Connect with Miguel and Andrew

https://www.linkedin.com/in/armaza/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewendicott/

VC Uncovered's View

Meet Andrew and Miguel

Key Quotes

Original Responses (Lightly Edited for Clarity and Flow)

Background and Personal Journey

Experiences Shaping Our Investment Approach

Andrew: As with so many entrepreneurs, family played a big role in shaping my path. My biggest influence remains speaking at the dinner table with my Dad throughout my childhood. Hearing about oil wildcatting in Texas and Oklahoma in the early 20th century, with the risk and potential payoffs involved, has tons of similarities to VC and was really influential for me. I am also a major devotee of the things that Warren Buffett has written throughout his career, even though venture differs from value investing in major ways. All of this, plus simply being from a rural part of the South and then moving to the epicenter of the global economy, NYC, gives me several different ways of seeing the world.

Miguel: My thinking was influenced by living in Russia and China in the 1990s and 2000s, at a time when these economies were growing extremely fast and going through intense change. Lots of entrepreneurs came out of those years.

Moment Inspiring Venture Career

Andrew: I came to VC indirectly having been an entrepreneur with Petal, the NY-based consumer fintech company in the credit card space. Prior to being an entrepreneur, I was not particularly interested in becoming a VC. Most of my interactions with investors had been with private equity funds and hedge funds when I was an investment banker and corporate lawyer. But I loved learning about the decision-making processes of VCs once I encountered them in the wild, and eventually, I realized over time that it was what I wanted to do long-term.

Miguel: My story of breaking into VC was very organic. I spent 8 years in banking, two of which I worked in the operations and technology department at Citi Payments and then Capital Markets. Seeing Citi’s antiquated technology was a huge realization for me. I thought banks had the best tech, but it was actually the complete opposite. So I started investing small angel checks into fintech companies founded by friends I trusted (Petal being one of them!) Through podcasting, I met a lot of world-class entrepreneurs and founding partners of large VC firms. These experiences inspired me to start Gilgamesh.

Unconventional Beliefs

Andrew: Although investors are pretty adept at assessing traction and other basics, I strongly believe that many investors are atrocious at assessing products, strategies, and even market size. They simply can’t do it—they’re no better than consultants in my opinion because they aren’t doing the things. Instead, investors should dedicate almost all their time to assessing the judgment and capabilities of founders, via discussions about these topics. Founders who illustrate an amazing grasp of what they are doing are the ones you should back.

Miguel: As a result of my own experience, I believe in the concept of “distance traveled” when evaluating people. The heights a person has reached in their background can be a great basis for understanding them, but only if you assess it in light of where they came from. Said differently, not everyone on third base in life has hit a triple—some just started there. I deeply believe in the power of grit in powering entrepreneurial success, and it is an important quality I look for when assessing opportunities.

Best Advice Received

Andrew: 
“Just win baby, win.” – Al Davis
“Whether you think you can or can’t, you’re probably right.” – Henry Ford

Miguel: 
“There’s no plan B, so you have to figure it out.”

Balancing Intuition with Data

Andrew: I am almost entirely intuition-driven, and this is how I think seed investing should work. Data has a place in seed investing, but most of the time, it’s a knockout variable when something looks bad—not a reason to invest on its own.

Miguel: I agree with Andrew on this one—traction, awareness, early revenue growth, and customer usage/retention are all important things when looking at an early-stage opportunity. But they only go so far. At the end of the day, you are making a 10+ year bet, and how someone has done in the first six months only tells you so much. The soft stuff matters so much more early on.

Influences on Worldview

Andrew: My Dad had a pretty profound impact. But I also read a lot, and not just business stuff. Relevant influences on my general philosophy include Warren Buffett, Nassim Taleb, Karl Popper, William Faulkner, and Tolstoy. Not all of that is business-related, but each shaped how I see the world and make decisions. Given that I also see VC as a career of understanding people, I also read lots of biographies, and the stories of John D. Rockefeller, U.S. Grant, J.P. Morgan, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin have been very important to how I see the world.

Miguel: Running Fintech Leaders, I have had the privilege to get to know 350+ titans of industry in the world of financial services. On top of the amazing people I get to meet as an investor, this has radically impacted my perspective on decision-making in the last several years. Being from outside the United States for most of my life had a foundational impact on my worldview as well—I bring an immigrant’s mindset (perhaps with a bit of a chip on my shoulder) to bear every day when I get to work. Both of these inspire me to think smarter, move faster, and work harder.

Philosophy and Insights

Investment Philosophy

We invest in people with the horsepower to bring to life ideas capable of transforming how money is moved, stored, borrowed and invested across the world.

Values When Working with Founders

Founders have to combine a lot of important traits to succeed. We only invest in people who bring to the table tremendous amounts of energy, intelligence, expertise, and vision around their ideas. They must be authentic leaders, and they must illustrate the tenacity to fight through extreme difficulty without giving up.

Approach to Risk

In venture capital, risk is good, and if you are not investing in risky opportunities, you will have disappointing returns. Risk is furthermore unavoidable given that you cannot know or predict everything, and it’s downright impossible to predict how people will behave over the long-term. As investors, we control for risks by partnering with tenacious, intelligent people, and we only invest when we are confident that the upside is big enough such that if things go right, it is worth the risk of things going wrong. We’re not always going to be right, but when we are, we want it to make up for the times we aren’t.

Measuring Success Beyond Returns

This is simple. We measure success by earning the respect of founders we deeply admire and rewarding the confidence of the people and institutions who have invested in us. Everything else is a mirage.

Trends and Future Vision

Misconceptions about VC

There are certain ideas that (effectively) can’t scale without the backing of venture capital. These are big ideas that can revolutionize markets and daily life, changing how so many things work. But it is still a minority of companies. Other forms of capital make more sense for the vast majority of companies, and trying to use VC to build them can create problems for everyone involved.

And —there is a myth that VCs do not work in the summer. We do!

The Perfect Founder Pitch

Andrew: A founder needs to be able to tell us a story that we can understand and believe in. They have to possess a unique insight into the problem they are solving, and they be maniacally focused on that problem. When we see that, we get really excited. We want to know that a founder has a clear plan, and we want to know what they need from us to make their vision a reality.

Miguel: We get a lot of pitches every week, and the ones that stand out are those with a clear, compelling story. We want to see a founder who is a "builder". We love founders who have a unique perspective on a problem and who are genuinely obsessed with finding a solution. We look for the founders who have a deep understanding of their market and a unique perspective.

Challenges for Early-Stage Founders

Andrew: The biggest challenge for early-stage founders is fundraising. It’s a tough market right now, and it’s very difficult to raise money. I think founders need to be very focused and disciplined about how they approach fundraising and how they build their businesses. They need to have a clear plan and they need to be able to execute on that plan.

Miguel: I think the biggest challenge is finding the right people. The right co-founder, the first few employees, and the early advisors are all critical to a company's success, and it can be hard to find those people in a crowded market. We try to help our founders with this as much as possible, as we have a very large network of founders and operators.

Emerging Trends

Today is an exciting time for fintech. Every decade or so, financial services renews itself, and conditions open up enabling people to take new approaches to big problems—said differently, every once in a while, you have fresh chances to really swing for the fences and really slay the dragons that dominate the industry.

We are living in such a moment right now. It is a thrill to have so many different types of opportunities that are leveraging transformative infrastructure, largely via the use of AI and stablecoin architecture. Generational companies are being built as we speak, and the exciting part of our jobs is that we have the chance to be part of some of them.

Future of Venture

Andrew: The industry is changing faster than ever. There’s a new generation of investors coming in with different perspectives and unique experiences. They are a lot more hands-on and a lot more founder-friendly. That gives me a lot of optimism about the future.

Miguel: I’m optimistic because of the people. There are so many ambitious, and talented founders who are building amazing companies. And there are a lot of investors who are willing to take risks on those people and help them build something great.