Vicente Cruz has a particular way of facing challenges. He likes to play video games on the most difficult level, read, play sports and constantly learn. He says he always needs to be doing something, whether it’s cooking, traveling, sharing with his friends or discovering a new topic. That curiosity also explains his professional history.
Before starting a business, he spent more than twelve years in the financial world, advising companies, managing private debt and making investment decisions. But there was a goal that he had set for himself from a very young age: to become independent around the age of 30 and build something of his own.
The decision came a year later than planned. And he was born in an unusual place. During a scuba diving experience, an instructor asked him to dive backwards from a boat with an oxygen tank on his back. At that moment he understood that entrepreneurship was very similar to that feeling: jumping into the water with limited resources and without knowing exactly what he was going to find.
“To undertake is to back down with a limited pool. In the worst case scenario you get back on the boat and continue with your life. But if you never jump in, you will never know what it’s like to be at the bottom of the sea”
When he returned to Santiago, he submitted his resignation.
From finances to an idea that solved one’s own problem
Sheriff’s idea was not born from a business plan. It was born from a problem that Vicente experienced every day.
While managing a private debt portfolio, he spent much of his time researching companies: asking for financial, tax, judicial and commercial backgrounds to decide if a company was a good counterparty. A process that could take weeks.
The question appeared almost immediately. Why was all this information, which already existed, still so difficult to gather?
• What was it that you saw in the financial system that made you think there was an opportunity?
“It took me a long time to talk to a counterparty and ask for all the background information. I said: this can be automated. And not only for the financial world but for any company…
…you need to know who you are doing business with”
Thus Sheriff was born. The platform brings together public and private information from more than 25% of information so that companies and individuals can assess the risk of clients, suppliers or partners in seconds.
What used to take days can today be solved in just 5 seconds in a single search. But the first product was far from resembling the current platform.
“The first Sheriff MVP was: send me a RUT and I would send you back a Word with the judicial cases. It was very simple, but it served to validate that there was a real problem”
For Vicente, that continues to be one of the great lessons of entrepreneurship: starting before everything is perfect.
Verify before you trust
If there is one word that Vicente repeats during the conversation, it is verify. He learned it from a former boss and it ended up becoming a work philosophy.
In the financial world, he says, no one is going to voluntarily tell you that they are in trouble. That is why decisions cannot be made solely from intuition or trust.
• What learning from those years do you continue to apply as a founder?
“You always have to verify. Intuition helps, but the data has to confirm what you believe. That applies to a client, a supplier, a contract or a partner”
That idea also marked Sheriff’s culture. The company today works with more than 415 clients and operates in 16 of the 21 main industries in the country, but the underlying problem remains the same: reducing uncertainty before making a decision.
For Vicente, transparency is also part of that process. A leader cannot change the direction of the company without explaining it to the team. If destiny changes, people need to understand why. That is why he tries to constantly share where the company is going and what decisions are being made.
“If the captain changes course without warning, the team continues rowing the other way”
Building a company is also learning to jump
Today Sheriff operates in Chile and Peru, is preparing its arrival in Colombia and has already begun to develop solutions to evaluate companies outside of Latin America. This step is reflected in Marshal, its new autonomous artificial intelligence agent for compliance and due diligence, which is soon to be launched and will be able to operate in more than 192 countries.
The tool seeks to solve an increasingly common problem for companies: how to evaluate a person or company in Latin America and the rest of the world?
Marshal tracks the background, integrity and risks of people and companies on international bases, including sanctions lists, fraud, corruption, money laundering, organized crime and politically exposed persons (PEP), reducing a process that traditionally takes days to a much faster assessment.
But Vicente assures that the growth also completely changed his work. He went from selling and responding to support alongside a programmer to leading a team of 27 people distributed in different areas. And that change, he says, has been one of the most difficult learnings.
• What has been the most complex part of becoming CEO?
“Manage people. You have to hire slowly and fire quickly. You love people, but when someone doesn’t work it ends up affecting the rest of the team”
When you think about Sheriff’s five-year projection, he doesn’t talk about expansion or revenue first. It speaks of a region where information flows better between countries and where companies can make more informed decisions, regardless of whether the counterparty is in Chile, Peru or Colombia.
And when they ask him what advice he would give to Vicente who was just starting out, the answer comes almost without thinking.
“Go for it. Validate quickly, make mistakes quickly and adjust quickly. The important thing is not to wait for the perfect moment; it’s to get started”
But he also believes that there is a huge difference between getting back in the boat after trying and spending your entire life wondering what would have happened if you had taken the plunge.
