Vicente Climent has spent just over two years in the world of venture building. Before that, he worked at Agicap, where he led sales teams engaging with CFOs at large companies, and founded his own financial information company with more than 800 international clients. That journey partly explains the way he reads projects: from the numbers outward, not the other way around.

At GCO Ventures, where he is part of the venture builder team, he applies that same judgement to market exploration, company building and portfolio monitoring. His view on which trend is undervalued says a lot about his place in the ecosystem: operational efficiency and execution discipline over noise.

If you had to explain what you do at GCO Ventures without using your job title, what would you say?

I monitor our portfolio startups, both financially and from a business perspective, analysing their evolution to identify risks early and support them where they need it most. In practice, that means staying close to teams in moments of change, when the data begins to point to something that does not yet have a name.

What did you believe about the startup world before working here… and what did you change your mind about most quickly?

I changed my mind when I saw how important it is to keep KPIs and financial metrics under control. Before joining, I thought the essential things were business vision and execution. But without rigorous tracking of the numbers, it is very difficult to grow sustainably. Vision without metrics can easily become poorly managed intuition.

What kind of person (founder, builder or teammate) makes you think: “I would go into the trenches with this person”?

Someone who is very transparent with the numbers and acts quickly when they detect a risk. Someone with judgement, but also the ability to execute: who gets into the details, prioritises well and does not lose focus on what matters. And above all, someone who wants to be the best in their sector. That combination – judgement, execution and transparency – is harder to find than it seems.

What skill of yours would you never put on LinkedIn, but is key to your day to day?

Staying calm when things go wrong and helping bring focus back to what matters. In moments of uncertainty, the ability not to amplify the problem has more value than people usually recognise.

The professional mistake that taught you the most… and that you would still repeat despite everything.

Trusting too much that everything would continue according to plan and not putting clearer control mechanisms in place. I would repeat it because that overconfidence came from believing in the project, and I would not change that. But I did learn that believing in something does not replace having visibility over what is really happening.

What question would you like more teams to ask themselves before scaling or raising a round?

If you stopped growing tomorrow, what is the real bottleneck that would hold you back first, and how do you know it is not something structural in the model? It is an uncomfortable question, but it is exactly what separates teams that have seriously thought about their business from those that have only thought about their growth.

Which trend do you think is overvalued right now… and which one is undervalued?

Everything that sounds like “AI for AI’s sake” is being overvalued, especially when there is no clear use case or real business impact. Many projects are applying artificial intelligence because it is fashionable, not because it solves a specific problem better than before.

What is undervalued is the work around operational efficiency and execution discipline: companies that grow more slowly, but with much better control of cash, margins and focus. That kind of company building is harder to sell in a pitch, but over the long term it tends to be much more solid.

When a project does not work (startup, product or initiative), what usually has the biggest impact: the context, the idea, the team or ego?

I would say the team and, within that, ego. Often the idea can evolve and the context can change, but if the team is not able to adapt, challenge itself and make decisions without being attached to ego, that is when the project really gets stuck. I have seen projects with mediocre ideas go far because the team knew how to correct course, and projects with solid ideas stall because no one wanted to be the first to give way.

What do you do outside work that, without realising it, makes you better at it?

Reading, paying attention to how other people make decisions and spending time understanding the why behind things helps me develop better judgement. Most problems that seem operational are, in reality, decision-making problems.

If someone reads this interview five years from now, what would you like them to think about your time at GCO Ventures?

That, in some way, I helped those startups not only grow, but turn ideas that seemed small into something with real impact in the world.

What emerges from this conversation is not only the profile of someone with strong analytical ability. It is the portrait of a particular way of understanding venture building: close to the numbers, and comfortable with the productive discomfort of asking questions that teams would rather postpone. The question about the structural bottleneck before scaling is not a diligence tool. It is a way of thinking. And that way of thinking, when applied consistently both to the design of new businesses and to the monitoring of portfolio companies, is precisely what turns venture building into a real practice: not observing from a distance, but helping to build with judgement.

To discover more perspectives from the GCO Ventures team and from the founders in its portfolio, come back to the blog. We will continue publishing new instalments in the Inside GCO series.