Santiago Tamayo was in Buenos Aires, learning to write film scripts, when the phone rang. It was his dad. The Tamayo family had been planting sugar cane for generations in the north of the Cauca Valley, in Colombia, until the Cauca River overflowed twice in less than two years and destroyed the crops. Some relatives were completely dependent on that income.
“We need the help of the whole family,” his father told him.
Santiago packed his bags and returned to Bogotá without knowing, yet, that this call would end up turning him into an investor. He defines himself as a family man, dedicated to the well-being of his people, fond of traveling and learning new things.
But before becoming CEO of Santa María Investment Group and president of the Family Office Network, the network that connects family offices with the region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, he spent eight years as the drummer of a rock band that he founded with his brother, with which he recorded an album.
He says that those years taught him, forcibly, something that he constantly repeats today: no one gets anywhere without knowing where they are going.
From battery to sugar cane
Santiago was the first to leave his brother’s band – who did go to live in Los Angeles to pursue a musical career – to dedicate himself to studying political science and law.
After finishing university, he took a few months in Buenos Aires, after a romantic breakup, to study film scripting.
There he found the family crisis: two overflows of the Cauca River in less than two years had devastated the crops on which part of his family depended.
• What learnings from that family crisis marked your way of understanding capital and entrepreneurship?
“The first thing is that no worthwhile effort comes from a single person; it is always a team effort.”…
…The second thing is the discipline to set objectives and move forward with planning. And the third thing, something that many people are wrong about, is that things are not done in one bite: one does not eat a whole whale, one eats it little by little.”
From that first family meeting, Santa María Investment Group was born, the family office that it leads today. He took the name from “Inversión Santa María”, the first company that his grandfather founded in the 1940s and which ended up being liquidated.
To fully professionalize the structure, separating investment decisions from family conversations, took six more years.
Families that distrust, capital that arrives late
The first contact of most business families with venture capital, says Santiago Tamayo, is usually bad: a young relative brings an idea, they invest without understanding the asset, the startup fails and the family concludes that “that doesn’t work.”
Added to this is that venture capital is an illiquid asset, which for years did not show great returns in the region.
That is changing, he says, thanks to the growth of companies like Rappi, Clip, Konfío and NotCo, as families with operating businesses begin to fear being left behind by startups that use artificial intelligence to compete in their own industry.
• How has the willingness of Latin American families to invest in venture capital evolved?
“When the Family Office Network started, in 2023, families’ investment in venture capital was 0.5% of their portfolio. Today we are reaching 7%. In the United States that figure is around 40%. There is still a long way to go, but the ecosystem has begun to deliver returns, and that changes the conversation.”
His argument with families is never to replace the portfolio, but to allocate between 10% and 15% to it. Venture capital, he explains, is countercyclical and consistently delivers returns higher than those of real estate, the favorite investment of family committees.
find the north
With his training in political science, Santiago insists that Latin America’s limitation is not money, but the lack of a public policy sustained over time.
He gives as an example Israel and California in the 1960s, whose technological development is explained by state decisions – not government decisions – that were maintained regardless of who was in power.
In the region, he says, Chile and Brazil are further advanced in this consistency; The rest still lack a coordinated vision between countries.
• If you returned to Santiago that was just starting out, what advice would you give it?
“That he was not afraid of being disruptive, of trying and failing. But above all, that he defined first what his north was. It took me a long time to understand what I was working for, and no wind is of any use to any sailor if he does not know where he is going.”
He doesn’t regret anything, he says: the sum of his decisions, including the mistakes, is what brought him here. What did take years was separating the family from the professional.
Today, an investment committee external to the family makes Santa María’s financial decisions, without emotional bias, while a family council defines who is part of that committee and where the assets should advance in ten or fifteen years.
“The purpose of the family office is to prevent the family from being destroyed over money issues. Dividing the professional from the family takes away a lot of problems.”
That same separation – between what is urgent and what is important, between the wind and the course – is what he says has taken him years to learn. From his father’s call in the midst of a family financial crisis to the presidency of a network that connects family capital with the region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
For Santiago, no effort makes sense without knowing, in advance, where you are sailing.
