How to Turn Crisis Into Opportunity: Unicorn Founders Speak About Their Biggest Challenges at Slush 

How to Turn Crisis Into Opportunity: Unicorn Founders Speak About Their Biggest Challenges at Slush 

Endeavor has strategically prioritized extroversion and international visibility for our ecosystem's next growth phase, solidified through our role as Official Partners at Slush Summit 2023, Europe’s leading startup and technology conference. This collaboration serves as a key step in our commitment to fostering global connections and amplifying the presence of our ecosystem on the international stage. Our participation at Slush not only advanced our global engagement but also served as a platform to spotlight our entrepreneurs and influential network, positioning us as ambassadors connecting with individuals worldwide.

With these efforts in mind, we hosted a vibrant side event featuring unicorn founders Loreanne Garcia (Kavak), Vander Corteze (Beep Saude), and Jordi Romero (Factorial), who delved into the intriguing topic, "Where Do Unicorns Come From," inspired by Endeavor's latest research on billion-dollar companies worldwide. By shedding light on the real stories behind unicorn success and mapping diverse career pathways, we aimed to decode the fantasy surrounding these extraordinary ventures.

Our unicorn founders shared stories of how they turned some of their biggest challenges into their biggest wins. 

At Slush, Endeavor Greece brought together top unicorn founders from across the Endeavor Network to discuss exactly how unicorns are made. One thing they all agreed on? The path to a billion-dollar valuation is always full of surprises, and challenges. 

Vander Corteze, MD, founder of home healthcare company Beep Saúde in Brazil, explained, as a founder “you cannot make plans and believe that this is where I'm going to be in five years.” A startup’s journey is too unpredictable for that. 

So how do you handle the inescapable risk that comes with being a founder? Loreanne Garcia, co-founder of used car marketplace Kavak.com, offered a story and some advice on not just living with risk as an entrepreneur, but actually leveraging it to your advantage. 

Surviving as a mobility company when everyone is stuck at home

Like a great many companies, Kavak was blindsided by the pandemic. “We were having our management offsite. It was January of 2020, and we were talking about all these amazing plans because we took the first year to test that we had a product market fit. The second year we hit the accelerator. We were starting to hire a lot of people. In the offsite, we weren't even talking about Covid. And then a week later everybody was in lockdown,” she recalled. 

The emergence of a paralyzing global pandemic threw the company’s plans into disarray, and for a while the leadership team was in crisis mode, trying to manage the fallout of the crisis. “We were like, it's time to get ready for doomsday. Everybody braced for impact,” said Garcia. 

Quickly, however, the team realized they could not continue playing defense indefinitely. Even in an incredibly challenging moment, founders need to think positively and creatively. 

“At some point we were like, we need to get out of this cycle. We're all very negative. This is not going to take us anywhere. We're all preparing for the bad and nobody's looking at the potential,” she continued. “So we split the team in two, and I was part of the doomsday team, preparing us for the worst case scenario. But this other part was going to see, what opportunity can we get out of here? What could we actually do with everything that the world is throwing at us?” 

While next to no one was buying cars during the height of the pandemic, some people were looking to downgrade their vehicles to free up a little cash to tide them through the emergency. How could the company benefit? How could Kavak help essential workers who needed to get to work but feared taking public transportation?

This creativity and forward planning positioned the business for success when the Covid crisis eventually eased. “We were ready for it. E-commerce started picking up in Latin America faster than ever,” Garcia said. The company quickly became a unicorn as soon as people started moving again. 

Seeking opportunity in crisis

This is, of course, an interesting story of how one scrappy startup survived an incredibly tough time. But according to the panel at Slush, it is also an example of an essential quality of founders — the ability to see opportunity in crisis and reconceptualize risk as an opportunity. 

And the skill of looking at a crisis as a spur to innovation doesn’t just apply to once-in-a-century pandemics. When the recent funding crunch pushed Kavak to become profitable more quickly than originally planned, the founders leaned on the same mentality. 

“From one day to another we're like, ‘We need to turn towards profitability in a matter of a month,’” Garcia related. The team once again approached the challenge as an opportunity: “Let's figure out how we can make this better, how we can be a leaner team, how we can be smarter with how we invest, and get ready to come out when everything changes hopefully soon.”  

As Corteze put it, for founders “knowing how to deal with risk is something that you need to master.” Kavak’s story is an excellent illustration of how to do that by leveraging challenges to innovate and strengthen the business.