Meet Gustavo Vizcardo, StartupYard’s new Head of Partnerships

It’s our great pleasure to introduce the newest member of the StartupYard team (there are now 5 of us), Gustavo Vizcardo.

Gustavo joins us as Head of Partnerships. He brings over 15 years of corporate experience, most notably as procurement manager for CEE at Coca Cola. Gustavo is also an experienced entrepreneur, and has been a valued mentor at StartupYard since 2015.

Gustavo’s role, which is a new one at StartupYard, is to facilitate bringing innovation thinking from our startups to corporations. The goal is to help corporations to stir innovation while being engaged and learning from our startups, while looking for opportunities and new technologies that will help them to serve their clients, customers and employees in a smarter way. 

StartupYard aims to establish long-term collaborative relationships between corporations and startups.

If you’d like to contact Gustavo about his work with StartupYard, you can reach him at Gustavo@startupyard.cz.

I caught up with Gustavo this week to talk about his new role, and his plans for making StartupYard a key connector between enterprise and startups:

Hi Gustavo! You’ve been with the StartupYard team over a month now. Tell our community a bit about what you’re doing here.

First of all, I consider myself very lucky and privileged to work at StartupYard. My role is to connect startups working on exciting technology, with corporations in a mutually beneficial way. New services and new business models are being born constantly, and corporations are seeking cooperation with agile startups more and more. We’re seeing this across the spectrum, from Fintech to Automotive, to Retail – technological advances are playing a central role in the direction of large companies, and they need the infusion of new ideas and new methodologies from startup companies to move forward.

Part of my job is also to mentor corporations, in the same way that corporates help mentor StartupYard’s startups, on how to get the most out of their relationships with early stage, high tech companies. Corporates need to move at a faster pace, but they are constantly looking for sure footing when it comes to new ideas. StartupYard is a bridge between emerging tech and established business in that respect; we can help show big corporations what they need to focus on and who they should be talking to.

You come originally from Peru, and you’re a UK citizen as well. How did you end up here in Prague?

Well, that’s a combination of a professional and personal reasons. At the beginning of 2013, I was in London working for Coca-Cola,  responsible for marketing procurement in 23 countries in CEE and Southern Europe. Due to my role, the company asked me to relocate to the region.

On the personal side, in the same year I got married to a beautiful Slovak woman, and together we were thinking where will be the best place for us to live. Prague was a natural decision for both of us, and we love it here. At Coke and J&J Consumer, I got an in-depth view of the corporate mindset in a number of countries, and that has really helped me to understand how startups and corporations can begin to work together – even if this is sometimes easier said than done.

I worked with Coca-Cola for a number of years, before leaving to pursue some of my own business ideas, and now to work with StartupYard.

You’re also an entrepreneur. Can you tell us a bit about your previous ventures?

In 2014 I founded ValensGen, a doctor-supervised weight loss program, based on the professional and detailed genetic study of each client. Our ambition was/is to support people to live healthier by using the most advanced technology available.

However, the road has been very, very tough, much more than what we initially anticipated. We’ve made many mistakes which we learned from. Today, the business is somewhat dormant. As we say at StartupYard: the default scenario is failure, so I’m not afraid to admit when things haven’t gone as planned, but learnt from our mistakes and keep working hard.

I still believe that genetics will transform the way how people approach health and healthcare, but the market is really still in the early stages. Consumers are just not aware yet of what genetics tech can do for them, and companies also need to work on ways of using this technology to really deeply benefit people; to make understanding genetics more than a “nice to have” part of a healthy lifestyle. I still want to be part of that.

You spent many years in corporations. Why did you decide to leave corporate life behind and work in startups instead? How does your experience help you in reaching out to corporations now?

Doing business for myself, entrepreneurism, has always been at my core. My father and grandfather were entrepreneurs, and I’ve heard about business since I was a very young. My family ran a successful bakery in Peru. However, by the time I graduated from high school, the economic situation in Peru had become very tough. We had customers, but we had nothing to sell to them. We were experiencing hyper-inflation, and there were shortages of all the raw materials and commodities. People queued up at our door at 6 in the morning to buy bread, but we didn’t even have enough to sell to everyone. It was a very sad time for us, and the country. In the end, the family business closed because the underlying economy couldn’t support it.

Hence, the corporate world was the ONLY option when I first left school. In the last 13 years, I probably had 3 attempts to set-up something for myself, however, I always found reasons to procrastinate. Being in a corporation can give you a safe kind of feeling, and that can make you complacent.

As per the second part of your question, after 15+ years working at large corporations, I understand their complexity and problems, but at the same time, their strengths and opportunities. We have to be empathetic with large enterprises; it doesn’t pay to bash them and see everything they do as inept. If it were, they wouldn’t be around, some of them for a century or more. On the other hand, having gone over my own entrepreneurial experience and as SY mentor, I also have good idea of what the ‘startup’ community can bring in terms of innovation for new/better services.

The fact is that corporations will find ways to survive into the future, and that is not an inherently bad thing. Many people need security, and consumers need some basic consistency in the services they use, and the products they buy. I would not have had a good chance in my life and in my career without the opportunities that an international corporation gave me. They can bring large-scale discipline and efficient processes to people and places who lack them, and need them the most. I still owe much of my thinking to the way I was trained, and I am thankful. Startups are a big part of the future, but not the only part.

What has surprised you so far about working with StartupYard? What have been some of your biggest challenges?

In terms of surprises, I will say there are two fronts: Startups and Investors. I’ve been in contact with our startups from the last cohort since December and I’m impressed about the speed at which they have evolved and improved. This is something I couldn’t imagine before.

As per investors, I’m also surprised about the caliber, experience and expertise of investors in the Czech Republic. They really know their stuff, and work very hard.

My biggest challenge is about how to materialize innovation and technology from our startups toward the corporate world on the sustainable basis.

What can people in corporations do to work with you? What kinds of people would you like to connect with, and how can you help them?

C-Level executives of Czech and International corporations (with operations in Czech Republic), can talk to me about the pain points they are experiencing with technology, and find out how we can align them with startups we invest in and accelerate. I can work with corporations to identify what these pain points are, and begin to show them how working with startups can offer exciting solutions and opportunities.

While we want to work with top management, we also recognize that some corporations are developing internal “Innovation Leads” and other teams which are tasked with bringing more outside tech innovation into the company, and we are happy to support and work with them as well on that mission. Our aim is to help empower these people, by finding ways for them to deliver on their mandate for the company, and break through the typical firewall between a corporation’s internal activities and the outside world.

Komercni Banka, for example, came to us about helping them to shift their internal culture and their strategy towards tech innovation. As part of that effort, we are co-organizing a Fintech Hackathon with them for this month, which promotes their focus on new customer solutions and a better user experience and helping their customers (and their own team) to leverage more emerging technologies. In some ways, we can call that effort a proof of concept for KB – one step in a larger process that involves people at every level of the company.

Big corporations are duly concerned that younger people don’t favor their products, don’t want to work for them, and don’t feel they can be depended on in the way they could as employers and service providers for previous generations. In short, corporations are experiencing many strong challenges ahead, and the only solution is an honest and open approach to innovation, and to the way their employees, the tech world, and their customers are really living and working in today’s world. In a sense this has been a continuous feature of corporate life, but technological progress has accelerated the need for new approaches in recent years.