VALENTIN
VINCENDON
PRODUCT
DATA
STRATEGY
MISSION
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WHAT I DO
I helps scale-ups scale even faster – if you are a founder or a private equity fund, please visit my professional website.
This brings me to continuously reflect on Productivity, Management, and Leadership.
My professional expertise sits at the interface between Strategy, Data, and Product.
WHO I AM
Advisor and angel investor with a decade of experience building B2B fintech products: asset management, payments & digital assets.
I am a dedicated proponent of:
Before working with Copper, I spent 4 years at Checkout.com successively
zero-to-oneing the company's flagship premium product ("Fraud Detection") now real-time screening $100m+ daily across ~200 countries,
making data ~100x faster to access for ~100x more users by zero-to-oneing the company's data infrastructure, team & operationalisation as VP Business Intelligence,
leading its strategy & go-to-market as VP Strategy.
I spent all of my childhood and teenage life reading about 50-100 books per year. The only sanction my parents had found that would have any impact on me was: “That’s it, you’re not allowed to read for X days.”. And that would still simply lead me to ruin my eyes reading under my blanket with a lamp torch at night. I read about science, history, literature. I studied Latin, Ancient Greek, and philosophy.
I thought I understood lots.
Obviously, I didn’t: I had zero life experience.
But it did give me deep knowledge roots and consumption habits.
Later, I spent the first 3 years of university studying the world through the prism of theoretical mathematics and physics, chemistry, and molecular biology. I taught physics and chemistry at university. Although incredibly enjoyable and useful, I realised those were not providing anything close to an exhaustive mental frame to truly understand the world beyond physical reality.
I then spent the following 3 years studying economics, quantitative finance, management, and strategy. I plunged myself into behavioural sciences and evolutionary psychology.
Still not enough to truly understand what matters.
I worked in strategy consulting, asset management, and built and lead product teams in two different Fintechs. I lived in several countries, worked with incredibly smart and successful people, learnt a third language and culture.
Guess what - it helped, but still not enough.
I also experimented a lot on the side: human psychology through professional magic tricks, decision-making under stress through private plane piloting and mountaineering, personal resilience through barefoot running and some MMA.
5 years ago, I also started writing and publishing online.
This forced me to think about how I actually consumed and processed knowledge, how I made decisions, and how I actually thought. I started mapping them, analysing them, and fixing them. I started seeing my blind spots much more clearly, and I learnt more in a first year of writing in public than in any other.
The last catalyst was my wonderful daughter, and wondering how I could save her some of those 30+ years of trial and error. I still don’t think I know much - or at least nowhere close enough of what I would want to know - but I understand much better how to learn and apply what truly matters.
CONTACT
