startupi

I had coffee with Renato Shirakashi of Direct Labs these days. I learned he is going to Las Vegas to participate in a poker tournament. “I’m just an amateur; I’m going just to get to know the place,” he explained. In his story as an entrepreneur, however, Renato has bet big, and there’s nothing amateur about him.

When his former company, Via6, received a capital investment from Confrapar, I wrote two posts about it on my blog. One was about the risks of venture capital, pointing out the good and bad sides of receiving such a large influx of money, as Via6 did. The other was a post with comments from Renato himself, from people at Confrapar, and from other entrepreneurs.

I found it very interesting to go back and speak to Renato again two and half years after this investment and a little over a year since the launch of Direct Labs. Direct Labs was launched with his business partner and childhood friend Diego Monteiro and with the support of Grupo Direct, which in turn is supported by investments from Rio Bravo, DGF Investments and CRP Companhia de Participações.

Like any good player, Shirakashi knows the rules of the game well: “to make a product for the end consumer, as is the goal of Via6. It requires a big investment of capital, but has the potential for enormous gains. High risk, high return. Services for the corporate market generally involve less risk and since we are profiting from month one, there is less pressure.”

Comparing the two experiences, Renato said that “the venture capitalist is much more worried about profitability and valuation [the value of the company in a potential sale] and this creates many short-term expectations. I am much more fond of the other world [of services for the corporate market] because people can develop a business with solid, long-term goals without so much stress.”

Direct Labs doesn’t live just on services work. Besides creating solutions for their own internal needs, they developed a social network monitoring technology that might turn into a marketable product. It’s called Scup. After a closed testing period, the service was launched as a spinoff (independent of the brand name it was known under before) and has had good initial success, especially among digital agencies.

With a very lean team, Renato says that strategy is important, but execution is the secret. “At the end of the day, the strategy is to try to predict things that will happen or not; in the execution, you can control what you actually do,” he says. He knows that just as in poker, the entrepreneur needs to know how to make the best possible play with the cards he has in his hand.

Check out Renato Shirakashi’s blog. On twitter, follow @renato_shira and @scup_