Follow the biggest innovators and tech founders in Latin America as they cover valuable insights and inspire entrepreneurs facing challenges in scaling their business and raising capital. Presented by Brian Requarth, Co-founder at Latitud. 

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, Oriana is either traveling, reading, or scouring New York for delicious food and baked goods. But another one of her passions is complexity. That is one of the reasons why in 2016 she started Emptor, a B2B SaaS company doing automated background checks in 10 countries in Latam, with clients like Didi, Cornershop, Kavak, and Uber.

Find out how Emptor works in this episode of Altitud, a segment of Latitud Podcast where we talk to the founders of the future high-flying companies connected to Latin America.

Altitud | Oriana Fuentes from Emptor and the automation of trust

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 should pay attention to. It not only helps you set priorities, but also build a path to profitability.

Having met hundreds of founders in the past decade she's worked in VC, Mariana Donangelo has seen healthy unit economics as a common thread among successful businesses. She also experienced the power of this tool first hand at Invoice2go, where she lead growth for 4 years and made sure to understand and have better control of the levers that eventually made the company lucrative.

Before Invoice2go, Mariana was an investor at Accel, helping close several deals in Latam. In 2020, she became a partner at Kaszek. Today, she talks to us about:

The metrics you should look at to understand unit economics

Her own initiatives at Invoice2Go to make it more sustainable

And her views on how the VC ecosystem changed in the past 10 years

Unit Economics and prioritization: Mariana Donangelo, Kaszek

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 doing some corporate VC and angel investing, he started getting jealous of all the startup founding teams he was meeting and decided it was time to join them in the trenches. So he brought back to life an idea he had 8 years before with his friend Juan Martin, and together they launched Aptuno, a solution for seamless residential rentals.

Find out how Aptuno works in this episode of Altitud, a segment of Latitud Podcast where we talk to the founders of the future high-flying companies connected to Latin America.

Visit latitud.com to learn about the Latitud Fellowship program.

Altitud | Alejandro Gomez from Aptuno and pain-free residential rentals

“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 fundraising. And too many times, he saw the negative impact that lack of preparation has – not only for the business, but for the founder's confidence and ability to deal with rejection. A lot of them needed more effective processes.

That's why last year he launched Adamant Ventures, a firm dedicated to making fundraising easier and accessible. Today, he shares concepts like calendar density and purity of motivation, besides actionable tips to help you sharpen your axe.

Stick around to learn:

Some intricacies about investor psychology

How to rebalance the power dynamics between investors and founders

And his views on pre-money vs post-money SAFEs

Sharpening your fundraising axe: Jason Yeh, Adamant Ventures

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 the last 5 years, she has lived in 5 countries including Germany, Japan and the US. Now in the UK, she combines her experience in tech, education, product and community management to build Lernico, a new social learning platform, where expert can easily build and scale their online learning communities and monetize their knowledge through different types of premium content such as cohort-based courses.

Find out how Lernico works in this episode of Altitud, a segment of Latitud Podcast where we talk to the founders of the future high-flying companies connected to Latin America.

Altitud | Yasaman Rajaee from Lernico and the future of education

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.me was sold in 2016, and Henrique enrolled at Stanford University. But he left after just a few months to follow his entrepreneurial instincts. In YC, he and Pedro started Brex, a B2B fintech that is an all-in-one finance for business, disrupting the century-old industry of banking small companies.

Brex became a unicorn in record time. One year after its first product was released, it was valued at US$2.6Bn. Today, it's worth US$7Bn.

Henrique's thoughts on fundraising and super-high valuations

How Henrique and Pedro make it work as co-CEOs

And what is harder and easier about founding a company in the US vs in Brazil

Dreaming big and achieving big: Henrique Dubugras, Brex

César Salazar had years of building successful products for Latin America, but it was only after visiting Silicon Valley that he started considering that his ideas had the potential to go global. The realization that he lacked ambition was the first step to start supporting founders that might have been feeling the same way.

From that experience, he decided to start Mexican.VC, the first Silicon Valley seed fund dedicated to Mexican startups. In 2012, 500 Startups acquired Mexican.VC and brought César in as the 6th member of its investment team. He helped put 500 Startups on the map in Latin America, and consequently put Latin America on the radar of international investors. As the leader of the first 500 Startups office outside of the US, he was critically involved in making dozens of investments in the region.

César is now the founder and CEO of Beyond, where they aim to accelerate a global sphere of remote collaboration by helping companies build a dream team of creative problem solvers.

His takes on Latam's challenges and mindset shifts

Why tropicalization may not be the best strategy

Less obvious opportunities for founders in the region

And what he'd have done differently as an investor today

Finding the confidence to go global: César Salazar, Beyond and ex-500 Startups

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