About Fiftyfaces Focus - The Last Frontier: Diverse Founders and VCs
It has been said that "access to capital is the last frontier of the civil rights movement". This podcast series tells the stories of diverse founders and venture capitalists across the business landscape, their experience with accessing capital and growing their businesses and the networks that have enabled them to thrive.
Episode 24: Violeta Noya of bebot digital - Out of the Box Thinking for Out of Home Media in Brazil - Latin American Voices
Violeta Kertesz Noya is Chief Executive Officer and Partner at bebot digital as well as a board member at PG Advogados and Coohnect. She launched and sold Otima, an Out of Home Media Company in Brazil, and has received numerous awards. Our conversation starts with Violeta's start as a civil engineer and the ambition that drove her to gain numerous adjacent skills including in marketing, HR, scaling businesses and financial services. We trace her career from Brazil to an MBA degree at INSEAD - where we ultimately met as students together - and then on to various European capitals. We hear about her return to Brazil, and what motivated it, and how she reached a point in her career where she wanted to be a CEO and what she had to do to achieve that. What follows is a master class in innovation, grit, and ambition which led Violeta to launch an out of home media company consisting of over 6000 bus shelters in Madrid and competing with far larger global players, We hear about the challenge of gaining ground as a start-up, the psychological stakes in convincing a buyer to take a risk on a new firm and how to remain data and RoI focused. Moving then to her new role in digital media at bebot, we hear about Violeta's current focus and her core beliefs around brand and marketing and how she expects marketing and its relevance to evolve in an age of AI and increasingly digitized delivery. This is a remarkable story of ambition and determination to build a firm and a team against the odds, the importance of not giving up and the essence of bouncing back from setbacks.
3 Oct 2025
Episode 5: Courtney McColgan, Founder and CEO of Runa, Tech for Small and Mid-Cap Businesses - when to de-risk and when to rebuid
In this special episode - part of our Latin American voices series, we return to our discussion with Courtney McColgan, for a new discussion. We spoke in June 2023 about her role as founder and CEO at Runa, a Mexico City based firm that offers a complete cloud-based HR and payroll software solution designed for small to medium-sized companies in Latin America. You can listen to that here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7ljfcVwBTMyrN9q5Z48Uej?si=966c37e4aaa84199I wanted to ask Courtney back now, two years later, to discuss what has changed in the intervening period and to provide a snapshot of the state of technology in Latin-America at present.We check in as to the impact of the last few years, the persistence of inflation and the uncertainty of today's geopolitics on Mexico and small and mid size companies in particular. She reflects on the explosion of AI over the last two years and the experience of being a founder during uncertain times. She discusses this de-risked approach to raising money and the reminder that all money raised has to be returned.
15 Aug 2023
Episode 23: Anthony Amunategui - On Leadership and Capturing the Factory of the Future
Anthony Amunategui is founder of CDO Group, a women owned business that provides general Contracting and Construction Management. He now spends most of his time as podcast host of The Future Factory Podcast, a podcast focused on diving into conversations about what the future holds for us personally and professionally and the adventures that shape that journey. Our discussion starts with Anthony's upbringing in Florida and how he got his start - painting houses, and then as a stockbroker. We speak about how he learned to grow his sales technique, and the mentor who taught him about using his language to convey images. We hear about the relentlessness needed to make 300 calls a day, and how he processed the rejection and the no. We jump then to his work in construction management and how he devised the concept of outsourcing construction management and how the business achieved its growth. We hear about mindset - about letting go of some of the baggage that weighs us down, weighing on our confidence and outreach. Anthony is the founder and host of The Future Factory Podcast - which you can find here: https://www.futurefactorypodcast.comHe tells us what drove him to gather this collection of leaders and the sparks that unite them. We hear about the importance of working on oneself as an attribute of leadership - of pushing oneself to learn and change. He touts the benefit of coaching in many aspects of life including in business, relationships, personal development and leadership.
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