generative. On the CTO side, Vladislav, who's the amazing co-founder who leads part of the team, and essentially the product and engineering team, is someone that we really trust in terms of his judgment for the market, his technology shops, et cetera.

All of these pieces put together led us to say, okay, we want to invest. Obviously, at the end of the day, it's also a deal. Sometimes entrepreneurs miss that. I know Gopi you're focused very much on entrepreneurs and out of the lessons learned from VCs, there has to be a good deal as well. There has to be a good valuation. There have to be good conditions for us as investors to come in. In our case, we took a board seat, et cetera. So, it has to be a good deal in the end, not just a great company. 

Gopi Rangan: I see that you have a very thorough process. You look at the product, you look at the team, you look at the technology and everything together. How long does it take for you to go through that process? 

Nuno Gonçalves Pedro: To finalize technical due diligence and get to a term sheet, if we're very, very excited about the deal, it might be three, four weeks. If the deal has a little bit more time spent on it, because the company's still thinking through things, it might take us a little bit longer than that.

If we're really excited about the deal, it means all hands on deck, certainly on the deal team side for due diligence. And then we get stuff from our technology platform that helps us be a little bit more productive. It can take us longer depending on the pace also it depends a lot on the entrepreneur, right?

How fast is he sending us things or your sheet? How fast are we given access to their data room? If there's one? How fast are we getting access to some documents that we ask for? Can we go faster? Yes. But we would need to then either understand the space really well, or have known the entrepreneur from before, and maybe then there's a couple of things we can short circuit in the process, like the reference check piece or the background check piece. After the term sheet, there's still obviously more legal due diligence, which we do with the help of lawyers.

And we might still do some due diligence after that, like customer feedback, user feedback, et cetera. But the core of, what I would call the technical diligence from a venture capital standpoint would come in those three to four weeks. 

Gopi Rangan: The first meeting is usually a crapshoot. That's when most VCs say no at the end of it. And it's frustrating for entrepreneurs to take so many meetings, not knowing which ones will turn into a second meeting and subsequent meetings. What's your advice to entrepreneurs? How can they prepare for the first? 

Nuno Gonçalves Pedro: Because we are quantum tech-enabled. We have our lists. We actually reach out to a significant part of the companies that are top of our funnel. So we do take inbound. We're pretty open on inbound, but just to highlight that sometimes when we're asking for the first call, it's us asking, you reach out to many cases, a significant, I would say right now we're almost tipping over. It's almost more than 50% of our top of the funnel is outbound. This means we're processing a lot of the top of the funnel. We still get a lot of inbound. 

To answer your question, one, know who you're talking to, the VC firm, what does it focus on? What does it stand for? Two is the person in front of you, be it an associate or a partner or an associate partner wherever they are. They make sure you understand something about them. At the end of the day, the first call is a sales pitch. Find the right anchors to generate linkage to whoever you're talking with, understand how they think through investments. Understand their thesis, understand their value system, understand everything.

Maybe I'll ask you this, what percentage of entrepreneurs do you see coming to that first call that know very little about you. 

Gopi Rangan: Very few. Entrepreneurs spend a lot more time understanding their customers. They don't tend to spend that much time trying to understand investors. 

Nuno Gonçalves Pedro: Yeah. For example, we look at gaming very heavily. It's one of the areas around consumers that we spend call it all the time around. People coming to us explaining to us gaming at a high level, I'm like, I don't know if you check this out, but Songyee was the president chief strategy officer of NC Soft, which is the largest multiplayer gaming company. I've done several investments in gaming. I've been on the board of directors of gaming companies for the last decade. So can you go to the parts about where are you guys better than others? And so it's a little bit like that and you'd be shocked. I mean, literally be shocked. There's nothing.

Gopi Rangan: This is very interesting. So you're talking about when an entrepreneur is in rhythm, is it the same pace as the investor? When the entrepreneur knows about the investor's background and interests and where they have invested previously, then they can accelerate in certain conversations and they can slow down certain other conversations depending on what is best. That's something that they can prepare before they come to the meeting. 

Nuno Gonçalves Pedro: Yeah. I think all of us at sales training at some point in time of our life, and there's this concept of releasing your agenda, you come into a meeting as a salesperson and you have an agenda and you will always have to really search and you have to figure out at what time and in what circumstances. And I feel a lot of entrepreneurs like I'm going to get there and that slide. We just asked the question. Can you just go to that slide? So it's not that we're trying to be arrogant or difficult. We're trying to make the most use of the most limited resource that sets the table at that time, which is time. If we have a 45-minute call or a 30-minute or one-hour meeting, it's limited. If we're saying you can go faster, cause I've totally bought into your problem statement and I understand, we'll need to do a little bit more analysis, some market sizing, but a lot of it we'll need to do ourselves. Can we just jump those 10 slides and go into the 10 slides that matter - business model, go-to-market, product? Some entrepreneurs get the cue, they go through it naturally. We don't even need to say anything. Those are the best. Others will get the cue and move on and that's great. And others will just stick to it and be very defensive.

And I'm like, I understand. You know that at some point our discussion will evolve to be a partnership discussion. Well, you need to know a lot more about us as well and why you should take our money and not someone else's money. But right now we're still at that part of the process where you need to sell me on your business.

You're still in sales mode. Down the line. We're going to have more of a partnership discussion, but right now we're in sales mode. The best entrepreneurs are exceptional at managing pace, cadence at each call and every meeting, but also have the timeline on how they engage the VC firms, how they bring them back to them, how they get back to the VC firms when they're on due diligence, et cetera.

They're really good at that. And it's a little bit of a dance, right? It starts like you've convinced me to go to the prom with you. So you have to sell yourself a bit, but then we will go through the preparation of the prom and whatever. Eventually, we will go to the prom together, if we invest. 

Gopi Rangan: This is very interesting. You're hitting on something really interesting that happens so often, but we don't really talk about it. Entrepreneurship is a very difficult journey. So I hats off to any founder that attempted to start a company. When they come into a meeting with an investor, they have a plan, they have a slide deck. They have a story that they have rehearsed many times. They work really hard to tell that story. When they walk into the room, they want to go through that story. They want to tell you a slide after slide after slide, but sometimes when they, in that process of telling the story, miss the audience, the questions that come from the audience made break the rhythm of the story and that's okay because we want to get to a point where we can, as investors, understand the business better. And sometimes entrepreneurs are disturbed by those questions. It's actually a good thing when questions come through and it leads to jumping a few slides and going to another place in the slide deck.

Nuno Gonçalves Pedro: I had a mentor of mine and I became his head of strategy. I remember showing my first presentation and he's like, the presentation is great, but it's crap. And I'm like, sorry, what do you mean? It's great. But it's crap. Like the presentation is wonderful, but it's almost like the presentation's too good. And you need to improve your communication skills. And I was like, I've been in consulting before. I've been a product manager. I've been..."No, you're crap at communicating." And he's like, "the issue, and this happens with a lot of consulting firms and consultants, is when you talk about something, you're talking about something you're showing the slide, you're talking about something. You're not talking to someone. And the whole objective of whatever meeting is happening is that you're talking to someone. It's a dialogue." 

If you just presented one slide out of the 30 slides you have there, but you have a really good dialogue. That's much more profound than you went through the 30 slides. And the relationship would be built on that. That was a great lesson learned. Fortunately, I had this mentor that taught me that, and then he said, okay, you need to go do media training because that's the most aggressive type of communication I know. I'll back you for six months. 

For six months, every meeting you go to you just focus on communication. Don't focus on substance. You know too much. Just focus on communication. I was like, but people will see through me. He said, "No worries. I'll cover your back." Right. And those six months transformed my life. Cause it's when I learned that people really want to talk to someone else. They don't want to see beautiful slides. Beautiful slides are great, but they can be prereading. They help with memorizing things and getting stuff stuck into your head because they're images. So there was value to them. It's not that they don't have value, but the most profound thing is how that dialogue happens. And to your point, entrepreneurs sometimes forget that this is a dialogue.

Gopi Rangan: Are there some tips or tricks you can share with us on how to manage communication better? What did you learn from those six months? 

Nuno Gonçalves Pedro: One is you need to start from where you're strong at. If you're really good with details and information, you can use that in your communication. You can use some tidbits just to create immediate credibility without going too deep. The issue with engineers for example is, classically, they'll go too deep very fast, and then they never come out of the weeds. So you can show a little bit of tidbit just so that there's credibility created, but just come back up to a high level, assuming people are relatively idiots. And if they're not, they'll tell you. Or you can ask them if you can move faster in a certain area of the presentation or not.

The second piece is trying to come from a place of authenticity and communication. I remember the CEO of one of the great innovators in the telecom space. His English was not very good but he would do keynote speeches in this broken English that everyone understood... because of his passion, because of how he moved his arms, because of everything around him. Even if you didn't understand a hundred percent, you'd understand 80% and it was seen as a powerful presentation. So, even if you're not a native English speaker, [many of the people that might be listening to us or not, I am not, for example] you actually can be great at communicating and coming from that place of authenticity. Then the third piece is communications about empathizing with who's looking at you. Adapt. If the person said "I'm super stretched today, you're in between meetings. I'm five minutes late. We need to break it up the hour." That person is stretched, for sure. And on top of being stretched, they're stressed. So just lower their stress levels. Relax them at the beginning and then go very sharply to the message you want to leave them with. For example, you could ask if they want to reschedule or if it's really, really too tight, but it could be that you just go very sharply to "Okay. Let me just leave you with these three or four things today. And if you find this exciting, maybe we do another call" I don't want to get you late into your next meeting or something like that. So empathize again it's part of that dialogue of the human notion that it's two people interacting. 

The things absolutely not to do: don't be 'all form no substance'. That gets sent through very quickly. And particularly as we jump into due diligence. So you might get away with it in the first few calls, but you won't get away with it afterward if you're talking to a good VC firm. 

The second piece, don't be inauthentic in your communication. In the US there's this great notion that people are almost educated with sales and marketing. I'd say it's great security of the success of the U S' sales and marketing. And they're so good at it; like they've been growing through school, always pitching themselves and stuff. 

Sometimes they get bad habits. They get expressions they use, some people use neuro-linguistic programming, which I personally hate, and it just comes across as extremely inauthentic. And you can see through it. Particularly, if you're seeing a good VC firm or if you're seeing someone on the other side on the VC firm side, that is good with people, they will see through it, like in two minutes and you've just lost all credibility. I'm not sure I can deal with you.

At the end of the day, don't forget this is a conversation that starts with a sales pitch, evolves into a partnership discussion. At some point it needs to be about this long-term relationship, which is, do we want to be together for the next, let's say seven to 10 years, if we're talking to an early stage entrepreneur and early-stage firm. Do we want to be together for the next seven to 10? Can we have fun together besides actually this being a great business? These questions will come later on in due diligence. They'll come later on in your interactions, but just think through that communication piece and how you adapt, but it always needs to start from you, what are you strong at, and what comes authentically to you in how you communicate.

Gopi Rangan: Oh, this is incredibly valuable. This is like a masterclass on how to communicate. And the first meeting with an investor is definitely a sales conversation. The entrepreneur is trying to sell something to the investor and how you do that is starting with your strength, communicating authentically and empathizing with the investor with the objective of building a long-term business, long-term relationship. This is incredibly valuable. Thank you so much for sharing your personal insights and nuggets from your own experience. 

I want to switch to the next part of our conversation and ask you about your community involvement. Is there a nonprofit organization you are passionate about? Which one? 

Nuno Gonçalves Pedro: I've been passionate about a number of organizations through the years, I helped found an organization called West to West, which was connecting the Portuguese and Luco-descendent ecosystem in California, and in Portugal. I dropped out of that board a couple of years ago but was part of that organization for five years.

The second piece has been to work around education. I was on the board of two entities, one focused on California. One more focused on the bay area. One is called Partnership for Children and Youth, which is an intermediary organization focused on helping K - 12 learners get after-school or summer school support. I was on that board for over four years. And so that's another strong area of passion for me.

Gopi Rangan: Thank you so much for spending time with me and sharing valuable lessons from your experience and your interest in community development. I look forward to sharing your nuggets of wisdom with the world. 

Nuno Gonçalves Pedro: Thank you so much for having me. 

Gopi Rangan: Thank you for listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I hope you enjoyed listening to real-life stories about early believers, supporting ambitious entrepreneurs. Please subscribe to the podcast and post a review. Your comments will help other entrepreneurs find this podcast. I look forward to catching you at the next episode.