In this sense, Vincent Speranza, general director of Endeavor, pointed out that having a dozen Unicorns in two years is a validation that Mexico is fertile ground for high-impact entrepreneurship, which triggers economic, social and cultural growth. Mexico had been late, Uruguay had its first unicorn before Mexico.
Now there is the infrastructure that did not exist before to be able to be an entrepreneur, there is human talent and there are many needs. “When you put these three parts together, that is where society is permeated to give them better services and a better quality of life,” added Jimena Pardo, partner of ALLVP, panelist at the Inter.Mx Expansión Summit 2022.
What changes for a company when it becomes a unicorn?
Being a Unicorn creates extreme pressure around the entrepreneur and increases complexity. As an ecosystem, and as a society, we must not only help there to be more, but also, when they are there, how to keep their feet on the ground, said the Endeavor manager.
When we talk about the valuation of Unicorn, several things change both internally and externally. Externally, it is the exposure that the company has both to the media and to talent, it is necessary to be more careful in the movements to be exposed to the public eye. Internally, the demands rise, processes must be improved and a lot of structure must be added to take the next step and raise more rounds of private investors, explained Alfonso de los Ríos, co-founder and CEO of Nowports.
Is the arrival of unicorns in Mexico going to stop?
There is no brake on the arrival of Unicorns, we come from two or three spectacular years. There is more activity, but with more caution, the idea of growth at any cost has been abandoned and there is more reasoning behind the investments, Speranza said. Entrepreneurship is not over, there is still a lot of room to continue creating value for markets and consumers. “It just comes a rebalancing of how the resource is distributed,” she said.
The way in which capital is raised has changed, now it must be very clear what is going to be done with it, how margins are going to be improved in the long term, not in the next 10 months but in the next 10 years, and there are greater demand in the creation of work teams. Now the process takes longer, said Alfonso de los Ríos, Co-founder and CEO of Nowports.
Pardo pointed out that there are certain characteristics that the funds look for in entrepreneurs: 1) that they be brilliant, passionate and rare; 2) who are competent to start a business and know their industry; 3) they are ambitious; and 4) the capacity for leadership and conviction to move the company forward.
Today there are many more sources of financing for any type of company, only that “not all funds are good for all companies and not all companies are good for all funds”, said the Director of Operations of SoftBank.
“Receiving investment is nothing more than beautiful, it comes with a series of obligations, restrictions and surveillance and things that not all entrepreneurs want to do. As long as the venture is high-impact and high-return, you will find financing.”