Team size: Four

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

As the COO and general counsel of a venture capital firm that invests in startups across Latin America, we invest with a long-term vision. In this sense, political or economic crisis should not drive our investments, given that such crisis or turbulences are cyclical and our investment strategy is meant to go further than those. Nonetheless, in periods of instability, we do advise our portfolio companies to be proactive and not reactive. In this sense, we advised our portfolio companies to monitor legal, regulatory, and market developments across their jurisdictions in which they operate. This allowed them to map potential risks early, assess their business impact, and identify the legal levers available to mitigate them. For example, in times of economic volatility, we asked our portfolio companies to review contractual obligations, particularly financing agreements, shareholder agreements, and key supplier contracts, to ensure that they understand both their rights and exposure.

During crises, clarity and prioritization become essential. The first step is to identify the most critical legal exposures, those that could immediately threaten the organisation’s operations, financial health, or reputation.

In the venture capital industry, one of the key aspects is to deploy money. Therefore, in times of instability, we still need to deploy and invest the cash that we have raised. In this sense, we, as the legal team, need to be enablers and not disablers and therefore we need to align with the investment team to keep investing as such periods of uncertainty often bring periods of opportunity.

What measures has your company taken to embed sustainability practices into its core business operations, and how does the role of the general counsel contribute to driving and ensuring sustainable practices within the company?

Venture capital firms are in a unique position to foster change in the world. We are proud investors of companies that through technology provide access to products and services to people that were previously excluded from the traditional business world, including: financial services, healthcare, education, retail, among others.

We want founders we invest in to be focused on having a positive impact on all stakeholders including employees, clients, suppliers, shareholders and the environment. We believe that responsible business practices help generate superior long-term performance and thus responsible investing, managing capital to generate positive environmental, social and governance outcomes, is at the core of Kaszek’s investment philosophy.

Because of our fiduciary-focused belief that there is financial value to be generated by data- driven, actionable assessments of material ESG considerations, we take an active role in how our portfolio companies manage ESG issues and actively encourage our portfolio companies to have the very best ESG standards.