Thank you Validated ID !
My name is Pol Fañanás and during the last 4.5+ years I have had the huge blessing of being an early employee and Strategy & Finance lead at Validated ID, an esignature and decentralized identity B2B SaaS backed by Caixa Capital Risc (Spanish VC with €195M+ AUM and investments like unicorn Glovo and the recently acquired by Facebook, PlayGiga), Randstad (HR corporate, €20B+ annual revenue in 2020) and Cuatrecasas (2019 Most Innovative Law Firm in Europe by Financial Times).
As a startup operator I could earn both, some wins and a lot more of scars and lessons. In this path, Validated ID has played a major role in my professional and personal development, profoundly and positively impacting my life.
That being said, I have found a new passion and now I feel it is time for me to continue evolving in a new calling, so I am announcing I will be moving out from my full time role at Validated ID to become an advisor to the founders and go into a different adventure (which I will announce in the coming days).
Falling in love with the tech startup world and realizing it was the place to be, clicking with the great team and understanding the compelling vision, is why I joined. Finding a new love and feeling now is the time to go, is why I leave.
I am writing this piece to simply say a public thank you to some great people.
STARTING AS AN OPERATOR
Back in 2016 I came across 2 of the founders of Validated ID, Santi Casas (CEO) & Iván Basart (CTO), thanks to a connection by my good friend Gerard García, straight out a period in consulting at EY, and after an earlier ride in the startup world with Kantox (FX/payments fintech with $10B+ transactions done and with $40M+ funding by Partech, Idinvest and others) and Loanbook (once a leading marketplace lending fintech in Spain with €50M+ loans provided, now defunct).
Long story short, while in consulting I realized I was not feeling it and tech was the place to be, where the magic was happening. Tech was eating the world and if you wanted to learn, evolve and be able to help and contribute more to a positive impact to society, you had to be there.
Then, still being at EY, I got approached by Google to join their team, went through all the application process and ended up reaching last stage (being flown to Google’s EU HQ in Dublin, meeting the team and all that cool stuff) but finally I got rejected. And although that moment was painful it also hid a big lesson.
That was one of Google’s peak hype periods and having a brief look into the insights of their dominance reinforced my believe that the tech startup world embodied what I was looking for. Not a temporary trend, not a niche world apart, but the main creator of our future.
Additionally, other things contributed to nurture my conviction, such as happening to be somewhat close to the sale of tickets e-commerce startup Ticketbis to Ebay for $165M while working at EY (It stucked with me how a Spanish tech startup could grow so much so fast and with relatively limited resources, ending up in a significant amount of tangible value), reading Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance (sorry for the cliché) and getting to know 3D Hubs (3D printing startup recently acquired for $280M by Protolabs) in the early seed/Series A times thanks to co-founder Filemon Schöffer replying to random cold emails from curious kids (found him because getting interested in the space after trying and failing to build a 3D printing B2B marketplace for airplane components while in university, inspired by the work I was doing as ground staff at the airport to pay for my degree, and specifically thanks to spending night shifts day dreaming about how I could build something that flies me out to a more enjoyable life where I could get some sleep, a decent pay, and avoid that detail of being shout at and threatened constantly by passengers, and almost beaten every now and then by some crazy travellers — no joke, wild job).
So after all that, my friend Gerard suggested me to meet Validated ID, connected me with the founders, we clicked, I loved the vision of building a new decentralized identity and esignature paradigm that could truly empower individuals in a new digital world, I felt it was the right moment to jump into the startup scene again and I started helping them.
BUILDING AND GROWING
The early days
I still remember working in a 10 squared meter rented room hand to hand with Santi and Iván in a small Spanish esignature company bootstrapping through a significant weight of consulting services and a handful of customers. Big hopes, but pending facts.
The scale up
Given our starting point, the goal was to build a systematic, deterministic, repeatable and sustainable scale up angle while solving the problems of inefficient signature and identity verification alternatives by providing a superior and differential solution.
In esignature we built a B2B SaaS multichannel platform targeting high trust use cases and indirect sales via partners. And we focused on growth.
In identity we started playing with a new concept of high potential, decentralized identity (also known as self-sovereign identity). And we focused on product.
Now
Now, a B2B SaaS trust service provider focused in esignature and decentralized identity with 2000+ customers around the globe, 190+ partners, 45+ employees, 6 digit MRR, 3 digit annual growth and €2M+ VC funding.
Still a bunch of things to be done better but what a ride ! So much comes to my mind I could share, lessons and all that, but there is just one thing I believe I have to say right now, and it is …
THANK YOU
- Thank you for the trust. I started as a rookie with no previous executive experience in high growth tech startups. Yes, I worked as an operator in Kantox and Loanbook but that was in more junior roles with less responsibilities. This? A different game. And you, Validated ID team, did not necessarily needed to trust someone like me to do so much. But you did. And it impacted my life. If I could add any value is because you trusted me.
- Thank you for the freedom. I always found funny when someone asks for specific, static and super structured standard answers regarding the nature of a role when you are an early employee at a high growth startup. The answer? I would say, at least at first, everything that could be done in the intersection of the needs of the company and founders, and your own capabilities. During the last 4.5+ years I had the chance to learn, grow and help in matters of product, business development, strategy, finance and a long etc. All of this could not have happened if the founders did not have a solid vision on the importance of giving freedom to committed early employees. Easy to say, difficult to truly implement. But you, Validated ID team, did.
- Thank you for the love, laughs and support. Hustle, scrappy, dirty, fun, stressful, winning, losing, fighting. I love the startup world but it can be a pretty crazy rollercoaster, professionally and personally. And yeah, I enjoy a good fight, but caring and supporting unconditionally your team, your people, is not a marginal secondary priority. Even though not everyone seems to act accordingly in today’s world. Yet you, Validated ID team, did. During these years not everything has been good, there have been and will continue to be struggles, both as a company and in our individual professional and personal lives. And every time I’ve gone through some of them and I failed, I was not left behind, but supported.
Thank you Validated ID founders, Santi, Iván, Fernando and Jaume, and overall thank you to all Validated ID team for everything !
