Jimena Pardo, New ALLVP Partner, on This Year for the Region: “Companies Are Going To Tighten Their Belts, but They Are Still Going To Come Out Ahead”

«Back home!». That was how Jimena Pardo titled a blog post to announce that she would become the third partner of the Mexican venture capital fund ALLVP (the other two are Federico Antoni and Antonia Rojas). A homecoming, since her first company, the car-sharing startup Carrot, was also the first one ALLVP backed a decade ago.

After Carrot, Pardo worked at Facebook/Meta, where she specialized in product and go-to-market, kept in touch with entrepreneurs for mentoring, and made some angel investments.

Now he is joining ALLVP full time to offer her experience to the companies that are—and will be—part of the fund’s portfolio. Pardo spoke with Contxto about her plans to contribute to the venture capital, the fourth fund they are raising, the investment in Brazil, and her particular interest in blockchain and web3 companies.

What are your personal goals as a partner in ALLVP?

At ALLVP, we each have our own strengths in a different area: Federico on the strategy side, Antonia with investors, and me operating. I want to get involved with the entrepreneurs to help them. That’s where I add the most value to them because I have a lot of experience in product and go-to-market. On the other hand, ALLVP has not been involved in any new technologies such as blockchain and web3. I would like to find those people in Latin America who are building a real solution through these new technologies and, why not, convince my partners to support them. These are technologies that are here to stay.

ALLVP said it would start a new stage. What is coming?

Fund four, which we are starting to raise. We have our sights set on Latin America. The first investment is coming to Brazil. We want to explore this country and new technologies. Always with ALLVP’s business as usual, with the learning, algorithm, and discipline it already has to identify the best entrepreneurial teams in Latin America, so we can quickly add them to our portfolio and help them to be successful.

Do the investment amounts remain the same, or will they increase?

We are sticking with the same thesis because, in the end, ALLVP has already proven it, and the portfolio it has today looks super successful. 

After the incident involving ALLVP’s former partner, Fernando Lelo de Larrea [accused of making advances to his female students], what is ALLVP’s current position on the matter?

I see today at ALLVP that we have the strongest standards in the entire industry. In fact, some of the associations we work with, our partners and portfolio companies, are looking to us to implement these kinds of new standards. After what happened, ALLVP redoubled its efforts with the transparency that the entire industry should have.

What are your goals with ALLVP for 2022?

Fund four and start investing in it. Personally, I see that everything happening in this quarter of 2022 will bring outstanding entrepreneurs because, at the end of the day, the valuations have been corrected. In this uncertain environment, the best entrepreneurs are always staying. I am excited to start looking for these resilient entrepreneurs who, with the right metrics, are sure to be successful.

Last year we broke startup investment records in LatAm, but now we have seen layoffs and losses in some startups. What outlook do you see for the ecosystem by the end of 2022?

I have another context because I started in 2012, and the Latin American entrepreneurship ecosystem was tiny, the tickets were very low, and the number of companies was also minimal. Last year, there was a hype, perhaps an excessive expenditure. But I still see that for Latin America, we are not going to go backward. In other words, we will correct it, but we are going to keep going forward. There is no other way but for this to continue growing. It will be very interesting that this year the valuations will focus on the most important KPIs, on businesses being profitable, and on a very analytical growth. This will bring us a lot more talent, and companies are going to tighten their belts, but they are going to continue to come out ahead. At the end of the day, we will continue to see the ecosystem grow because we still have a long way to go.  

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