Latitud Podcast

If you told 13-year-old Miguel Santos with his first Apple device that he'd grow up to build his own billion-dollar tech company, he might have had a hard time believing you. When Miguel started Technisys over 20 years ago, he and his co-founders set up office in a living room with a piano for a desk just as the internet started to become an integral part of everyday life. Their digital banki...

Colombian-born Santiago Molina got his degree in business administration and finance from Houston Baptist University on a soccer scholarship, and moved back to his home country after his MBA to start his entrepreneurial journey.     Santi is second-time founder focused on promoting financial inclusion, and is now on a quest to create an innovative solution to democratize access to capital in Latin...

By 2030, the UN predicts that 3 billion people will be living without shelter. Today's guest is doing something to combat that. Brett Hagler is a Y Combinator graduate, a published author and cancer survivor, but you may know him best for his non-profit New Story and for his impactful key note speaking. Brett started New Story at 25 years old. In the years since they have funded over 2,300 ho...

Angela Strange is a multiple marathon winner and once achieved 7th place in Canada's distance running national ranking, but you may know her best as an investor on behalf of Andreessen Horowitz . Before joining the world of venture capital, Angela launched and scaled up Chrome for Android and Chrome for iOS during her time at Google , and her previous experiences have uniquely positioned her...

Francisco Larraín 's professional journey tells a story of coming full circle. It all started as a founding team member for advertisement network Tapjoy . Having gotten a taste for the world of startups, he went on to found payment technology solution Zappedy and to have a $30 million exit to Groupon , where he stayed as Head of Local Engineering for 3 years. It wasn't long before Franci...

Pierre Schurmann has never shied away from great adventure: he and his family left Brazil when he was 15 with the goal of sailing around the world, and after 4 years of traveling with them, he disembarked in the US to obtain a degree in Business Administration. Since then, Pierre has become an accomplished multi-time founder and an established investor through VC firm Bossa Nova , which he founded...

Lolita Taub has made it her mission to create generational wealth in community. As the daughter of a Mexican immigrant family, providing underestimated founders and funders with resources is at the core of what Lolita has set out to do. With 15 years working in the Silicon Valley ecosystem, she's made + 90 investments as an angel and VC at Backstage Capital and The Community Fund . Lolita als...

Born and raised in a chinese-brazilian family, Bedy Yang has a lengthy track record of consulting for global companies on go-to-market strategies in Brazil. She moved to the US at a time when there weren't many links between Silicon Valley and Latin America, and so she helped build and strengthen them. It started in 2009, when she founded Brazil Innovators , scaling its network from 0 to over...

Vicente Zavarce was born and raised in Venezuela, but went abroad to study in the US during his university years. He quickly found his way into their booming startup ecosystem, and went on to join Postmates ' User Acquisition efforts in Silicon Valley before moving on to be Director of User Acquisition for Getaround . His experiences led him to a lightbulb realization: what if there was an ap...

Before he knew he wanted to build a company, Gerry knew he wanted to make people’s lives better. Born in Monterrey, Gerry Colyer left Mexico to attend Yale University , then went on to pursue a degree from Stanford Business School . His initial game plan was to go into public service, but he soon stumbled upon the realization that technology was the key to drive change at scale. Eager to learn, he...

Fabio Muniz is a product designer turned founder and CEO. He worked with clients such as Google and Viacom before transitioning to VC-backed startups until he found out we wanted to build his own. Awari came to be when Fabio realized that there were many career opportunities in tech and not enough qualified professionals.  Awari's goal is to help Brazilian talent learn technical skills throug...

There's a famous anecdote in which a CFO asks the CEO: "What happens if we invest in developing our people and they leave us?" To that, the CEO responds: "What happens if we don't and they stay?" Upskilling teams is vital for businesses to evolve and UBITS has made that decision a no-brainer for Latin American companies. The woman behind it is co-founder and COO Marta...

Rafael Stark is an engineer with problem-solving in his blood. He started his own Product Studio called Hummingbird and came across a client wanting to automate refunds, and that's where he realized there was a market-wide opportunity to simplify several payment processes at scale. Stark Bank was born to modernize the financial infrastructure in Brazil through the power of integrations. They...

The last 10 years have completely changed Latin America's financial landscape but, when compared to other more established regions, we still lack basic infrastructure, and that's what Pablo Viguera set out to build. With experience in UK open banking from his time at Revolut, Pablo wanted to pave the road for the next generation of financial businesses, so he and co-founder Oriol Tintore...

Born in the US and raised in Uruguay, Nathan is a football enthusiast currently splitting his time between Silicon Valley and Mexico City. As a third-time founder , his passion is in building companies that tackle Latin America's biggest problems. The problem he is tackling at Flexio is B2B payments : Helping businesses manage their cash flow. As an entrepreneur-in-residence at Google Launchp...

Making history in LatAm's fintech industry is very on brand for today's guest. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Pierpaolo Barbieri left Argentina to study in the US as a young adult. He returned 12 years later with a Harvard University degree and a career as an economic historian and published author, but you may know him from being the founder and CEO of Ualá . Ualá's complete fina...

Children are often fascinated with technology, and Sahil Lavingia 's story isn't any different: he first started getting into computers at about 12, playing around with graphic design tools like Photoshop, and it soon naturally developed into building websites for family and friends. One Computer Science and Engineering degree later, Sahil turned what started as a casual project for hims...

Universal as it may seem now, in 2014 access to banking services was still very much limited in several LatAm countries. That realization was what sparked Daniel Vogel 's idea of democratizing financial services through the existing but underused infrastructure of mobile phones. With the Bitso app, buying and selling cryptocurrencies become as easy as ordering pizza. Daniel's founder jou...

With over 10 years of experience in Brazil's VC scene, Rodrigo Baer was hearing pitches and offering offering term sheets long before the LatAm capital craze started. He has an unquestionable understanding of the country's entrepreneurial landscape, and is a believer of sharing knowledge with the world, which he has been doing for the last four years through his Youtube channel " Pe...

In his own words, Daniel Bilbao is a friend to all latino entrepreneurs. He went from spreading papelitos in Comic Sans looking for engineers to shaping the future of fraud prevention in Latin America. Born and raised in Colombia, his mentality is one of giving back to our region first. Daniel first dipped his toes into the cybersecurity space with his previous company Paladin Cyber in 2017. Now C...

Alex Vilhena was born in Rio de Janeiro, but moved to Los Angeles to pursue a Bachelor's degree in Communications and had a chance to try out the startup scene in the US. Big lover of jiu-jitsu, he has over 10 years of client-facing roles under his purple belt, and helped build Santander 's Loyalty Program before moving on to his own projects in the financial industry. Now CEO of Plug Pa...

Andres Bilbao is a Colombian triple threat, and that goes far beyond being fluent in three languages: he's a unicorn entrepreneur, an angel investor, and a trusted advisor to many others in the LatAm startup ecosystem. He was one of the co-founders of Rappi and reached an impressive $5.25 billion valuation within six years of starting operations. Now Andres is putting down roots in blockchain...

Entrepreneurship is much like running into a wall until you knock it down, and German-born Florian Hagenbuch has committed to making sure that the wall stays down for those coming after him. Florian founded Loft to digitalize the real estate market and make it accessible to millions of Brazilians dreaming of owning a home. Their latest funding round bumped them up to a nearly 3 billion-dollar valu...

Very few people are product builders at heart, and Jeff Orr is one of them - he founded Maply to connect people to events happening in real-time around them, and has helped the likes of Delt.ai and Noonlight improve their own product and experiences. He first came into Latitud's radar as a Fellow in our 3rd cohort, but I soon realized that he shared our passion and vision for emerging markets...

Starting four different companies AND dabbling into music production isn't for everyone, but Dhaval Chadha has managed to balance the two passions just fine. Other than his musician profiles on streaming platforms, you'll find Dhaval's name attached to companies like ClassPass , which acquired his previous company Vivo, and where he led LatAm Expansion . Now CEO of Justos , Dhaval a...