#189 - Edson Rigonatti (Astella): From opening to Nirvana to chasing unicorns in Brazil

In this week's episode we talked to Edson Rigonatti, co-founder of Astella, a Brazilian early stage VC firm that's been around for almost 15 years. Edson has an interesting background, starting his professional career in a very different field: music. As he discusses in the interview, he was part of one of the most popular Brazilian punk bands of the time, even opening for Nirvana on its Brazilian tour. After that he spent some time working at the family business, before becoming VP of Sales of Lucent Technologies. At the beginning of 2008, along with Laura Constantini, he founded Astella, starting a pioneering cycle in the Brazilian VC market and experiencing its ups and downs through the years. In this episode, we talked to Edson about his upbringing as a son of Italian immigrants, how coming from a family of entrepreneurs impacted his development, his short career as a musician and, most importantly, building and scaling Astella while seeing first-hand the development of the Brazilian tech ecosystem.