Fernando Fabre, Kauffman Fellows CEO on Building Venture Ecosystems

**Grace Gong** (0:04)
Hi, Fernando, welcome to Venture with Grace.

**Fernando Fabre** (0:07)
Hi, Grace. How's it going?

**Grace Gong** (0:09)
Good. I just came back from LA yesterday, so it's been a fun trip. What about you? How are you? How was the weekend?

**Fernando Fabre** (0:20)
Weekend was great. Father's Day. Anybody in New York? Happy Father's Day. If you're in New York, you have to go to see this art exhibit, called Clean-A-Man in the Park Avenue Armory. It's spectacular.
Highly, highly recommend Clean-A-Man for anyone to see.

**Grace Gong** (0:39)
Clean-A-Man? Okay. Everyone, please, if you're listening, definitely go see that.
Before we dive into our deep conversation about everything in Venture Capital, I want to give a quick shout out to our amazing sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Nebius, the ultimate call for AI innovators. Nebius provides AI infrastructure you can count on, combining reliability and speed with flexibility and engineering support unmatched by high-grade skillers. AI leaders like Meta, Shopify, and Higgsfield already partner with Nebius to run their AI workloads. Plus, Venture-backed startup can save up to 150K on compute costs when they apply for access. Visit nebius.com or nebius.com/startup to learn more. Okay. I want to start with your journey. You have been running amazing. You started your career. I don't think this is your first job, but you were a founder and then before that, you were Director of Operations of a company. Later on, you were a professor before becoming Managing Director of Endeavor, which is a huge organization for entrepreneurship.
Right now, I'm just going to fast forward to right now.
You are both GP at Matterscale Ventures, as well as the CEO of Kauffman Fellows. I want to start with, what were some core lessons that you've learned early on in your career, kind of shaped you into who you are today?

**Fernando Fabre** (2:04)
Thank you. I think it's been a combination of being at the right place at the right time. It's luck plays a very big role in our lives, and some people recognize it and some people don't. But started off, back in 1998, I was in Claremont, California, studying economics.
This is LA, not San Francisco, but it's the height of the.com bubble.
I had never thought of entrepreneurship or venture capital up until that time. It was a completely alien concept to me. Then I had this professor of mine, Richard Smith, he wrote a case study in 1998 about amazon.com, which at that time was the largest bookstore in the planet. That was their thing. Nothing else than that. It's a four-year-old company and it had about $100 million in revenue. It was losing a ton of money, of course, but for me, it's sort of this eye-popping moment of how did I miss this? I'd been studying economics and economic development and whatnot. This company out of nowhere creates a $100 million of revenue that goes to someone. It's not staying with the owners of this company because they're losing, so that means that it's a $100 million that's going to someone else. It's sort of this dripping effect of capitalism at its best. I was hooked on that. I said, I need to stay close to this thing, entrepreneurship and venture, which I did. I moved back to Mexico City where I'm from, where I was born, launched an entrepreneur accelerator without knowing much else in early 2000 And what happened then is the.com crash meant that everyone who had anything entrepreneurship in Mexico City shut down. And I had just opened an office. So I was sort of the one standing after the storm, which gave me this unique window into positioning myself for a couple of years as a voice in entrepreneurship in the city. And eventually the accelerator I launched didn't work out. We lost a ton of money. But Endeavor was launching offices at the time in Mexico. They needed a CEO. They brought me in.
Six years forward, they needed a president to run global operations in the New York headquarters of Endeavor. And that's why I ended up moving to New York in 2010
I did that for about eight years. And after 15, 16 years working at Endeavor, I decided to leave. Started a venture capital fund, Matterscale, small pre-seed investment into Latin founders throughout the Americas, from Canada all the way down to Patagonia. Twenty-five million dollars, almost fully invested. And at the third, fourth year of running that fund, I spoke to my partners. Kauffman Fellows, which we'll talk more about in the moment, was looking for a new CEO. I'm a graduate of Kauffman Fellows. I did this program, I don't know, 15, 16 years ago. Stayed very close to them. I love the mission. It's entrepreneurship, it's venture capital, it's education.