We talk about disruption all the time — but few founders have lived it like Daniel Vogel.
In 2014, when crypto was still synonymous with Silk Road headlines and skepticism, Daniel left a comfortable Silicon Valley job to move back to Mexico and build Bitso — a crypto exchange in a country where millions remained outside the formal banking system.
Ten years later, Bitso is one of Latin America’s largest digital-asset platforms — a cross-border payments engine moving billions in remittances and one of the region’s first crypto unicorns. But its story is far more nuanced than the headlines.
Behind every “first crypto unicorn” lies a founder who spent a decade fighting regulators, skeptics, market crashes, and cultural resistance to risk — and still managed to build trust in one of the world’s most misunderstood industries.
What stood out about Daniel wasn’t the scale of Bitso’s success — it was the depth of his conviction and the discipline behind his obsession. He talks about curiosity as a lifelong engine, leadership as reinvention, and composure as a skill refined the night the Central Bank nearly shut the company down on Christmas Eve.
This conversation is a masterclass in resilience, clarity, and long-term thinking.
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Most unicorns never leave the stable.
We celebrate billion-dollar valuations on paper like they’re cash exits—but in Latin America, the real wins are different.
The true backbone of the region’s startup ecosystem isn’t paper unicorns. It’s the strategic acquisitions that return capital, recycle talent, and prove you can actually build, scale, and exit here. Yet we give them almost no airtime compared to funding rounds.
So earlier this year—months before Sem Parar, the Brazilian mobility giant owned by Corpay, a NYSE-listed payments company with a market cap of over $20 billion, acquired Gringo, a super app for drivers, for about $200 million—I sat down with Caique (Kai) Carvalho, Gringo’s co-founder and former Chief Product Officer.
We talked about what really matters when building a consumer-tech company:
The hard lessons behind two failed startups—and how they shaped Kai’s approach to product-market fit.
The principles of great UX—why listening to customers isn’t enough, and how design clarity turned Gringo into one of Brazil’s most-loved consumer apps.
The 80/20 rule of growth—why mastering one acquisition channel drove most of Gringo’s traction.
The business-model decisions that turned a WhatsApp MVP into a platform processing billions of reais in transactions every year.
The art of building a cap table—how Gringo brought in investors like Kaszek, VEF, and Valor Capital for their complementary strengths.
The culture principles that helped the team scale without losing its startup DNA.
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Is hustle culture the biggest startup lie? Is Brazil the end of credit cards? Can a fintech run like a pharmaceutical lab?
In this episode of The J Curve, I sit down with Piero Contezini — founder and executive chairman of Asaas, one of Brazil’s most influential fintech platforms serving thousands of SMEs and processing billions in payments. Backed by SoftBank, Bond, Bradesco, and other top investors, Asaas has evolved from a Stripe-for-Brazil experiment into a full-stack financial operating system with 37 revenue streams.
Piero’s story is one of relentless experimentation, radical cultural rules (like an 8-hour workday and zero-bug policy), and building in sync with Brazil’s regulatory revolution around PIX and Open Finance.
Here’s what we cover:
• Why service companies can’t scale like product companies
• How one SME pain point grew into 37 revenue streams
• The fintech monetization model tied directly to customer success
• The culture rules that shaped Asaas: 8-hour workdays and zero bugs
• How PIX and Open Finance reshaped Brazil’s fintech landscape
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Julio Vasconcellos is the Managing Partner at Atlantico, one of Latin America’s leading venture firms, and the driving force behind the Latin America Digital Transformation Report. Now in its 6th edition, the report has become the definitive data backbone for investors and founders seeking to understand the region’s tech landscape.
Previously, Julio was Facebook’s first country lead in Brazil and co-founder of Peixe Urbano, giving him a rare operator-to-investor perspective on LatAm’s digital transformation.
In this episode, Julio unpacks the 2025 report’s biggest findings—from venture returns to geopolitics, Pix’s disruption, AI adoption, and Mexico’s rise—and what they mean for global LPs, founders, and corporates betting on the region.
Here’s what we cover:
LatAm Venture Outperformance: Why local VC funds have quietly outperformed global peers, and what it will take to attract more LP capital.
Brazil vs. Mexico: Why Mexico features so prominently this year, how it compares to Brazil, and what it means for investors placing their first bets.
The Geopolitics of Tech: 39% of Brazilians say they’d align with China over the U.S.—what’s driving that sentiment?
Pix’s Relentless Rise: With 87% corporate penetration and $15B in fee savings, Pix is reshaping payments. What does this mean for Visa, Mastercard, and fintechs?
Brazil’s AI Moment: Over 60% of Brazilians have tried ChatGPT, and Microsoft just invested $2.7B in AI/cloud. What role will Brazil play in the global AI race?
Founder Archetypes: Atlantico’s research into the traits of successful Latin American founders—and how they compare to Silicon Valley counterparts.
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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. Olist has raised $314M from investors including SoftBank, Wellington Management, Goldman Sachs, Valor Capital Group, and Accel partner Kevin Efrusy, and operates in Brazil's $60B+ e-commerce market.
The Brazilian unicorn founder discusses marketplace strategy, venture capital, M&A integration, and building Latin America's leading SMB commerce platform.
Here's what we cover:
From Marketplace to Ecosystem: Olist began as a single storefront. Today it's an operating system for 45,000+ merchants. What does it really take to expand from one product to a multi-product platform?
The Three Pillars of a High-Performing Board: Behind every enduring company is a board built on the right foundation. What makes boards truly high-performing—and why do the best ones keep evolving?
The M&A Integration Playbook: Acquisitions can accelerate growth—or sink the ship. Tiago shares the hardest lessons from integration, why protecting new acquisitions from the gravitational pull of core operations is critical for innovation, and why earnouts are so tricky to get right.
Olist's Vision of Intelligent Commerce: What if your business could think for itself? Tiago explains how AI-powered decision-making could reshape SMB operations across Latin America's fragmented ecosystem.
The Investor Breakup Playbook: Not every relationship lasts forever—including with investors. Why does Tiago part ways with board members he "really likes," what tough conversations are required when someone who got you to $10M isn't right for $100M, and how secondaries help recycle the cap table without burning bridges?
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Why do 90% of LATAM founders struggle to raise venture capital funding? It's not their product or market - it's because they don't understand the game they're playing. This episode reveals the patterns behind every major VC success story from Nubank to QuintoAndar. I cover the fund economics that drive every investment decision, the founder profiles that get fast-tracked, the three business models that dominate portfolios, and the four-element framework for stacking odds in your favor.
Plus: why fundraising is actually sales, how to evaluate VCs before they evaluate you, and the exit math that determines premium outcomes.
Key Insights & Takeaways:
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Three ecosystem builders who created $1B+ in exits share the exact strategies behind Latin America's biggest tech wins in this rare roundtable, recorded live in São Paulo with AWS.
Daniela Binatti: Built Pismo into one of Visa's largest fintech acquisitions ($1B cash)
Romero Rodrigues: Sold Buscapé to Naspers for $374M, now Managing Partner at Headline. Early investor in Pismo and Wellhub
Carlos Costa: Valor Capital Managing Partner ($2B+ AUM) behind CloudWalk ($2.15B valuation), WellHub ($2.2B valuation), and Pismo ($1B exit)
Key Insights & Takeaways:
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Dr. Vitor Asseituno is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sami, Brazil's fastest-growing health insurance startup. Sami has raised $65M total funding and serves 20,000+ customers across 11 Brazilian cities in the $60B private health insurance market.
Key Insights & Takeaways:
1. The "pipeline mathematics" behind turning 100+ VC rejections into Series B success
2. Investor psychology: what resonates when pitching complex healthcare business models
3. How embracing broker networks after everyone said "avoid them" drives 50%+ of sales
4. AI workflow implementation: $800+ monthly savings per clinician and 30% EMR compliance improvement
5. Loss ratio optimization tactics: the specific changes that improved margins from 85% to 53%
6. Why regional focus beats national scale in Brazil's complex healthcare market
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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 an entire industry. What started as a Facebook group for truck drivers has evolved into a logistics giant, processing nearly $18 billion in freight transactions annually and serving ~900,000 active drivers—roughly 80% of Brazil’s entire trucking fleet.
In this episode, Federico shares how Frete.comsolved the classic chicken-and-egg dilemma, scaled a fragmented industry from the ground up, and transformed Brazilian complexity into a competitive moat. It’s a masterclass in grit, product obsession, and doing things that don’t scale.
Here’s what we cover:
For founders building in complex markets—and investors betting on logistics and fintech as the future—this episode is a must-listen.
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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 won’t recap every episode.
I’ll go deep into three.
João Del Valle (EBANX), Mike Packer (QED), and Gustavo Mapeli (Kanastra).
We’ll unpack EBANX’s global growth playbook, explore how QED built conviction around LATAM as an outsider VC—and what they’re betting on next—and break down how Kanastra scaled by defying startup orthodoxy.
Here’s what I’ll get into:
→ In LATAM, complexity isn’t a bug—it’s the moat.
→ Revenue is the best anti-dilution strategy.
→ In frontier markets, global expansion is a risk management.
→ Outsiders win in LATAM when they think like founders: test, learn, commit.
→ Multi-product vs. single-product: what founders need to ask before picking a lane.
If you enjoy today’s episode, please rate us on Spotify, subscribe to our newsletter at blog.thejcurve.com, and follow us on YouTube (@thejcurvepodcast) and Instagram (@olgamaslikhova).
Let’s get into it.
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 sustainably to $20M ARR. Along the way, they’ve pioneered a build-in-public strategy that attracts customers, builds trust, and fosters engagement. They’ve also developed sharp insights into segmenting by use case rather than industry, prioritizing speed and first-principles thinking, and leveraging customer feedback to scale efficiently—insights that have become part of their DNA and that they generously share in this conversation.
Here’s what we cover:
What founders need to know about horizontal vs. vertical strategies in B2B
Why building in public is more than a marketing tactic—it’s a B2B growth engine
How to find product-market fit in fragmented, high-friction industries
What Brazilian complexity taught Barte about opportunity and execution
Lessons in prioritizing product bets when everything feels urgent
This episode is the second in a special three-part series brought to you by AWS.
AWS has become a key growth partner for Latin America’s startup ecosystem—helping founders scale from idea to IPO with world-class cloud infrastructure, local expertise, and a global support network. We’re incredibly happy to partner with them.
For founders and investors who see Latin America’s friction as an opportunity—and fintech as the future—this conversation is a must-listen.
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Welcome to Season 4 of The J Curve with me, Olga Maslikhova.
This week, I sit down with João Del Valle, co-founder and CEO of EBANX—one of Latin America’s most iconic fintech stories and a company that built one of the most expansive cross-border payment platforms in the world.
Founded in Curitiba—well outside Brazil’s traditional tech hub of São Paulo—EBANX was built for scale from day one. Its global-by-design approach quickly became a powerful competitive moat, allowing the company to expand into 29 countries, process billions in cross-border payments, and power transactions for global giants like Spotify and AliExpress.
In this episode, we talk about what it really takes to scale global infrastructure from Latin America, why complexity is a competitive advantage, and how João evolved from founder and CTO to CEO of a company backed by Advent International in one of their largest-ever tech deals.
Here’s what we cover:
• How embracing regulatory and payment complexity became core to EBANX’s GTM playbook
• What 2022–2023 taught João about discipline, cold-blooded decision-making, and founder-mode leadership
• How João leads distributed teams across the U.S., China, and Latin America
• What it means to scale sustainably without blitzscaling—and still attract a firm like Advent International
• How João thinks about long-term planning, investor alignment, and the path to liquidity
• Tactical insight on navigating cross-border regulation, local payment rails, and real-time systems like Pix and UPI
For global operators, fintech builders, and investors looking for real lessons in execution—this episode is packed with insight.
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Welcome to Season 4 of The J Curve with me, Olga Maslikhova.
Last week I got to spend a few days in cidade maravilhosa—Rio de Janeiro—for Web Summit, which this year attracted over 37,000 people. The event was action-packed—both inside the venue and across the city, with an incredible lineup of side events.
It was a milestone week for The J Curve. We recorded our very first live episode on stage—a conversation I’ve been wanting to have for a long time, and the one we’re releasing today: a live interview with Mike Packer, partner at QED Investors.
QED is the legendary firm founded by Frank Rotman and Nigel Morris—the creators of Capital One and pioneers of data-driven credit long before it became mainstream. They’ve been betting on Latin America for over a decade. Their first investment in the region was Nubank, now the most valuable digital bank in the world.
Here’s what we cover:
— Why growth capital is the new frontier in LatAm
— What makes a founder truly fundable in 2025+
— AI’s real impact across QED’s portfolio
— What it really takes to IPO from LatAm
— The vertical SaaS trap—and the case for vertical AI
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Welcome to Season 4 of The J Curve 🎙️
This week, I sit down with Marcelo Lutz and Roberto Biselli, the co-founders and co-CEOs of Capim—a vertical SaaS + fintech company that started as an MBA class project and is now doing $10M+ in ARR, serving thousands of dental clinics across Brazil.
Their story breaks every rule—and proves that in Latin America’s most fragmented industries, the right wedge isn’t software. It’s credit.
Instead of trying to “disrupt” dentistry with a standard SaaS tool, Marcelo and Roberto built a credit product tailor-made for the quirks of Brazilian clinics—and used it to build their way into a much bigger platform play.
Here’s what we cover:
• How Capim reached $10M+ ARR in 3 years without a traditional SaaS GTM
• Supply-side fragmentation as a feature—not a bug—for B2B marketplaces
• Understanding distribution in offline markets—without relying on paid ads
• What 70,000+ dental procedures taught Capim about underwriting and risk
• How to think about product sequencing in complex industries
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Welcome to this special solo episode of Season 4 of The J Curve with me, Olga Maslikhova.
Every few months, I take a step back from the interviews to zoom out, connect the dots, and reflect on the themes that emerged from our conversations with Latin America’s most driven founders and sharpest investors.
This quarter, the learnings hit hard.
From Paulo Passoni’s breakdown of growth-stage capital and the M&A trap, to Roberto Oliveira’s slow-and-steady playbook at Blip, to Guilherme Horn’s vision for conversational commerce and fintech infrastructure on WhatsApp, to André Penha’s disciplined expansion strategy at QuintoAndar—one truth kept resurfacing:
In Latin America, the founders who win don’t just ride momentum. They build leverage.
Here’s what I cover:
• Why M&A caps in LatAm create a hidden trap for venture-backed startups
• The SoftBank boom, and what it got right—and wrong—about the region
• How control, not capital, gave Blip the upper hand in choosing investors
• Why the next wave of winners will scale productivity—not headcount
• The difference between surviving a downturn and compounding through it
• How conversational commerce + AI is reshaping the frontend and backend of business
• What Andre Penha’s expansion philosophy can teach us about product sequencing
• Why the real fintech opportunity isn’t credit—it’s infrastructure and insight
• And why sometimes the boldest thing a founder can do… is walk away and start again
This is your quarterly operator’s memo—full of tactical insight, strategic frameworks, and hard-won lessons from the frontlines of building in Latin America.
If you enjoy today’s episode, please rate us on Spotify, subscribe to our newsletter at blog.thejcurve.com, and follow us on YouTube (@thejcurvepodcast) and Instagram (@olgamaslikhova).
Let’s get into it.
Welcome to Season 4 of The J Curve 🎙️
This week, I sit down with Gustavo Mapeli, co-founder and CEO of Kanastra — one of the fastest-growing fintech infrastructure companies in Latin America. Gustavo started out building a traditional asset manager focused on private credit and wealth outside of Brazil’s core markets. But after feeling the pain of operating in a fragmented, manual, and outdated system, he made the bold decision to build the infrastructure he wished existed — and Kanastra was born.
Today, Kanastra powers over R$13B in assets across 150+ credit and securitization facilities — and has raised capital from top investors like Kaszek and QED.
Here’s what we cover:
♢ How Brazil became fertile ground for fintech infra – Why regulation, wealth decentralization, and embedded finance created the perfect storm.
♢ The contrarian decision to go multi-product from day one – And why Gustavo believes they had no other choice.
♢ How Kanastra is winning in a concentrated, low-tech market – Tactics for building trust, reputation, and distribution in a system built on inertia.
♢ Hiring and culture in high-performance teams – Why Gustavo believes the best cultures are the most exclusive.
♢ Founding with conviction – The story of Gustavo and his co-founder’s 15-year friendship, and how they’ve built what he calls an “unbreakable” partnership.
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Welcome to Season 4 of The J Curve 🎙️
It’s rare to meet a founder who bootstrapped for two decades—then brought Warburg Pincus, SoftBank, and Microsoft onto his cap table. This week, I sat down with Roberto Oliveira, founder of Blip, the company powering billions of conversations across WhatsApp in Latin America. We covered a 25-year founder journey that began with mobile phone booths and evolved into one of Brazil’s most powerful AI platforms.
Here’s what we cover:
♢ Why websites and apps are being replaced by messaging—and how brands need to adapt now
♢ How AI is transforming sales, marketing, and customer service
♢ Why Brazil is the perfect lab for the future of business
♢ The playbook for taking Blip global, where the biggest opportunities lie, and why the U.S. is lagging behind
This one’s about product timing, strategic architecture, and building a truly global company—starting from Belo Horizonte.
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Welcome to Season 4 of The J Curve 🎙️
This week, I sit down with Guilherme Horn, one of the most influential figures in LatAm’s fintech and tech landscape. Guilherme has built and exited multiple companies, including Agora (acquired for $500M by Bradesco), which helped transform Brazil’s stock market, and Órama, the country’s first fully cloud-based bank. Now, as WhatsApp’s Head of Strategic Markets, he’s driving a major shift in how businesses, banks, and governments leverage messaging as their primary digital infrastructure.
Here’s what we cover:
♢ Why WhatsApp is replacing websites and apps – The rise of C-commerce and what it means for businesses.
♢ Why Brazil leapfrogged the U.S. in digital adoption – The cultural and structural reasons behind WhatsApp’s dominance.
♢ AI in fintech – How automation will redefine credit, payments, and personal finance.
♢ How WhatsApp is becoming a financial services hub – and all the surprising ways banks are integrating into chat.
♢ What founders must unlearn when they scale – Why the skills that get you to $10M won’t get you to $100M.
This episode is for founders navigating tough markets, investors looking for the next breakout tech, and operators rethinking how businesses connect with customers. It is packed with unfiltered insights you won’t hear anywhere else. Let’s get into it. 🚀
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This week, I sit down with Andre Penha, co-founder of QuintoAndar and CEO of IBBX, for a brutally honest, founder-first conversation on building and scaling in Latin America.Andre built QuintoAndar into a $5B+ real estate giant, raised $750M from top investors, and is now betting on wireless electricity, aiming to make chargers, cables, and batteries obsolete with IBBX.Here’s what we cover:♢ Why product—not storytelling—wins in fundraising and how investors went from doubting QuintoAndar to fighting to get in.♢ How QuintoAndar cracked real estate’s biggest inefficiencies – and why transparency, speed, and reliability were non-negotiable for scale.♢ Scaling culture the hard way – Why Andre enforced a “No Assholes Allowed” rule and fired high performers who didn’t align.♢ How to make high-stakes decisions – The Option A vs. Option B framework Andre used to allocate resources and bet on the right things.♢ Board governance done right – How to turn your board into a growth accelerator, not a time drain.♢ Why wireless power is the next trillion-dollar industry – And how IBBX is betting on the future of energy.If you’re a founder, investor, or just obsessed with how to build game-changing companies, this episode is packed with unfiltered insights you won’t hear anywhere else. Let’s get into it. 🚀
Welcome to Season 4 of The J Curve 🎙️
Kicking off this season with a must-listen episode featuring Paulo Passoni, one of the sharpest investors in Latin America. Paulo played a key role in SoftBank’s multi-billion-dollar investment in Latin America’s tech sector, serving on the boards of Quinto Andar, VTEX, and Creditas. Now at Valor Capital, he’s focused on backing and scaling the region’s next generation of high-growth startups.
This conversation is a direct, tactical breakdown of what really matters when building and scaling in LatAm. Here’s what we cover:
♢ Why M&A is a broken exit strategy for VCs in LatAm – and why startups need to think bigger.
♢ The hard truth about IPOs – If you don’t hit $300M+ in revenue, forget about a public listing.
♢ Why the “$200M acquisition trap” kills LatAm’s unicorn potential – and what founders should optimize for instead.
♢ How SoftBank’s cash wave reshaped the market – and the pricing mistakes that investors (including Paulo) made.
♢ The scarcity of growth capital in LatAm – what it means for startups at Series B and beyond.
♢ How to spot truly “crazy” founders – and why they are the only ones who build billion-dollar businesses.
♢ The game-changing role of AI in scaling startups faster with fewer people.
If you’re building or investing in LatAm, this is the playbook you need to hear.
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