Alejandro Resnik

Few Argentines have raised as much venture capital in the United States as Alejandro Resnik. A programmer from childhood, an ITBA engineer and an MIT MBA graduate, he founded three companies in three different industries—nutritional supplements, used cars and residential rentals—and repeated the same approach in each one: identifying a vast market where consumers distrust intermediaries and replacing that distrust with data, guarantees and service. Today, he leads Belong, a platform that manages long-term rentals in several North American cities.

A Commodore 64 in Flores

His story begins with a home computer. Resnik grew up in the Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Flores and learned to program in primary school using a Commodore 64 given to him by his parents. With the support of scholarships, he attended ORT for secondary school and later studied Industrial Engineering at the Buenos Aires Institute of Technology. His first formal job was as an analyst at Ternium.

His entrepreneurial drive appeared before he earned his degree. At the age of 18, he had already created an internet domain registration company and, before graduating, launched a second business focused on the online sale of health products. Global Vitamins, founded in 2005, sold vitamins and supplements through subscription services in Latin American and European markets. The company grew to around 75 employees and was sold in 2011, providing the funding for the next chapter.

Boston, MIT and a car that caught fire

After completing the sale, Resnik moved to the Boston area to pursue an MBA in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The origin of his third company was not an academic thesis, but an accident. In 2011, he bought a used car from a dealership and, only a few days later, the vehicle caught fire on a motorway while his wife was driving. When he complained, he was told that the legal liability period had already expired.

The legal claim ended with a refund and compensation for damages, while also forcing him to study the fine print of American lemon laws. There he found the problem he had been looking for: the information imbalance between the seller and the buyer of a used vehicle. He turned it into his master’s project and worked with MIT professors to investigate how much consumers would be willing to pay to buy a car online and where the main points of friction were located.

Beepi and the standard of 240 inspections

That research led to Beepi, a peer-to-peer used-car marketplace founded by Resnik and Owen Savir. The company controlled the entire process. Its first employee was the head of inspections, who designed a 240-point assessment carried out at the seller’s home. Beepi set the price, performed minor maintenance, delivered the vehicle to the buyer within four to nine days, guaranteed it for three months or 3,000 miles and accepted returns within ten days.

One domestic detail captured the company’s philosophy: every delivered car came with a bow, and the company analysed data even to determine which colours buyers preferred. Beepi expanded into sixteen metropolitan areas across the United States, employed more than 260 people, raised approximately 149 million dollars in capital—with the Chinese carmaker SAIC among its investors—and reached a valuation of nearly 500 million dollars. Its run ended in early 2017.

In 2014, while Beepi was expanding, MIT Technology Review included Resnik in its Innovators Under 35 list for Latin America in the Internet and Web category.

On the other side of the desk: Andreessen Horowitz

After Beepi closed, Resnik spent a period at Andreessen Horowitz as a Founder in Residence in Menlo Park. It was a less visible but decisive stage. It allowed him to view the business from the investor’s side of the table, understand how market theses are evaluated and identify what separates a scalable company from one that merely grows.

Years later, that same fund—the firm that backed Airbnb in its early stages—would become the leading shareholder in his next project.

Belong: renting without friction

In 2018, he founded Belong with Owen Savir and Tyler Infelise. The idea was to create a market for residential leases of more than one year in which the platform would do more than connect the parties. It would take responsibility for the entire operation.

When a pipe breaks, the tenant reports it through the app, the owner approves one of three quotes and the process ends there. The landlord is guaranteed payment on the first day of every month, regardless of whether the tenant has paid on time. Tenants can pay the deposit in instalments, while 3% of their rent is allocated to a fund intended to help them eventually qualify for a mortgage.

Growth came quickly. The pandemic acted as an accelerator because people preferred to search for housing without visiting properties in person. In 2020, the company increased the number of registered landlords and tenants fivefold. By 2022, it was managing properties worth around 2 billion dollars, processing 100 million dollars in annual rent and generating between 200 and 300 new contracts each month.

Financial backing followed. Three successive funding rounds had raised 58 million dollars by early 2021, with investors including Jeff Jordan, a shareholder in Airbnb and Pinterest; Eric Wu, then CEO of Opendoor; and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. In May 2022, Belong closed a fourth round worth 80 million dollars led by Andreessen Horowitz. That same year, the company moved its base from the San Francisco Bay Area to Miami and later expanded into Utah, while also opening a back-office centre in the Philippines.

Argentine talent as a strategy, not a gesture

The characteristic that best distinguishes his leadership is where he chose to place the team. When opening Belong’s third research and development centre, Resnik did not choose Silicon Valley, but Buenos Aires. In 2021, the company set out to hire forty Argentine developers and engineers. A year later, it expanded the search to two hundred professionals in Argentina and Mexico for roles in engineering, product and data science, most of them working remotely.

His reasoning is not sentimental. He argues that Argentine human capital is difficult to find anywhere else in the world, even in Silicon Valley itself, and that universities in the country’s interior produce highly capable engineers. That conviction has an internal counterpart: at Belong, everyone from an engineer to a plumber carrying out repairs receives equity in the company.

For someone who built his career by solving problems of trust between strangers, sharing ownership of the business with those responsible for executing it is less a benefit than a matter of consistency.

Alongside his career as a founder, Resnik has invested as an angel in more than twenty-five startups, a role that keeps him connected with the next generation of Latin American entrepreneurs.