Marcelo Calbucci

    One thing that I learned over the years is that you can’t pretend an angry mob of anonymous commenter and blog posts don’t exist, because when someone searches for you or your company years later they will find that information and have no other data on the web to disprove it, unless, you take the time to make that online record.
    So I want to disperse two particular misrepresentations that you’ll find on the web about Sampa, and, both are about investors and investments.

Myth 1: “How a team of 2 people burns $1.4M in 12 months?”
    There are 3 things wrong with this statement. Seriously. The saddest part is that I read it (or parts of it) on professional journalists reporting of Sampa closure, which shows the quality (decline?) of online reporting – I guess you can’t trust everything you read on the web.
    Let me start by saying that we raised $400K in 2007 and $1M in January/Feb of 2008. In other words, at best we would have burned $1M over 18 months. But the reality is that we didn’t spend all that money.
    Finally, as we closed Sampa there were just 2 people. But in 2008 we had a team of 9 employees and contractors working with us.

Myth 2: “Sampa investors told us to do X”
    I’m amazed by the basic lack of understanding of the relationship between an investor and a startup. You read about how investors pushed the product into direction Y, or how they were mad at the founders because they didn’t do X, etc. As far as I know, this is all baloney and people talking like that never had an investor beyond friends and family.
    Like most people on this planet, investors are busy people. They didn’t invest on you because they thought they could decide the destiny of the operations. They invested in you because they thought *you* would make good decisions.
    To go direct to the point, our investors never asked us to take the product on any direction. All the decisions, smart and stupid ones, were done by us. Investors were not “mad” at us because we shutdown Sampa. None of them gave us a hard time. They were certainly very upset their investment didn’t return what they wished for, but that’s part of being an investor and accepting risk. Not only that, but they are wise investors. They have invested on many startups to diversify this specific investment class and they certainly invest on many different asset classes as well.