Looking Backward to See Further

I was sixteen years old, sharing a barracks with two hundred and forty other cadets, when I first noticed that my universe was a nutshell.

The Brazilian Air Force Academy doesn’t tell you, when you arrive, that the next years will quietly rewire your sense of what is possible. They tell you to be ready at 5 a.m. They tell you which uniform to wear. They tell you to march. The rewiring happens incidentally, in the space between formations, when you realize the cadet on the bunk next to you grew up speaking three languages, or that the one from Amazonas — a fairly remote region — has read more philosophy at seventeen than you will read in the next decade.

I had grown up mostly in the interior of São Paulo, in a family that was middle-class on a good year. My mother remarried when I was five or six. My step-father, a Japanese-Brazilian man, introduced me to a particularly Japanese discipline toward study. Three professions were acceptable in his ledger: doctor, lawyer, engineer.

Then I was fifteen, and I heard stories about my German grandfather — whom I had only met a few times before he died young — who had been a pilot in WW2. I decided, with the absolute clarity that only a fifteen-year-old has access to, that I wanted to fly. The only way to fly, given what my family could afford, was through the military. The entrance exam was difficult enough that most of my classmates didn’t bother. I studied. I got in.

Looking back, the Air Force wasn’t where my life would happen. It was where my line of sight began to change.

· · ·

That career didn’t work out. I left, went to one of the country’s better universities, did an exchange in Europe, and joined the most ambitious firm I had heard of: McKinsey. Fourteen hours a day, every day. I thought it was the top of the world. Then a colleague mentioned private equity, investment banking, MBAs at the best schools on the planet. I noticed, with some embarrassment, that the game had barely started.

I got married. I went to Wharton in Philadelphia with the satisfaction of someone who has finally crossed the finish line, and discovered, again, that I had crossed nothing. The classmates around me thought in billions before they thought in millions. The unit of measurement had changed. And when your unit of measurement changes, what you can see changes with it.

What I did next is briefer here than it should be in any honest account: I spent years operating and investing — building companies from zero, backing dozens of others, eventually running a billion-real fund inside one of Brazil’s largest banks. Then I founded Airborne.

· · ·

If you look at any of this from the front — from the perspective of the sixteen-year-old in the barracks — none of it makes narrative sense. The trajectory looks like a series of unrelated jumps.

But if you look backward, which is how stories tell themselves best, the pattern is almost embarrassingly clean. None of it was planned from the previous step. Each step simply widened the field of view enough to make the next one thinkable. Not inevitable. Just visible.

It’s a useful theory I have about strategy. Most frameworks treat the addressable market as a fixed property of the world — something you measure, something you size, something you put in a slide. It isn’t. The addressable market is a function of who is doing the looking. The same market is small to one company and vast to another, and the difference has almost nothing to do with the market.

· · ·

I feel this most acutely not in the data room. I feel it in the first half hour of a conversation with a founder.

It is in the questions they ask. The questions they don’t ask. Whether they speak about their company as the thing it is, or as the thing it could become if a few specific factors they cannot yet see were to fall into place.

The founders I’ve backed at meaningful checks tend to have a particular quality that is difficult to describe but fairly straightforward to recognize. They have a wider field of view than the moment they are in. They speak naturally about adjacencies that don’t yet exist. They hire for capabilities they themselves don’t have. They carry a strong character and a reputation that precedes them. They invest in optionality that won’t pay off for years.

Underwriting them, in retrospect, is less about underwriting their product than underwriting how wide their field of view will be in three years. How wide will a Series A field of view be at Series B or C? That has almost nothing to do with the slides they show you today.

· · ·

I don’t know if any of this counts as a strategy framework in the formal sense. I’m not sure it can. However it is the closest thing I have to a theory of how the careers and the companies I’ve watched closely actually became what they became.

What I keep asking myself is how to recognize whether your own field of view is genuinely widening, or just rotating in place. When I try to answer that for myself, I find I can only answer it backward.

I only run Airborne because I ran a billion-real fund inside a bank. I only got that mandate because I had been operating and investing on my own for years. I only had the standing for either because of Wharton. I only got to Wharton because of McKinsey. I only got to McKinsey because I had left the Air Force. And I only got to the Air Force because, at fifteen, a boy in the interior of São Paulo was inspired by his late grandfather’s memoirs, passed on by his father, and decided he wanted to be a pliot.

If you’ve thought about this in your own life or work, send me a note. I’d love to continue the conversation. or just listen to this great music ;)

— Eduardo

Managing Partner, Airborne Ventures