Wences Casares (Bling Nation & Lemon Bank) - The Value of True Partnerships

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
You are listening to the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series, brought to you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. You can find podcasts and videos of these lectures online at ecorner.stanford.edu.
Today's guests are very, very special to me. I met both Micky and Wences a couple of years ago down in Chile, and was totally impressed. The two of them have started several companies together and really made some terrific contributions.
Wences is originally from Argentina, and Micky is from Venezuela, and they've got a great story about how they met, how they got together, what brought them here to Silicon Valley, and all the adventures they've had. I know that they're going to tell us a lot about what it means to be an entrepreneurial team and what's made them so successful. They are the co-founders currently of Bling Nation, and I can't wait to hear their story. Without further ado, Wences and Micky.

**Wences Casares** (1:09)
Thank you very much for having us. When Tina invited us to talk, she suggested a theme that we have informally talked with Tina and with others about, that is the importance of an entrepreneurial partnership. The partners you start something with, the co-founders, if you will. And we've talked a lot about it, and it's something that we paid a lot of attention. Micky and I have been working together for over 13 years, but we've never given a talk like this about it, so it made it at the same time very interesting to do something that we haven't done before, but also more challenging than repeating some talks that we have done before.
We believe that we do a lot of or not a lot, but a little bit of angel investing and we realize that when we look at a very early stage company that we are considering on investing, almost without realizing we pay a lot of attention about the founding team and especially the dynamics within the founding team. And we think that is something that is very often overlooked.
We...
I like boats a lot, sailboats in particular, and I bought used sailboats a few times, and I learned that sometimes instead of trying to go over and going over the technical specs of what this boat has, when they added this, when they added that, how many miles it has, where it has been, if they tell me a story about the previous owners, it's much more easy to understand everything that there is to... everything sort of falls in place. It's a couple and he really likes to sail, but she didn't want to sail, and so he put the air conditioning so she wouldn't leave, and da-da-da. All of a sudden, things that were very hard to make sense in the tech spreadsheet make a lot of sense. And I find the same thing with companies. A lot of things that are hard to understand make a lot more sense when you understand the partnerships that drive those companies. And I think it's no coincidence when you look at some of the most important successes in Silicon Valley, but elsewhere, you see very strong partnerships at the core of those successes. And also, when you see companies that fail, the usual explanation is we ran out of money, but that's a consequence of something else. Of course you ran out of money, but why did you run out of money? And then they may follow that explanation by saying, well, we didn't get a good product-market fit, or there was a problem with a product or a problem with the marketing. And that's still a consequence. When you dig deeper and say, why did you have that problem, very often we see problems that have to do with the dynamics between the partners. And I think that that is something that is very often overlooked.
Many more companies fail because of the dynamics between people. And the number one focus for bad dynamics is the dynamics between the partners. So this is very important on both sides. And we sort of informally have talked a lot about this, the many things that we have done together with Micky a little over 13 years. And so the talk today, we wanted to summarize what we think we've learned. This is probably a never-ending task. But there are some things that we think we learn or when we see a team that we can see, it's a strong team, it's a weak team, what we like, what we don't. And in our own sort of dynamics.
Micky has a lot of opinions about this. Some of them are similar to mine and some are very different.

**Meyer Malka** (4:57)
Yeah, I think that what we've learned in 13 years, I'm going to summarize it in five words and then we'll go over and give you the whole history. But it's a partnership where it works because I have the looks and he has the brains.