Crossing Borders with Nathan Lustig

As an intern at a law firm, Juan hated parking in cash-only parking lots. After having to go to the ATM or getting countless parking tickets, he thought there had to be a better way. In 2016, Parco was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and has since expanded into 28 cities across the country. Parco allows parking lot operators to install a software system to their existing parking systems for consumers...

Alexa Clark is an Associate at Magma Partners, an early-stage venture capital fund based in Latin America. After working for four years at an accelerator in Guadalajara, Mexico, Alexa joined the Magma team as an Investment Analyst and worked her way up to Associate. Although she majored in International Relations, she pivoted to the startup world to create more impact in Latin America. In this epi...

Two months ago HR tech startup Revelo acquired Listopro, a Mexican tech talent marketplace. In this episode, I interviewed the founders of both companies: Lucas Mendes (Revelo) and Giuseppe Belpiede (Listopro). Together, these startups have more than 300,000 tech professionals and are the largest platform for US companies to hire Latin American talent. Lucas, Revelo’s cofounder, is Brazilian and p...

There are nine million motorcycles in Colombia, a country of 60M compared to eight million in the US, a country seven times larger, and Brazilians own 14+ million motorcycles. In Latin America, motorcycles are not transportation, they're also a work vehicle for delivery and courier workers. Freelancers who work for delivery apps like Rappi, Uber and Didi use motorcycles and bicycles to make delive...

For this week’s episode of Crossing Borders, we’re revisiting one of our greatest hits episodes featuring Benjamin Labra, CEO and Co-founder of Houm. Latin America’s real estate market is opaque, broken, and bureaucratic. The home buying process in the region can take up to a year, and even just renting an apartment requires having another property as collateral in some countries. There are many p...

For this week’s episode of Crossing Borders, we’re revisiting one of our greatest hits episodes featuring Gonzalo Blanco, Co-founder of Quansa. For years, Gonzalo Blanco and Mafalda Barros have seen how the misaligned incentives in Latin American financial products push the average person to make bad financial decisions. Due to this lack of guidance, people improvise and spend money without realiz...

For this week’s episode of Crossing Borders, we’re revisiting one of our greatest hits episodes featuring Maribel Dominguez, Founder, and CEO of Circulo de Belleza. After graduating from university in the US in 2009 at the height of the financial crisis, Maribel Dominguez decided to move back to her native Mexico until the economy got better. While she was home, Maribel and her dad came up with a...

For this week’s episode of Crossing Borders, we’re revisiting one of our greatest hits episodes featuring Agustin Feuerhake, Founder of Fintual. For retail investors in Latin America, the options to invest are limited. This space is often dominated by traditional banks that charge very high fees and involve processes that are quite complex for non-experts. As co-founder and CMO of robo advisor Fin...

For this week’s episode of Crossing Borders, we’re revisiting one of our greatest hits episodes featuring Ximena Aleman, co-CEO and co-founder of Prometeo. ~70% of Latin Americans are unbanked or underbanked. That means that there’s a huge opportunity to improve access to financial products and services across the region by leveraging data and technology. Ximena Aleman is co-founder and CEO of Pro...

For this week’s episode of Crossing Borders, we’re revisiting one of our greatest hits episodes featuring Deepak Chhugani, CEO and founder of Nuvocargo. Deepak Chhugani’s multicultural background was considered rare and unexpected in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where he grew up most of his life. He was born in Kenya to Indian parents who migrated to Ecuador in their late 20s. Logically, after studying at...

Izabel Gallera is a Partner at Canary, a venture capital firm born in Brazil that invests in early-stage Latin American startups. She describes Canary’s core business as leveraging its network to create connections and help founders fundraise for their startups. Izabel is from Brazil, and as an engineer, only discovered the startup world after graduating and entering the job market. Working at End...

For this week’s episode of Crossing Borders, we’re revisiting one of our greatest hits episodes featuring Caterine Castillo, CEO and co-founder of Neivor. In Latin America, a building manager typically has to handle thousands of apartment units and tenants. This means simultaneously dealing with building maintenance, reconciling payments, and meeting tenant and landlord requests. Currently, this i...

Santiago Suarez is the CEO and co-founder of Addi, a Latin American fintech company. Addi promotes and enables digital commerce in Latam. As Santiago puts it, Addi’s mission is to enable every Latin American to buy and shop digitally. Addi offers “buy now pay later”, and is currently active in Colombia and Brazil. Originally from Colombia, Santiago moved to the US on a full scholarship. After univ...

​​For this week’s episode of Crossing Borders, we’re revisiting one of our greatest hits episodes featuring Gabriela Estrada, CFO and co-founder of Vexi. Only one in ten adults in Mexico have access to a formal credit card, according to Gabriela Estrada. That’s more than 70 million people that are not able to build a credit history. As cofounder and CFO of Vexi, Gabriela is on a mission to make cr...

Stefan Moller, CEO of Klar, a Mexican fintech democratizing access to banking, wants to change the way Mexicans think about money. Stefan grew up between Mexico and Germany and worked traditional jobs to finance his own ventures. His experience working traditional jobs and startup companies led him to start Klar to try to make Mexicans' lives better. According to Stefan, traditional banking in Mex...

Banafsheh Fathieh invests in startups that positively impact their communities in Latin America. As an early-stage venture capitalist looking for opportunities in the Latin American market, Banafsheh is the Head of Investments at Prosus Ventures, the venture arm of Prosus Group, the international Internet assets division of South African multinational Naspers, and one of the largest tech investors...

Doménica Obando, CEO and co-founder of Talently, is helping build Latin America into the next tech talent hub while offering better jobs to skilled developers and data scientists. Originally from Peru, Domenica worked in an NGO and the public sector before becoming a full-time entrepreneur. First, she founded Andi, a learning platform, which afterward she decided to pivot into Talently. Talently i...

Daniel Undurraga never thought he would sell even one Latin American company to a company in the US market, but with the recent US$225M acquisition of Cornershop, a grocery-delivery app he has officially sold two startups to US companies. His first startup, Needish, was the basis for Clan Descuento, a Chilean Groupon clone that was acquired by Groupon in 2010. Clandescuento’s acquistion was before...

Luis Rubén Chávez, co-founder and CEO of Zenfi, is changing the way people in Mexico think about financial health. Zenfi is a complete digital finance platform focused on lending that strives for the financial health of its customers. With more than 2.5 million users, the platform provides customers with tools to build a consistent long-term financial plan. Zenfi offers an app that reviews clients...

Originally from the US, Sophia Wood is a political scientist turned tech entrepreneur, ghost writer, VC, and now leads a tourism company dedicated to boosting conservation in emerging markets as CEO of Friends of Wallacea. Sophia’s journey from the US to Africa to Latin America shows what a determined, smart, principled person can do across multiple industries very quickly. Listen to this episode...

From a young age, Daniel knew he wanted to create something new, but he didn’t know exactly what it would be. His curiosity and drive led him to always have several side businesses, even as a teen when he started a (painful!) business raising bees and honey. Daniel pushed himself to try new projects, which helped him deal with adversity when starting Local Adventures, a travel startup that not onl...

​​For this week’s episode of Crossing Borders, we’re revisiting one of our greatest hits episodes featuring Ben & Frank’s co-founder Mariana Castillo. Mariana Castillo believes that the eyewear shopping experience in Mexico is broken. It’s generally reduced to an impersonal exchange that only considers the basic optical measurements, rather than catering the product to the customer’s style and per...

I sat down with Santiago to talk about his experience as an entrepreneur, while Santiago shared the story of Ontop and their meteoric growth in their first fifteen months (actively operating in over 190 countries, transacting over $2M per month).

In this episode, I sat down with Maricel to talk about Compound Food’s mission in tackling climate change, her career in science without being a scientist, her journey of building a company at the start of the pandemic and the future of the coffee industry.

In this episode, I sat down with Juanma to discuss how Guros is making inroads into the insurance industry and gaining market share with a digital model that is democratizing access to insurance and bringing new opportunities to innovate, improve customer experience, and ultimately, driving growth.