Latitud Podcast

Oriana Fuentes has been based in New York for the past 12 years, where she went back to after living in Peru for 8 years. With a Bachelor's in Economics and Finance from Syracuse University, she proudly built a career in Wall Street. However, not being able to find her real purpose, she left to pursue a Masters's degree in Machine Learning from Columbia University. In her free time, Oria...

There are a ton of bright shiny lights on the way to building a startup, and it's tempting to burn through cash for the sake of rapid growth. So after getting a big capital injection, for example, it's normal for founders to get excited. But how long can you keep this up before it becomes unsustainable? When you're playing the long term game, unit economics is something any operator...

Alejandro Gomez de Greiff is a born and raised Cachaco (from Bogota) who you may find running in the streets of Colombia while listening to business and history audiobooks and podcasts. He studied industrial engineering and quickly joined the dark side, as he describes it, to become an investment banker. He was also the first employee at a Private Equity firm, where he worked for 6 years. After do...

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” This powerful quote by Abraham Lincoln is often shared by our guest. Jason Yeh has spent a lot of time both fundraising and analyzing fundraisers. After working as an investor at Greycroft , starting a business and being acquired, he became Silicon Valley Bank 's go-to Executive coach around fundraisin...

Born in Iran, Yasaman Rajaee is a first-generation middle eastern immigrant woman. Besides having been a private tutor and teacher, she also has an impressive background as a student and researcher in Technology, Management, Computer Sciences and Engineering. At MIT, for example, she spent a few months investigating how Collective Intelligence can be used to improve the way organizations work. For...

Henrique Dubugras taught himself how to code as a teenager. He met his co-founder, Pedro Franceschi, over an argument on Twitter, which ended up turning them into best friends. The Brazilian tech duo went on to join teams at different startups and even start a few business projects. In 2013, they founded payments company Pagar.me — the Stripe of Brazil — when he was only sixteen years old. Pagar.m...

Gabriel Monteiro is a second-time founder. His first company, Shopgram, was a fashion and decor marketplace, sold in 2015 to B2W, a leading digital commerce company in Latin America. Gabriel went on to work at B2W for 5 years, soon becoming the head of Submarino.com. That's where he met his co-founders and together they decided to start Newtail , an omnichannel platform that brings new capabi...

It's hard to think about tech startups without thinking US and Israel, just like it's impossible for corporations to ignore digital transformation. In Brazil, there's one venture capital firm that is bundling all of that together, by investing in some of the most innovative companies abroad, bringing them to Latin America, and connecting them with big local companies to accelerate t...

Demian Bellumio is the founder of Nue Life, a startup that is using technology and ketamin-assisted science-based treatments to make mental wellness scalable and cost-effective. Nue Life isn't based in Latin America, but it's situated in the gateway to the region, Miami. Father, immigrant and long-time entrepreneur, Demian was born in Argentina and started his first company right out of...

For a long time, Loreanne Garcia and her brother, Carlos, had talked about building something together. Originally from Venezuela, they finally found the perfect opportunity in Mexico in 2016. That's when Lori, Carlos and their co-founder Roger started Kavak , an online platform for buying and selling secondhand cars. With a $4B valuation, Kavak became the first Mexican unicorn in 2020, right...

Pomelo is the fintech as a service (FAAS) platform for Latin America, founded by former Mastercard, Mercado Pago and Naranja X executives. The startup took some of its first steps during the Latitud Fellowship program, where Gaston Irigoyen, Hernan Corral and Juan Fantoni joined the second cohort. Latitud had the privilege of being Pomelo's first check, later introducing the founders to over...

Cristiano Rocha is a seasoned engineer who started his career as a Master’s Student in Artificial Intelligence. Fresh out of university, he bootstraped his first company for about 8 years, back when venture capital in Brazil was almost unheard of. As a young founder, he established a reputation as a knowledge management evangelist and community management especialist. Almost by accident, Cristiano...

For the longest time, we've only financed personal and professional projects by acquiring debt. But what if, the same way investors bet on super early-stage business ideas, we could bet on high-potential people through an income share agreement, regardless of what those people decide to do in their lives?  Equity-based financing for people is barely talked about, yet Sam Lessin has been pract...

We do not always realize it, but we are living in two economies: digital and analog . In fact, depending on who you ask, 2020 was either the best year for business or the worst, and a lot has to do with how these two orders contrast and relate.  Today, 9 out of the 10 largest companies in the world are in technology, and many began as small startups not very long ago. Meanwhile, new startup ecosys...

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. That’s true for companies, it’s true for products, and it's true for VCs too.  Emergence Capital is known for a few superstar deals, like Crunchbase and Zoom, but also for their focus sourcing and selecting deals. They look at B2B software as a service companies, and nothing else.  In the early 2000s, when the firm started, it wa...

We live in a software-powered world but many practices in the venture capital industry still lack the technology it invests in. We see innovation increasing at an accelerated pace, whereas many of the VC firms that finance innovation seem stuck in time.  Avlok Kohli has a few possible explanations for this irony, and a lot of propositions to offset it. CEO of AngelList Venture , he's been lea...

With a Harvard MBA under his belt, after his role as co-CEO of Groupon, Lucas Vargas had a lot of options for his next step. But he didn't take a step: he took a leap of faith – and decided to join a small proptech startup in Brazil called Viva Rea l. As CEO, Brian hired Lucas to be the Vice-President of Sales. Just a couple of years later, Brian knew Lucas was going to be his replacement whe...

Falling and getting back up is what makes the cycles of an entrepreneurial journey, but some people just enjoy to be constantly getting ideas off the ground, even if the previous ones are growing steady. Alex Torrenegra is an example of this. Alex has been a friend for 10 years, and I'm proud that his first ever angel investment was in my company, Viva Real. You may also know him as a tiburón...

In the startup world, it's becoming more common for founders to share mistakes they made when they were starting out, but we rarely get to know about early mistakes investors make. Well, today, Jonathan Lewy is gonna bring the challenges he faced from both sides. Jonathan moved from Belgium to Mexico right out of college, and built a food delivery app called MiOrden that was sold to SinDelant...

While a lot of VCs may ironically be discouraged by turmoil in emerging markets, Shu Nyatta feels comfortable in messy places. In his own words, because he grew up in one.  A Nairobi native, he's lived in the US as a young consultant, in the UK as an Anthropology student, and in Dubai as a company operator. He even had a brief career as a recording artist – if you noticed a soundtrack change...

As the CMO of Cabify, Courtney McColgan led the company's market expansion from series A through series D, across 120 cities. She had roughly 350 people that reported to her. And every month, without exception, she received complaints from team members about issues with their paycheck.  Motivated by solving a familiar challenge, Courtney founded Runa , a startup that automates payroll for bus...

Kevin Efrusy is low-key. You won't find a lot of interviews with him, and that's by design. One of his reasons is that he believes entrepreneurs should be the ones taking all the credit, and that's a testament to what an outstanding investor he is.  But truth be told: Kevin has done a lot for many founders, Brian included, both as an angel and as a partner at Accel , a top-tier glob...

Stop fishing in the sludge. There's a lot more healthy fish where people don't go as often. And while some investors care too much about other investors' signals and might see particular markets as small ponds, Claire Diaz-Ortiz uses that as an advantage by searching for overlooked big opportunities. Claire is a VC, angel investor, author, and speaker who was an early employee at Tw...

When Marcelo Abritta pitched Buser to a VC for the first time, he didn't have a lot of leverage. His operation was quickly blocked by authorities and incumbents. He wasn't yet working full time on the business. And the cherry on top: he had a six-figure debt from a recently failed company.  He did, however, receive a great investment offer from a top-tier fund that same day .  Everyone k...

Brian's book is now available! Go to book.latitud.com to get your copy of Viva the Entrepreneur: Founding, Scaling and Raising Venture Capital in Latin America . This episode is not about that, though, and even less so about him. Yes, sure, our guest today wrote the foreword -- but above all, she's a huge inspiration to me and thousands of other founders around the world. That's bec...