Confidence Through Challenge: Leadership, Scarcity Mindsets, and the Power of Exposure

In this episode of Leadership Quotient, Lindsay Guzowski speaks with Leticia Souza, CFO at SAVii and angel investor with Epic Angels and GVAngels, about the leadership lessons learned from building a bootstrapped startup into a venture-backed business and ultimately through acquisition. Leticia shares why early wins are critical for developing confidence, how scarcity mindsets shape decision-making, and what she looks for in founders as an investor. The conversation explores adaptability, resilience, culture during acquisitions, and why increasing your exposure to opportunity is often the only variable leaders can truly control.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to Leadership Quotient, a podcast by The Crucible where we explore how leadership teams in investor-backed companies are built, aligned, and scaled for impact. I'm your host, Lindsay Kazowski, and in each episode, we'll talk with the people shaping value behind the scenes, from operating partners to investors to advisors to C-suite executives, about what it really takes to drive performance through leadership. On today's episode of the Leadership Quotient Podcast, I chat with Letitia Souza, CFO at Savvy, an angel investor with Epic Angels and GV Angels about needing to have quick early wins to enable confidence, bootstrapping engendering a scarcity mindset, and angel investing as a way to give back. Letitia, welcome to Leadership Quotient. In order to give some context, I'd love to hear how you got into the investor back space and walk us a little bit through your career trajectory. You've had a lot of success very quickly. So I'd love to hear how that came about.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Thank you. Um yeah, I actually never thought that I was going to move to um a startup, right? I never thought that I was going to move to the fintech scene. I I always knew that I wanted to do investment banking. And I knew that I was going to leave eventually, but I always thought that I was going to go to the buy side, right? So started my career back in Sao Paulo, where I'm originally from. So I was born and raised in Brazil. And um I joke that I did all the balance sheet in investment banking scene. So I did a little bit of equity research, then I did the proper MA advisory, and finally uh capital markets. So that was my last position when I was um already thinking about uh the fintech specifically scene in in Latin America. It was at the time when um new banks started to be really ramping up all the hirings that they were doing in banking. And that opened my eyes to the fintech environment. I ended up being connected to uh someone that was uh building a company in Singapore um that was primarily doing SME lending. Um this person was uh uh previously backed by Brocket Internet, so the ones that are old in the venture capital industry and uh remember the the brothers, and they were pretty big in Latin America and in Southeast Asia. So there were a lot of Brazilians working in China and a lot of you know Chinese and Southeast Asians working in Latin America. So that was how I got connected to him. I decided to go. That was 2017, stayed with that company for a couple of years, so I was doing capital markets, all the fundraising function. Um that was appropriate, you know, fintech backed by venture capital, like all the big names in that region. So um 500 startups, action, all this financial um inclusion, um seed investors. Um but a couple of years after that, I met An Liam, who is the CEO and co-founder of um Savi, which is a salary lending company. So we essentially do financial uh wellness through uh salary, you know, the overall ecosystem of everything that touches the salary of employees in in the Philippines. Um he wasn't building a company that was venture-backed, right? He was bootstrapping the business. And I kind of like stumped into him and he was building this company, and I saw an awesome opportunity for us to really bring that to the next level. Um, so I was part of the founding team when we really started to bring that to a venture capital backed in tech. So we built that company for the last you know seven years or so. Um back in 2023, we started to have discussions about a potential sale um to a regional bank called Gold Time that started operations in South Africa and was in 2023-2024 expanding operations to Southeast Asia. Funnily enough, they ended up being invested by new bank again. So it's so funny that it's full circle. Now I'm back to having new teams in Portuguese as well. And um, yeah, I did that for the last seven years. Um, and now just you know, helping the team with the merge and with the transition over the last two years, um, taking care primarily of the finance function. So I oversaw my my formal title was CFO, but I oversaw legal compliance, risk, um, operations, market expansions, a little bit of everything.

SPEAKER_01 5:25

Well, in those roles, and especially in startups, uh the CFO title I think encompasses far more than people give it credit for. And it's one of these jobs where anything that doesn't explicitly fall under another title becomes a part of the office of the CFO.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

Absolutely, absolutely. I had, you know, it's it it I feel that nowadays the title chief of staff has a different connotation than he had, you know, 10 years ago. But it's a little bit like that, right? You're second in charge for everything that the CEO wants, CEO level attention. And the title really helps on that because you just bring that authority that and focus. Um, and I was really lucky to just be working with a set of founders that were very empowering, right? So I always had a a large say um on how things could be moving forward. So I I I really had the taste of, you know, uh doing things not necessarily my way, because uh decisions are always shared, not only with the co-founders, but with the main investors. Um but a very participative um decision-making process, which I think was one of the key reasons why we were successful.

SPEAKER_01 6:48

One of the challenges a lot of leaders experience when they transition from the investment banking and capital market side into leadership roles within a company is that the structure becomes very different. The responsibility set, the accountability. How did you develop the skills in your early career that allowed you to become a good leader and have that participatory collaborative environment when you moved into that CFO role?

SPEAKER_00 7:19

Yeah. No, I I can completely agree to that because it's literally real life, right? Uh working in a in a startup and in an executive role. I think what really I think that there were two instances that I can get from my early um career. So working for a boutique was so important because you're so close to the founder. And you don't have a rigid type of structure. Everybody does everything, right? Like you had VPs that were doing slide decks back in the days of the 2010s, where you still had, you know, slide decks. I don't know how people are doing nowadays. I imagine that Claude is building everything for everyone. Um, but um that was super helpful, you know, to just be in a very uh fluid environment, right? When I moved to my final role in investment banking, that was capital markets, and I'm in it it is like Itaú BBA is like Goldman Sachs in Brazil, you know, like you have a large balance sheet, a strong retail, or even even bigger, like JP Mark, right? You have strong corporate uh balance sheet and a massive type of organizational structure. So navigating these dynamics of politics in the best way, but just understanding how to excel in a corporate structure was really helpful. Not now, right? Because when I was building Savi, you know, we barely had any corporate structure, but I already had in mind what would be like best practices, um, but mainly understanding the speed in which um sales decisions were made, right? So it was less necessarily related to how we were going to run the company, but more our clients were going to make their own decisions. But understanding more like the sales champion within, especially because we were selling um financial services, I was brought into the discussion quite often, right? To kind of have like a peer-to-peer discussion with the CFO of other companies. Um, so I think these two things of working in a very small um environment and in a in a in a MA boutique was extremely helpful. And I will always, always recommend starting your career in MA. Um, it's just so diverse. MA or consulting, right? I just believe that you developed this very generalistic way of checking business, understanding businesses, especially if you're coming from a background like mine, in which my family was a little bit entrepreneurial, but not in the sense more like brick and mortar type of business. Right. Um, so I didn't have exposure to that in the past. So that was really the foundation for what um I could mainly use for during my time in in entrepreneurship.

SPEAKER_01 10:31

That's an interesting perspective. A lot of American VCs and PE groups, when they're looking for leaders for their companies, explicitly exclude people that have had consulting or MA early careers, in part not because they aren't bright, engaged people, but because there's this perception that the consequences of your actions aren't still under your purview because you're recommending things, you're, you know, facilitating, you're doing a lot of those activities. I think they forget about that flip side that you mentioned, which is that you get exposure to so many different business models and seeing what works and what doesn't, and learning about new and unique ways of operating.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

Yeah. No, it's I never thought about that. That's a very mature way of seeing it. For me, I think the most important thing is you need to have quick wins early in your life. So you need to build that confidence that you can do hard things, even if it's just like staying awake until 4 a.m. for months in a row, you know, like once you you get that confidence that I can do it, um it just sets the foundation for who you're gonna be for the rest of your life. And I don't know if there are many companies out there that will give you the same level of grit that consulting and MA would give you, right? It's so maybe it's less about the hard skills that are developed, right? Like I'm not sure if I if I could only come back to my days in banking, I always say that. All I could think of, like when I was in a meeting with one of the biggest, I don't know, retailers in Latin America, all I could think of is I want this meeting to be over because I want to sleep. If I could come back now with the mentality mentality that I have now and just understand how rich was the discussion that I was being part of, right? So I'm not saying that I came, you know, perfect because I just wanted to sleep, but I think uh comparing to my friends that just went to, you know, a good corporate job, right? We're talking about property, we're talking about like good companies. Um, I just pushed harder. I just pushed harder. And that just made me realize that you know, life is really hard. And um, if you want to do great things, it's really hard for you to not have to go through some struggles. So I think it's more like on the soft skill side.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

Fantastic. That's uh that's certainly I think a keen insight there. You guys experienced the bootstrapping to venture-backed to now corporate-backed transition. In each of those environments, what were the different leadership skills that you had to rely upon? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:34

One one is that I'm still trying to get rid of, uh, or maybe just spark it in a while, is the um scarcity mindset, right? Like bootstrapped and venture banked, I was always very, very focused on efficiency, right? Um, just by having that responsibility that I was the one doing payroll every 15 days, or paying all the vendors and signing all the contracts. I was so focused on being scrappy, right? So that is a mindset, and especially because we were building a uh a venture-backed company in Southeast Asia, right? We were not in um the US. Plus, we were we had you know heavy pockets because there are a lot of Chinese money that or Japanese money that comes to those regions, but I feel that there's a little bit of a less free will that you can just you know test business models, right? I think the US just has just built this amazing ecosystem in which you have proven proof proven for through cycles the venture cap venture-banked companies, they work, they exist, and they return amazing results, right? In other regions of the globe, that uh math is still not very obvious. So you still have you know venture capital a little bit like venture capital checks with fee accountability, you know, with a corporate board. So it's like a mix of everything, right? So I think that is a mindset that was very existent uh on me during my period in uh the bootstrapped and the venture-backed uh time, that is a little bit less welcome when we're thinking about building a bank backed by publicly listed companies, right? So I think that that is something that I really need to, you know, like I cannot simply go with the cheapest vendor, right? I need to go with a vendor that has all one of maybe it's not the cheapest, but has all the compliance requirements under all the regulators, I foresee events, I I don't push things to go so fast as I used to, right? So I think that this has been the the biggest uh mentality shift, which comes with a different way of working, right? I was very used to just make decisions, me, my CEO, you know, a couple of other people, and then we would just execute. Now I feel that it takes me three months to just have a discussion, right? Because I have so many stakeholders. I have people in South Africa, I have people in Singapore, I have people, you know, in other uh geographies that I need to connect to, that I need to get the insight. So this overall dense became a more complex, right? And I need to understand what are gonna be the parties that are gonna be involved on that. So um these were the two uh main changes, you know, from venture back to bootstrapped and to the corporate environment. Not harder, not easier, just different.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

Do you miss being in the bootstrapped environment, or are you happy that the uh maturation of this company enabled more of a corporate structure?

SPEAKER_00 17:11

Look, I I it's not easy to barely have money to make payroll. So saying that I miss it is a strong statement. So having heavy pockets is definitely better. Um, but I miss a little bit of the agility, but I always appreciate what we have now, right? I I always wanted to be part of a larger platform uh to have larger impact and to be part of more people working towards the same goal. I just love this concept of what we were able to do with Savi from zero to you know like a hundred million dollars now, um to enable the main goal, right? Which is to fight the incumbents and eventually become one, right? Great.

SPEAKER_01 18:06

You also do some angel investing. Yes, I do. When you're looking at the companies in which you'd like to support, what are you looking for?

SPEAKER_00 18:20

Yeah, look, I I feel that angel investing is more of my give back, right? Um I I always want to provide value whenever I'm writing a check. Um I look for companies that have some sort of um track record, right? I I I love the journey of being bootstrapped for a while and then going for venture capital as a decision, you know, because I don't think that every business is venture-backable. A few businesses may be just a lifestyle or one-person business, and it's too hard to with with the unit economics to hire someone else, you know, especially like when we're talking about brick and mortar, some real estate. It's really like a one-man job, you know, to really uh build the whole foundation of the business. Um, so usually I prefer to see businesses across different sectors um that have some track record of being Bootstrap and when they see a massive opportunity, then going for venture capital. Um currently I invest in companies in the digital marketing space. I have some companies in the food and beverage space. Um, I have some companies in uh I don't have I know I have one fintech company and one um health tech companies. Primarily it's that in terms of financials, right? I'd just like to see some sort of track record. And uh I know that it sounds cheesy, but it is the founder, isn't it? Like there's absolutely no way that you can foresee what the business is gonna be in in two months, in six months. So how can you invest in that that business? That is not gonna be the same business in in in six months' time. It's really the founder, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 20:25

And what skills do those founders bring that makes you confident in their ability to navigate those changes, that when things change in two months, when they have to build a team nine months later, when they're given an opportunity and having to make a good decision as to whether that's the path to pivot to or to hold steady.

SPEAKER_00 20:48

What what skills are you think you're looking for? I don't I don't like overconfident people. I I like people that you know take some time to answer. I like people that say, I don't know. I like people that say, I think I'm gonna do this, you know. Um because in reality, that's that's what you end up with when you're doing when you're building your business, right? You're not sure what you're gonna do. Like you're gonna test it out, and you can kind of say when someone is actually a doer, right? So I I I I I usually look for this, I don't know how to name it. Is it flexibility maybe, but I just don't like overconfidence. I like people that um show that they have an ability to figure out, right? Yes. Uh it's really hard to test it. Um, but and then I'm I'm trying to get better on how to name it. Um, because as of the moment, uh every time that I have a discussion like that, when people ask me, what kind of investors what what if if you were to look at your your previous investments, what would you say that was the track record? It's that, you know, like I don't like overconfidence, but the rest I don't really know, right? It's yeah. It's a very it's it's less of a of a it's more art and less of a science.

SPEAKER_01 22:07

Well, and when we test for some of those things through the crucible, yeah, it's interesting because we have one scale that highlights bias for action and we look for intellectual curiosity and we look for people who are resilient and people who have enough energy and drive to get them to the right places. But one of the other things that we look for is in times of stress, do they have too much arrogance? And it's that overconfidence. You want people who are confident, but you don't want people assuming that they know the right way to do things. Yes. And so having having some numbers behind that often can highlight where where those things might materialize and where they may not, yeah, and whether those people can be adaptable for that uncertain future.

SPEAKER_00 23:05

Yeah. No, you're completely spot on because sometimes when you are in a big crisis in in the business, right, if you're not extremely confident and blindly, you know, optimistic, yeah, it's just uh, you know, a cascade of things in the rest of everyone. So it's really hard to say if that's a good thing or not. So maybe, maybe showing confidence in different uh environments, right? Um, I I just you know our whole uh exit story is just fascinating because it's not, and that's another thing that I keep on telling people, it's not a straight line. You know, there's uh I I I I I think I should be a little bit more pragmatic about frameworks and this, you know, jargons, but majority of my career was built on top of I am going to figure it out. And I also believe that any kind of successful outcome in life is related to um exposure, right? So probability you don't have much control over, right? Like I think we try to create too much uh casuality on random events, like it's just the the system one thinking from thinking fast and slow, uh that we are just trying to say, I know that happened because of that, but sometimes it's just a random event, right? So the only variable that you have control over is the quantity of exposure, right? So we were taking all the investor meetings, we were doing all the right things, we were profitable. Like that was like we were increasing our odds of being successful because we were controlling the variables that we could. And the rest, you know, I love Chinese culture because they are the hardest working people in the world, right? Like they they work seven days a week, you know, even founders are extremely rich and successful, they're still working and building and everything, but they still wear red when they're going for an important meeting because they believe in the luck aspect, right? So I think there's so much wisdom there. There's so many things that we cannot control. The only thing that you can actually control is the amount of times that you're exposing yourself for the opportunity.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

I'd love to look back to that exit story. Can you talk through the the twists and turns of how you got to your exit?

SPEAKER_00 25:42

Absolutely. So um, Savi, we were already profitable. Uh, that was back in 2023. We were not going to fundraise at that specific time. It was around July 2023. One of a large um, one of the large investors that we had spoken to in the past was in town, right? We were based in Manila, and this fund was based in in London. Uh, and um, they just wanted a coffee. So my CEO and myself went for a coffee and we explained the business, and that's the thing, right? We were prepared. It was like we were on a fundraising round because I had all the materials. We just had the drill of because we were continuously fundraising for the growth of the loan book. So I we had the same dynamics with the rest of the team, presenting the team. What is the um, you know, um data room? So it never really stops for us. Um, they loved us, we went through the whole IC, and they said we can only write a check of X, uh, and we were looking for 50% of X if we were to fundraise, because we were profitable at the time and we didn't want to have too much dilution, we just wanted to buy a banking license, right, instead of the other way around. And they said, um, so if you guys are not willing to, if we can only write the size of check, why don't we look into one of our portfolio companies go time to do a full uh strategic acquisition? And that was how things started. So and that was July 2023, the transaction closed in June 2024, right? So it was a long process of yes, you know, just going through the due diligence and then figuring out that ah, you actually recognize revenue in a different way. Ah, the deal is off, you know, and then two weeks after the deal is back. So it was it was, and then uh very close to to closing, there was that big Klarna. Um I think they did a big layoff, right? Talking about AI and everything. And the Philippines is a country with a lot of uh BPOs, with stuff, of course, not necessarily only call centers, but you know, a lot of people doing outsourcing jobs. And then all the board members from GoTime got concerned, like, oh my god, are we increasing our exposure to this segment? Shouldn't we be doing something else? Right. So it it was a lot of uh, there were a lot of uh ups and downs during the the whole uh negotiation, but we finally were able to to close it off. And I think we're integrating really well with the rest of the organization. Excellent.

SPEAKER_01 28:26

I think people forget how many twists and turns that exit process can take. That even if you have a great investment banker and even if you have a timeline that looks consistent, when you get into diligence, there's always an issue, there's always a concern, and it could be on either side. And that's where it creates some of the challenges that these aren't straightforward processes in most cases. And if they are, one party's either overpaying or underpaying or getting underpaid pretty dramatically.

SPEAKER_00 29:00

Yeah, that is true, that is true, and even the integration first, like the whole structuring of the deal, um, had um 50% cash, 50% share. So you capture the employees very incentivized for the overall growth of the big pie. You had an earnout component. Um the funny thing was that savvy was bigger than go time in terms of revenue. So even if they were a bigger organization, they were a startup in that sense. Right. So it was a funny dynamic when we the the acquired company was bigger than the acquirer. So but we ended up having a very good cultural feat, which you know, it's hard for founders to come to good terms with that, but for the success of the deal, you need to take that into consideration. You need to, especially when we're talking about a company of our size. We were already 400 uh employees at the time that we were acquired, so it wasn't, you know, like it's the livelihood of a lot of people.

SPEAKER_01 30:07

Um so yeah, I think that is an overlooked component, is that integration of culture, making sure it can be a good fit, and then consciously and proactively working toward ensuring that fit will continue after the acquisition.

SPEAKER_00 30:28

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 30:29

Okay, as we wrap up here, um where do you see the next wave of value creation coming in whether it's the fintech space or in the investor-backed space um for these types of companies?

SPEAKER_00 30:50

Yeah. So look, I'll be a little bit, you know, I I love just nerding out on the fintech and and financial services scene. I'm I think there's still so much disruption that can be uh done within the financial services space when we're talking about banks, right? Banks, insurance, there's so much application of AI that can be done in those segments, right? So I think there's a massive upside uh there. Um and not necessarily just applying AI to the processes, but also understanding compliance and regulatory environment of how do you make this process um automated with AI compliant. So I think even that discussion is an opportunity per se. So I always think of that. Like, is there a company like Venta that can do kind of like this automation for uh, I don't know, like checking um insurance claims, you know, like that doesn't need to have some sort, and I I know that all of these regulations is so specific per country. So how do you like tackle probably first in the US and then just bring that to larger markets? Um, not necessarily the solution itself, but just being something really compliant. So that is something that I always think of. And for me, the most obvious, especially because I was doing a lot of cross-borders, uh stable coins. I think they were still so behind when we're thinking about international transfers. Like we still wait three, four business days for, and I'm not talking about like massive transactions, like sometimes it's not even a million dollars, right? We still wait all of that time and like you know, 40, 60 for one transaction when I know that you can just use any stable coin, like use Bitcoin, which is like the worst rail for international transfer, and it's gonna be cheaper and faster. Yeah, so I think these two things are always like the things that I'm like, why isn't this more mainstream? You know, it doesn't matter if MasterCard, Stripe, all of them have the solutions. Uh when I was doing it, it was not available. You know, I was still doing transactions via Swift. So I think um it needs to become mainstream, like in the let's put Saving to a SME side. It wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't available.

SPEAKER_01 33:22

And that wraps up another inspiring episode of Leadership Quotient. Many thanks to Letitia for sharing her experience and informed perspective. To our listeners, if you found this conversation valuable, be sure to subscribe to Leadership Quotient wherever you get your podcasts. You can also learn more about the Crucible and how we're helping investor-backed companies align leadership teams for scale at the crucible.com. We'll see you next time for more real conversations on leadership, talent, and value creation.