Latitud Podcast

Yuri Danilchenko grew up in Russia during one of the most defining moments in history. He's had a knack for tech and entrepreneurship since before he noticed it, having sold cell phones for pocket money when he was only 13, and fixing his friends' computers even though he didn't own one. Then, after living in the US and getting his masters in AI, he moved to Brazil and worked at sev...

It’s here: the last episode of 2020. We started this year by interviewing Paulo Veras, the co-founder of 99, the first Brazilian unicorn . Now, we end the season on the highest of notes with the guy that was managing the company when it was sold to Didi.  Peter Fernandez held leadership roles at Google and was an angel investor and advisor for 99 before he joined the team in 2016, becoming CEO 10...

In the early days of Love Mondays , co-founder Luciana Caletti was encouraged by her investors to talk to every player in the industry, including competitors. Not only did that accelerate their learning as a startup, but it also allowed them to build a relationship with their US-born more developed equivalent, Glassdoor .  Fast forward 3 years, they joined forces as Glassdoor expanded and Luciana...

Fabricio Pettená is a partner at Global Founders Capital , a stage-agnostic lifecycle global venture capital firm. If you’re wondering what that means, this is the episode where he explains it!   We also talk about:  GFC's decision process and how they support startups;  What good board meetings should look like;  His analysis of Latin American markets;  And the signals investors pay attentio...

Gina Gotthilf was the VP of Growth at Duolingo , the most downloaded education app in the world, leading the team that built its user base from 3 to 200 million. She also led Tumblr 's growth in Latin America and participated in the Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign to help oversee digital ad campaigns at a historical daily spend.  In 2020, she joined Brian and Yuri as a co-founder of Lati...

A few years after getting his degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University, and fresh out of his MBA at Harvard Business School, Antoine Colaço wanted to go into the VC world as an investor. But he’d always heard it’d be better to get operational experience first. So he joined Yahoo!. Then, in 2003, he took a risk and accepted a position at a small startup. It was calle...

A company’s DNA is what makes it stand out. It guides everyone’s behaviors and determines the quality of the people you have by your side, from the initial hires to the hypergrowth stage. It can be the difference between a team that is indifferent and one that is all-in. This is something Eric Santos and his co-founders paid attention to from the get-go. Similar to what Netflix’s culture code mean...

No matter the game, understanding the other player always helps you make better moves. This logic applies to the fundraising game too.  Julio Vasconcellos is a great example of this, being a very prolific entrepreneur and investor. Julio was Facebook’s first country manager in Brazil, back in 2010. That same year, he started Peixe Urbano , which became a leading local commerce and services company...

Startups are the wildest roller coasters. You can have your best day and your worst day oftentimes in the same day. You really need to learn how to deal with the ups and downs and accept that there are things that you simply cannot control. Oskar Hjertonsson has been on a crazy ride for the past 14 years. Born in Sweden, he met one of his co-founders, Daniel Undurraga, in Chile, where they first c...

Starting a business is a game of persistence. As our guest Sergio Furio says in this episode, “we build businesses to thrive over 10-20 years, but we don’t know what’s happening tomorrow.” Sergio was born in Spain and moved to Brazil after his wife, Silvia, told him about the high interest rates in the country. He founded BankFácil in 2011, which later became Creditas . Much later, in fact. Sergio...

Thomas Floracks and Brian Requarth have been partners for 16 years -- Germany and USA joined forces in Colombia to ultimately build a successful proptech scale-up in Brazil: Viva Real .  They've been through thick and thin together, and the experience made Thomas a product and growth expert. Today he’s back in Colombia as the Chief Product Officer of LaHaus, another amazing proptech company w...

Support, knowledge-sharing and collaboration go a long way — they’re just as important as other resources. Building an environment with these characteristics helps us grow individually, and it continues to do so as we give back and create value for the whole, rather than the parts. Brad Feld is the co-founder of Techstars , one of the first accelerators in the US, and runs the Foundry Group, his f...

When we’re starting up, we don’t always pay much attention to legal structures or to tax legislation. Entrepreneurs tend to go with the fastest, easiest, or cheapest way to get the business off the ground.  Brian, too, made this mistake. It cost him approximately one hundred million dollars in company value.  Dan Green is a partner at Gunderson Dettmer , a global law firm specializing in tech. In...

What does this downturn mean to startups who are currently looking to fundraise? Nicolas Szekasy shared some of the challenges he faced as CFO do Mercado Livre during the internet bubble in 2001 and the 2008 recession. Now, as co-founder and Managing Partner of Kaszek Ventures , he uses what he learned to help founders build high-impact tech companies in Latam.    In this episode:  The difference...