How to Turn Deep Technological Innovations into Unicorn Businesses that Improve Humanity
/Visual technologies leveraging computer vision, machine learning and artificial intelligence are revolutionizing how humans communicate and do business. Innovations are emerging every month and our visual technology market is poised for exponential growth.
On March 23rd, we at LDV Capital – the only venture capital firm with the thesis of investing in people building businesses powered by visual technology – are hosting our annual 8th Annual LDV Vision Summit. It’s a premier global gathering of people in the visual tech sector.
We are thrilled to announce the fireside chat between LDV Capital’s Evan Nisselson and Martín Varsavsky, an extremely successful serial entrepreneur, professor and investor who has founded 8 companies (3 with unicorn status) in the US and Europe in the last 30 years.
Today, Martín is focused on revolutionizing fertility as the founder and CEO of Overture Life, an automated embryology company; as well as the Founder and Chairman of Prelude/Inception Fertility, the largest chain of fertility clinics in the US, and as Founder and Chairman of Gameto, a new biotechnology company focused on ovarian longevity.
At the start of his career in the 1990s, Martin built Viatel, which became the first pan-European fiber-optic network, followed by Jazztel, a telecom operator. When Martin sold Viatel, the company was worth $1.2 billion and when he left Jazztel, it was worth $770 million. Jazztel was subsequently sold for $4.5bn.
In the early 2000s, Martin built Ya.com, which was sold to Deutsche Telekom for $650 million. Martin subsequently co-founded Eolia, together with Miguel Salis, one of Spain’s largest renewable energy companies which sold for $1.6bn in 2019. He is also a member of the board of the German media company Axel Springer.
He is passionate about autonomous driving as CEO of Goggo Network. He invests via his family office Jazzya, VAS Ventures, Myelin VC and MVB Fund. At LDV, we are thrilled to co-invest with Martin in Synthesia’s LDV led seed financing.
In the lead-up to the Summit, Evan had the privilege of asking Varsavsky a few questions.
Evan: There are very few people in this world who have built a single $1B business, much less +3 businesses. If you had to point to one skill that you have honed throughout these experiences and played a major role in your success - what would it be?
Martín: One of my top skills is to understand where I am weak and to hire great teams around me. I also have learned to delegate which at the beginning was tough but trusting in my team has been a force multiplier.
Evan: Your early work days were in the telecom industry. How/why did you go from telecoms to healthcare, specifically fertility?
Martín: This is a bit of a misconception. I was actually a failed medical student first and then during my MBA, I started a real estate business. After that, I launched Medicorp sciences which was a pioneer in AIDS testing. It was only later that I moved into the telecoms space. However, like most of my businesses, I started researching fertility after the experience of having my 4th child via IVF. I found the process so poor that there had to be a better way.
Evan: At Overture, one of your tag lines is “using technology to push what human biology cannot consistently deliver today.” How much of that technology is visual tech? Are you seeing AI significantly outperform humans today at selecting embryos? How far out are we from having NaturaLife in every doctors office, fully automating the IVF lab?
Martín: There is a large part of what we do that is visual tech. Part of the IVF process is to look at the morphology of eggs and embryos to gauge how healthy they are. In the Naturalife device we are incorporating optics and will be building our own visual tech to score embryos alongside our proprietary metabolomic embryo testing.
Evan: What are you most looking forward to at our 8th annual LDV Vision Summit?
Martín: Looking forward to seeing all of the amazing new companies in the visual tech space and catching up with you.
