Felipe Gomez Herrera, founder of Welli, discusses how he raised $115M in equity and debt to build a financial platform for healthcare in Latin America.
Felipe Gomez Herrera, founder of Welli, discusses how he raised $115M in equity and debt to build a financial platform for healthcare in Latin America. He shares insights on launching a business, securing funding, and solving crucial problems within the healthcare sector.
Most startups fail because they're solutions seeking or in search of a problem and not the other way around. [music] All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the Dealmaker Show. So today we have a really great founder, you know, a founder from Latin America. uh and we're going to be talking about all the good stuff of building scaling financing when they recently announced a very exciting round of financing but also depth financing. So we're going to be able to talk about both uh talking about two decision to transition from corporate to startups as well as raising money, why and how you should think about picking your own investors and other great stuff. So really brace yourself for a super inspiring conversation. And without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Felipe Gometh Errera. Welcome to the show. >> Thank you, Alejandra. Thanks for having me. Very excited to be
here. >> So, originally born and raised in Colombia. Give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you, Felipe? >> Well, uh, very much born and raised in Colombia. So, spent, uh, back and forth most of my time here, but I also spent a fair amount of time in the US. uh very privileged in the sense that I had access to uh great um great education but also uh a great environment mostly in healthcare uh which is where I ended up. Um so um being born and raised in Colombia and then having unique knowledge about the the healthcare issues that that we face uh sort of like open up uh what would be the rest of my my career. >> So then let's talk about politics. How do you get into politics? Because I know that politics, you know, played quite a critical role especially during the early days for you. >> Yeah. So, so it was funny like I I did not have uh
but I guess you you hear this often in your in your show, but I did not have the uh typical background on on uh where you would think somebody will end up in a in the startup world. Um I I was a policy major in the US. Uh what I wanted to do was public policy. uh that's where I thought um where I would make the most difference. Uh I was uh very quickly disillusioned by the public sector. That being said, kind of like that that bug of of service and about like broader impact stay with me. Um so that's way and when I decided to to join the corporate world and and later uh founding my my own startup, I knew that what I wanted to do was was having that double impact. It it not only needed to be like a great business, but it also needed to be a business that would have a a dramatic uh impact on the livelihoods of of Latin Americans. >> And we'll talk about that with Wellie in just a
little bit. I want to talk about uh you were alluding to corporate and how you transition out of uh the public to the more the private sector. McKiny. Um, working at Mckenzie and and obviously all this consulting sector, how do you think that shaped up the way that you think about problem solving? >> I think dramatically. Um, I I often uh tell this story, but when I joined McKenzie, I had pretty much never opened an Excel spreadsheet. I had learned that I had to learn that from scratch. So, it was quite a a steep learning curve for me. I was uh used to thinking about like public policy thinkers about uh I don't know uh world affairs and so on and then just learning the basics of of how a business works uh made a huge difference but also I think the way uh a consulting firm such as McKenzie teaches young analysts like myself how to approach a problem um how to decompose a problem
into a more manageable parts and how to really like tackle any problem regardless of industry or uh function uh in the same manner uh would dramatically change how I think. I I used to be probably all over the place and now I I approach things in a more systematic manner. So I'm always thankful about uh on about my background and about the opportunity that I had working with uh in consulting and especially at McKenzie. So then you go to Harvard uh business school and and that seemed to be quite the shift of gears because that got you closer to really doing that transition from corporate to startup. So walk us through the sequence of events. >> So I think especially I mean obviously Harvard was like my lifelong dream um and and once you get there the the imposttor syndrome uh quickly sets in, right? So I was uh used to thinking about smaller problems coming from a smaller country
and I was never really exposed to uh kind of like people thinking about startups thinking people thinking about like disruptive industries. I had never learned about I don't know crypto or like financial infrastructure or things like VC that those those things were like completely foreign because even though I came from a business background in the sense that I came from a KNC I was doing mostly banking and stuff like that which are not really that exciting uh uh or or um engaging in a way. So when I get there everybody is thinking like what's the next big thing? So I think for me uh business school and HBS made a huge different especially in the sense that I I was exposed to these like super interesting people that just really wanted to like do the next big thing and and really change the world. >> So then talk to us about that thinking of hey maybe I I can change the world too.
>> I think that's that's also an important thing right. So the I think probably the most important learning or the most important skill uh that I like learned or gathered from my time in in business school was just confidence, right? So you you you're there with people that are incredibly bright and incredibly driven. Uh and then then also like very well-rounded. I I thought I was going to um ended up like being classmates with a bunch of geeks, socially awkward, uh that were just like really great bankers, and that really wasn't the case. Uh some of my really best friends are are come from business school. Um and then once you're there, you really just like like really buy into the thinking that you can do that as well, right? Um, and then that's when my mindset shifted from like, hey, I'm going to be this consulting partner at Mckinzy Colombia or whatever to, hey, maybe I can uh
start my own thing and and really make a difference and then do something that I think is it's more exciting and meaningful. >> So then talk to us about taking the plunge, you know, what what needed to happen? How did the whole idea of Wellie come knocking and how do you go about deciding to take action because it's quite the uh it's quite the jump. >> Yeah. So, so I think it that was that was really tough. Um I I cannot take the full credit to be honest because I was working then at Shopppee uh very large e-commerce uh from from Singapore and then Shopee decided to close down operations in every uh market uh with the exception of Southeast Asia and Brazil right so I was there I was launching the company in Colombia we're doing uh quite well I believe um we had I don't know 300 plus employees and then all of the sudden um they decided like this is gone. Um in the in kind of
like in a positive note um I also had like six months of salary and I could do whatever I wanted for the next six months. So that was uh kind of like a great way to get rid of the golden handcuffs as they as they say. So with my partner which um whom whom I met at Shopee, we said like hey let's do something. We're not going to take any uh interviews or job offers in the next three months. Uh we're just gonna come to the office because we still had an office uh back then. We're going to come every day. We're going to do 8 to5 uh and then we're going to think about ways we get I mean things we that we can do that will not uh involve us coming uh back to the corporate sector. Um so I had come from a family of doctors as I mentioned. We kind of knew the model. We knew the problem for sure that we knew that there was a massive problem of uh access to medical procedures in in Latin America. We
knew that there were similar models in the US that we had seen uh the care credits of the world and and so on. And then we realized pretty quickly that there was nobody doing uh something similar in in Latin America, right? So that's when when kind of like it clicked. So it was um combination of factors but uh it was tough like I I cannot take full credit again. >> So then for the people that are listening to get it what ended up being well what'si >> so wedi in in a nutshell um aims to provide access to healthcare to millions of Latin Americans. Um the way we go about this is that we want to become the financial partner of both clinics, doctors but also uh patients uh by creating sort of a full ecosystem of uh financial products um for the healthcare sector which should resemble a lot like the bank for healthcare. That's kind of like the the the quick short version. We want
to become…