Anteriormente Talisman AI
It all began at a dinner in Palo Alto. At the time, I was running Enter from my dorm at Schwab, where Stanford MBA students live. I would wake up every day at 4:55 a.m. to join the company’s daily meeting with our six-person team at 5 a.m. (10 a.m. Brazilian time).
It was December 2023, and our revenue had grown 10x in five months (from $1,600 to $16,000 dollars per month). The traction convinced me that I had to dedicate my life to this business, so I decided to drop out of the MBA. The feeling of doing something halfway, of having to juggle MBA classes instead of focusing entirely on my company, was unbearable for me.
I arranged a meeting with John Hennessy, the former Stanford president and now global chairman of Alphabet. He had given me a full scholarship for the MBA, and I owe him a lot. I wasn't sure how he would react as I explained the situation. He replied, "I didn't expect anything different from you. Go build something big."
With my bags packed to return to Brazil—three heavy bags with MacBooks for the engineering team—I received a cold email from Konstantine Buhler, general partner at Sequoia Capital, the world’s leading venture capital fund that invested early in Apple, Google, NVIDIA, Airbnb, WhatsApp, Nubank, among other home runs. We had never spoken before.
He was inviting me to dinner with some Stanford students who were entrepreneurs. I arrived about 30 minutes early to secure a seat next to him. It didn’t work: the dinner had assigned seating, and my name was at the end of the table. During the dinner, I took advantage of a colleague's bathroom break and sat next to him. I shared with him our elevator pitch and he was hooked. We talked for about twenty minutes. I started with our company's mission: Enter is going to be the biggest AI company in Latin America. It resonated with him.
A decade before, John, who funded my MBA, had been Konstantine's advisor for a master’s in machine learning in Stanford’s Computer Science department. They spoke, and Konstantine asked for references about me. John spoke highly thank God, and I'm sure that was crucial for Konstantine to stay in touch.
Konstantine always replied to my emails in less than 30 minutes—always. On Christmas 2023, no investor messaged me (nor did I expect them to), except for him: “Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and I hope you’re having a lot of success with Talisman.” How is it possible that a partner from the world's top fund, with the best track record, is the very one who takes the time to send me a cold email for dinner, a Christmas message, to mind these details? Perhaps that’s exactly what makes them the best.
Back in Brazil, the company was growing. Returning from Stanford was a Manhattan Project moment. Mike and Henrique resigned as CTO and CMO of Wildlife Studios; Banduk moved newlywed from a beach town with his wife and two dogs; Israel and Alex came from Brasília on a one-way ticket; and Juliano moved from Campinas. Everyone came to work in person in an attic in Pinheiros, every day, nicknamed “pigsty” by our angel investor André Street, founder and former CEO of Stone (NASDAQ:STNE), because of the lack of air conditioning in the middle of summer and a mosquito infestation.
I returned to San Francisco six months later, in July 2024, for a 1-on-1 meeting with Sam Altman at his house. I took the opportunity to visit Sequoia and catch up with Konstantine. I didn’t prepare a presentation or a deck. I just wrote four words on a notebook page: “90% of labor lawsuits.”
I knew his main objection to Enter was the size of the Brazilian market. “Sequoia only invests in businesses that can be worth at least $10 billion,” he explained when we first met. That made sense: their last investment in Brazil had been Nubank, worth $45 billion dollars at the time.
I focused on showing him that despite Brazil's smaller GDP compared to that of US and China, it accounts for 90% of the world's labor lawsuits. Meta and United, two US-based companies, face more consumer lawsuits here than in the United States. I explained the billion-dollar liability caused by predatory litigation and widespread documentation fraud, often larger than companies' net income. And our product was genuinely helping major companies reduce legal damages and expenses from legal fees.
Between leaving the Sequoia office on Alabama Street and getting into my car, I received an email from him with the subject “Energizing.” I arranged for him to meet two of our clients—two publicly traded banks. He often asks clients what they would do if the company disappeared. “We don’t have a plan B if Enter goes out of business,” was the phrase that stood out the most, said by one of the banks, he later told me.
I returned to Brazil but should have stayed there. A few days later, I flew back to San Francisco, this time with Mike and Henrique, to tell our story to the entire Sequoia partnership. Konstantine picked us up at the airport with big chicken sandwiches waiting for us. I was starving. Again, the details.
During our partnership pitch, right after hearing Mike and Henrique's personal introduction, one of the partners shouted from the back of the long meeting table: “I'm fired up!” The pitch was perfect. The best entrepreneurs rise to the occasion, and I felt lucky to have two co-founders whose journeys left everyone in awe and who had built the AI product any Brazilian company would want.
We explained to Alfred Lin, number 1 on the Midas List and investor in DoorDash, that iFood (the Brazilian DoorDash) was our client and had been sued—instead of getting a customer complaint—for a $4 dollar milkshake refund plus $2,000 dollars in psychological damages for it being spilled. It was a completely new reality for them. We convinced Sequoia that the problem was too big to ignore.
The partners deliberated for an hour while we waited in a room at Sequoia's office on Sand Hill Road. Out of nowhere, we saw a movement of all of them walking towards us. They entered one by one: Roelof Botha first, then Pat, Lauren, Shaun, Charlie, Alfred, and the others. Konstantine was holding a two-page document. It was a term sheet.
We called Wilson Sonsini to help us figure out the details—still at Sequoia’s office, with the photos of Steve Jobs and David Vélez showing on the TV— and signed the term sheet a few hours later.
We then went to celebrate at Evvia, a legendary Palo Alto restaurant where, for instance, the merger of Confinity—founded by Peter Thiel—with X.com (payments)—founded by Elon Musk—was negotiated in 2001, creating PayPal (also a Sequoia company). I learned about this reading the book Power Law on the flight back to Brazil, which Konstantine gave me that day.
But before heading to Evvia we took a photo with Konstantine and Lauren where all of Sequoia’s portfolio company's S1 forms from IPOs are kept.
I sent a message to our investors, including John, who became an angel investor when I left Stanford, announcing the round: “We’re raising additional capital to take over the Brazilian litigation market, not to expand to other AI verticals. We’ll add more wood behind fewer arrows. Our team is driven by a deep sense of urgency that the world's most profound technological transformation is happening before our very eyes, and its business upside is up for grabs.”
More than a year after that dinner in Palo Alto that started it all, there's still a lot of work ahead. Now we’re going to deliver on what I told Konstantine when we first met, that Enter will be the largest AI company in Latin America.
Mateus
