Pedro Torres Picón
Good morning, All,
Our next Breakfast with an Investor is this Thursday, November 20th and our guest investor will be Pedro Torres Picon, founder of Quotidian Ventures.
Pedro Torres Picón came to the US from Venezuela and founded Quotidian Ventures, a seed stage fund. His passion lies in “helping founders create technology products that modernize large industries in which they have deep domain expertise.”
The fund tends to focus on the earliest stages of a product’s development, when it’s often pre-product and pre-VC, and on products that represent a radical efficiency leap when compared to existing alternatives, and they prefer New York City-based companies. More about him on the eventbrite page, and he is a very active early stage investor – and always has a great story to tell. Register here.
It has been about a year since Cowboy Ventures founder Aileen Lee wrote her now-famous piece about the Unicorn Club, which is when unicorn entered the tech lexicon signifying that rare breed of entrepreneur who would founded a billion dollar company.
A lot has changed since then, and we’ve seen quite a few more newly-minted unicorns, from Travis Kalanick (Uber) to Evan Spiegel (Snapchat, which did get a $10B valuation back in July, never mind that it hasn’t made a penny), since the days when they’d happen much more rarely. With valuations having gone wild, it’s time to redefine our terms.
There’s a world of difference between a Travis Kalanick and an Elon Musk and therein lies the distinction between the true unicorns of the industry, and the latest members of the Billionaire Boys Club.
This is not to detract from the accomplishments of the Billionaire Boys (we’ll call them the Beebs). It’s just that unicorns are a very rare breed, and there’s a difference between building a company and having the ability to see twenty minutes into the future. Uber is a disruption – and has its share of competitors, including Lyft and Hailo. We’ve yet to see whom the outlier will be. The Hyperloop is an innovation from well above the usual accomplishment of those of us dwelling within the typical mortal coil.
What to speak of Musk’s micro-satellites, which may well help to knock the teeth out of the Net Neutrality issue.
The unicorns are the outliers. They’re the ones who push the envelope, rather than skirt the edges of what is legal and barely ethically acceptable. And the distinction is an important one. We will always fall squarely on the side of the true unicorns, the ones who will unflinchingly move the industry and the human race onward and forward.