Marcos Monteiro is co-founder and CEO of Veezoo AG. Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Marcos moved to Zurich to study Mathematics & Statistics at ETH Zurich. 

Marcos specialised in computational statistics and artificial intelligence, researching on how the brain encodes information in the primary visual cortex V1, and graduating with distinction from ETH Zurich. 

Together with João Pedro Monteiro and Till Haug, they founded Veezoo AG with the ambition to make business critical data easily accessible.

What are your thoughts on failure?

How do you define failure? Is it only about not achieving goals? Because I believe if you are not setting the right goals, then you are already failing.

At Veezoo, we have one ultimate goal: to make valuable information that is hidden in databases easily accessible to millions of non-technical people. There are many intermediary milestones on the way, and we might miss some of them. However, as long as our learnings take us a step closer to our ultimate goal, we will succeed.

We fail, when we fail to learn.

How important is company culture and what is your top tip to get it right?

Culture is fundamental. We tie our values to actions. Afterall, that's their purpose: if our culture is not guiding us to take better actions and decisions, then it's not being useful.

Therefore, our culture values sound more like actions, and we have processes that reinforce them. For example, instead of talking about curiosity and innovation, we look for people that know how to ask the right questions and we encourage them to do so. Same goes for our other values: focus on the essential, take decisions based on data and reasonable assumptions, and do the impossible, beautifully.

How do you believe the evolution of tech will affect your industry over the next 10 years?

In a world, where data is being generated in ever increasing amounts, the big differentiating factor will be about how you can get infinitely easy access to the business relevant information, while keeping the noise out.

This plays out at different layers: Faster and larger databases, vast pipelines for data extraction and more flexible tools for data transformation. At the final layer, there should be absolutely no friction between the moment you need an information to the moment you get it. An intelligent and sophisticated question-answering system will play a fundamental role in that step. It is game-changing and what we see as a key part of the tech world of tomorrow.

Do you have a morning routine or ritual to get your day started on the right foot?

Yes, definitely. The best way for me to start the day is wake up as soon as the alarm goes off, no snoozing. Grab a green tea and then exercise for 30 minutes, nothing too long but enough to get the blood flowing and then ten minutes of mindfulness meditation. It only takes an hour but it makes the day much better. 

In order for me to be the best CEO I can it means focusing on myself both in and outside the office, so investing time in my physical and mental health is a big priority for me.

Any new product launches we should know about?

We have just launched Veezoo Cloud, a smart virtual assistant that empowers non-technical users to get fast, meaningful business insights from cloud databases using natural-language questions. Today’s business intelligence systems are frustratingly basic and unintuitive, they feature complicated 1990s drag-and-drop interfaces that confuse non-technical users. We wondered why nobody had created an intelligent system to make it easy for people without a degree in computer science to get the answers they need from cloud data warehouses. So, we decided to build one.

We know from experience that some of the best insights are triggered by the spark of an idea — an ad-hoc question that occurs during a meeting. We wanted to give decision makers a tool that encourages a free-form, inquisitive thinking process.

What’s the most important question entrepreneurs should be asking themselves?

One of my favourite questions is ‘what is required to make this work?’ It can be applied to many use cases in business. ‘What are the minimum amount of features we need for the product to sell? What must happen before your company signs the license?’

It's such a simple question, yet so powerful. In particular, because it's not just a one answer question, you can dive even deeper into the answer asking 'What else?' and uncovering only the most important requirements.

How did you conquer those moments of doubt that so often affect entrepreneurs or stop many with great ideas – what pushes you through?

All entrepreneurs experience these moments of doubt. “Is this going to work? Am I capable of this?” those niggling internal doubts. What I think is most important is to have the right people around you, who keep you positive but also support you. You don’t want people to sugar coat things, but surrounding myself with positive people who encourage me helps to combat those feelings of doubt. 

I also find mediation helps me a lot too. Those doubts we all experience from  time to time are rarely useful, and I find that mediation helps clear the mind of these wasteful worries and enables me to really focus on what matters.

Any moments where you thought you’ve bitten off more than you can chew?

Yes, constantly. That’s the whole point when you’re being ambitious. But the key is to cut the portion into small, manageable pieces that you tackle one at a time - so that you can eat it all, just not in one go.

How much time do you spend on things that don’t add customer value?

Not much really. Ideally everything we do helps and adds value to the customer in one way or another, at least in expectation. Basically the only such things we do are the ones that we have to do by law or by some regulation.

What do you think gives a brand longevity?

Customer focus. That's all that matters. A culture where the customer is at the center of everything we do, and everything we do adds value to them.

What are your top tips for entrepreneurs wanting to get their business out there?

My number one tip is to excel at your core, the core of what you're building. For the rest of it, leverage the best of what is out there. Stand tall on the shoulders of giants to get you further and build what you’re good at, better than anyone else.