Seedstars Podcasts

One out of every two students in Latin America quits school before graduating, and Blended is trying to change these statistics. Federico and his co-founder Nicolas realised one big pain point within the system: communication between parents and schools. In 2015, two founders tried to talk to as many headmasters and users as possible to find out which features to build. 

At that time, Federico was offered what he thought back then a dream job at KPMG, but he decided to reject an offer and asked Nicolas to quit his job as well to work on their edtech startup together. 

They hired their first programmers and negotiated their first investment deal, and today, Blended is serving 500 thousand daily active users in Latin America. Federico also shares his entrepreneur story and how he dealt with hard times such as limited cash flow and not being able to pay his team.

Federico recommends reading Reid Hoffman: Blitzscaling. 

Christina was born in Jerusalem, moved to North Carolina, USA as a kid because of the tense political situation in Palestine, but came back to her home country as a teenager. She changed countries a couple of more times for her studies in Chicago and London. The idea of starting something new always sounded exciting, so it was always easy for her to switch places as well as to start her own business. Having a well-paid job in a good company wasn’t enough for Christina. 

One day sitting in her car with a friend, they decided they should launch a startup! They didn’t know what to do exactly, but were eager to start something together that would impact the lives of women. This is how Kenzwoman (a platform selling lingerie in the Middle East) was born.Their goal was and still is to help all women in the Middle East find bras and lingerie in suitable sizes and styles. Started in 2015 out of a simple friendly conversation, now Kenzwoman operates in different countries around the Middle East and is currently raising series A round.

Cristina recommends reading 

Malu Halasa and Rana Salam: Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie: Intimacy and Design, Tony Hsieh: Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose and listening to Girlboss Podcast.

Following a path less travelled for women in Africa, Hilda's passion for innovation and societal transformation through entrepreneurship has already driven her to help multinational corporations like Coca-Cola create last-mile solutions in Africa and begin transforming the way businesses access funding in Kenya and across the African continent. You'll be amazed when she shares the number of how many good and profitable businesses in the region closed after just 2-3 years simply because they couldn’t access the funds to scale. 

Her company Pezesha provides valuable solutions for small businesses to survive and thrive, connecting them with funding solutions, credit scoring, and business and financial education; all these are the things that simply don't exist. It not only helps existing business owners operate their businesses more efficients, but it also encourages and inspires entrepreneurship in local communities, stimulating the economy and ensuring wealth is distributed to all. 

What's fascinating about Hida's approach to technology and innovation is the way she and her team layer this over existing social behaviours, resulting in wider acceptance, more engagement and greater impact. 

In our episode, you'll learn what a 'chimba' is and how Hilda is burning a trail for women as entrepreneurs in Africa.

From a Hungarian refugee family who emigrated to the United States, Tenke Zoltani is running fast as  part of the Hungarian national running team, marathon winner and entrepreneur. She has dedicated a big part of her life to sustainability and impact investment and is now advising large family offices on how to invest their money to receive above market rate financial and "impact" returns. Her integrity allows her to have the ears of the most wealthy families of the world and guide them to make positive change around the world.

Tenke recommends reading Peter Wohlleben: The Hidden Life of Trees. 

The Seedstars Mexico City winner is helping Mexicans by providing personal microloans to people without a credit history. At Baubap this is done by assessing someone’s likelihood of paying back the loan by using cell phone data. The company starts by building a credit history with their customers- everyone starts off with a  $25 USD loan as a first-time borrower. Roberto started out working on the issues of financial literacy in Mexico as an employee at HSBC more than a decade ago. In the meantime he's worked at a local Mexican bank and was the CFO of a media company. This is also where he met his co-founder. Actually, their founding story started out with a juicy little detail: Roberto fired his co-founder. To understand how this was the foundation for the launch of a successful fintech startup, explore the metrics their machine learning algorithm looks at, learn how important concerns with data privacy are, and hear life lessons and book recommendations, listen to this episode!

Roberto recommends reading Tara Westover: Educated, Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World 

Martin has one arch-enemy in life and it’s cash. After studying in Canada and working in India, a consulting project with Accenture led him back to his home country, Mexico. Instead of returning to Canada, he decided to stay when the project ended. With a friend from university he started a software factory. While this company was doing well, he started to work on a problem he faced himself monthly: paying his rent, which included going to a bank. They published the tool and were surprised that other people used it for completely different purposes, such as paying back money that they owed to friends. This made them realize that cash flow was a bigger issue in Mexico than they had realized and it touched every facet of life. Recently, Martin’s startup Payit.mx was  acquired by Rappi and the entrepreneur is now leading RappiPay Mexico, which gets him closer to his goal of going digital and killing cash.

Martin recommends reading Ryan Holiday: The Daily Stoic, Reid Hoffman: Blitzscaling, and Larry Bossidy: Execution.

Originally from a small town in Senegal, Papa Amadou has decided to dedicate his life to serve others. The PhD that he received in his early twenties on the issue of migration gave him a holistic overview of the problem, and since then, he has never stopped working towards solving it on a macro level. Working with the World Bank, OECD, International Monetary Fund, African Development Bank, he has done it all. 

As a Minister, he's now supporting entrepreneurs in Senegal to foster job creation, reduce unemployment and under-employment, gender inequalities, and he hopes to eventually tackle the migration issue using these areas as his pillars. His grand-parents inspired him while studying and a job abroad gave him the tools and open-mindedness he needed to now approach his work as a pure entrepreneur: he applies lean startup practices to government work to generate a bigger impact.

Papa recommends reading Jean-Michel Severino and Olivier Ray: Africa's Moment