Tino Reyes
Angel Investor and Startup Consultant
Fantsy Football as an investment model – Tino Reyes
“If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re probably in the wrong room. So, go find the rooms where there are a lot more people that are smarter than you and more successful and good things will come out of those rooms that you mix and engage with”
ABOUT
•Co-Founder and CEO of startup consultancy
•Part of Newchip Accelerator Mentor Team
•Angel fund with $8 mm AUM with investments in bombas.com, cleancult.com, donegood.co, hatchcollection.com, trygatsby.com, littlechonk.com, kraken.com, spacex.com
•Former Investment Banking Associate focused on upstream oil and gas industry
•Executed over USD4.0 billion in transactions across capital markets and mergers & acquisitions
•Successfully advised on over USD2.0 million in seed/start-up/growth financing
Specialties: Fundraising, Financial Statement Analysis, Financial Modeling, Market and Company Research, Management Consulting, Strategic Rationale
THE FULL INTERVIEW
Tino Reyes
The full #OPNAskAnAngel talk
Tino: JP, thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here, really excited to get in the weeds here with you.
Jeffery: I love it. Likewise. Well, Tino, we’ve been chatting and working together I guess for the last few months and what I really like about it is, you have this oil banking background that really defines and really drives in nicely into how entrepreneurship works. because when it comes to money, that’s what VCs and investors are looking for and I think you’ve got a lot of that great insight. So, we’re going to dive into that today. But the way we like to start is, maybe you can give us a little bit more on your background, where you’ve come from, the things that you’ve done, where you’re at today and then one thing about you that nobody would know.
Tino: definitely, yeah. So, I have a semi-traditional background coming to VC, having gone through the investment banking side as my path towards the VC side. And yeah, I went to Brown University. I studied business economics and I had the unfortunate experience of graduating during the 2008 financial crisis. And I was really passionate about corporate finance. I’ve always been interested in investing and how companies raised capital and how they really got investors to really buy in and believe in their narratives. So, I was applying to all these investment banking jobs and probably applied to over 100 and I didn’t get any responses that nobody was hiring at all. But luckily enough, oil prices were peaking at this time. So, there was one vertical where I was able to get some traction. So, oil and gas, I was lucky enough to get an interview with. Well, to actually go back, I mean I got a job with Goldman Sachs doing private wealth. Obviously, not corporate finance, not investment banking, but my hypothesis was, if I can get in the door and network and learn enough, I’ll be able to make connections with the people that will open the door for me down the road. And Goldman Sachs was great. They have this thing called Goldman Sachs University which is pretty much like an investment banking training course that junior analysts go through when they join the firm. And even though I wasn’t part of the investment banking group, Goldman Sachs University is something that they open up to the whole employee force. So, I went through all of the investment banking modules, all the junior training programs and figured this has put me in a place where I can go to these interviews comfortably and start networking. So, I was lucky enough to meet an ex-Goldman Sachs banker who had just become the head of Bank of Nova Scotia’s oil and gas practice in Houston. So, like I said, oil and gas prices were through the roof around this time. They were doing a lot of deals. So, they’re building out the team and he liked that he’d taken the initiative to go through all that Goldman Sachs stuff while working on the private wealth side. So, there was a really good fit. And he hired me from Goldman and I joined their team in Houston and I spent some time there around late 2008 to early 2009. During this time period, we started to see the Asian national oil companies, the CNPCS, the Knox of the world, start to really step up their investment in North American assets in Canada and America. So, there was a real need to set up an office in the Asia region to service this new deal flow. So, at the time, the Bank of Nova Scotia only had one MDS in their Singapore office. They didn’t really have any of that infrastructure. the junior analyst associates work that you use, like your financial models, your Facebook templates to go around and do deals. So, they offered me an opportunity to go to Singapore. So, I definitely couldn’t turn it down. I’m actually Filipino so I have a good Asian background. a lot of my family is still there. So, it was great. Singapore is just a hop right over the pond. So, it’s a quick fight and it was a good opportunity to get back to my Asian roots. So, I did that for several years and one of my MDS from Houston at the Bank of Nova Scotia was hired by Standard Chartered Bank to start up their Hong Kong oil and gas practice under the similar hypothesis of Asia expanding. And he saw what I had done in the Bank of Nova Scotia in Singapore and really wanted me to spur that building process in Hong Kong. So, he pulled me aside and I joined the Hong Kong team there. So, yeah, I did that for about two years and then I did my last stop like my little oil and gas tour. I’m from Houston, Singapore and Hong Kong and I finished up in Calgary. Obviously, the heartland of Canadian oil and gas. I spent some time there and finished it up. And yeah, it was around 2013 when I was starting. I’m starting to get a little burned out from the lifestyle. I mean it is to an extent true what they say, your 80 to 90 hour work weeks. Also, I was just never passionate about oil and gas. It’s a great business. It’s a great learning opportunity. But, once you get into that flow of just talking about oil and gas fields with geologists and engineers day in and day out, you’re lacking that passion for it, it’s really hard to motivate yourself to keep on moving forward and moving up which is still ambitious at this stage. I still am now. Anyway, what I saw in 2013 VC capital was starting to get is starting to really pick up. Everyone was into startups. Everyone wanted to build their own startup or work with the startup. And I have an entrepreneurial spirit. I’m really passionate about that. I wanted to be in the startup ecosystem. I wanted to work with them, not even from an investment standpoint. But I just really saw this white space where founders didn’t even have the priority or the resources to hire not only a full-time CFO, but a part-time CFO. That’s not something really considered. you don’t even typically as you would know see a full-time CFO on a bounding team, until probably post series b. But having said that, there’s three to four rounds where a founder could leverage that deal experience running point. It’s almost like a full-time job running a fundraiser. So, I saw an opportunity to leverage my experience there. And it was beautiful because it almost created a negative customer acquisition cost funnel into the fund that my wife and I had started if we wanted to invest in startups as well. So, it was great. I was getting this deal flow where startups were paying me their advisory shares or consulting fees to help them out and then I could also invest in them if I wanted to. So, I’ve been doing that for about eight or nine years now since I left investment banking in 2013. Just continuously, I love talking to founders. I definitely love talking to investors.
Jeffery: taking a page out of your playbook, you seem to be living the dream. looking to one day be at your level hopefully soon. Well, that’s a great story and it’s interesting. But you fell in the place that you probably at least expected yourself to fall into which was oil and gas. And I’m pretty sure that over the journey of your cycle in working with early-stage companies or investing, you will come full circle and you’ll probably end up doing