Big ideas from the conversation with Joao Barbosa, co-founder of a $2.4B wellness juggernaut Gympass / Wellhub: the art of pivot, creating high-performing teams and how to build a global tech company from Brazil🌎 🇧🇷

Last week was completely insane.

On Monday in São Paulo I recorded an incredible irl conversation with Alexandre Zolko, founder and CEO at CRM&BONUS. The company was launched as a gift back platform back in 2018, became profitable 3 months after the beginning of operations and was bootstrapped for 3 years until they finally raised ~$56m series A from Riverwood Capital, Softbank, Volpe and others. It was Alexandre’s very first ever interview in English and I can’t wait to share it soon(ish).

On Tuesday I had a pleasure to share the main stage of Web Summit in Rio de Janeiro with Luis Silva, founder and CEO at Brazilian $2.15B payments company CloudWalk and Sebastian Castro, co-founder and President at $1.5B Ecuadorian fintech Kushki. I summed up our convo and posted some pictures from the panel here and here’s the recording of the panel that we just posted on our Youtube channel 👇🏻

Later that day, we released the brand new episode of The J Curve featuring my conversation with Joao Barbosa, co-founder at Gympass / Wellhub (more on this below)
And if that wasn’t enough, I got to attend the evening reception at the house of Eduardo Paes, the current mayor of Rio de Janeiro, and meet a number of phenomenal founders and investors. What a day!

On Thursday I had an opportunity to moderate a conversation between Joao Barbosa and Tiago Dalvi, founder and CEO at $1.5B Brazilian e-commerce marketplace integrator Olist. Joao and Tiago shared their learning from a decade of building tech companies locally and globally. More on that here.
Right after the panel with Joao and Tiago, I together with Marcelo Goncalvez, the founding partner at DOMO.VC did 1h startup pitch feedback session. I summarized the main pieces of advice we gave to the founders in this post and below is the link to the panel recoding 👇🏻

Now I am back to New York to enjoy the prettiest spring blossoms, and plan the happy hour that we will be hosting in Sao Paulo in June. Stay tuned! 🥂🤝

But back to Joao Barbosa and Gympass. Gympass that has been recently re-branded to Wellhub in preparation for IPO was founded back in 2012 in Brazil and today is the leading corporate wellness platform in the world. It is present in 11 countries and has 1.2m subscribers across 15,000 corporate clients including the likes of Amazon. Oracle and Activision Blizzard. The latest round led by EQT Growth valued Wellhub at $2.4B up from $2.2B in 2021. Wellhub raised a total of $555m to date and employs ~2000 people worldwide. It’s a truly spectacular and still very rare example of a LatAm tech leader accomplishing success outside of the region!

The journey to this global dominance was rough and included five pivots, two almost bankruptcies and tons of learnings along the way, something we talked a lot about during the recording. Here are the five big ideas that resonated with me the most from the conversation with Joao:

1️⃣ Startup pivot is not an event, it’s a process

Base your decision on data, customer feedback and other validated learnings. Establish clear KPIs that will guide decision-making and define what should success look like. Be prepared to test and iterate and test again. Flexibility, adaptability and sensitivity to feedback is key

2️⃣  Building a MOAT, or competitive advantage is essential for a startup to compete and sustain growth

In Wellhub case the moat is network effect. It’s difficult and expensive to build (CAC was huge) but at scale it represents a huge barrier to exit for corporate clients.

3️⃣  Put a lot of thought into pricing model, especially if you operate in a B2B segment

Early-stage founders frequently under-price their offering. Once you land 1-2-year enterprise contracts, changing the price will be problematic.

4️⃣ International expansion has to be carefully planned and executed post-product market fit

Ideally once you have already significantly penetrated your domestic market and gained a clear understanding of how / why every dollar you spend internationally will deliver you more money than if you were to spend it domestically

5️⃣ Standardized processes are at the core of building teams at scale

When you hire 100 people a month it’s not about keeping the bar high but about creating a clear set of rules to evaluate the performance and hire and fire fast

You can watch the full interview with João on Youtube 👀👇🏻

Or listen / watch the episode on Spotify 🎧

Before you go, here’s some content that I’ve been exploring recently:

The Rising Importance of the Great Art of Storytelling - this Bill Gurley’s thought piece on the ever increasing importance of storytelling is as relevant now as it was back in 1999

The Importance of Doing Nothing  by INSEAD professor Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries. Our lives are defined by busyness and this article is building a compelling argument of why doing less and reflecting more is the killer productivity booster. If you want to dig into the original paper by Manfred that expands on the article, here is the link

Invest like the Best with Aravind Srinivas, founder and CEO of Perplexity, one of the hottest AI companies out there. Super curious take on why building smith new in foundational models would be extremely tough for startups

Thanks for reading,

Olga