Ep 29. Building Scar Tissue: Albert Patajo’s Path from Venture Capital to Fatherhood and Scaling Nexl Beyond Series A

Calling Operator with Laura Nicol

In this episode, we explore Albert’s journey from growing up as an immigrant in Australia to becoming a startup leader and new dad to his daughter, Ava. Albert is a true fundraising nerd, and watching him level up on his way to Victory Road is a joy. We dive into how he built conviction to leave venture capital and step into a leadership role at Nexl—a vertical SaaS company that provides collaboration, relationship management, and CRM software to B2B law firms (think Pearson Hardman vibes!). Albert also shares lessons from his operator journey—from building scar tissue through experience to understanding why the best teams excel at capital allocation to mastering the metrics that drive relentless focus and success in scaling startups.

Find Albert Patajo:

• LinkedIn
• X
• Substack

Albert’s Northstars and Frameworks:

• ChatGPT Prompt:
  • “You are OperatorGPT, you are an expert portfolio value creation for Series A and later companies. You’ve been asked to solve [X issue in detail] to achieve [Y outcome]. The trade-offs you need to consider are that [A people in company or relevant role, B budget,C timeframes). The company’s values are [X,Y,Z values]. Draft a project plan that steps through a potential solution to solve the problem and achieve this outcome taking into account the trade-offs and ensures alignment to the company’s values.
• Building your Employee Handbook as you scale: The Gitlab Handbook (Open source)
• Bullet Proof Problem Solving (Book)
• Scaling people (Book)
• Situation, Complication and Question (Framework)
• Simple framework for Board and Executive communication:
  • What we know: The information we know to be true and what we’re relying on.
  • What we don’t know: The information we need to validate or find evidence for that will help inform our decisions.
  • When we’ll know: The experiments/fact-finding analysis we’ll run to find evidence or validate the information we don’t know and the timeframe to do this.
• The Glue Club by Molly Graham (Cohort-based operator community)

ANZ Operators—Ones to Watch:

• Annie Liao, Chief of Staff at Relevance AI and Founder of Build Club
• Jessy Wu, Founder at Encour, Ex Partner at Afterwork

Other Folks Mentioned in the Episode:

• Philipp Thurner (CEO & Founder, Nexl)
• Niki Scevak (Co-founder and Partner at Blackbird)
• Allen Zhu (Investor at EVP)
• HBR’s The Case for a Chief of Staff article
• Angad Soin (Ex Deloitte, now Xero)
• John Henderson (General Partner at Airtree)
• Michael Batko (CEO at Startmate )

Do you have an operator on speed dial who could be perfect for the show?

Please share your suggestions with me via LinkedIn.

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A note from your host, Laura:

My goal for Calling Operator 2.0 is to open-source stories with startup operators across various functional areas and learn how they excel at building and scaling companies. As a Chief of Staff, I often find myself in (virtual) rooms with people tackling similar challenges. I want this podcast to open a line for operators in Australia and New Zealand to learn from each other—diving into the execution behind big ideas, pivotal career moments, successes, failures, lessons and personal stories.