The J Curve with Olga Maslikhova

Brian Requarth is Founder and General Partner at Latitud — a Silicon Valley-based venture fund and platform that leads pre-seed checks into the top 1% of Latin American founders building global companies. Brian previously co-founded VivaReal, which merged with ZAP Imóveis in 2017 to form Grupo ZAP — later acquired by OLX Brazil for approximately $640M in 2020. Latitud's fellowship has accepted...

Paulo Passoni, Managing Partner at Valor Capital, and Olga Maslikhova sit down with their first-ever TJC Debrief guest — Ivana Delevska, Founder and CIO of Spear Invest and Portfolio Manager of the Spear Alpha ETF (SPRX, Nasdaq), one of the best-performing actively managed AI ETFs. Ivana spent a decade at Tiger Management, Millennium, and Citadel before founding Spear, where she now runs over $100...

Felipe Carvalho is Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Camu — an AI workflow automation platform. Previously, Felipe spent 10 years building the global go-to-market organization at Pipefy alongside founder Alessio Alionço, scaling a horizontal workflow platform that serves Volvo, Capgemini, IBM, Accenture, Visa, Santander, Itaú, and thousands of other SMBs and enterprises across Brazil, the US...

Paulo Passoni, Managing Partner at Valor Capital, and Olga Maslikhova break down the two forces reshaping tech and capital markets right now — the end of 40 years of global integration as the US-China tech split hardens, and the collapse of the services moat as AI lets companies scale from $0 to $100M in revenue in 24 months by replacing labor. This is the May 2026 edition of TJC Debrief — a month...

Latin America is the third-largest fintech and payments market in the world — bigger than India, behind only the US and China.  Gastón Irigoyen is Co-Founder and CEO of Pomelo, the fintech infrastructure company powering card issuing and processing for banks, fintechs, and global enterprises across eight markets including Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Panama. P...

Paulo Passoni, Managing Partner at Valor Capital, and Olga Maslikhova break down Claude 4.6, Brex’s $5.15B sale to Capital One, and why only 4 US companies can IPO right now. This is the April 2026 edition of TJC Debrief — a monthly show covering tech, venture, and capital markets for Latin American founders and investors. We cover why Claude 4.6 was a bigger “aha moment” than the original ChatGPT...

Pedro Conrade is the founder of Neon — a $1B run-rate Brazilian neobank that serves millions of underbanked Brazilians and has raised $924M from General Atlantic, BBVA, BlackRock, and PayPal. In this TJC Originals episode, Pedro shares how he survived the 72-hour crisis that almost killed Neon in 2018, how engagement data beats credit scoring, and the fundraising playbook behind a decade of capita...

Stelleo Tolda co-founded MercadoLibre in 1999 and ran Brazil for 25 years — building the $100B company into Latin America’s most valuable publicly traded business. In this TJC Operators series premiere, Stelleo unpacks how MercadoLibre outlasted 80 competitors, declared war on Amazon, scaled logistics from 8% to 95% in-house, and architected a three-year succession that actually stuck. We cover ho...

Hernan Kazah is Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Kaszek Ventures — Latin America’s largest venture firm, backing Nubank, Kavak, Gympass (Wellhub), and 100+ other LATAM companies. He previously co-founded MercadoLibre, now a $100B public company. In this Season 5 premiere, Hernan shares how Kaszek evaluates founders, why the default outcome in venture is failure, the venture power law behind gene...

Paulo Passoni is Managing Partner at Valor Capital — one of the most active crossover investors in Latin America, with positions in Nubank, Plata, CloudWalk, and dozens of public tech companies globally. This is round two with Paulo, following the most-played episode in J Curve history. We cover why speed is the last real moat in the age of AI, why Anthropic may be a safer bet than OpenAI, the hir...

Dileep Thazhmon is Founder and CEO of Jeeves, a global corporate card and expense management platform serving SMBs across Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and 15+ other markets. Bruno Maimone is Managing Director at Warburg Pincus, a $90B+ AUM global growth equity firm. In this conversation, Dileep and Bruno break down why Brazil went from six $100M ARR companies to thirty in a few years, whether AI is k...

Roberto Dagnoni is Executive Chairman of Mercado Bitcoin — Brazil’s largest crypto exchange. Ben Lizana is Principal at SoftBank Latin America. Gui Gomes is Founder and CEO of OranjeBTC. Recorded live at Digital Assets Conference 2025 in São Paulo, this panel covers the real bottleneck to mainstream crypto adoption, why Latin America’s volatility is creating a global edge, why public markets are s...

Olga Maslikhova, Founder and Host of The J Curve, breaks down what four Latin American founders did differently — Daniel Vogel (Bitso, $2.2B), Caique Carvalho (Gringo, $200M exit to Corpay), Tiago Dalvi (Olist, $10B GMV), and Piero Contezini (Asaas, 37 revenue streams). This is a strategic debrief on why the friction that makes emerging markets “too hard” is exactly what makes them defensible. We...

Daniel Vogel is Co-Founder and CEO of Bitso — Latin America’s first crypto unicorn, valued at $2.2B and serving millions of users across Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia. In this conversation, Daniel shares the pilot’s mindset of leadership and what flying small planes taught him about control, composure, and crisis management, the risk paradox of building in volatile markets from a culture...

Caique Carvalho is Co-Founder and former Chief Product Officer of Gringo — a Brazilian super app for drivers that was acquired by Sem Parar (owned by NYSE-listed Corpay) for approximately $200M. Before Gringo, Caique built two failed startups that taught him everything about product-market fit. In this episode, Caique shares the hard lessons behind two failed startups and how they shaped his appro...

Piero Contezini is Founder and Executive Chairman of Asaas — a Brazilian fintech platform serving thousands of SMBs, processing billions in payments, and backed by SoftBank, Bond, and Bradesco. Asaas has evolved from a Stripe-for-Brazil experiment into a full-stack financial operating system with 37 revenue streams. In this episode, Piero shares why service companies can’t scale like product compa...

Julio Vasconcellos is Managing Partner at Atlantico — a leading Latin American venture firm and publisher of the Latin America Digital Transformation Report, now in its 6th edition. Julio was previously Facebook’s first country lead in Brazil and co-founder of Peixe Urbano. In this episode, Julio unpacks why local LATAM VC funds have quietly outperformed global peers and what it will take to attra...

Tiago Dalvi is the solo founder and CEO of Olist — Brazil’s leading e-commerce operating system, serving 45,000+ merchants and processing 60 billion reais annually in Brazil’s $60B+ e-commerce market. Olist has raised $314M from SoftBank, Wellington Management, Goldman Sachs, Valor Capital Group, and Accel partner Kevin Efrusy. In this episode, Tiago shares how Olist went from a single storefront...

Olga Maslikhova, Founder and Host of The J Curve, breaks down why 90% of LATAM founders struggle to raise venture capital — and the patterns behind every major success story from Nubank to QuintoAndar. This isn’t about product or market — it’s about understanding the game VCs are actually playing. Olga covers the fund economics that drive every investment decision, the founder profiles that get fa...

Daniela Binatti is Co-Founder and CTO of Pismo — acquired by Visa for $1B cash. Carlos Costa is Managing Partner at Valor Capital ($2B+ AUM), early investor in CloudWalk ($2.15B valuation), Wellhub ($2.2B valuation), and Pismo ($1B exit). Romero Rodrigues sold Buscapé to Naspers for $374M and is now Managing Partner at Headline, with early bets on Pismo and Wellhub. Recorded live in São Paulo with...

Vitor Asseituno is CEO and Co-Founder of Sami — Brazil’s fastest-growing health insurance startup, serving 20,000+ customers across 11 Brazilian cities in the $60B private health insurance market. Sami has raised $65M in total funding. In this episode, Vitor shares the “pipeline mathematics” behind turning 100+ VC rejections into a Series B raise, investor psychology and what resonates when pitchi...

Welcome to Season 4 of The J Curve with me, Olga Maslikhova. This week, I sit down with Federico Vega, founder and CEO of  Frete.com —the largest freight matching platform in Latin America. Federico’s story is anything but conventional: he grew up in a small town in Patagonia, left a career in investment banking at JP Morgan in London, and moved—without speaking the language—to Brazil to reinvent...

Welcome to this special solo episode of Season 4 of The J Curve with me, Olga Maslikhova. Every few months, I zoom out to reflect on the lessons that stuck with me from the show. Think of this as your quarterly operator’s memo—especially if you’re building, raising, or investing in Latin America. Q2 was full of sharp insights and real operator depth. But in this edition of The J Curve Insider, I w...

Welcome to Season 4 of The J Curve with me, Olga Maslikhova. This week, I sit down with Caetano Lacerda and Raphael Dyxklay, co-founders of Brazilian fintech Barte, which is transforming the payments and working capital landscape for mid-to-large companies. Barte’s journey is a masterclass in efficient growth: from zero to $10M ARR in less than two years on just $1.5M of burn—and then growing sust...

Del Valle is Co-Founder and CEO of EBANX — one of Latin America’s most iconic fintech stories, processing billions in cross-border payments across 29 countries and powering transactions for Spotify, AliExpress, and Shein. EBANX is backed by Advent International in one of the firm’s largest-ever tech deals. Founded in Curitiba, outside Brazil’s traditional tech hub, EBANX was built global-by-design...