Matias Recchia successfully raised $45 million for his company, Keyway, from top-tier investors. He emphasizes prioritizing founder-aligned investors.
Matias Recchia successfully raised $45 million for his company, Keyway, from top-tier investors. He emphasizes prioritizing founder-aligned investors for true partnership over higher valuations.
Keep your eyes open as you're executing in terms of what's lack, what's real traction, what's some headwinds in the industry, what's some winds going against you in the industry. When things take a little longer and are a little harder, if you stick through them, they end up working out. [Music] [Applause] [Music] All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show. So today we are going to have an amazing time here. We have a repeated founder. We're going to be talking about the building, the scaling, the financing, you know, I mean he's done it all. And in today's, you know, episode specifically, we're going to be talking about, you know, working with people that, you know, versus new people. You know, in his case, he's worked with a bunch of people that he worked with his previous startups before. We're also going to be talking about AI, you know, and why it's so important
and how to think about things differently now when starting a business as well as why, you know, going with the least high um term sheet, you know, why they went with the least high term sheet, not the highest term sheet, but one that was perhaps more compelling given other facts that we will discuss and then also thinking about selling software in a very traditional industry. So again, brace yourself for a very impactful, inspiring conversation. And without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Matias Reia. Welcome to the show. >> Hi, Alejandro. Thank you so much for having me on the show today. >> So Matias, I know that you were born in Argentina, but raised all over the place. You know, your dad was in the oil industry. So give us a walk through memory lane. How was life for you, Matias? The early days. As you say, I I grew up all over the place. So, I'm originally
from Argentina, but even in Argentina, I lived in several cities. My father was in the oil and gas industry, so we moved every two or three years. Um, when I was seven, we moved to Venezuela, which is really where I grew up. Um, also in several cities there. Then I moved to the UK, then to the US. And you know, for the last 15 years, I've been living back and forth between New York and and Buenosirus. >> Now, I mean, it's amazing, you know, also your uh your education, you know, the London School of Economics, Harvard Business School, and I'm sure that you were able to build, you know, quite the network, you know, in those schools. >> For sure. I mean, a lot of the businesses I've started, people I've worked with, people I've hired come from come from those schools and and those formative years. So, they've been great educational experiences, but also a great way to find
partners and, you know, and people to to work with and and have fun with. So how do you go from Mckini you know which is a great place for learning how to grab big problems and you know break them into little problems great great I would say great background and and great frame of reference on how to tackle problems but how do you go from that to entering the venture world and in this case a social gaming you know type of uh company that was mainly in Brazil. >> Yeah. So as you very well put it, McKenzie is an a fantastic place to learn. It's almost I I see Mckenzie as a continu continuation of my education. It was just a fantastic place to learn to get to know a bunch of smart people. My office mate in my Mckenzie years in New York is one of my advisors now and he was a board member of Kiwway when we started it. So even at Mckenzie, I think that sort of like network of impressive
people um it's it's very helpful as you start businesses and it gives you sort of like a common language to talk to others. So while I was at Mckenzie, I started to help some friends of mine that had started this social network for Latin America that was called BOSU. Now it's a long time ago but at that point in time um it was you know a competition to Facebook but in the region when Facebook was just leaving through Ivy League schools in the US these guys were doing the same thing in Latin America and I joined them when we pivoted the business model to become a social gaming company and focus really in gaming in a Google platform and we grew to be the largest social gaming company in Latin America. the third largest social gaming company in the world. 20 to 25 million daily active users. We went from a team of 10 people with when I joined to a team of 400 people. So, you know, it's you
you you think you've seen everything when when you read these business school cases um or when you work at McKenzie, but you know, the reality of a high growth startup punches you in the face. So, it was very very exciting times. Um, it was just fantastic to work with some of my close friends from business school, some of which have been in your in your podcast as well. Um, like Mario um and uh it was just very very exciting but very different than you know than those years at at Mckenzie. Mario and I had both worked at McKenzie and I and I I do believe that gave us sort of like a common language when we were framing problems or or trying to solve through you know tough situations. >> And for those of you wondering Mario the founder of Oscar Health so you can definitely you know check out the episode with him. It was a great episode. So now Matias the the company V2 ended up
getting acquired I guess. What kind of visibility did that give you uh in terms of being able to see the full cycle of a business? It was it was great. We went through high growth. We went through restructuring. We went through working closely with partners. So when you do social games many times you're you're working in platforms that are not owned by you but so you're not the owner of the users themselves. So we were you know big partners of Facebook in the region. We were huge partners of Google in the region and and in other regions. We were working with advert advertisers as well to do brand positioning. So it was not just a a B2C business, but it was a lot of business development, a lot of people management, you know, where you're dealing with developers, but you're also dealing with designers, and you're also dealing with finance people and strategy people to figure out the the
monetization of the business. So it was just a very powerful experience all around where you know it's like you're managing you know a a business um you know with three or four years of um of work experience. So it's it's a crash course and you make lots of mistakes in the way um and you learn from those mistakes hopefully and you don't repeat them but at the same time it's just the the thrill is is so um so wonderful. But I think that's why once you've been an entrepreneur, it's so hard to go back to regular job. It's just like the if you if you like that adrenaline, you're seeking that adrenaline all the time. >> And how do you go from Bosu to to Iguana Fix, which was your your next baby. >> So Iguana was fundamentally different. Um I started Iguana with Bosus CTO. So with a with a former CTO of Bostus. So it was someone with whom I had built a fantastic working
relationship with um and uh we decided we wanted to do something together. And after spending several years in the full virtual world um in which we were selling you know virtual assets and virtual cows to people, we felt a strong need to do something that was related to the physical world and something where we could bring technology to a more traditional um industry and and and that's sort of like that's been my my theme afterwards. It's just like how do I bring technology and a different way of doing things and more efficiency to industries that haven't faced that in in the past and you know real estate is is a very backward industry in terms of um on of technology adoption or kind of like a slow industry to adopt technology and home improvement services are are like that um as well. So we were thinking how can we apply this like marketplace mindset and this idea of you know the early
days of Uber why can't it be as easy as ordering an Uber to hire a plumber an electrician um someone to you know install your furniture and and so on and you know in Latin America we see kind of like a huge divide between social classes and many times folks that are doing this important work don't get to scale their own businesses or become entrepreneur themselves. So we we sort of love this idea of bringing technology to a traditional industry and then on top of that how could we help these small entrepreneurs become more mediumsiz or even large entrepreneurs in these um particular businesses. So we we launched Iguana Fix. We scaled the business a lot. We we had over 80,000 independent service providers in the platform that were doing millions of jobs every month um working both with B2C customers and B2B customers. So we ended up doing maintenance for some of the largest corporations
in the in the region as…