Serial entrepreneur Gonzalo Parejo Navajas shares his journey from corporate law to founding startups in Brazil and Europe. After learning hard lessons about product-market fit and international fundraising, his latest venture, Kamino, tackles the critical but often-ignored problem of accounts payable for startups.
Key takeaways
- Your “non-startup” career is a source of unique advantages.
- Don’t confuse raising money with finding product-market fit.
- Raising US capital for an international startup requires a specific narrative.
- Mastering back-office operations is a competitive advantage, not a chore.
- Automate accounts payable before it slows your growth.
- The most valuable problems to solve are often the ones you’ve lived yourself.
Your “Boring” Career Path Might Be Your Biggest Asset
Most founder origin stories follow a script. Drop out of college, move to the Bay Area, start coding. Gonzalo Parejo Navajas’s story is different. He started his career in a prestigious Madrid law firm, a world away from startups.
He could have climbed the corporate ladder, making partner in 10-15 years. Instead, he found the path unfulfilling. He left a secure job at Clifford Chance that paid 24,000 Euros—a solid starting salary at the time—to take a risk on something new. This wasn't a rash decision; it was the first sign of an entrepreneurial mindset: the willingness to trade security for impact.
He then took an unusual detour, running a public-private housing company for a municipality. He made it profitable, delivering public housing and equipment. This experience, far from the typical startup grind, taught him how to operate within constraints, manage diverse stakeholders, and navigate bureaucracy—skills that are invaluable when building a company from scratch.
The Common Mistake: Discounting Your Pre-Startup Experience
Founders often think their "real" career began the day they incorporated. They dismiss their time as a lawyer, a consultant, or a middle manager as irrelevant. This is a mistake. Your non-startup background gives you a unique lens. The skills you learned navigating corporate politics, managing budgets, or negotiating complex contracts are directly applicable to fundraising, sales, and operations.
Gonzalo’s legal and real estate background gave him a deep understanding of complex financial structures and entity management. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, he was thrown into reorganizing chaotic real estate portfolios, dealing with banks who weren't even sure what leverage they held. This trial-by-fire taught him how to find order in chaos—the core job of an early-stage founder.
Lesson 1: The Pain of Finding Product-Market Fit in an Emerging Market
Gonzalo’s first major entrepreneurial venture was Bidu, an online insurance brokerage in Brazil he co-founded in 2012. The insight was powerful: insurance was a mature, mandatory product in developed economies, but in emerging markets like Brazil, it was an early and booming opportunity.
He saw a young, ambitious population and a market ripe for a digital-first solution, similar to Geico in the US. The thesis was strong enough to raise $12M from investors in Palo Alto, a significant achievement for a Latin American company at the time.
Non-Obvious Insight: Raising money from top-tier VCs doesn't mean you have product-market fit. It means you have a compelling story and a credible team. The real work starts after the wire hits.
The Bidu team learned this the hard way. Gonzalo admits they "spent a lot of money on the company before they could put together the right business model." This is a classic founder trap. You have millions in the bank, so you scale the team and marketing spend, assuming you can figure out the unit economics later. This approach is fatal.
How to Know You Haven't Found Product-Market Fit
Your growth is linear, not exponential. You have to spend more on marketing to get each new customer. Growth is a direct function of ad spend. · Your retention curve slopes to zero. Customers try your product once and never come back. · Unit economics are negative, with no clear path to profitability. The cost to acquire a customer (CAC) is higher than their lifetime value (LTV). · No one would be upset if you shut down. Customers aren't actively recommending you or integrating your product deeply into their lives/workflows.
For Bidu, the journey involved painful pivots and a relentless focus on getting the model right before scaling further. This experience forged a crucial lesson for Gonzalo’s next ventures.
Lesson 2: Adapting to Different Startup Ecosystems
After Bidu, Gonzalo joined the founding team of Ontruck in Spain, a marketplace for freight logistics. The move highlighted the stark differences between building a startup in Latin America versus Europe.
Founder Mistake: Assuming All Markets Are the Same
US founders often think of "international" as a single bloc. In reality, every market has its own DNA.
Talent: In 2012 Brazil, the tech talent pool was nascent. Finding experienced engineers and product managers was a major challenge. In Europe, the talent is more mature, but also more expensive and competitive. · Fundraising: Raising US capital for a Brazilian startup required selling the macro story of an entire country. For Ontruck in Spain, investors were more familiar with the market but also had more preconceived notions about its size and scalability. · Culture: The "young and ambitious" atmosphere Gonzalo found in Brazil contrasts with Europe's more established, and sometimes more risk-averse, professional culture.
Successfully navigating these differences requires intellectual humility and a willingness to adapt your playbook.
Lesson 3: Solving the Problem You Know Best
After two successful ventures, Gonzalo could have tackled any problem. He chose one that most founders ignore: accounts payable.
His new venture, Kamino, automates the painful process of managing invoices, getting approvals, and paying vendors for startups. Why this problem? Because he had lived the pain himself. At both Bidu and Ontruck, he experienced the operational drag of a manual back office.
"I spent a lot of time on things that were not the core of my business," Gonzalo might as well have said. "I was trying to build a disruptive insurance or logistics company, but I was stuck approving invoices and chasing receipts."
What a Broken Accounts Payable Process Looks Like
A spreadsheet with 50 vendor invoices to pay each month. · Slack DMs to department heads nagging them for approval. · Your finance person spending two days a month manually processing payments. · Not knowing your true cash burn until 20 days after the month ends. · Wasting senior management time on low-level operational tasks.
Kamino was born from the direct experience of this inefficiency. It’s built to give founders and finance teams their time back and provide a real-time, accurate view of company spending. This is a classic example of "founder-problem fit"—when the founder's personal experience gives them a unique insight into the problem and the motivation to solve it.
How to Apply These Lessons This Week
Audit your "unconventional" experience. What skills did you learn in your pre-startup career? List three non-obvious skills (e.g., navigating bureaucracy, managing difficult clients, understanding regulation) and map them to a current challenge in your business. · Pressure-test your product-market fit. Look at your retention curve for the last three cohorts. Is it flattening? If not, stop scaling your marketing spend and refocus all energy on user retention. · Review your accounts payable process. Track how many hours your team (including you) spent managing invoices and payments last month. Multiply those hours by your fully-loaded salaries to get a rough cost. Is this the best use of that time and money? · Refine your fundraising narrative for geography. If you are raising from investors outside your home market, write down a one-paragraph answer to: "Why is this specific market the best place in the world to build this business, and why now?" Avoid jargon and assume they know nothing about your local ecosystem.
Frequently asked questions
- What is accounts payable (AP) automation?
- AP automation software replaces manual tasks like entering invoices, chasing approvals, and processing payments with a streamlined digital workflow. This saves time, reduces errors, and gives you a real-time view of your company's cash flow.
- What are the biggest mistakes founders make when expanding internationally?
- Founders often underestimate differences in talent pools, sales cycles, regulatory hurdles, and customer expectations. They also fail to adapt their fundraising narrative to explain the specific market opportunity to foreign investors.
- How do you know if you have product-market fit (PMF)?
- Key signs of PMF include strong organic growth, high user retention (a flattening retention curve), low customer acquisition cost, and customers who are visibly upset if your product disappears. If you have to spend heavily to convince people to use your product, you likely don't have PMF.
- Can a startup in Latin America raise money from US VCs?
- Yes, but it's challenging. You need a compelling narrative that explains why your target market is a massive, untapped opportunity. You also need to demonstrate a unique insight into the local market that other founders lack and show a clear path to a venture-scale return.
