The 5-Minute Version: Manuel Rosemberg built Ana.care into Latin America’s leading caregiving platform by doing the opposite of the Silicon Valley playbook. Instead of building “Uber for caregivers,” he picked up workers at subway stations, sat in customers’ homes, and asked one transformative question that changed his entire business model. His journey from bootstrapping with customer money to saying no to VCs to building government partnerships offers a masterclass in sustainable impact entrepreneurship. Here’s how caring about humans first built a company now serving millions – with aspirations for billions.
When Life Punches You Three Times, Build Something That Matters
August 2015 should have broken Manuel Rosemberg. His father was diagnosed with cancer. His grandmother with Alzheimer’s. His father-in-law suffered a stroke. All within the same month.
Suddenly, Manuel found himself navigating the chaos of Latin America’s caregiving industry—or rather, the lack of one. Finding reliable help was nearly impossible. The sector was completely informal, fragmented beyond recognition. Caregivers would cancel last minute. Quality varied wildly. Training was non-existent.
Most people would have just struggled through. Manuel saw a systemic problem worth solving.
“It made me realize just how difficult it was to get reliable help, how informal the sector was, how fragmented the industry was—if there was an industry at all,” Manuel told us. But instead of building another tech platform from a distance, he did something radical: he became the service.
For months, Manuel literally picked up caregivers at subway stations and drove them to patients’ homes. Not as a temporary measure—as a business strategy. “When you’re starting a business, you need to make sure everything goes right. You don’t have much margin for error because you’re starting to build a reputation.”
This wasn’t just customer service. It was intelligence gathering. Sitting in those homes, watching the interactions, understanding the friction points—this proximity to pain created insights no amount of user surveys could have revealed.
The lesson: Your first 100 customers should know your cell phone number. The insights from being uncomfortably close to the problem will shape everything that comes next. Every entrepreneur thinks they understand their customer’s pain. The ones who succeed live it.
The $10 Million Question That Cost Nothing to Ask
Manuel’s company, initially called PazMental (”Peace of Mind”), started by exclusively serving dementia patients—the ones every other agency turned away. The medical establishment said there was nothing to be done for these patients except wait it out. Manuel disagreed.
They incorporated creative therapies, built specialized training, created detailed care protocols. But the real breakthrough came from their makeshift reporting system—a white-label Indian chatbot Manuel programmed himself with simple decision trees.
Each day, when caregivers arrived at patients’ homes, the chatbot would check in. But instead of immediately asking about the patient’s condition, medications, or symptoms, Manuel added one simple question at the beginning:
“How are you feeling?”
Not “How is the patient?” Not “Did you complete the care tasks?” But “How are YOU?”
The responses changed everything. Caregivers opened up: “Underappreciated.” “Tired.” “Burned out.” “Alone.” “Overwhelmed.” “Scared I’ll make a mistake.”
This wasn’t just data—it was a revelation. The entire industry had been focused on the wrong problem. Everyone was trying to optimize patient care while ignoring the humans delivering it. Unhappy, stressed, untrained caregivers led to poor patient outcomes, high turnover, and spiraling costs.
“It seems obvious in retrospect,” Manuel admits. “But it wasn’t obvious to us what hardships caregivers go through.” The company’s slogan evolved from “Happy caregivers, happy patients” to its current version: “We care for those who care.”
This pivot transformed Anna from a dementia-focused agency into a caregiver support platform—a market that includes not just professional caregivers but anyone caring for a family member. Suddenly, they weren’t serving thousands. They were serving millions.
The data validates this approach: Well-trained, supported caregivers reduce healthcare costs by 30% through fewer emergency room visits and avoidable hospitalizations.
Sunday Morning Training: The Experiment That Revealed Everything
Here’s something that would never happen in Silicon Valley: Manuel started offering free training sessions on Sunday mornings. Physical rehabilitation techniques. Injection procedures. Medication management.
Think about that. These caregivers worked five or six days a week, often in physically and emotionally demanding conditions. Sunday was their only free day. And they showed up. In droves.
“I was like, wow. This is their only free day, and we asked them to be there on a Sunday morning. And all of them are avid to learn more.”
But here’s where it gets interesting. The most popular courses weren’t the technical ones. They weren’t about lifting techniques or wound care. The courses with the highest attendance? Meditation. Breathing exercises. Stress management. Self-care.
These caregivers weren’t just looking for better pay (though that mattered). They were looking for dignity, support, and recognition. They wanted to be seen as professionals, not just pairs of hands.
This insight shaped everything that came next. Anna’s platform now includes both professional development and personal wellbeing content. It’s not just about making better caregivers—it’s about supporting better lives for the people doing this essential work.
The Anti-Silicon Valley Funding Playbook That Actually Works
While his peers were perfecting pitch decks and chasing Sand Hill Road VCs, Manuel was raising money from the most unlikely sources: his customers.
“A lot of our funders are ex-customers or customers. They’d say, ‘You helped me so much with my husband. Your company is so great. Let me know how I can help.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, if you want to be part of this company, you can invest.’”
No pitch decks. No hockey stick projections. No TAM/SAM/SOM analysis. Just proof that the business solved a real problem for real people willing to pay for it.
This wasn’t some romantic notion of customer-funded growth. It was strategic. These investors understood the problem intimately. They had realistic expectations. They weren’t pushing for 100x returns in five years. They were investing in a solution they wanted to exist in the world.
“We always told them: do not invest anything that you need in your life or that you’re counting on. Just invest something that... we later found out there’s a name for this: venture philanthropy.”
The progression was deliberate:
Customer capital ($40,000 from four angels at $10K each to start)
Continued customer investment as proof points accumulated
Inter-American Development Bank funding (contingent loans with 0% interest)
European impact accelerators (Norrsken in Sweden)
Only then, institutional investors
When the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) promotted their Silver Economy Challenge, Manuel was ready. But the IDB didn’t offer traditional investment. They offered something better: contingent loans. Zero percent interest. No collateral. Only pay back if you hit your goals. Eight-year repayment terms.
“It’s technically debt, but it feels like a grant,” Manuel explains. More importantly, the IDB’s endorsement opened doors. “When the IDB says, ‘If you’re interested in the caregiving sector, you should really talk to these guys,’ everyone listens.”
This is the thing about impact entrepreneurship that not enough entrepreneurs know: there are more ways to fund your business and big experiments than you realize. If your organization exists to really make the world better, there is financing beyond the profit-maximizing VC world that you can access.
The Mexico City government partnership? That came through an IDB introduction. The expanded regional presence? IDB forums and connections. The credibility with other investors? The IDB seal of approval.
The framework for impact entrepreneurs:
Start with people who understand the problem (customers, affected families)
Graduate to development banks, foundations, government programs, philanthropists and other innovative financiers with impact metrics
Use that credibility to access impact accelerators
Only then approach institutional capital, and only from investors that are legally and financially committed to impact
At each stage, use the credibility from the previous stage as leverage
How to Not Get Eaten Alive by VCs (A Practical Guide)
Manuel watched peers raise $10 million from Y Combinator and prestigious Silicon Valley VCs. Within a year, they were bankrupt. The pattern was always the same: pressure for hypergrowth, burn through capital acquiring users at a loss, fail to find product-market fit, die.
“I know a lot of entrepreneurs that got YC funding, raised $10 million, and then went bankrupt a year later. We didn’t want to be one of those.”
His example hits hard: a YC-backed electric scooter company in Mexico went from zero to unicorn valuation to selling for $1 in less than a year. Why? When the market shifted from “growth at all costs” to profitability in 2022, companies with negative unit economics collapsed overnight.
So Manuel developed a rigorous investor vetting process that flips the traditional power dynamic:
The Manuel Method for Investor Due Diligence:
Read their thesis first. “Some of them will lay out their thesis day one, saying ‘We want to show investors you can invest in impact and have the exact same financial returns.’ So they’re very honest about it.” If impact isn’t mentioned in their thesis, they’re not aligned with your mission.
Ask for references. “Talk to other entrepreneurs they’ve invested in.”
Go off-script in meetings. “I always like to go off on tangents…I talk about my kid or I talk about my hobbies. I try to suss out what kind of people they are…The kind of jokes they make will let you know if they’re sexist, racist.”
Watch how they react to your boundaries. “When we said we weren’t interested in hypergrowth, some VCs literally laughed. Others said, ‘That’s refreshing.’ Guess which ones we kept talking to?”
Be patient. “Be very slow to hire, very fast to fire. That works for funders, too. The first person that gives you money is not necessarily the person you want to grow with.”
The key insight: “It’s important to understand that they also need you. They just raised a lot of capital from LPs, and they need to place it somewhere…You can ask as many questions as you want.”
Manuel now looks at his cap table with zero regrets. Every investor understands the mission, respects the pace of growth, and contributes beyond capital. That’s worth more than any unicorn valuation.
The Cofounder Dance: When Dreamer Meets Doer
Manuel’s cofounder Ariel operates at a different frequency. “He has a million ideas per minute. It’s amazing. He’s a dreamer.” Manuel, by contrast, is “very much a doer, present-focused.”
This could be a recipe for disaster. Instead, they’ve turned it into their superpower through specific collaboration protocols:
The Idea Management System:
When Ariel comes with a new idea (which happens daily), Manuel doesn’t shoot it down. Instead, he uses what they call the “sandwich method”:
Start with what’s good about the idea
Address concerns or limitations in the middle
End with a positive or possibility, and a move to run an experiment
“I never turn down an idea. I always suggest a way we might test it out.”
But here’s the crucial part: they’ve learned that ideas have natural lifespans. “Some ideas just die out on their own. He might not even like them the next day.” The ideas that survive a week of Ariel’s mental filtering? Those get tested.
The MVP Philosophy:
When Ariel wanted to immediately integrate AI into everything, Manuel didn’t say no. He said, “What would be a good MVP?”
Ariel: “It’s AI! We can’t MVP this thing. We gotta invest!”
Manuel: “You can totally MVP AI. We can have an intern answering everything and just see if that kind of response works with patients.”
This isn’t about being cheap. It’s about validating demand before building supply. “I’m convinced that everything is MVP-able. Even very sophisticated AI. It’s very fast at doing what humans can do slower, but humans can do it. If you start out with a small enough MVP, you can get a human to do what you want the AI to do later.”
They’ve tested dozens of ideas this way. Online support groups? Everyone said they’d love them. Would they pay? Absolutely not. Killed. AI-powered care recommendations? Tested with human “AI” first. Worked. Built. Scaled.
The Balance:
“It’s kind of like a rubber band. He stretches it, and I pull it back.” But it only works because of mutual respect. “I think he appreciates that out of those thousand ideas that come up every minute, I can cherry-pick the ones that might work and actually make something with them.”
The Numbers That Actually Matter (And How Often to Check Them)
Forget monthly active users. Forget growth rate. Manuel obsesses over two metrics:
1. Runway (checked twice monthly) “We’re looking at our runway twice a month. Did anything happen that derailed this? Did we lose an important client? Another expense? People can lose track very fast of what the runway is.”
The discipline is religious: “We still have ten months to go at this rate of burn. Yes? Okay. Because things happen.”
2. Caregiver happiness (which drives everything else) Not patient satisfaction. Not revenue per user. Caregiver happiness. Because everything flows from there. Happy caregivers → better patient care → lower healthcare costs → sustainable growth.
But here’s what most entrepreneurs miss: Manuel also maintains what he calls the “always be raising” infrastructure:
Monthly investor updates go to current investors, potential investors, and anyone who’s expressed interest
Financial reporting discipline forced by IDB requirements (”It’s a muscle we had to build”)
A finance committee that meets monthly with board members
Clear documentation even when it wasn’t legally required
“Financial reporting is a lot more complex than one would think. It sounds like income versus expenses, but it’s so much more complex than that. It really takes a while for a startup to build that muscle.”
When It Gets Heavy: The Founder’s Escape Valve
Running a caregiving company after watching three family members struggle with illness? The emotional weight is crushing. Manuel’s response isn’t what you’d expect from a mission-driven founder.
“I’m an avid hiker and nature enthusiast. It’s just disconnecting. Just disconnecting from phone, computer for a while.”
Not meditation apps. Not executive coaches. Not founder therapy groups. Complete disconnection.
“If you don’t give yourself those spaces, problems become a lot bigger than they are. Just letting some problems rest for a while and coming back to them a week later really puts them in perspective.”
He recalls times he was “hysterical about a problem that a week later was... that wasn’t really worth the trouble, was it?”
His cofounder is the opposite—thinks through problems constantly until solutions emerge. “The more he thinks about things, the more possibilities come up in his head. For me, it’s the other way around. The more I think about issues, the bigger the problems become.”
Know your style. Honor it. Build your life around it.
The Grandmother Test That Changes Everything
Manuel’s 99-year-old grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, isn’t just on Anna’s website. She’s a user. She’s a tester. She’s the quality bar.
“I’m not just the director, I’m also a member,” he jokes, referencing the old Hair Club for Men ads. But the joke contains profound wisdom.
When you build something you’d trust with your grandmother’s care, everything changes:
You can’t cut corners on safety
You can’t compromise on dignity
You can’t optimize for metrics that don’t matter
You can’t sell something you wouldn’t use yourself
This isn’t sentimentality. It’s strategy. When government officials ask about Anna’s quality standards, Manuel doesn’t show certifications. He shows them his grandmother’s profile on the platform.
“A lot of people in my family, unfortunately, have been clients or users of Anna over the past ten years.”
The proximity to the problem isn’t just about understanding it. It’s about being unable to accept substandard solutions.
What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About Impact
Manuel’s witnessed multiple “unicorn” failures up close. The pattern is always identical:
Impressive YC pedigree or Valley backing
Massive fundraise on aggressive growth projections
Burn capital acquiring users at negative unit economics
Celebrate vanity metrics while ignoring fundamentals
Collapse when market sentiment shifts
His example: “This electric scooter company, they were YC and Silicon Valley golden boys. Their valuation grew by the minute. Three months later, I asked how they’re doing. ‘Oh, we’re broke. We had to sell the company for $1.’”
From unicorn to nothing. Why? “Every new user cost them more money. When the market changed from growth at all costs to profitability in 2022, they didn’t make it through.”
The alternative Manuel proposes:
Sustainable impact growth:
Revenue from day one (even if small)
Customers who’d be devastated if you disappeared
Investors who understand the mission takes time
Growth that doesn’t require constant capital infusions
Unit economics that work at small scale
“Impact takes time,” he reminds investors. And the ones worth having understand that.
The Three Meta-Lessons That Actually Matter
1. Your customers aren’t just your market—they’re your first investors, best advisors, and quality control
Manuel’s angel investors weren’t angels in the traditional sense. They were families he’d helped. They understood the problem intimately, had realistic expectations, and wanted the solution to exist more than they wanted returns.
This isn’t just about capital. It’s about building with the people you’re building for. When your customers are your investors, you can’t bullshit your way through board meetings. The accountability is real, immediate, and impossible to game.
2. The best pivots come from listening to humans at their most vulnerable
No algorithm would have suggested asking caregivers how they feel. No market analysis would have revealed that self-care courses would outdraw technical training. No competitor analysis would have shown that supporting caregivers was more valuable than optimizing patient care.
But one question—”How are you feeling?”—revealed a billion-dollar insight. The lesson isn’t just to talk to users. It’s to ask questions that let them be human, not just customers.
3. Growing slower with aligned partners beats growing faster with misaligned ones
Every unicorn Manuel knows that optimized for growth is now dead or sold for parts. Meanwhile, Anna has:
Government contracts
Sustainable unit economics
Investors who understand the mission
A team that isn’t burned out
His grandmother’s approval
“We didn’t want to explode or bust. We really believed in what we were doing, and we said if it takes us a bit longer, it takes us a bit longer.”
In impact entrepreneurship, patience isn’t just a virtue. It’s a strategy.
Watch the Full Interview
Manuel goes even deeper on fundraising mechanics, managing cofounder tension, and building in Latin America in our full conversation.
Three moments you can’t miss:
32:15 - The role-play where Manuel shows exactly how he handles cofounder disagreements
48:22 - Breaking down the Inter-American Development Bank funding process
1:02:30 - Why he checks runway twice monthly (and what happened when he didn’t)
About Ana: The platform now serves thousands of caregivers across Latin America, with AI-powered training, marketplace connections, and wellbeing support. They’ve partnered with Mexico City’s government and are expanding regionally. Learn more at ana.care.
For Investors: Manuel is currently raising institutional funding to build out C-suite leadership and expand marketing. Reach out through LinkedIn (the only social platform he uses—”the others are terrible for your mental health”).
Want to Learn from Purpose-Driven Founders?
Transcript
Mark Horoszowski (00:01:05):
My name is Mark Horoszowski. I’m the host of how to help a few billion people, a podcast where we profile and dive deep with social entrepreneurs who are putting the pursuit of impact and purpose above their profits. In this episode, we talked to Manuel from Anna, a groundbreaking technology platform with AI augmented tool that helps caregivers around the world provide better care to those in need, particularly in aging population. I’m actually looking at their website right now, and it’s so fun to look at because front and center is their aspirations for the future to create over 100 million formal jobs to help save over 30% in terms of cost of care for those people that need care at home, and to positively impact the lives of 1 billion people. So when you say 1 billion people here, we’re talking about particularly an aging population. So what Anna does is it helps people that are aging and are aging at home.
(00:02:06):
Some of them with very acute conditions, say dementia to others that just are slowly losing the ability to live fully on their own, and they need somebody in the home that can help care for their mental and physical health. Now, a lot of the people that provide that care are what we would call the informal economy. Maybe they’re not formally employed, but they are being paid to some degree in order to help this population. But especially in informal settings, these people then do not necessarily have formal training, and they also maybe don’t have their support because let’s be honest, caring for somebody that is sick, whether that’s physically or mentally, is really exhausting and can be really challenging. And what Anna has done is built a platform to not only help the matching of these folks, the people that need her at home with caregivers that can provide that care, but it also provides training and support to both parties and even provides real time guidance and support using AI as an additional tool.
(00:03:06):
Now, it also provides training. There’s real humans behind the scenes here that help provide support, but most importantly, it is helping care for those who care. In my conversation with Manel, we go into how the organization started, which is a touching and inspiring story in and of itself, how he’s capitalized the business. So how we raised funding to pivot from a manual matchmaking model to this technology platform, some tips in terms of where to look for funding and how he’s done that. We also dive pretty deep for a little bit into some actual legal language around different financial and funding instruments. So some of you might love that, some of you might fast forward through that section. But then ultimately we also get to the personal side of things is how do you really create a human-centered focus, not only for your team, your co-founder, your employees, your customers, your other stakeholders, your investors, but also for yourself. So this conversation with Manuel left me fired up, left me energized. It also left me smarter, and I really hope you have the same takeaway from this awesome, awesome conversation with Manwell. So without further ado, let’s jump in. Manwell, welcome to the Helping Billions podcast. I am so excited for our conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your schedule to find time to speak with us.
Manuel Rosemberg (00:04:29):
It’s great to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
Mark Horoszowski (00:04:32):
So man, I love your story. I love how this organization that you’ve been now developing and growing has come to be. I think it’s incredible how you’ve identified this market that literally has the ability to positively impact the lives of not only tens of thousands of workers, but also millions and eventually billions of people that receive care at home, usually through informally employed workers. So that’s what Anna is doing as a company, right? You are developing a place so that people care, workers, caretakers, that are in people’s homes, in locations around the world, have access to knowledge, to training, to everything. You’re using AI to improve training. You’re using marketplaces, you’re doing so much. But bring us back to the inception. How did you even come up with this idea in the first place?
Manuel Rosemberg (00:05:39):
Well, the idea has been evolving, as I’ll tell you over the next hour. But originally 2015, they say that when it rains, it pours and it poured hard. In August, 2015, my father was diagnosed with cancer. My grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and my father-in-law had a stroke. This all happened August, 2015, and it forced us to start getting help. All three of them needed some kind of support, and it made me realize just how difficult it was to get reliable help, how informal the sector was, how fragmented the industry was, if there was an industry at all. And just by sheer coincidence, I was finishing up a project. I was looking for something new to do. So fixing the caregiving industry seemed like a big enough challenge that I would want to take on.
Mark Horoszowski (00:06:40):
I love that. How hard could it be? Tell me a little bit more about how that came to be though, and ultimately why you decided on pursuing a social enterprise, a business model solution to this problem as opposed to say, a philanthropic or a legislative solution to it.
Manuel Rosemberg (00:06:58):
Yeah. So we realized there was a big gap between the needs of millions of families and what the market was offering. And that gap was training caregivers, supporting caregivers, giving caregivers tools to make their job less stressful and more impactful. We decided instead of just coming up with a technology that we wouldn’t understand to start with a caregiving agency, and we call that caregiving agency, al, which translates to peace of mind. Part of the reason for that is that at first we decided to only accept patients with dementia or Alzheimer’s or cognitive decline, and we decided to do that because those were the patients that everyone else was turning down. And because we thought there was a paradigm to break there, because when a patient is diagnosed with dementia, doctors usually say there’s nothing to do, but wait it out. And we thought there was a lot more to do. And although we don’t have the cure for dementia, I think we’ve been very creative in incorporating or we were at that time because we’re not solely focused on dementia anymore. But we were very creative in finding therapies that would at least reduce the rate of decline. But I, going on to tell this story, I said at first that the concept has been evolving. So at first we were focused on the patients, specifically on dementia patients, but that led us to understand that the woes of the caregivers were much greater.
(00:08:40):
And so over time, we began switching our focus from patients to caregivers. And caregivers comprise a pretty large sector of the population depending on how you count them, but some people count all mothers as caregivers, some fathers as caregivers, anyone who’s taking care of a family member, professional or unprofessional, paid or unpaid is technically a caregiver. And that’s what makes it so appealing. It’s not a niche for a certain kind of profession. It’s a responsibility that most of us at one point in our lives will be faced with. And that’s why it’s so relatable to your specific question. It’s just I think my nature to believe more in social enterprises than it is to believe in NGOs. Part of it, I guess is my nature. Part of it is the states has done an amazing job at creating a whole ecosystem for non-for-profits. I don’t feel it’s the same way for Latin America.
(00:09:46):
They’re greatly underfunded. In fact, governments make it hard to start an NGO because there’s this longstanding idea that social work is supposed to be done by governments and not by private individuals. So it’s a difficult, I mean, I consider heroes the people who go into the non-for-profit sector in Latin America, but it’s surprisingly easier to navigate and the for-profit sector. And it also just feels like it’s more sustainable. I just didn’t want to spend all of my life fundraising. A bit of irony there, because as an entrepreneur, you pretty much spend half of your life fundraising at least. But I didn’t expect it to be that way. At least there’s some income that doesn’t rely on constant fundraising. But yeah, it is just my nature. It’s just I think my definition of success personally for me includes some sort of a financial success. And I thought there was a way of putting it all together.
Mark Horoszowski (00:10:51):
So tell me more about then this evolution. So you were experiencing this problem really, really firsthand. I mean, to your point about it pouring, I can’t imagine what that would’ve been like. And I’m really grateful for you kind of sharing the genesis of this. But how did you come out of that work and the mental load of the time to then actually start with pace to start the very first business model here? How did you take those very first steps? How did you get to first customer?
Manuel Rosemberg (00:11:28):
Well, first of all, I was grateful to find a business partner that was going through a very similar situation as mine, and we compliment each other very well. And that he’s a dreamer and he thinks big and he’s always looking for the future. And I’m very much a doer present. And so I think that’s been a very complimentary relationship. And I think that dynamic still stands today. And so we kind of together dreamt up this idea that we would be the go-to brand for anyone in need of caregiving. And we decided to bootstrap it pretty much. We had literally four angel investors investing $10,000 each. So really pretty much bootstrapping in. And I was literally the salesperson, the recruiter.
(00:12:25):
I think the only salary we had was curiously enough or that goes on to tell the story. Anna and Anna did a bit of everything. She helped with recruiting, she helped with customer support, she helped with training, medical reporting. She did a bit of everything. And I mean, I’m jumping to a story down the line, but that’s why the platform is called Anna. She was so great at everything. We wanted to reproduce her a billion times. The way to do that was to create a software. So yeah, she was helping out put out, we went to talk to all of the doctors we could find that that had dementia patients. We told them what we were trying to do, and they thought it was refreshing that someone was putting an optimistic spin on what can be done with dementia patients.
(00:13:19):
And so they took a chance on us and started recommending patients. And some, I wouldn’t say the patients, but family members took a chance on us and said, at least you’re trying, at least you’re promising me not such a dire outcome. So we’ll give it a shot. And Mexico, Latin America, again, is so informal caregivers, they’re angels, but they also know they’re in high demand so they can cancel from one minute to the other. There’s a lot of informality. So I would literally pick the caregivers up at a nearby subway station, take them to the patient’s home. When you’re starting a business, you need to make sure that everything goes right. You don’t have much margin for error because you’re starting to build a reputation. So it was pretty exhausting, but I think it was incredibly valuable. And I would go on to say that I recommend all entrepreneurs do something like that because that’s when you really get to understand your customer’s needs. I mean, I was literally inside my customer’s homes understanding what they were going through. And so it would constantly give me new ideas when I talked to them and when I understood where they lived and what they were going through. So I found that it was exhausting, but extremely valuable. And I really can’t emphasize how much I think entrepreneurs should go out there and meet their customers if possible, literally in their homes.
Mark Horoszowski (00:14:46):
Yeah, so that’s fascinating to me. So when you were starting here, so before Anna became the Anna that it is today, right, the big tech platform that’s AI enabled, you were really more of a manual service. You were matching patients in homes who were your customers to caregivers, usually from informal sector, and you were picking them up, you were spending time in the homes, you were monitoring, you were observing, you had that proximity to not only the sales process, but also it sounds like the delivery aspect as well.
Manuel Rosemberg (00:15:16):
We had our first version of ANA was a white label chatbot that I found, and it was one you could program, but it was very easy to program. I think it was an Indian company and it was a web app, so we didn’t have to be experts at it. We just created the decision tree pretty much. And caregivers would report what was going on, and then we would get to see that in an Excel spreadsheet. It was very unsophisticated, but at least it gave customers a lot of confidence that we were actually following up with what was going on. And so that was an iteration 1.0 is letting our customers know that we knew what was happening, that we knew at what time our caregivers got there, that we knew how caregivers were feeling, what they were reporting. And then at first it was just calling our customers and talking to them about it and just being close to them.
(00:16:12):
But an has evolved along those lines, letting family members know that someone is out there watching for their loved ones and someone is out there supporting caregivers in whatever they might need. So that’s how the evolution started because we incorporated one question and that started making all the difference. That one question at the beginning of the day when caregivers made it to the patient’s house, we would ask them, how are you feeling? We wouldn’t ask ‘em about the patients. How are you feeling? And that became, I mean, that gave us so much information, underappreciated, tired, burned out, alone. And so that’s what first opened our eyes to the real challenge being the caregivers. And at first our slogan was like, happy caregivers, happy patients. It evolved to the current slogan, which is we care for those who care. But they’re kind of similar. But I mean, it seems obvious in retrospect, and when I talk about it, it may be obvious, but it wasn’t obvious to us what the hardships that caregivers go through. And so when we decided to move out of just the dementia space and into caregiving for whatever patient needed some kind of support, that’s when we switched our focus to saying, you know what? We’re not going to become experts in all of these diseases and all the causes for caregiving, but we can become an expert in supporting caregivers. And so that’s when we changed our focus.
Mark Horoszowski (00:17:47):
It’s so interesting, and this is why I love talking to social entrepreneurs because, so I’m based in the states, the Silicon Valley solution to this problem probably would’ve been more uber inspired, which is create some, I dunno, maybe carrots, but primarily sticks caregivers, if you don’t show up on time, you don’t get paid.
(00:18:06):
And what you did was different. So when you started with almost like a manual matching of like, Hey, if you are a family member that has a family member that needs care, or if you just need care directly, we’re going to help you find a good caregiver. We’re going to help make sure that caregiver gets there on time. And in doing that, you were looking at this problem very holistically, systematically what’s going on, but also very humanly, you were picking these, this is what you said earlier. You were picking these caregivers up and you were taking, and in so doing, you learned that they didn’t need sticks in order to show up time, they needed care, they needed empathy, they needed. And so you started to then develop a solution for them, the caregivers, and that’s what really became Anna, the platform that you have today.
Manuel Rosemberg (00:18:56):
Yeah. The other thing that happened along those lines, we started offering free training Sunday mornings, like the caregivers work five, six days a week. And then we said, if you make it Sunday morning, we’ll give you free training on physical rehabilitation or how to inject the patient. And so many of them started showing up. I mean like, wow, this is our only free day. And we asked them to be there on a Sunday morning, and all of them are avid to learn more. So another big component of Anna is training. That’s why I mentioned it. And it’s not that we had the idea firsthand. We started offering training to whoever wanted it. And so many of them showed up. We said, this is another need that the market isn’t covering.
Mark Horoszowski (00:19:40):
Interesting. So then that’s really what Anna’s doing today. It’s not only helping caregivers find work and not only helping people that need care find caregivers, but you’re also providing, it seems like assurance to those that need care. And you’re also providing training to these caregivers so that they can move through the day with less stress and be more effective. And I would imagine probably earn more in the process as well. And
Manuel Rosemberg (00:20:04):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Improving the livelihoods of caregivers is essential. So all these training inevitably leads to that. But also one thing we noticed is the courses where most people showed up or self-help were like self-care. So meditations, there was a course on meditation or breathing exercises or stress release. And so a lot of the educational content that we have is actually self-care. So it’s not all it designed for better pay, it’s designed for better life, better living.
Mark Horoszowski (00:20:42):
So I want to continue on this journey then of how then this app continued to grow, how you’re integrating ai, how you funded it, et cetera. I want to get into that, but before I lose this one kind of thread, you mentioned something earlier related to your co-founder dynamic that I thought was really interesting where you have a different kind of skillset, but it seems like you’re really complimentary with each other. Emphasize for me again, your differences. And then I want to follow up with the question, which is with those differences, how do you collaborate so well together? Because oftentimes that difference can really lead to founder tension.
Manuel Rosemberg (00:21:29):
I’ll answer that second one first. I think it’s the recognition that the other person has skills that you don’t, and being fine with that, not pretending to be the perfect entrepreneur with a hundred percent of the skills. So I think he recognized that I can, he has a million ideas per minute. It’s amazing because he’s a dreamer and I appreciate that about him because for instance, we wouldn’t have become an AI company if he hadn’t spotted so fast so early on, as soon as AI was a thing we need to be. And I was more, well, right now I can’t see where we would be applying it. But I think he appreciates on the other hand that out of those a thousand ideas that come up every minute, I can cherry pick the ones that might work and actually make something with them. So he appreciates my skills, I appreciate his skills, and it’s been a good balance say in how we spend our money because he’s always thinking of the investments we need to make for future success. And I’m always balancing it with like, well, what’s our runway? How much income are we making? And so it’s kind of like a rubber band. He stretches it and I pull it back.
(00:22:51):
And I think, but it’s all, it works because of the recognition that we appreciate each other’s assets. And it’s been I think a pretty good balance. And when we talk to investors, when we talk to clients, it is very evident. Our personalities are extremely different. And I think investors have recognized that we make a good team, that we compliment each other, that the fact that we’re not the same is an asset for the company.
Mark Horoszowski (00:23:18):
Yeah, I want to spend just a little bit more time here because I think it’s interesting, and from my own experience, having a co-founder also that was ideas and still have a great relationship with my co-founder of Moving Worlds, even though he is not operationally involved anymore, but during the times when it was stressful, it was stressful. When he was coming forward with a bunch of ideas and I was looking at the finances, I’d love to be in the room. So can we experiment here? Can we do a quick role play? I’m curious to see how you do it. Okay, so time of the business, we are stressed out. Work is hard. We’re a little bit below target. We’re looking at runway problems. And I’m your co-founder and sorry, remind me your co-founder’s name.
Manuel Rosemberg (00:24:12):
Ariel.
Mark Horoszowski (00:24:13):
Ariel. So I’m Ariel. I come in and I say, Manuel, I’ve been tinkering with this A on the side. It’s in incredible. We need to incorporate it into Anna, and we needed to do it yesterday. We’re ready. Falling behind. The way that I think it could help is save a bunch of time in terms of patients that give them faster response. I think it could help caregivers almost as natural therapy. And I’m going to keep going here. There’s so many AI ideas that I have.
Manuel Rosemberg (00:24:42):
I would say I like the idea. Unfortunately we don’t have the money to do what you’re thinking right now, but why don’t we think up together of an MVP where we could test out the idea without having to make a big investment? What would be a good mvp?
Mark Horoszowski (00:24:57):
Well, it’s ai. We can’t MVP, this thing. We got to go. We got to invest.
Manuel Rosemberg (00:25:05):
You can total the MVP ai. I mean, if you think of a large language model, we can have an intern answering everything that and just seeing if that kind of response works with patients. But I mean, I would distill all of the answers and he does the same. And this is pretty much in the open, the way we react to ideas. I think they call it the sandwich theory, where first you say something positive about the idea and in the middle you pack in what you don’t think is going to work, but then you finish it up with another piece of bread. And so it is bad news, but wrapped up in something soft. So I never turned down an idea. I always suggest a way we might test it out and work it out. And
Mark Horoszowski (00:25:57):
I think that’s it. That’s what I loved hearing you say. You’re like, Hey, we could MVP this. How does it go forward from there? How do you go from who designs the experiment? Did that transfer to you? Did that stay with him? Did you put that to
Manuel Rosemberg (00:26:16):
A product lead? It depends. So I think what happens often is some ideas just die out on their own. He might not even like them the next day, but I say this in really admiring way. His idea, his ability to come up with no ideas is amazing. And so if he’s still at it the next day and a week later, he’s probably going to try to convince me or think up of an MVP, that’s option A. Option B is that I love one of his ideas and that I come up with the MVP and I say, let’s test this right away. We can do this and this and this and that. So one of the two will happen. It’ll be a good idea. It’ll be an idea that he loves so much that it’s not going to disappear or it’ll
Manuel Rosemberg (00:27:02):
Idea that I love. And we both decided to test it out. And I mean, I’ll tell you over the past 10 years, we’ve tested out so many ideas and some of them have stuck and become part of the platform and others, even though we think are great ideas, just like we couldn’t make them happen in the market. There’s a lot of things, I think this happens in every industry, but clients say they really love, they would love to have, but when you ask them if they’re willing to pay for it, that’s a whole different question. So things like we started online forum to support groups and everyone said, I would love that. Yes, it’s so important for me. Would you be willing to pay for a support group? Absolutely not. It’s not that important for you. But there are a lot of things that you don’t realize that you don’t know if people are going to be willing to pay for unless you put ‘em out there and you start testing them out.
(00:28:01):
But back to your question, when you were role playing, I think I’m completely convinced that everything is MV Pable, even very sophisticated ai, it just AI does. It’s very fast at doing what humans can do slower, but humans can do it. So if you started with a small enough MVP, you can get a human to do what you want the AI to do later and see if that’s something that the clients would love, that the process makes sense. I don’t believe in just testing things with AI without having an idea of what the AI is going to do. So everything’s MV Pable, and I think everything’s MV pable with a pretty small budget.
Mark Horoszowski (00:28:50):
It resonates a lot. And I even think about the biggest challenge is not can you build an AI enabled chat bot? Even years ago, we knew that you could, right? The biggest challenge is would people use it, right? And so I think it’s also what it sounds like here is that you’re really looking at these ideas less of a technical feasibility perspective. We can figure those things out. It’s like you’re really looking at it from a human perspective. Will our users want it? And then is it
Manuel Rosemberg (00:29:19):
Well, users want it and pay for it. And yeah, that’s really the only question you have to answer because I mean, if you can, I know we’re not talking about investment yet, but any investor, if you say, I’ve tested this out and these are the results, now I need the money to actually build something that is professional looking, then it’ll be very easy to raise the money. But the other way around is harder is like, I have all these great engineers and we can build this thing and we don’t have no idea if it’s going to work. It’s much harder to raise money that way.
Mark Horoszowski (00:29:52):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The startup history books are filled with the failures of the latter one and they keep coming. Look, I think that’s a great segue. My mind was going there, so let’s go there. You’re starting then to build Anna. You’re building then technology in order to do that. Are you bootstrapping with free cashflow from the manual matching service? Did you go raise money for it right away? At what point did you say we’re switching from the pays to Anna and we’re going really all in on building the technology platform?
Manuel Rosemberg (00:30:36):
No, we fund raise to too. We’ve been fundraising all the time, but we’ve just fundraised in a very non-conventional way. So a lot of our funders are customers or customers like, oh, you helped me so much with my husband, it was so great. Your company is so great. I’m so grateful for you. Let me know how I can help. And she said, if you would want to be a part of this company, you can invest. And so a lot of our funders were family members of patients we cared for. And so it’s like nonconventional because we didn’t have to pitch anything. It took us a while before we ever came up with a deck. It was just like, well, you know, us personally, if you want to be part of this dream, then you can invest. And so we took the friends and family to friends, family and customers, and a lot of our fundraising was done like that.
(00:31:36):
Up until we started working with Inter-American Development Bank, we really had no need to have all these Excel spreadsheets and decks and investment memorandums. It was just, well, you know what we’re trying to do. We think it’s worth this. We were not sure. We were very honest about it. And it was positive because it was very low stress investors. They were investing in an idea and a dream, and we always told them, do not invest anything that you need in your life or that you’re counting on. Just invest something that we later found out there’s a space for this called venture philanthropy. But at that point, it was just people who wanted to, they thought we were doing, had a lot of future and there was no method to it to valuations. There was no method at all. It was just, we think it’s worth this. Why? Because our last customer, because six months ago we said it was worth less.
Mark Horoszowski (00:32:34):
Tell me a little bit more then about the mechanics of this. So let’s call these people angels. Were they giving donations? Was it a safe or was it even more flexible? It was just like, here’s money at some point in the future, it’ll be worth something. Come back to
Manuel Rosemberg (00:32:51):
Me. No, no, no. We did establish a valuation and then we just, once a year, we took on money at different valuations and we capitalized it formally later on because the safe figure is not so clean cut in Mexico as it is in the states.
Manuel Rosemberg (00:33:11):
On, when we went to an impact venture accelerator, we incorporated a Delaware LLC, and then when we got the money from the Inter-American Development Bank, and then we started using saves, but before that, we agreed on evaluation, and then we just capitalized all those once a year. And so like I said, on the upside, it was low stress because none of the investors were expecting 10 x over five years or a hundred x. The downside has been that our cap table is kind of dirty, and now that we’re trying to become more institutional is there’s some work eventually we had to put ‘em on in an SPV and find a way for more institutional investors for it to be cleaner. But I think being able to grow without the stress that more institutional investors put on a business has been positive in general. I mean, I do recognize there’s some value in having a little pressure, but we put so much pressure on ourselves. We didn’t need the external pressure, really.
Mark Horoszowski (00:34:26):
Pressure. Yeah. Okay, cool. I want to recap this a little bit and then also just define some of the acronyms that we use in case some of the listeners here aren’t familiar with some of those. So you were incorporated in Mexico, you took on some money from investors. It seems like there was some formal documentation and formal annual valuation so that they understood probably what percentage of the business that they owned, et cetera. But you weren’t in a more formal, at least, I’m going to say more formal, at least in the us, you weren’t following a traditional safe or convertible note structure. And then as you grew and you needed to then incorporate, it seems like in the us, in order to take bigger institutional fundings included from the Inter-American Development Bank, and we’ll get into that, then you incorporated as an LLC in Delaware at that point. Some of that, probably that cap table formalized a little bit more. And then you did raise on a safe, so simple agreement for future equity. This was an instrument popularized, I believe, by Y Combinator. And then you also mentioned an SPV. So a special purpose vehicle essentially, where you can aggregate a few individual angels into just one entity. So they’re taking up one line on your cap tables, so that’s easier to manage. Okay, so you’ve done that, you’re growing, and it seems at some point you said, okay, I need probably bigger checks and I need to become more efficient in managing investors. And you saw an opportunity, if other steps happen first, please correct me. But then you saw an opportunity with the Inter-American Development Bank.
(00:36:14):
How did that come to be?
Manuel Rosemberg (00:36:16):
There’s this organization called Tech for Good, and we were trying to work with Tech for Good, and we were asking them for their help to help us make introductions to potential clients. We weren’t thinking about fundraising. We were more concerned with fine clients. And they said, have you seen what you’re trying to do? I think would fit really nicely with this, the silver economy challenge that the Inter-American Development Bank has come up with. And it basically said, we are looking for Latin American tech companies that have found and ingenious solution to the challenge of caring for our elders in the region. And that pretty much sounds like us, spot on. So we presented Anna. And so Anna, as I said, the original name was because of our first employee who did everything well. But when the Inter-American Development Bank asked me what Anna meant, I don’t know why at that moment, it just came to me.
(00:37:17):
And I said, it’s automated nursing assistant. And they thought, oh, that’s pretty good. And so that’s why a lot of people refer to N-S-A-N-A, because we always use caps, the acronym. So both are true. It is an automated nursing and assistant, and it is in honor of ana. And so we presented this as a technology that could help the entire region formalize the caregiving industry, and in doing so, earning caregivers better wages, just a better livelihood in general. And also helping reduce the costs of elder care. Because one thing that is, I mean, it’s evident now, but there are a lot of studies that support it, is that people with chronic conditions that are cared for by well-trained caregivers will have costs of 30% less than people who are not cared for by trained caregivers. And that’s primarily due to avoidable hospitalizations. Avoidable emergency room visits is a major driver for high costs.
(00:38:22):
And so investing in caregivers can help reduce the costs of the healthcare systems in general and help support one of the only jobs that won’t be displaced by ai, I mean, not in Latin America. I know AI is doing that job in Japan and Korea, but it seems very distant, if ever, that it’ll happen in this region. So yeah, the Inter-American Development Bank forced us to clean up our finances. I mean, we were formal in that we paid our taxes and things were clean, but we really didn’t have the muscle to present our financials in a way that a bank would want to see them. So it was great that they forced us to build that muscle. Six months later from getting the grant, we also got accepted or someone recommended that we go to an impact, a startup, a venture, not a venture builder, but what do they call ‘em?
Mark Horoszowski (00:39:24):
Like an accelerator?
Manuel Rosemberg (00:39:25):
Yeah, accelerator. Accelerator. And there was this one in Sweden called Norkin, and apparently at least it was positioning itself as the main impact accelerator in Europe. And we thought that Europeans would be, especially for our industry, a lot more in tune, they would understand the need because Europe is much ahead of the curve in terms of aging. And so they would understand the problem very well, and they would see how inevitable it was that it was going to reach Latin America. And so we got accepted to this impact accelerator and also, and that forced us to clean up our financial, I want to say our financial act, but our financial reporting at least. And it’s something that if you haven’t never done it, financial reporting is a lot more complex than one would think. It sounds like income versus expenses. Yeah, this is how we’re doing, but it’s so much more complex than that. And it really takes a while for an organization, a startup, especially, to build that muscle because as a startup, you’re just thinking of selling the operation clients actually, you never have the time to organize your reporting, but it’s a very important muscle to build. If you want to keep growing,
Mark Horoszowski (00:40:48):
It resonates so much. Total side note, I have a master’s in accounting. I know my way around spreadsheets, financial models, all the things.
Mark Horoszowski (00:40:56):
And I still feel as the organization’s continued to grow increasingly less equipped and time starved in order to look at it and use it as a more strategic tool. Actually, one of our other guests, our episode with a niche from AYA slash without talks a lot about finance. We talked a lot about how much he was in model. So your point I think is really resonant with him, and it’s a lot of work to really be in there. So anyway, side note, but please, please continue
Manuel Rosemberg (00:41:28):
Also because it combines that part of a model where you combine your history into your projections, and that needs to be congruent, but at the same time, it can’t be that congruent because as a startup, you’re trying to show that really rapid growth is going to start happening. And so saying, well, how are you projecting this in the future? Well, because things start accelerating. So I don’t know. Someone once made the joke, they said what the Microsoft application is where most fiction is written, and it’s like, if you’re an entrepreneur, the answer is Excel very much. I love it. But yeah, learning how to play with numbers so that you’re being truthful about your history, but also laying out the possibilities of the future that don’t look like your past is an art form.
Mark Horoszowski (00:42:30):
So can I ask, are you the finance guy then? Do you have a CFO? Do you have an interim CFO or a fractional? Do you have an advisor that helps with that? Have you just learned it over time?
Manuel Rosemberg (00:42:44):
Yeah, I think I’ve just learned it over time, and my partner also participates in this. And what we have now is a monthly finance committee where we do invite some board members, and it’s ahead me. And also again, the Inter-American Development Banks guidelines about what they expect to see has also been kind of a good north star of what we’re supposed to look like. So like I said, it’s a muscle that we’re building. When you’re fundraising, I’m always, it just never, it’s never a priority to have a CFO because you want to bring people in who can help grow the income. And so we always like, well, yeah, we need A CFO, we know we need ‘em, but we’ll push that down the line a little bit more. I think though, in our next round, it’s going to be become a priority. I think the organization is big enough and complex enough that we can’t hack it anymore. We’ve been doing so far,
Mark Horoszowski (00:43:48):
Yeah. Yep. Hitting very close to home. We just onboarded our first fractional CFO and yeah, we’re unlocking value there. And again, it’s like I thought I could do it for the longest time. So you raised money from the Inner American Development Bank, and I think for our listeners, it’s important to know that these institutions exist. So I’ll try and explain it a little bit, but you can layer on because you’re more intimate with them than I am. But a lot of regions around the world, there’s a European Development Bank, there’s an Asian, et cetera, and they are banks that have essentially received financial contributions and capital from a number of countries in that region. And then they deploy that capital. Some of it they do via grants, some of it actually as equity investments or some of them either in debt instruments and they have, some of these development banks are massive, and they come up with lots of different ways of deploying capital. So you received grant capital from the Inter-American Development Bank, is that correct or
Manuel Rosemberg (00:44:48):
No? We received what they call a contingent loan.
Mark Horoszowski (00:44:52):
Oh, okay. Tell us more.
Manuel Rosemberg (00:44:53):
So it’s a loan with 0% interest and contingent upon achieving the goals that the loan was given out for,
Manuel Rosemberg (00:45:04):
There’s no collateral. And so we set out, we negotiated, what are you going to do with this money? Well, we are going to create this platform and we’re going to license it to a hundred companies, and I think this is what’s going to happen. And they said, all right, so if you achieve these goals, then you can pay back the money over an eight year period. So it’s very, very, very generous terms. And if you don’t, and so it is technically debt, but it feels like a grant
Manuel Rosemberg (00:45:40):
It’s such a generous form of debt. And this instrument is kind of a, it’s a division of the IDB called IDB lab. And so the amounts, well, I mean relative to what, they were pretty big for us. But I mean, for an Inter-American Development bank, there’s small amounts.
(00:46:04):
And so they’re willing to lose that because out of maybe a hundred companies that they make these loans to X number will succeed, and then they will need bigger loans, and then they could start doing either equity investments or more structured loans. So it’s kind of a way for them to find which companies are worth investing in, but companies that match their goals. So the IDB and silver economy, silver economy, I mean, it’s obvious, but maybe not to everyone. It is everything that relates to aging silver because of the silver hair. And so silver economy is a big priority of the bank nowadays. I would say caregiving specifically is a big issue around the bank. They came up with a whole division called quida, the IDB cares or CARES for, and it’s become a very important priority for the region. So they gave out these loans or grants to companies that are fulfilling their mission as a bank.
(00:47:10):
But now that you’ve opened up the conversation, I can’t stress enough how it’s, I think for impact companies, for social enterprises, it’s I think the best form of financing because they aren’t bullshitting. They’re very honest about their mission. They’re very mission driven, and if you’re fulfilling that mission, they’ll be very supportive and generous with the kind of financing that you get. So we’ve had an amazing experience. And the other benefit of getting money like that is that they’re very influential. So the IDB has these forums and they can bring a lot of attention to your company. We’ve been fortunate enough to have licensed our platform to the Mexico City government, which have never happened. If the IDB wouldn’t have presented us with the government at a forum and said we were backing this company up and we love them. And in the Inter-American development banking specific, they have a lot of clout in Latin America because they lend money to all of the national governments.
(00:48:25):
And it’s not just the money. They’re also trusted as an institution with a lot of expertise. They do a lot of research. And so when the IDB says, oh, if you’re interested in the caregiving sector, you should really talk to these guys, then everyone is willing to listen. It gets a very powerful recommendation. So it’s not just the money, it’s the cloud, it’s the influence, it’s the connections that they have. And I know funders usually always put this on the table how influential they are, and some of them are, but these multilateral institutions, development banks are incredibly, incredibly
Mark Horoszowski (00:49:06):
Influential. Yeah, that’s really interesting. So then as you received that capital, that kind of helped you grow a little bit more, then I’m sure there was like, okay, now we probably need follow on financing. Where have you continued to look for funding? Did you look at private equity? Did you look at traditional VC money? Tell us a little bit more about the fundraising journey.
Manuel Rosemberg (00:49:31):
So we’ve spoken to a lot of VCs, and I don’t think up until recently, and by recently, I mean the past month, we hadn’t found VCs that we felt comfortable working with. It is just, we know we’re in a very interesting space and it’s growing. We don’t know if it’s growing at the pace that VCs want yet, or we didn’t know. I think we’re feeling more comfortable about it now, but when we were just growing the business, it just felt like the kind of pressure that we didn’t want. We know a lot of entrepreneurs that got even YC funding and they raised $10 million and then went bankrupt a year later.
Mark Horoszowski (00:50:25):
I’ve seen
Manuel Rosemberg (00:50:25):
That so much, and it’s because, yeah, and we didn’t want to be one of those, we didn’t want to explode or bust example. We really believed in what we were doing, and we said, if it takes us a bit longer, it takes us a bit longer. And so we’ve had to find the kind of investors that really connect with our mission. And like I said at the beginning, so many people have had to dealt with taking care of a loved one that so many people understand the problem,
(00:50:53):
That we’ve been fortunate that we’ve found a lot of investors that were more aligned with the mission than with the returns. I think recently we’ve had a number of breakthroughs and the kind of clients that we found that make our story more appealing. For VCs specifically, we work with what’s called Impact VCs. So Impact VCs theoretically put a lot of value on impact. Some of them do. Some of them want the same returns as a usual VC and the added impact. So it’s just like they’re not very appealing for you as an entrepreneur because you’re not getting much value, but some of them are truthful about the value that they place on Impact. And over the past few months, we have found some matching impact VCs that we’re working with and we feel comfortable with. But there are intermediate funding actors. There are a lot of foundations that have an impact like a venture branch.
(00:52:01):
So they have venture money, but not in the same sense as we understand venture money in Silicon Valley in that they’re not expecting these a hundred x returns. They’re venture in that they’re adventuring their money, but they want moderate returns. And so especially in Europe, there’s a lot of these kind of venture foundations, and I was saying some of them call themselves venture philanthropy where they do want their money back, but they understand it’s more the philanthropy than it is a venture. So I mean, there’s a pretty huge array of potential funders, and I think depends on what you’re doing, which ones you’ll find more attuned with. I think if you’re coming up with a microfinance app, then you’ll find a lot of resonance in VCs because they understand that. They understand that industry very well. But if you’re in caregiving, it’s just going to make, they don’t know it very well. There haven’t been many ventures in this industry, so they find it hard to relate. So it’s just a matter for each entrepreneur in each industry finding the right match. I don’t think there’s one better than the other. It’s what works for us.
Mark Horoszowski (00:53:27):
It
Manuel Rosemberg (00:53:28):
Has been other sorts of funding. Yeah,
Mark Horoszowski (00:53:31):
I want to talk about this more because, so you mentioned of people that went into yc, raised a lot of money and went bankrupt, right? I’ve seen the same thing, and I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurs kind of get on this venture capital conveyor belt. It’s like they raise the safe, and then as soon as you have the safe, it’s like, well, you don’t technically have to go raise VC money, but the pressure is kind of there for you in order to do that. So you’re just advancing to the next round. You’re advancing to the next round. And you said something that I think was interesting. You said theoretically they care about impact. And so it seems like you were kind of picky. You were having conversations because you knew funding was important, and that’s a very common path for people to pursue. But it feels like you were doing diligence on these investors to say, we really need to ensure there’s alignment with our mission too, and we’re willing to take slower growth in order for that to happen. How did you suss that out? How did you know that, especially now, the funders that you’re talking to, how do you know that they’re not just saying it, but they really are willing to better balance the need for purpose alongside the financial returns?
Manuel Rosemberg (00:54:40):
I think it becomes evident pretty fast once you’re having a conversation. Some of them will lay out their thesis. Day one, they’re saying, we want to show to investors that you can invest in impact and have the exact same financial returns. So they’re very honest about it, but I dunno, you vibe, you feel the vibe of people and you hear their personal stories, you see what other companies they’ve invested in. And then one thing I would always recommend is that you say, who else have you invested in? Can I talk to them? And that you ask that you talk to other entrepreneurs, if I’ve invested in it and you said, wait, wow, what’s your experience been? So it’s important to understand, I think as entrepreneurs, I know a lot of people who put themselves with the position or I need money, so I’ll do whatever the money.
(00:55:37):
And it’s important to understand that they also need you. They just raised a lot of capital from LPs and they need to place it somewhere. And so they need you as much as you need them. So you can ask from them, what are you, it’s not just you answering their questions. You can ask as many questions as you want, and they have to answer and they have to be appealing to you too. I think in Mexico, I don’t know, I think Silicon Valley, a lot of investors are better trained for this, but in Mexico, I see that entrepreneurs laid down at the investor’s feet and what do you need? What do you need? What do you need? Instead of understanding that investors need them as much as they need the other one, but sussing people out is something that you think you always do, right? You don’t always do. It’s like hiring people.
Manuel Rosemberg (00:56:32):
At interviews are like, oh, this is going to be a great employee. He’s going to lead the text. And then three months later, I made a mistake. So that can happen too. And it’s just something you get better and better at the more people you talk to.
Mark Horoszowski (00:56:44):
Yeah. Okay. So I want to add just a quick kind of educational element just because you use an acronym in there
Manuel Rosemberg (00:56:54):
From
Mark Horoszowski (00:56:54):
An LPs. And I think that’s important to also think about as entrepreneurs. So a venture capital group, if they’re formal, will raise a fund and they’ll raise that fund from LPs limited partners. Those limited partners put money into the fund and the VC then operating that fund is trying to deploy that capital within a set period of time. And they’re probably also making some commitment into the time at which there will be a return back to their LPs. So they’re actually, they put themselves in a position that they need to make a lot of investments quickly, and they need those to be very, very high growth. So it’s not that VCs individually are necessarily bad people, but they’re operating in a system that is really prioritizing fast deployment of capital and really trying to put pressure then on entrepreneurs for high growth. And most likely those LPs in the system is forcing financial returns.
(00:57:47):
It’s not promising impact unless of course the investors, the VC formalize it in some way. And one way of doing that is with an investment thesis, which you mentioned. So most VCs, most funds should have a investment thesis or a fund thesis or a VC thesis, which really clearly articulates what they want to invest in, who they want to invest in, and what’s going to happen in there. And I do think that is a way to really suss out some of these VCs. If you look at their thesis and there’s nothing impact related who you’re talking to. And if you’re that high growth of an organization and you’re pursuing billions of dollars, the writing, so to say, is literally on the wall there. Your diligence is more though, and I like it. You’re checking for impact, but you’re also checking, it sounds for entrepreneur friendliness. And I love how you are talking about really recognizing the dynamics of, Hey, you need me. Let’s figure out if we’re the right fit. And so you’re doing diligence, you’re talking to other people that they’ve invested in, you’re reading about their thesis, you’re getting more involved. Anything else that you do to due diligence on the investors?
Manuel Rosemberg (00:59:00):
No, just things come out in a conversation. I always like to go off on tangents and diverge a bit in conversations and go into my personal life and see if they do it, because you learn a lot from people. When I talk about my kids often in these interviews or my kid or I talk about my hobbies and I try to suss out what kind of people they are, what they’re into, and that often tells you a lot more than what they say in a business format. The kind of jokes they make will let you know if they’re sexist, racist. So understanding them as people often tells me a lot more than as the business performance they want to sell. So I do it on purpose that I start talking about other things and see if they follow along, and I get to see that the human dimension of them, and that’s been very important for me.
Mark Horoszowski (01:00:00):
Mango, the number of times that you’ve kind of brought up the human side of things is really interesting to me, right? It’s like the human side of the patient, the human side of the caregiver, the human side of your co-founder. Speaking of tangents, I’d love to go on this. Where does that come from for you, just having this attunement with the human side of really everybody that you’re working with?
Manuel Rosemberg (01:00:25):
Yeah, A lot of people have noticed that about me, how often I talk about it. So my mother was a hippie, my dad was a go-getter entrepreneur, and I think I have a bit of both, but my mother, she’s now a family therapist, so a lot of her conversations are about people dynamics and what families work and how they understand each other. And empathy is a word very often used in my house. And so I think it is just, you can’t deny where you come from. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. And so I think it is that side, and I am always very in tune to that.
(01:01:14):
Yeah, I think in the US they use the term granola. I’m very granola. So yeah, when people describe me as an entrepreneur, I think a social impact entrepreneur, I think I do stress that out because I don’t think I would be satisfied if I would’ve created something that creates no social value and a lot of money. I think it wouldn’t have felt right. I don’t think I would’ve been successful, even, to be honest, I don’t think I would’ve ever been successful because I wouldn’t have had the drive. But to fully answer, yeah, I think it comes from my mother’s side, and I think my grandparents were Holocaust survivors, and that’s always put a lot of things in perspective for me. But yeah, a lot of people said it’s not a coincidence that you ended up in the caregiving field because you’re always looking out for people so much. That’s your nature. It was a natural fit for you. And I didn’t think about it until recently that someone pointed that out, that I did end up looking for a space, it would be about caring for people because that comes naturally to me.
Mark Horoszowski (01:02:32):
Yeah. Wow. You shared a lot in there that I really appreciate you opening up about. And just on a very personal thread, my dad’s parents, so grandparents on my dad’s side, also Holocaust survivors out of Poland, and it’s always struck me how much attunement with the human condition comes from him. And so that’s interesting to just hear you say that. I haven’t talked to another entrepreneur who’s had that experience directly, so that’s fascinating to hear.
Manuel Rosemberg (01:03:11):
Yeah. Actually, if you go to anna.care website, the picture on the website is my 99-year-old grandmother.
Mark Horoszowski (01:03:20):
Whoa.
Manuel Rosemberg (01:03:21):
Yeah. She’s one of the people that we’ve care for and that we’ve tested a lot of the technology and the platform with, wow. I don’t know what company was that said, I’m not just the director, I’m also a member. I think it was the hair club for men, CEO or something like that. And so I’ve had, as I told you the story, I started because of all these issues with my family. So a lot of people in my family unfortunately, have been clients or users of Anna over the past 10 years.
Mark Horoszowski (01:03:56):
Wow. I had one of my friends who also went down the entrepreneur journey. He had something that he called the grandmother test is like, I won’t build anything. I wouldn’t be proud to sell to my grandmother. So interesting to hear. There’s just such a proximal solution here and how that must feel to just be building something is making your family’s lives better and that for so many, coming back then to what’s next for you as you’re continuing to grow here. So you are raising some institutional funding then as your next stage of growth. Can I ask, are you expanding internationally? Are you investing that all in technology? Can I ask, what’s the primary use of funds there?
Manuel Rosemberg (01:04:52):
I think about one third is building a stronger tech team. One third is being a C-level team. I was saying we’re going to start bringing a CFO and a CMO. A lot of these jobs that we’ve as funders that we’ve had to do and we’re our own bottleneck. We can’t do these jobs very well, but we’ve done, and so we’re bringing in a C level team. And the other third of the money is marketing and advertising and stronger growth.
Mark Horoszowski (01:05:23):
Just on the bottleneck comment, what signs really showed up where you’re like, I’m the bottleneck and the bottlenecking will only get worse. What really made that real to you and said our way through this is bringing in the right expensive talent.
Manuel Rosemberg (01:05:43):
I don’t know. I don’t know if I can pinpoint to an exact moment. It just becomes evident where you have your to-do list and then you’re not finishing every week. You’re like, I didn’t get through half of my to-do list. And it just keeps getting longer and longer and longer. And one day you realize, yeah, I’m the bottleneck.
(01:06:06):
I’m the one making things slower here because I put so much on myself and some things you let go and you say, well, they’re just not that important. But other things, the conclusion is I need to fundraise more money. I need to get more money because I’m growing. Generations ago people didn’t have people think of my father’s generation. You grow a business and then you reinvest the earnings and then that keeps on growing. But nowadays things are happening so fast that even if you have a successful growing business, you need a lot more capital than what you can bring in to grow at the speed that is required nowadays with tech and with worldwide competition and with so many opportunities. So having to fundraise money doesn’t mean you’re not doing well. Some people ask me, why are you always looking for money? Always growing faster, especially older adults find that difficult to understand.
(01:07:07):
It’s like if your business is doing well, why are you always looking for money? Well, because it is doing well and I want it to do a lot better. So even though I sometimes criticize this Silicon Valley ethos of more stronger, I understand it and I am empathize, I just sometimes realize how destructive it can be. I have this one specific company, they did the electric scooters. Remember when that was a whole thing? And they were the kings of the electric scooters in Mexico. And so they were YC and Silicon Valley golden Boys. And their valuation grew by the minute, by the minute, and then at some point they fundraised so much money and they made it, they were a unicorn. And I talked to them three months later, how are you doing now? Oh, we’re broke. We had to sell the company for $1.
(01:08:11):
They had made it to Unicorn because at some time, 2022, the market changed from growth at all costs to profitability, to profit to profitability. And so those companies that were growing and growing and growing and growing and growing, but every new user I have, it cost me more money. They didn’t make it through that schism that happened somewhere in 2022. And so that’s the part that I think is destructive. But the reason they were growing at that pace and without thinking about their finances is because that’s what the market was pushing them to do. It’s not like they were bad entrepreneurs, it was just the market was forcing them to grow at that rate. And that’s the kind of destructive hypergrowth that I’ve wanted to distance myself from.
Mark Horoszowski (01:09:03):
Well, and as an observation, and also I remember from a conversation when you and I had the chance to meet in person is when you center impact into the story, it’s like, well, if I can grow there, I can serve that many more people. I can serve that many more patients, I can serve that many more caregivers. And so there’s just an extra pull. And if that’s the motivation and that’s pulling you into it, you see capital as a necessary ingredient in order to do that, but find the right capital. And it seems like you’ve been very diligent in doing that.
Manuel Rosemberg (01:09:36):
Yeah, we try to do the same. My partner came up with this mantra, it is more about recruiting people, but it works the same way for recruiting funders. And it’s like be very slow to hire, be very fast to fire. Once you realize something is not working, don’t stretch it out longer than you have to, but take your time in hiring. And I think that works for funders too. The second part doesn’t work the same way with funders, obviously. Yeah,
Mark Horoszowski (01:10:09):
Once they’re in their end,
Manuel Rosemberg (01:10:10):
Once they’re in the end, but take your time to really choose them. The first person that gives you the money is not necessarily the person that you want to grow with. And so yeah, being very patient there has been key for us and I think we’ve done a very good job. I look at my cap table, I don’t regret anything,
Mark Horoszowski (01:10:31):
Any tips, because I want to agree with you in theory, it sounds so great. Like, hey, every entrepreneur, be patient. Don’t be desperate for capital. And then many entrepreneurs get into a position where they are desperate for capital. So they don’t have that maybe luxury that you do. What helped you have that luxury? What’s the insight? What’s the wisdom that you could pass on that would help entrepreneurs think far enough in advance or be prepared so that they can actually take a long time to find the right capital?
Manuel Rosemberg (01:11:03):
But I guess two things. I mean, one of them, and this is not, I’m not saying anything new. A lot of funders will tell you this is always be raising capital, not when you need it. But that has to be always go to these impact or investment forums and everything. Always be out there and always be attracted to investors and always be in a round somehow or another, even though it doesn’t have to be a formal round, but always in conversations where you’re always interested in people who would want to invest so that when you actually need the money, you already have a lot of people that you’ve had a pre-discussion with about investing.
(01:11:43):
And the other thing is always be very mindful of what your runway is and never let it catch you off guard. Like, oh shit, we only have three months left. We were looking at our runway twice a month. We’re still on track. Did anything happen that derail this? No. The runway still that we still have 10 months to go at this rate of burn. Yes. Okay. Because things happen, you lose an important client, another expense, and then people can lose track very fast of what the runway is. And so we’re always obsessed with how is this going to change our runway? Alright, we still have 10 months. It’s a safe investment.
Mark Horoszowski (01:12:28):
Yeah. Wow. Yeah, that’s really helpful. And even just to hear those numbers of, it seems like you’re looking at that very analytically every two weeks. Earlier you mentioned you have a monthly finance committee, so yeah, there’s a lot of diligence and rigor around that process, so that’s really interesting.
Manuel Rosemberg (01:12:48):
In the eighties, no, they used to call it the Rolodex, like the people you can call. We don’t have that anymore, but we are always building these contacts of who was really interested when I spoke about their business, this guy, this guy, this guy also said, I met this guy at a forum and always, so what we do is we send these bulletins about how the company’s doing and we send them to people we met who, and we said to all investors, friends and interested people, if they’re always in the loop, then when you ask for money, they’re like, oh yeah, I know that. You’re very diligent in reporting and very So yeah.
Mark Horoszowski (01:13:25):
How often do you send those bulletins?
Manuel Rosemberg (01:13:26):
Monthly. Monthly.
Mark Horoszowski (01:13:27):
Monthly. Very cool. I’m on a couple and I tend to see more quarterly, so that’s interesting that you do that monthly. But yeah, I’m trying to remember the movie. I’m pretty sure Leonardo DiCaprio is the actor. The Wall Streets. Yeah. Always be closing. Always be closing. Always be closing. Always be closing. Always be closing. Okay. Mariel, we are getting to what I like to call our lightning impact round. So I get to ask a few questions in rapid succession here. So shorter answers, really just looking for the golden nuggets here. And so I’ll start here. What is one mistake that you’ve made that you really hope future entrepreneurs will not make?
Manuel Rosemberg (01:14:15):
Overdoing it with the bootstrapping. Some initial capital is important.
Mark Horoszowski (01:14:22):
Go. I love it. What is one thing you want all impact investors to know?
Manuel Rosemberg (01:14:33):
Impact companies are always looking at the long-term, the long-term impact. So if you’re an impact investor, your timeframe should be a lot longer than if you’re a regular investor. Impact takes time,
Mark Horoszowski (01:14:49):
Impact takes time heard. What is the one leadership or managerial skill that you wish you could turn on, and if you could, it would make you a more effective team leader?
Manuel Rosemberg (01:15:08):
I think discipline sometimes vary. The methodologies I use with weekly or monthly meetings and the way I follow up on what happened the last meeting, I’m changing that all the time. And if I would’ve kept discipline form of tracking progress and tracking what was agreed upon on last meeting of how I follow up with that, I think I would’ve been more effective. I think I’m doing that much better now, but for a long time, every meeting was like, all right, so what are we going to talk about today? And I forgot to follow up on, well, what did we talk about last week that we need to keep discussing? So that sort of discipline in terms of how meetings are kept and how we follow up on agreements. I could have done a much better job at that.
Mark Horoszowski (01:16:00):
Yeah. Yeah. You, me and everybody. That’s actually, I just finished my own CEO 360 and one of the things that came out of it was rigor, but rigor. The core concept. Very, very, very similar. Yep.
Manuel Rosemberg (01:16:12):
Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s what I meant by discipline. Yeah.
Mark Horoszowski (01:16:15):
Yep. So this question, and I know I kind of said short one, but I want to deviate on just a little bit here and almost pay homage a little bit to earlier of our conversation. I think a couple times in this conversation you opened up a little bit more about, Hey, these were the things that happened to me that led to the creation of the business, or this is the story of my grandparents. And knowing that you are very human focused and you’re working in the pursuit of impact, I would just imagine that there’s a lot of emotional weight and gravitas to your work that probably also sits on you, and you’re in the stressful role of being an entrepreneur, so you so clearly care for others and you see them. I’m curious for you, what is a quote or a ritual or inactivity that you turn to for strength when things are really weighing on you?
Manuel Rosemberg (01:17:26):
I mean, this doesn’t have to do with the business, but I’m an avid hiker and a nature enthusiast and just disconnecting, just disconnecting from phone computer for a while. I gain a lot of perspective. I think if you don’t give yourself those spaces, those times problems become a lot bigger than they are. And so just letting some problems rest for a while and just coming back to them a week later really puts a lot of them in perspective. I mean, I also wish, back to your earlier question, I wish I would’ve done that a lot more than I have. I remember really exploding or being hysterical about a problem that a week later it was like, that wasn’t really worth the trouble, was it? So yeah, taking time off from work and really, really not thinking about it works for me personally. I know going back to my partner, he’s very different. He’s like, Keith is the more he thinks about things, the more possibilities come up in his head and the more like, oh, I thought about it all weekend and the light shine on this problem. And just for me, it’s the other way around. The more I think about the issues, the bigger the problems become, but it is just, we’re wired differently. So
(01:18:55):
That’s just what works for me.
Mark Horoszowski (01:18:56):
Yeah, cool. To have that attunement, who is another entrepreneur that you admire and you follow and you feel like you’ve learned a lot from,
Manuel Rosemberg (01:19:08):
You might have met him at the conference too, but Adi baler,
Mark Horoszowski (01:19:14):
He
Manuel Rosemberg (01:19:15):
Started needless, I am very much in awe of him also because he never loses his, sometimes I forget, this is a journey you’re on and you can make it fun too. Not everything has to be dead serious and like, oh, I’m so mission driven. The experience of an entrepreneur can be as should be fun. And so I think he’s very good at keeping things fun while really not losing focus, being very committed to the mission and also being an extraordinary entrepreneur. So I really like the way he operates.
Mark Horoszowski (01:19:55):
Yeah, very cool. I just had an interview with Claire from Farm to Feed, and she was talking about that bringing more joy into the workplace, more fun in the workplace. That’s cool. Who is somebody else that we should interview for the show?
Manuel Rosemberg (01:20:11):
Oh, if you haven’t interviewed him, I would consider him. I met this other person at DAVO called Madeline Ballard, who I was very impressed with how she organizes community workers around health, community workers in Africa, and I was very, very impressed with her.
Mark Horoszowski (01:20:38):
Very cool. We’ll have to follow up.
Manuel Rosemberg (01:20:40):
And
Mark Horoszowski (01:20:41):
My last question here, Mariel, how can we follow you? How can listeners support you? Where can we subscribe for updates to the incredible work that you’re doing?
Manuel Rosemberg (01:20:57):
The only social network I have nowadays is LinkedIn. I’m convinced that the others are terrible for your mental health. I mean, I used to be in all of them, but I dropped Twitter, I dropped Instagram, and now I’m only in LinkedIn. And I think it’s good because LinkedIn, whenever I post things about that’s happening to the business, whereas in Instagram, I would just post about other stuff. But if you want to be in the newsletter, you want to learn about things. I think if you, anna.care, if you contact us and say, I’m just interested in following you and learning about it, I’ll happily add you to that list.
Mark Horoszowski (01:21:41):
Cool. Amazing. Mariel, thank you so much for joining us today. This was fascinating. I loved all the different threads here that we followed, and I think kudos to you and your co-founder and your team for doing really incredible work. It was really, really an honor to have you here.
Manuel Rosemberg (01:21:57):
Thank you. Thank you for the interview. I enjoyed it a lot as
