Why Alejandro Diez Barroso Bets on People, Not Ideas
Traditional VCs talk about market size, unit economics, and product-market fit; Alejandro Diez Barroso talks about people.
“All businesses come down to people…you are a person selling a product or service to another person, and that other person will make a decision. It’s a people business.”
The founder and managing partner at DILA Capital, one of Latin America’s leading early-stage venture firms, Alejandro’s background is as an entrepreneur; he led WAU Spot and Vilbrequin in Mexico during a time when VC barely existed in the region. So, he experienced firsthand the lack of institutional capital and support for Mexico’s founders. There was a surplus of talent, ideas, and opportunities, but no structured mentorship, long-term partners, or established networks. That’s why he and Eduardo Clave, his partner, began DILA.
This week, we are launching our first co-authored blog with Alejandro Diez Barroso, discussing building teams, investing with conviction, and helping founders scale teams across emerging markets. Here’s what Alejandro had to say:
How To Build A Great Team
At Venture Guides, we spend a lot of time and effort thinking about team building; whether that be go-to-market teams, hiring for growth, or considering what team will excel in a new market. Alejandro thinks about this the same way, and his framework showed a new way of looking at team building. In fact, he and his partners spend significantly more time underwriting people than they do looking at business models. They look for four specific traits:
Diversity
The best teams aren’t clones of one another; they’re complementing each other. Alejandro has watched too many teams fail because everyone is similar. `
“We know that nobody’s perfect. The best founders are the ones that know what they don’t know. They identify their weaknesses and their flaws…and then partner with other founders that have strengths where they have weaknesses and vice versa.”
We tend to agree and partner with people who are like us, but this leads to bias, blind spots, and eventually, a failure to adapt.
Clarity
Founders with clarity know what they want, and know what actually matters, which nine times out of ten, is the customer. Clarity leads founders to understand customer pain, and game plan what is relevant in addressing that pain, both in terms of strategy and capital deployment.
“They have a clear plan of what the business needs, what their use of funds is, and how they’re going to manage the capital they raise. They don’t raise unlimited capital…They raise enough capital where they take care of their dilution, and they have a clear path to what they’ll accomplish with this particular round.”
Raising capital and figuring out what to do with that capital later is a mistake. The best founders raise exactly what they need and responsibly manage their capital from day one.
Speed
Successful entrepreneurship requires making decisions without the whole picture by testing, learning, and adjusting. Debating hypotheticals and waiting for perfect data will only create stalled growth.
“Entrepreneurship is about navigating through the unknown and making decisions with unclear or limited information, or sometimes no information at all. You don’t have certainty in entrepreneurship and startups, so being agile, quick, and nimble is very important.”
Integrity
This is the most important quality to Alejandro:
“Talent is definitely important, but character is more important…It’s important that we share these operating ways, that we see eye-to-eye, and that there’s transparency and integrity. We love founders that don’t hide problems, and that surface those problems early.”
In a long-term partnership, the truth is crucial. A talented founder without integrity will fail more often than an operator with character and incremental improvement.
What Many Are Missing About Emerging Markets
Emerging markets are not shrunken-down versions of developed markets; many founders and operators miss this. Instead, they offer different and new opportunities; and importantly, with completely different competitive dynamics.
“We have the ability to leapfrog old infrastructure with new technology…We’re always a little bit behind the U.S., a little bit behind Europe, but we have the ability to say, okay, what happened there? And we can leapfrog maybe 5, 10 years.”
A few interesting statistics that Alejandro mentioned:
Only 30% of Mexico has banking penetration: a massive opportunity for fintech.
Only 7% of Mexican dentists have digital oral scanners (96% in the U.S.). That’s 93% of the market without access to essential technology.
Roughly 30% of restaurants in Mexico use no SaaS infrastructure.
These aren’t problems to run away from. They’re white spaces. While this innovation has already taken shape in developed markets, emerging markets still have this opportunity to execute.
Long-Term Value, Not Headlines
One of our core philosophies at Venture Guides is building sustainable go-to-market engines. The same applies to Alejandro’s philosophy of investments, which is built around durability, not quick wins.
DILA writes small initial checks, but reserves 50-60% of their fund for follow-on runs. They’re not banking on receiving a return right away. Instead, they want to identify their winners and double down. Governance that prioritizes long-term thinking is why Alejandro and DILA have seen this success. They plan to invest in companies for up to 12 years, removing any incentive to take shortcuts for a quick exit:
“We’re optimizing for durability and not for headlines. We really prefer founders who want to build institutions and not exits…I’m not sure whether my LPs would love for me to say this, but I really prefer a 5x built with integrity than a 10x built with too much chaos.”
What makes Alejandro’s perspective and story so insightful is he’s not just looking at spreadsheets and predicting where the market and his investments are headed; he’s built companies in an incredibly difficult environment, lacking capital, infrastructure and support. That lesson cannot be learned from a textbook.
Today, he invests with the same principles as when he was building. That is his competitive advantage, and that is why we were so eager to learn more about Alejandro.
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Alejandro also joined VG Partner Sage Nye on the most recent episode of Built Not Born: The Startup Go-To-Market Podcast to discuss building with an operator’s mindset, expanding into new markets, the DILA philosophy and more. If you are passionate about building a great product, team, or strategy, learn more at ventureguides.com.
And if you would like to learn more about Alejandro’s story or DILA Capital’s investing philosophy, check out Alejandro’s LinkedIn or head to dilacapital.com.