if I try to think back to how I started Atlas (or Palabra, before that), I don't remember the state of mind I'm in now. I didn't start out thinking I'd build a 1B business. the first time I heard I had to put together a plan for 100M in annual revenue it sounded ridiculous to me. I didn't dream of raising vc. I couldn't picture what the next 5 years of my life would look like. but I also never doubted I'd want to keep going. my only north star was making a product I'd be proud of. my dream product.
I try to look at myself with the eyes I have now. would I have invested in karen? would I have seen the person I'd become 5 years later? would I have written her off as inexperienced? would I have read that as a lack of ambition?
when I talk to latam founders I'm sometimes struck by how they see their businesses: the focus on EBITDA, not thinking about going regional, sticking stubbornly to small markets or not even knowing the size of their market. my co-founder and I coined a term for it: "smbs with tech." they don't behave like startups. they don't think about growth. or they think about growth the way any smb founder would: sell until the business sustains itself, then sell some more so you can pay yourself a little better.
I try to imagine what I believed 5 years ago, and I wasn't any different from them. I didn't know the size of my market and I didn't know how to sell. Palabra died because I cared more about the product than about product-market fit. and if I wasn't dreaming about a positive ebitda and selling only into argentina, it was because of the people around me.
I didn't know any founders in argentina. while I was building Palabra from my living room in Caballito, the other founders I talked to were in SF. I learned and listened by working with people I admired. Daniel Gross invested in Palabra when we were nothing, and if I learned to think about the business like someone from SF, it was from blindly listening to someone I respected.
does that mean ambition feeds itself? my ambition wasn't fed only by the people around me and their giant dreams, but also by the sense that it was actually possible. when we started, Atlas felt inevitable. we were selling more than we could keep up with. our calendars were packed monday to monday with calls that converted into sales 50% of the time.
I think my ambition came from understanding the game, getting excited by the game, and also believing I could win it.
sometimes I look back on that period. one thing always surprises me: I was coming off a year and a half of building Palabra. we didn't have PMF, the last few months had been incredibly painful, and a month after shutting it down we started Atlas. it feels like years passed between those two moments but it was weeks. on one side, feeling awful. holding together a team that changed focus every week because we didn't know what to sell, watching the bank account run down, not knowing what to do. and then Atlas. all the energy of the early days. working hundreds of hours a day because we couldn't keep up. selling from day zero. having a ton of fun.
what changed so much from one week to the next? PMF feeds you, but more than anything it's the ambition for everything it could become. we started dreaming about building the next Deel because it felt possible.
one last footnote: that's why SF works. when you put the most ambitious people in the world in one place, they feed off each other. could they have done it somewhere else? maybe. maybe not.