Why Chingona Ventures is betting early on the boldest ideas in health, wealth, fintech, and education.
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Show Notes:
In this Mission Matters episode, Adam Torres interviews Samara Hernandez, Founding Partner at Chingona Ventures. They discuss Samara’s investment philosophy, her focus on overlooked markets, and how AI is transforming early-stage venture capital. Samara shares her insights on identifying visionary founders and why she’s committed to being their first and fiercest believer.
About Chingona Ventures
Industries that are massively changing and founders whose backgrounds uniquely position them to create businesses in growth markets that are often overlooked. Focus areas are in financial technology, future of work, future of learning, and health technology.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, today’s a very special episode. I have Samara Hernandez on the line, and she’s a founding partner over at Chingona Ventures.
Tamara, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. All right, so we got a lot to talk about today. Of course. I wanna learn more about what you’re doing over at Ana Ventures and also let’s let’s just kick it off by getting into the Milken Conference. For everybody that’s listening to this, this interview is part of our Milken Conference global series, where we bring to you some of the best participants, attendees, and VIPs that were at, at the Milken Global Conference which is one of my favorite conferences of the year.
I like to think of it as the, kinda like the Super Bowl conferences, if you will. So. Right. First off, have you been to the conference before? Is this your first time? , Give us some of the connection between you and, the institute? Yeah. No, I had been to the events around the conference in the past and this was the first year I actually attended the conference.
Oh, so you’ve been kind of like to some of maybe the regional events. No, just the surrounding events that happened because I think everyone travels there. Uhhuh, there’s a lot of events post-conference before conference definitely. Uh, So I’ve def if I’ve gone there in the past, but to the actual conference.
This was the first year. I love it. I love talking to a new attendee. This is like my third or fourth, and I remember my first conference, I was blown away. I’m like, what is going on? All these people, all this amazing content. So what was your impression as a first time attendee? Attendee for the overall, for the big show.
Yeah, no, it was great. I think that was a lot of topics that were top of mind. There’s a lot happening in the world today and there was just a lot of experts there, high quality people, and they were. They had opposing views and they were all on stage and you can kind of figure out both sides of the discussion and , it wasn’t just business, it was business, it was politics, it was finance, but then there was a lot around the health.
And mental health. And actually that was one of my favorite sessions was the last day, it was one of the panels that was just talking about mental health and all of them that had different perspectives. And I think that’s something that, , you typically put to the side or it’s just an afterthought and , it’s really part of who you are , and growing , and so that you can become a better leader.
And so I really appreciated the all the different topics that they had there with amazing experts on the panel. That’s great. Let’s switch it up a bit here. I wanna get more into what you’re doing over at and going on ventures. First thing, first, how’d you get into the venture capital space?
Like how did all that start? Yeah, I spent my early part of my career at a bank, so I was in finance. I’m an engineer by training and I’ve always liked to start things from the ground up. I’ve always been very entrepreneurial. And after going to business school, I was fortunate to join a local venture fund here in Chicago, where I started learning about what it, what it is to invest in.
Very early stage startups with very little information around product, traction, revenue, and fund these incredible ideas that are changing the world with these founders that are taking these massive risks to do this. And I fell in love with it. And a few years after I started at my last fund, I got the opportunity to launch my own firm.
And so we’ve been doing this now for, five years, I’ve been in ministry for 10 years and we’re now coming towards our third fund. Wow. , What an amazing story. , What is one of your favorite things about working with these founders that you talk about? What are some of , the things that you enjoy most?
’cause , not the easiest crowds, you know, these trailblazers is people that are trying to change things. Mm-hmm. What do you enjoy about it? Learning. I learn something new every single day. These founders are in the weeds. They know their customers, they know their industry, but more importantly, they have a contrarian view on how the world is gonna look in 10 to 20 years.
They’re taking a bet on themselves, on the market. They’re risking everything to start a brand new business. Develop these brand new technologies to not only change the world, but solve some of the biggest problems. There are a lot of things going on, right? And to be able to leverage technology to solve these problems around health, around you know, wealth around education.
For me, the best part is meeting with these founders and learning from them. Hmm. What do you look for in a founder when you’re thinking about actually allocating capital? Whether it’s, and by the way, you can, you can lump in the, if it’s, there’s a certain industry you focus on versus others, but in general, like for the investment piece, what are you looking for in founders when you’re investing?
Yeah, so we focus on FinTech, future of work, future of learning and health tech. Those are the sectors we focus on, and we focus on being the very first and largest. Check-in, high conviction, first check-in. We like to lead rounds. We don’t care who else is in. We will take the first bet on a founder, which is something that.
It’s really important because not everyone’s there, especially in this market, you know, to take a first bet on a founder or a fund manager. Mm-hmm. So we like to do that for founders and what we look for, we have a framework around five Ps, people, product, profit, potential, and portfolio. And the earlier you go, the less you have, the more you focus on the people.
But we’d like to look at their background, what they’ve done, have they personally been a part of this problem, experienced this problem? What have, if any, have they tested to make sure that it is something that not only do they, can they solve, but also do people wanna pay for it? And then is there a unique perspective that they have because we see anywhere from 10 to 15 deals a day and take about.
Five to 10 meetings a day, but, and so we see a lot of similar similarities, people tackling the same thing. So it’s really interesting when someone has just something, a com very completely different view on a problem in industry. Mm-hmm. And why are they uniquely positioned to solve that? So whether that’s experience, founder background, early validation, early traction, so yes, we focus a lot on the founder and their journey. And what kind of trends are you following right now? Like with that much deal flow and looking at, you know, 10 plus deals a day. That’s a lot of data. Like what, what kind of trends are you following? what interest and excites you?
I just had a meeting with a VC yesterday and she asked me the same exact thing. ’cause she focused on LA him, she’s like, but the amount of deals where we are, it’s just massive. There’s so many. So it does help that we’re focused on industries. It does help that we’re very focused on specific, entry points.
Mm-hmm. Early stage under a certain valuation, you know, raised under a certain amount. But also I’m an engineer, industrial engineer by training and so I, I incorporate process into everything I do in both my business life and professional life. So which drives my husband crazy. But you know, it helps us in the business world.
At least he knows he married an engineer. He knew it. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So but yeah, it helps us be structured and scale ourselves with a very small team. Now, as you know, AI has been the topic of everything, including the Milken conference. Right. Everybody was talking about it.
Mm-hmm. And that really helped accelerate a lot of just. I think complexities we had in the early stage space, so one of those is capital and capital intensive companies. It was, you typically had to raise money then, so there’s a lot of money depending on what space you’re in, and then hire more people and spend more time getting to your certain milestones and things are just changed.
So rapidly every single day you’re going from zero to 10 million in months versus years. You’re able to do this with half a third of the people that you’ve traditionally hired. And you’re able to do it with less capital raise. And so from two points of view, one from the company’s perspective, you know, that just changes the game on what you can do with the limited resources that you have.
But two, on the investor side. It changes how you look at companies. So for us, that’s what we’re constantly doing is saying like, how do we assess this company? How do we evaluate this company in a very different way? And there’s pros and cons to that. , , and not everybody is up to speed with that.
As in, you know, there’s a lot of conversations around it’s called seed dropping. So can a company just raise. Just a couple million dollars and never raise again. What does that mean from a exit perspective? What does that mean from a LP looking at a fund manager and saying, all right, you don’t need to have all these markups, like a company can literally just raise three to 5 million and then have this exit, and how do you evaluate the company until they have that exit or, or, the fund manager until they have that exit.
And then also , even in the industries that you’re investing in. So historically, you know, VCs did not wanna invest in services companies. They had low exit value. They low margins. And now AI just changed the game. Mm-hmm. , There’s like services companies can all of a sudden grow a lot quicker.
Less capital intensive and, and what does this mean for exit? I’m not sure, , but , when you asked about what am I looking at? What’s exciting? What, what am I focusing on? That’s it. , It’s how does this new technology. Change how we look at companies, change, how we advise , and what we talk about at the board meetings.
And then change even how we think about deals that we have historically not done. And so , that for me is really exciting. But we just have to stay up to speed , and learn very, very quickly. Yeah. That’s interesting. I do. It is interesting what you talk about with the service company thing.
’cause you’re right, if you need, if it needs less capital, that can be a very, very good deal now where in the past it would’ve been like, do we wanna take a chance on this? ‘ cause the execution and , how much capital it’s gonna take to execute what, and the type of, just so many things can go.
But if you’re looking at the risk and even just the quantity, and , I hadn’t heard that term before, Carrie. You are the first one to teach me that term Seed. Seed strapping. So good. To be sure I didn’t develop it, but you know, it’s all good. I just, I love you said why you like working with founders.
You’re learning every day. That’s why I like doing interviews, and I love this show and I love bringing this to my audience because I’m like, wait a minute, did she just say seed strapping? She just taught me some new vocab. We can’t just let that go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s great. I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s the whole industry , is you get to learn something new every single day.
You get to meet new people, new ideas, new technologies, and , I really am very fortunate to do what I love every single day. That’s great. Well, Samara, first off, it’s been a lot of fun having you on the show and catching up and learning more about you and going on ventures. Last thing, if somebody’s listening or watching this and if they wanna follow up, maybe their founder, they wanna submit to some of that mountainous deal flow you got going on already, , or maybe their investors, maybe they wanna get involved , in the fund or one of the funds.
How do people connect? How do they reach out? Yeah. So this is really important. So we look at every single deal that comes through through the door, and that’s not very common in bc. So what I mean, go to our website and submit your business. I truly mean that. We are actually gonna take a look at it.
And we have made investments given out term sheets to cold inbound deals. Actually, one we just closed on, I just had a board meeting last. Mm-hmm. Yesterday. I talked on Bloomberg and he heard me applied online and we gave him a term sheet and the round just closed over, subscribe round. So please, if you have a business in the FinTech future of work, future of learning a health tech space, if you’re in the pre-seed or early seed would love to see your business and have an opportunity to learn about it and to invest.
So go to www dot chin ventures and there’s a submit button, submit your business. And then we have two people look at it on the team. It goes through our channels. And then my analyst will look at it and then I will take a second look at it, and then we’ll reach out to you for first meeting if it aligns on thesis and interest.
And if you have any other inquiries. The media at one of that ventures, feel free to reach out. We have that inbox that someone will take a look at it and respond depending on, you know what your request is. But if you’re business, don’t send it. The email there, send it to the website. That’s the quickest way to get in front of us.
Perfect. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll put, we’ll definitely put some links in the show notes. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Tamara, thanks again for coming on the show. Thank you for having me.
