Max Rivera is one of those people.

He was coding as a boy in Honduras, long before it was obvious where any of it would lead. That early obsession with how things worked became the thread that pulled him all the way to a seat on one of the defining rocket ships of the last decade. This being a Halloween episode, I will say it plainly: the only thing haunting about Max’s story is how clearly he saw what was coming before the rest of us did.

The rocket ship

Max joined Snap and helped scale it into a billion-dollar company. We spent real time on what that actually teaches you, because scaling is a different skill than starting.

He talked honestly about the growth, and about what came after. The IPO is the moment everyone romanticizes, but the post-IPO chapter is where the real lessons live. Going public changes the physics of a company. The pressures change, the timelines change, the scrutiny changes. Riding a rocket up is exhilarating. Learning to fly the thing once everyone is watching is the harder, quieter education, and it is the one most founders never hear about.

Ghost Angels, and investing in your own

Out of that experience came Ghost Angels, the fund Max runs with fellow tech alumni. What I appreciated is how unpretentious he is about it. It started as a side project, a way for operators who had been through the fire to back the next generation of founders with real pattern recognition instead of theory.

That is a model worth paying attention to. Some of the best early capital does not come from institutions. It comes from operators who have actually built and scaled something, who know what the hard parts feel like from the inside, and who choose to turn around and open the door for someone behind them.

Social media split in two

Here is the idea from this episode I cannot stop thinking about. Max argues that social media has bifurcated into connection and content.

For years we used one word, social media, for two things that were quietly pulling apart. On one side is connection, the part that is actually about the people you know. On the other is content, the endless feed that has far more in common with television than with friendship. Most of the platforms we grew up calling social are now, in truth, media companies competing for attention.

Once you see that split, you cannot unsee it. It explains why the apps feel different than they used to, and it tells you where the next openings are.

The opportunity hiding in the disruption

Which leads to the part founders should really sit with. Max sees enormous opportunity for disruption as AI reshapes media, and he does not think most people are looking in the right place.

When the cost and speed of making content collapse, the entire media landscape is up for grabs. The incumbents are built for the old model. The next category-defining companies will be built by people who understand that the ground has shifted and move while everyone else is still defending the old thing. That is where Max is pointing his attention, and it is worth pointing yours there too.

The one trait

We got to the question every founder wants answered: what makes someone investable.

Max’s answer was not the idea, and it was not the pedigree. It was obsession, paired with resilience. The founders who make it are the ones who cannot put the problem down, who keep going long after a reasonable person would have quit. Ideas change. Markets shift. The obsession is the thing that carries a founder through the parts of the journey that break everyone else.

For all the frameworks in venture, it keeps coming back to something that simple and that human.

Why this conversation matters

Max Rivera is proof of something our community needs to see more often. A kid coding in Honduras can end up helping build a rocket ship and then financing the next ones. The path is not a straight line and it is not reserved for people who started with every advantage. It is built, obsessively, one hard lesson at a time.

Put on the episode, grab whatever candy you have left, and listen to how he saw it all coming.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Max Rivera.

Seguimos. 🎃🇵🇷

— Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

“It was like this did not exist until I physically made it,” he told me.

That sentence is the whole man. Luis is a first-generation college student who went from Trinity to a PhD in organic chemistry at Harvard, held patents, worked at Scripps, taught, consulted, and eventually became an investor at Capital Factory. On paper it looks like a series of career changes. Listen to him talk and you realize it was one continuous act the entire time: making things that did not exist before, and owning what happened next.

Chemistry was never just technical

Most people file organic chemistry under “hard science” and move on. Luis files it under creative work.

He describes it the way a sculptor describes stone. There are rules, there are materials, there is a long tradition you are working inside of, and within all of that constraint you are still making something new. The lab coat fools people. What is actually happening is invention.

That reframe matters, because it explains why the jump to startups was not a jump at all. A founder works exactly the same way. Rules, materials, tradition, and the stubborn attempt to bring something new into a world that did not ask for it yet.

The flask he dropped

My favorite story in this episode is a small one. As an undergraduate, Luis made a brand new molecule, and then he dropped the flask. Gone. Which meant he had to make it again.

I love it because it is the entire founder experience compressed into one moment. You do the impossible thing, you lose it, and the only option is to go back to the bench and do the impossible thing again. Nobody claps. You just start over, because the work is the point.

The only one in the room

We did not skip the harder part. Luis talked honestly about what it felt like to rarely see a Hispanic surname in the rooms he was walking into, graduate school, academia, consulting, venture. The isolation was real at every stage.

He did not tell that story for sympathy. He told it the way someone tells you about terrain they crossed so you know it can be crossed. For every scientist and every Latino founder who has been the only one in the room, that honesty is worth the listen by itself.

“It isn’t that I lost, it’s that I gained”

When Luis left chemistry, the easy narrative would be loss. He spent years becoming world-class at one thing and then walked away from it.

He refuses that framing completely. “It isn’t that I lost, it’s that I gained,” he said. Every skill carried forward. The patenting and tech transfer, the teaching, the consulting, the discipline of designing an experiment and reading the result honestly. All of it turned out to be exactly what venture diligence requires. He did not abandon the scientist. He gave the scientist a bigger lab.

Science project or business

This is the line every technical founder needs burned into their memory, and Luis says it plainly. A promising scientific idea is not automatically a company.

Both science and startups run on experiments that might work or might fail. But a founder has to do something a researcher never has to do: connect the work to a customer, a market, and a model that pays for itself. The experiment can succeed brilliantly in the lab and still be a science project, not a business. Knowing the difference is most of the job.

Build boldly

Luis has helped more than 200 founders over the years, not through one program but through decades of mentoring students, early founders, and portfolio companies. Ask him what he loves and he does not say deals. He says teaching. Helping a founder reflect on what they just learned, name the next experiment, and take the next step.

His parting charge was simple. “We need more founders building boldly.” At any scale, from any background, out of any discipline. Especially the people who are used to being the only one in the room.

If you have ever wondered whether your training in one world could matter in another, this conversation is your answer.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Dr. Luis Martinez.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

Domingo Guerra has lived both sides of that clock. In this episode of The Corridor, he traced a path that started in Mexico, ran through the hard middle of building and eventually selling a company, and landed where he is now, as Managing Partner at Chispa VC, writing checks into the founders building the next generation of security. What makes the conversation worth your time is that he does not tell the story the way most investors tell it, cleaned up and inevitable. He tells it the way an operator remembers it, with the scars still visible.

The move that started everything

Domingo’s journey from Mexico to Silicon Valley is the kind of story our community knows well, even when the specifics differ. You leave what is familiar, you carry more than your fair share of doubt, and you arrive somewhere that was not built with you in mind. That experience does not disappear when you succeed. It becomes the lens you see everything else through, including, years later, the founders sitting across the table from you asking for money.

He is clear that the outsider’s path was not a disadvantage he overcame. It was part of what taught him to see opportunities other people walked right past.

What bootstrapping teaches that a term sheet cannot

Before Domingo was an investor, he was a founder who had to make payroll. We spent real time on what that actually teaches you, because it is the part that gets romanticized and then forgotten.

Bootstrapping forces a kind of discipline that funded companies often skip. Every dollar has to come from a customer who chose to pay you, which means you learn very quickly whether anyone actually wants what you are building. There is no runway to hide behind and no narrative that substitutes for revenue. Domingo talked about timing and market readiness not as abstract strategy but as something he felt in his own cash flow, the difference between a product the market was ready for and one it simply was not yet.

That is why he keeps coming back to founders and sales. In the earliest stage, the company is the founder, and the founder’s ability to sell, to a customer, to a hire, to an investor, is often the whole business. Everything else is still a promise.

The operator becomes a sharper investor

There is a reason the best early-stage investors tend to be people who have built something themselves. When you have sat in the founder’s chair, you stop grading the pitch and start reading the person. You know which problems are survivable and which ones quietly kill a company. You know the difference between a founder who is early and a founder who is wrong, because you have been both.

Domingo’s operator experience shows up in what he chooses to back. He is less interested in the company that looks finished and more interested in the one solving a problem that genuinely matters, where impact and return are not at odds but point in the same direction.

Why security is the fight that defines this era

Then we got to the work he cares most about, which is cybersecurity in the age of AI.

The uncomfortable truth is that AI does not just help the defenders. It arms the attackers at the same time, and often faster. The same tools that let a small team build remarkable things also let a bad actor generate attacks at a scale and sophistication that used to require a nation-state. The gap between offense and defense is widening, and the people working to close it are doing some of the most consequential building happening anywhere right now.

Domingo’s view is that security is no longer a feature you add at the end. In the AI era it is the foundation everything else stands on, and the founders who understand that early, there is that word again, are the ones building the companies that will matter.

Why this conversation matters

Domingo Guerra’s story is a reminder that the lessons you earn as an operator do not expire. They compound. The founder who learned the hard way what it costs to be early became an investor who can spot the founders who are early in the right way, at the right moment, on the right problem.

In a moment when everyone is chasing the same AI narrative, that kind of judgment is the rarest thing there is.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Domingo Guerra.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

We gathered an intimate room of Latino founders, investors, operators, and cultural leaders for the first-ever live episode of The Corridor, a fireside conversation with Luis A. Miranda Jr. Founding president of the Hispanic Federation. Author of Relentless. One of the most consequential builders of Latino civic and cultural power this country has ever produced. And for one evening, he sat down with us and told the truth about what it actually takes to build something that outlasts you.

Today, that conversation becomes Episode 20 of The Corridor. And whether you were there or you’re hearing it for the first time, I wanted to share a little of what that night meant.

What it felt like to be in that room

I’ve hosted a lot of conversations. This one was different.

There’s a particular kind of energy that happens when our people gather with intention, when founders, investors, and builders who are usually scattered across the city find themselves in the same room, looking around and realizing how many of us there are, and how much we’re building. You could feel it. People stayed long after the conversation ended, trading stories, making introductions, exchanging the kind of “we should work together” that actually turns into something.

That energy is the whole reason The Corridor exists. For too long, our stories got told by other people, or not at all. That night, in that room, we told them ourselves.

What Luis gave us

Luis didn’t give us a keynote. He gave us honesty.

He talked about what it takes to build institutions that outlast the people who start them, the patience, the sacrifice, the willingness to play a long game whose payoff you may never fully see. He talked about moving between culture and capital across decades, about Puerto Rico and the responsibility he carries for it, and about the generations coming up behind him. He reminded a room full of ambitious people that the point was never just to succeed. The point was to open doors, and to make sure someone walks through them after you.

For those of us building, raising, creating, trying to prove that our community belongs in rooms it was long kept out of, it was exactly the reminder we needed. That it can be done. That it has been done. And that it’s our turn to do it.

Gracias

An evening like this doesn’t happen alone.

To SomosVC and José Piñero, thank you for partnering with us and believing this was worth building. To Silicon Valley Bank, thank you for opening your doors and giving us such a beautiful space. And to Jennifer Mendez, thank you for helping make every detail run seamlessly.

To everyone who filled that room: thank you. You didn’t have to be there, but you were, and your presence is what made it what it was. The messages I received afterward, from people who said it didn’t feel like a traditional event, that it felt real, that they left inspired, meant more than you know.

And to Luis: thank you for your generosity, your honesty, and your time. Interviewing you had been a goal of mine for years. Getting to do it, surrounded by our community, is something I’ll never forget.

For those who missed it

If you weren’t in the room, I’m glad you’re here now. Because the whole point of recording it was so this conversation could reach far beyond the people who could fit into one evening in New York.

Episode 20 is live today. I hope it gives you what it gave all of us that night, a little more belief that where we come from is not a limit, that our stories are worth telling, and that the room we’ve always deserved is one we can build ourselves.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Luis A. Miranda Jr.

This is only the beginning.

Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts, and watch the full conversation on YouTube.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

José grew up working the fields alongside his family, part of the migrant stream that follows the harvest across California. School was interrupted constantly. And somewhere in that childhood, watching the Apollo moon landing on a black-and-white television, a boy who had every reason to believe the stars were not for him decided that one day, they would be.

This episode is about how he got there. And it’s less about space than you’d think.

The five ingredients

The heart of José’s story is a recipe, literally. His father gave him a five-step formula for success, a simple, repeatable roadmap that a kid in the fields could actually follow. It’s the framework that carried him from farm work to orbit, and in the episode he walks through all five.

I won’t lay them all out here, because hearing José explain them, in his own words, with his own life as the proof, lands far harder than any summary. But the first one is worth sitting with, because everything else is built on it: determine your purpose in life. Before the education, before the applications, before the rejections, José had a clear destination. The purpose came first. The roadmap followed. And that clarity is what made the years of grind survivable, because he always knew what they were for.

That’s the part most people skip. They chase the goal without ever defining the purpose underneath it. José’s father understood that the purpose is the engine. Everything else is just steps.

Eleven times

NASA rejected José Hernández eleven times.

Think about what that actually means. Eleven times, he prepared an application, sent it in, and waited. Eleven times, the answer came back no. Most people quit after the first. Many never apply at all, because the fear of the no is enough to stop them.

What José does in this conversation is explain what he did between those rejections, because that’s the real story. Each no wasn’t a verdict. It was information. He’d look at what he lacked, go improve exactly that, and come back stronger. He treated rejection as a roadmap of its own, a list of what to fix before the next try. That reframe, that a no is a diagnostic and not a death sentence, is the single most useful thing a founder or a dreamer can take from this episode.

His line says it better than I can: never give up. Perseverance is key. It sounds simple until you remember he said it eleven rejections deep.

The choice most people never talk about

One of the most human moments in the conversation isn’t about triumph. It’s about a trade-off.

At one point in his journey, José faced a decision between advancing his career, an international training assignment most people in his position would never turn down, and being present for his family. And he chose family. He’s honest about what that meant, and why he made the call he made. In a story that could easily be told as pure ambition, this is the moment that reveals the man underneath the achievement: someone who understood that the purpose his father told him to find was never just about him.

For every founder and builder listening who wrestles with the cost of the climb, this part of the episode is worth the whole thing.

Where you start does not define your destination

If there’s one line from this conversation that belongs on a wall, it’s that one. Where you start does not define your destination.

José is living proof. The distance between a field in California and the window of a spacecraft looking back at Earth is not a distance most people can imagine crossing. He crossed it, not because the odds were with him, but because he had a purpose, a roadmap, and the refusal to let eleven rejections be the end of the sentence.

And what moves me most is what he’s doing now. He didn’t take that story and disappear into it. He turned it into a mission, through his foundation, his books, and his work inspiring the next generation of Latino kids who are sitting in front of their own black-and-white TVs, daring to dream something the world says isn’t for them. He’s spent his life since becoming the proof he needed to see as a boy.

That’s why I wanted him on The Corridor. Because this show exists to put stories like his in front of the people who need them most, the founders, the builders, the kids in the fields, who need to know that the no’s are survivable, that the purpose matters more than the odds, and that where you start is not where you have to finish.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with José M. Hernández.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

Martha spent more than two decades inside the healthcare industry before she became an advisor and an investor. She knows the regulation, the payers, the providers, the machinery of Medicaid and Medicare, not from a case study, but from the inside. Today she helps startups navigate that machinery, and she evaluates them as an angel investor. This episode of The Corridor is a rare thing: an honest look at healthcare innovation from someone who has seen it fail up close, and knows why.

Why healthcare breaks good companies

Martha is direct about something founders underestimate constantly: healthcare may be the most complex industry in the world to build in.

It isn’t one market. It’s a tangle of regulators, payers, providers, and patients, each with different incentives, different timelines, and different definitions of success. A product that would thrive anywhere else can die here, not because it’s a bad product, but because the founder never understood the machinery it had to move through. As Martha puts it, understanding the complexities behind the scenes takes time, effort, and capital. Founders who treat healthcare like any other software market, build it, sell it, scale it, run straight into a wall they never saw coming.

That’s the first hard truth of this episode: in healthcare, understanding the system isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the entire game.

The years inside are the edge

What makes Martha’s perspective valuable is that she isn’t theorizing. Her two decades inside the industry are exactly what let her see what founders miss.

She knows how a payer actually makes decisions. She knows what a provider needs before they’ll adopt something new. She knows where the regulatory landmines are buried, and how long it really takes to get a solution accepted into the flow of how care gets delivered and paid for. That inside knowledge is the difference between a founder who spends two years learning these lessons the expensive way and one who navigates them from the start. It’s also, she explains, exactly what she brings to the startups she advises and backs, the map of a system that outsiders keep trying to cross blind.

What actually makes a healthcare startup investable

For the founders listening, this is the part worth studying. When Martha looks at a healthcare startup as an investor, she’s evaluating more than the product.

She’s looking at whether the team has the resilience and the networks to survive a long, hard, relationship-driven industry. Healthcare doesn’t reward the fastest mover; it rewards the one who can endure the slow grind of pilots, approvals, and trust-building without running out of money or will. As she puts it, team resilience and networks are critical for startup success. The technology gets you in the door. The team’s ability to withstand how long everything takes is what determines whether you make it through.

The trap of the trend

One of the sharpest warnings in the conversation is about founders who build on top of a temporary market trend rather than a durable problem.

Healthcare, like every sector right now, has its waves, the hot category, the buzzword, the thing everyone’s funding this quarter. Martha is wary of founders who ride those waves, because trends fade, and a company built on a fading trend fades with it. The founders who last are the ones solving a problem the system will still have long after the hype moves on. It’s a discipline that separates the durable companies from the ones that raise on momentum and disappear when it stops.

Build for the system that exists

Another theme Martha keeps returning to: the best healthcare solutions are built within the reality of the existing system, not around a fantasy of how it should work.

The infrastructure has to be ready to receive your technology. The pilot has to be designed to actually prove something to the people who make adoption decisions. Founders who understand this, who design their pilots and their go-to-market around how healthcare truly operates, dramatically improve their odds. Those who build for an idealized version of the industry, one without the friction, the approvals, the entrenched incentives, tend to learn the hard way that the system doesn’t bend to a good idea. It has to be worked with, on its own terms.

Fall in love with the problem

If there’s one line from this episode that founders should write down, it’s this: fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

It sounds simple, and it’s the quiet cause of more startup failures than most people admit. Founders who fall in love with their solution defend it even when the market tells them it’s wrong. Founders who fall in love with the problem stay flexible, they change the solution as many times as it takes, because what they care about is solving the thing, not being right about how. In an industry as unforgiving as healthcare, that flexibility isn’t a soft skill. It’s survival.

The bigger lesson

Martha’s episode is about healthcare, but the deeper lesson reaches every founder building in a hard, regulated, insider-driven industry, the kind of overlooked, unglamorous markets this show comes back to again and again. The most valuable opportunities are often guarded by complexity, and the founders who win are the ones who respect that complexity enough to actually understand it before they try to change it.

She spent twenty years learning how the system really works. This conversation is a chance to borrow some of that hard-won knowledge, and maybe save yourself a year of learning it the expensive way.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Martha Mercogliano.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

Adrianna is a Partner at Cherryrock Capital, where she leads Series A and B rounds into the founders the market keeps overlooking. But before the term sheets and the fund, there was a family business, and a lesson that shaped everything. This episode of The Corridor traces the line from that lesson to the checks she writes today, and along the way she makes one of the sharpest cases for backing underrepresented founders I’ve heard on this show.

The ownership mindset

Adrianna keeps coming back to a single idea: the ownership mindset. And for her, it isn’t a business-school concept. It’s something she watched up close and absorbed early, from a family that built something of their own.

When you grow up around people who own the business, who carry the risk, feel the cash-flow gap before anyone tells them it’s coming, and understand that every decision lands on them, you learn to see companies differently. As she puts it, that ownership mindset is in our DNA. It’s the lens she now brings to every founder she evaluates: does this person think like an owner, carry the weight like an owner, understand their numbers like an owner? Because that mindset, she argues, is one of the truest signals of who will actually make it.

From operating to investing

That instinct is what carried Adrianna from operating into investing, and eventually into building at Cherryrock. Earlier in her career she built a scout program specifically to find Black, Latina, and Indigenous founders that no one else was looking for, to help them reach the seed stage and beyond. Cherryrock, she explains, is the same bet made at a different altitude.

Instead of writing small early checks and hoping someone else leads, Cherryrock leads rounds at Series A and B with larger checks. It’s a deliberate choice about where the opportunity compounds. The same conviction, applied at the stage where conviction turns into ownership and real returns.

Not a favor. An arbitrage.

Here is the reframe at the heart of the episode, and the one I most want people to sit with.

When most people talk about funding underrepresented founders, they reach for the language of fairness, of doing the right thing. Adrianna reaches for a different word: arbitrage. To her, this isn’t charity, and it isn’t a favor. It’s a mispricing. The market has consistently undervalued these founders, and the investor who sees that clearly is looking at an opportunity the rest of the market is walking past.

And her argument isn’t sentimental. She points to something concrete: that underrepresented founders often prove more efficient and exit faster, doing more with less because they had to. That’s not a diversity talking point. It’s a returns argument. The bias in the system creates the discount; the discount is the opportunity; and Cherryrock is built to capture it at the stage where it compounds most.

What actually makes a founder investable

For the founders in the audience, this is the part worth studying. Adrianna is clear that reaching Series A is a real bar, and she’s specific about what clears it.

It comes down to operational discipline, authenticity, and command of your own numbers. Founders who understand their data cold, who can show a repeatable, scalable model, and who carry themselves with genuine ownership are the ones who earn the check. She’s honest that the market has changed, and that founders’ strategies have to change with it. The bar that worked two years ago isn’t the bar today. Understanding your numbers and building something genuinely repeatable isn’t optional anymore; it’s the price of admission.

The gap where good companies die

One of the most useful stretches of the conversation is about the jump from seed to Series A, the stage where so many promising companies quietly stall out.

It’s a brutal gap, and Adrianna, whose whole focus is leading at exactly that transition, understands why. The companies that make it aren’t just the ones with a good idea. They’re the ones that built the operational muscle, the discipline, and the command of their metrics that a Series A investor demands. For founders sitting at seed and wondering what it takes to get to the next round, her answer is a roadmap: stop performing traction and start proving it, with numbers you own and a model that scales.

AI, and the shifting ground

She doesn’t shy away from the elephant in every founder’s room right now: AI. Her framing is balanced, it’s both a challenge and an opportunity, reshaping funding dynamics and market expectations at the same time. The founders who treat it as a genuine tool for building a more efficient, more defensible business will find advantage in it. The ones who treat it as a buzzword to raise on will get exposed. Either way, the ground is shifting, and standing still isn’t a strategy.

The advice that ties it together

Adrianna’s message to underrepresented founders is the throughline of everything she believes: trust yourself, and build the rooms you want to exist in. Don’t wait for permission from a system that was slow to see you. Understand your business better than anyone, carry it like an owner, and create the spaces, and eventually the capital, that the next founder will need.

That’s really the whole arc of her story. A kid learning ownership at a family business became the investor writing the checks that let the next generation own something too. The ledger she read as a child, and the term sheets she signs now, are the same instrument, pointed at the same belief: that the talent was always there, and the market just hadn’t priced it yet.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Adrianna Samaniego.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

Before she was a founder, before MIT, before any of it, Victoria was a farmer. And that single fact is what makes this episode different from any other conversation about fintech you’ll hear this year. Because she isn’t solving an abstract problem she read about in a pitch deck. She’s solving the one that nearly broke her, and every farmer she knows.

The wait that doesn’t make sense

Here’s the tension at the center of this episode, and it’s one most people have never thought about for a single second.

A farmer needs credit. Their land is producing. Their operation is real. And yet, getting a loan can take somewhere between thirty and ninety days, buried in paperwork, waiting, while the season moves on without them. In an era where you can get approved for almost anything in minutes, why does the industry that literally feeds us still move at the speed of fax machines?

The answer is more frustrating than you’d expect, and Victoria explains exactly where the system breaks. There’s a gap, she told me, between what’s actually happening on a farm and what a lender is able to see. Bridging that gap has always required something the industry never had enough of. What that missing ingredient is, and why it’s kept an entire trillion-dollar industry stuck, is one of the most clarifying things she says in the whole conversation.

From months to minutes

Then there’s the number that made me stop the recording in my head.

What takes the traditional system thirty to ninety days, Victoria’s company, Agxes, can do in a fraction of that time. Not a little faster. A different order of magnitude. The way she and her team pulled that off, what they actually feed the machine, how it reads a piece of land, and why it can suddenly see what a human loan officer never could, is the part of this episode I won’t spoil here. It’s better heard from the person who built it.

I’ll just say this: once she explains how it works, you’ll wonder why nobody did it sooner. And the answer to that question is the whole reason this episode matters.

Why nobody else could have built this

There’s a reason this company came from a farmer and not from a room full of engineers in San Francisco.

Victoria understands something about lending to farmers that you cannot learn from a spreadsheet, that the same crop, in two different places, under two different sets of local conditions, is two completely different risks. That kind of ground-truth knowledge is exactly what the industry has been missing, and it’s exactly what she carries in her bones from those years in the field. In the episode, she gets into why local understanding is the difference between a good loan and a bad one, and why the people who’ve only ever looked at agriculture from the outside keep getting it wrong.

It’s a quiet argument for something bigger than farming: that the best person to fix a broken industry is often the one who lived inside it.

The part founders need to hear

If you’re building something, especially in an old, overlooked, unglamorous industry, there’s a stretch of this conversation that’s worth the listen on its own.

Victoria is honest about how hard it is to build trust in a traditional industry that doesn’t move fast and has every reason to be skeptical of a newcomer. How she earns it, what she has to prove before anyone will change how they’ve done things for decades, is a real lesson for any founder trying to sell something new to a world that likes things the old way. And her advice for founders building in the industries the tech world overlooks is the kind of thing you’ll want to write down. I’m not going to repeat it here, because the way she says it, having actually done it, carries more weight than any summary of mine could.

The bigger story

This is an episode about agricultural lending. But it’s really about something The Corridor comes back to again and again: that the most valuable opportunities are hiding in the industries nobody’s watching, and the best founders are often the ones who lived the problem before they ever decided to solve it.

Victoria Tostado went from the field to the front of one of the most overlooked, and most important, markets there is. How she did it, and where she’s taking it, is the whole conversation.

You’re going to want to hear this one from her.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Victoria Tostado.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

She’s the founding GP of Velocity Catalyst, and her model is genuinely unusual: she invests directly into pre-seed startups, and she anchors the emerging fund managers building around them. A fund and a fund-of-funds, working in tandem, designed not to make one good bet but to rebuild an entire regional capital stack from the ground up. This episode of The Corridor is about why she built it that way, and what she’s learned climbing from one side of the table to the other.

From founder to funder

Desiree didn’t start on the investing side. She was a founder first. She built companies and went through the raise herself, the rejection, the doubt, the grind of convincing people to believe in something that only exists in your head. She lived the thing before she ever funded it.

That order matters, because it shapes everything about how she invests now. When she talks about backing founders, she’s not theorizing about a struggle she read about. She’s remembering it. And the single line that captures what that experience taught her is the one that anchors this whole episode: no doesn’t always mean no forever. A rejection isn’t a verdict. It’s a moment in time, often about timing or fit rather than merit, and the founders who understand that are the ones who keep going long enough to get to yes.

Two lanes, one system

The heart of Velocity Catalyst is its dual structure, and Desiree is clear about why it exists.

Investing directly into startups gets you exposure to the companies. But a single fund writing checks into founders doesn’t fix the deeper problem, which is that entire regions and entire communities lack the surrounding infrastructure of capital that lets founders climb from one stage to the next. So alongside the direct investing, Velocity anchors emerging fund managers, the smaller, focused funds who will provide the follow-on capital and the local relationships that founders need.

The two lanes reinforce each other. The direct investments give her a ground-level view of the ecosystem. The fund-of-funds work multiplies her impact, because every emerging manager she backs goes on to fund dozens of founders she’d never reach alone. It’s a system designed to build a stack, not just a portfolio.

Why emerging managers

Desiree’s bet on emerging managers is a bet most large investors don’t make, and her reasoning is worth understanding.

Small, focused funds see what the big generalists miss. They have proximity, to a region, to an industry, to a community, that a large coastal fund simply doesn’t. They’re closer to the founders, they move faster, and they understand the local context that determines which companies actually work. For a region trying to build a real startup ecosystem, these managers are the connective tissue. Back them, and you’re not funding one fund; you’re seeding the infrastructure that lets a whole ecosystem compound.

That’s also why the regional advantage matters so much to her. Venture has spent decades concentrated in a few zip codes. Desiree’s thesis is that the overlooked regions, and the managers who know them, are where a lot of the next opportunity lives, precisely because everyone else stopped looking.

Not charity. Catalyst.

The part of the conversation I most want people to sit with is how Desiree frames the work of backing underrepresented founders.

She is direct that this is not charity. It’s a returns strategy built on a market that’s been misread. But she’s also honest about something more nuanced: that at the earliest, riskiest stage, philanthropic capital can be a catalyst. Certain high-risk, high-reward bets, the ones traditional capital won’t touch until someone else de-risks them, sometimes need a different kind of first dollar to get off the ground. Used well, that catalytic capital doesn’t replace venture returns; it unlocks the companies that go on to generate them.

The distinction she’s drawing is important. Treating underrepresented founders as charity cases is exactly the framing that has held the whole system back, it lowers expectations and misprices the opportunity. But recognizing that the earliest stage of high-risk innovation sometimes needs catalytic fuel is just good ecosystem design. One is condescension. The other is strategy.

What building a fund taught her that building a company didn’t

Having done both, Desiree is clear-eyed about how different they are. Building a startup and raising a fund look similar from the outside, both are acts of convincing people to believe before there’s proof, but the mechanics diverge. And underneath both, she keeps returning to the same truth about how venture actually works: it’s more network-driven and reputation-based than anything else.

That’s not a cynical observation. It’s a practical one, and it’s generous advice for anyone building without an inherited network. The relationships and the reputation you build are the real currency. They’re what turn a cold pitch into a warm introduction, a maybe into a yes, and a first fund into a second. For founders and emerging managers alike, the lesson is the same: invest in the network and the reputation as deliberately as you invest in the product.

The throughline

What connects all of it, the dual fund model, the bet on emerging managers, the catalytic capital, the emphasis on network, is a single conviction: the system is fixable, but not one check at a time. Desiree isn’t trying to fund a few great companies. She’s trying to build the infrastructure that lets whole ecosystems and whole communities climb. And she’s doing it from the belief that the talent was always there, waiting on capital and access that finally show up.

For the founder who just got a no, or the emerging manager wondering whether they belong in the room, her message is the one she opened with. No doesn’t always mean no forever. Keep building. Keep asking. The room is bigger than it looks, and people like Desiree are working to make sure there’s a place in it for you.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Desiree Vargas Wrigley.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

That gap is the whole reason Corello exists, and it’s the sentence Carlos Maiguel kept coming back to in our conversation: the data exists, and the intelligence does not.

This episode of The Corridor is about what happens when you point modern AI at one of the least glamorous, most essential industries there is, and why the factories the tech world overlooks may be exactly where AI creates the most value.

Why manufacturing, of all places

Carlos didn’t stumble into manufacturing. He chose it, deliberately, after spending years in the trenches understanding it. While most of the AI world races toward consumer apps and developer tools, he went the other direction, toward small and mid-sized manufacturers, the businesses that actually make the physical things the economy runs on, and that have been almost entirely skipped by the software revolution.

That’s not a coincidence. It’s the opportunity. These factories run on legacy systems, paper, tribal knowledge, and instinct. The bigger players have the budgets for expensive enterprise software; the small and mid-sized ones have been left to fend for themselves. Which means the ceiling for improvement, in efficiency, in speed, in quality, is enormous, precisely because no one has bothered to build for them.

Data everywhere, unused

The core problem Corello solves is one Carlos describes simply: data is everywhere, but it’s fragmented and unused.

A factory’s information is scattered across machines, systems, spreadsheets, and people, none of it talking to each other. On its own, that data just sits there. It doesn’t answer questions. It doesn’t catch problems. It doesn’t help the person on the floor make a better decision in the moment. The raw material for intelligence is present in abundance; the intelligence itself is missing.

Corello’s work is to ingest that fragmented data and turn it into something usable, to close the gap between what a factory already knows and what it can actually act on. That’s the difference between a factory drowning in data and a factory that can finally use it.

The knowledge that walks out the door

The most human part of the problem is tribal knowledge, and it’s the piece that should worry every factory owner.

In these businesses, the most valuable knowledge isn’t written down anywhere. It lives in the experienced worker who knows, by feel, how to set up a machine, spot a defect, or quote a complex job. When that person retires or leaves, decades of hard-won expertise walk out the door with them. Nothing captures it. Nothing preserves it. The next generation starts closer to zero than they should.

This is where AI becomes genuinely powerful, not as a replacement for those workers, but as a way to capture and preserve what they know. Carlos frames the goal not as automation that removes people, but as AI coworkers, goal-driven team members that work alongside the humans on the floor, carrying the institutional knowledge and helping everyone operate at the level of the most experienced person in the building. The expertise stops being fragile. It becomes an asset the whole factory can draw on.

Building AI-native systems in old industries

The hard part, and the reason few people attempt this, is that building AI-native systems on top of old industries is genuinely difficult. You’re not deploying software into a clean, modern tech stack. You’re integrating with legacy systems, decades-old machines, and workflows that were never designed for digital tools. And you’re doing it for customers who, understandably, need to see real return before they trust something new on their floor.

That’s why Carlos emphasizes ROI and speed. A factory owner doesn’t care about the elegance of the technology; they care whether it saves time, reduces waste, and makes them money, fast. And trust has to be earned on the floor, with the people doing the work, not just in the front office. Corello’s use cases, things like faster quoting and clearer work instructions, are deliberately practical: real problems, real time saved, real value the moment it’s turned on.

The lesson underneath

What makes this episode matter beyond manufacturing is the founder philosophy underneath it. Carlos’s approach to building, understand the problem deeply before you build anything, and build openly by leaning on your network, is the same discipline that makes any hard company work. He spent years understanding his customer before writing a line of product, and he’s built in the open, gathering feedback and drawing on the community of founders who came before him.

There’s a bigger point here too, one that sits at the heart of why this show exists. The most valuable opportunities are often in the unseen spaces, the industries too unglamorous for the spotlight, the customers the tech world forgot, the founders the market overlooks. Carlos is building for all three at once. And the reason that’s a smart bet, not a charitable one, is simple: the data was always there. Someone just had to build the intelligence.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Carlos Maiguel.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

This episode of The Corridor is about that whole ladder, what the top teaches you about the bottom, why visibility matters as much as capital, and how you build an ecosystem where Latino founders and investors can actually climb.

What the top of the ladder teaches you about the bottom

From where Laura sat at Nasdaq, she watched companies at the summit of the capital markets, the IPO, the moment a private company becomes a public one. It’s the outcome every founder is told to dream about. But what she came to understand is that the journey to that moment is not a series of disconnected stages. It’s one continuous climb.

As she puts it, the capital markets journey is the same at every stage. The founder raising a pre-seed round and the company ringing the opening bell are doing versions of the same thing: telling a credible story, earning trust, proving they can endure, and convincing the next set of investors to believe in what comes next. The dollar amounts change. The fundamentals don’t. That’s a genuinely useful reframe for an early-stage founder, because it means the discipline you build raising your first small round is the same discipline that eventually takes a company public. You’re not doing something different from the giants. You’re doing the same thing, earlier.

Endure and adapt

If there’s a single quality Laura keeps returning to, it’s endurance. Not the dramatic kind, the quiet kind. The ability to endure and adapt through changing times.

Markets shift. Capital gets cheap and then expensive. Sectors fall in and out of favor. The founders and investors who last aren’t the ones who caught one perfect wave, they’re the ones who kept adapting as the conditions changed underneath them. Having watched companies navigate the full arc from early stage to public markets, Laura has seen which ones make it, and endurance, the willingness to keep adjusting without losing the core of what you’re building, is the common thread. For a founder in a hard market, that’s not a consolation prize. It’s the actual skill.

Visibility is capital, too

Here is the idea that gives the episode its heart. Laura is direct that visibility is key for Latina investors and founders, and it’s worth sitting with why that matters as much as money.

When founders and investors from a community are visible, when they can be seen succeeding, writing checks, ringing bells, they change what the next generation believes is possible. A young Latina who sees a Latina investor at the top of the capital markets doesn’t have to imagine whether she belongs there. She has proof. Visibility does quietly what no amount of advice can: it removes the question of whether the door is even open.

And it works on the other side too. Visible Latino investors get seen by founders who finally have someone who looks like them to pitch. Visible Latino founders get seen by the next wave of builders. The whole ecosystem compounds on being able to see itself.

Building the ladder for everyone else

That’s why so much of Laura’s work now is about the ecosystem, not just individual deals. Through her investing, including supporting women-led startups, and through her broader work building the Latino VC community, she’s focused on the same thing from a different angle: making sure the ladder exists, and that people can find the next rung.

Because capital alone isn’t enough. Founders need the community and the networks that surround the capital, the people who make the introduction, share the hard-won lesson, and open the door to the next stage. The Latino community is building businesses fast, but building an ecosystem means making sure the support systems climb alongside the founders. That’s the work: not just funding companies, but constructing the whole ladder so the next founder has something to climb.

The throughline

What connects the opening bell to the first check is a single conviction: the climb is the same for everyone, so the job is to make sure everyone can actually climb. Laura has seen the top and the bottom of the capital ladder, and her message to Latino founders is grounded in both. The journey doesn’t change based on who you are. The trust you build, the endurance you show, the story you tell, they’re the same at every stage. What has to change is visibility and access, so that the founders who have always been capable of the climb finally have the ladder in front of them.

For anyone building right now, wondering whether they belong on the ladder at all, that’s the reframe worth holding onto. You were always meant to climb it. The work now, for all of us, is making sure it’s there.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Laura Moreno Lucas.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

Lolita Taub has spent her career making that invisible rulebook visible. She went from South Central Los Angeles to becoming a venture capital General Partner at Ganas Ventures, and along the way she learned the codes the hard way, by running into them. Now she teaches them, most recently in her book, “What Actually Matters.” This episode of The Corridor is a preview of why that book is going to land for so many founders building without a map.

The invisible rules

The core of Lolita’s whole framework is deceptively simple: the startup world runs on invisible rules. Not written policies, but unspoken norms about how things actually work, how you get an introduction, how you signal you belong, how you talk to an investor, what you’re supposed to already know before you walk in.

For founders who grew up inside the network, these rules are invisible because they’re second nature, absorbed at dinner tables and in dorm rooms and through family friends who happened to be in the industry. For everyone else, they’re invisible because no one ever explained them. Same word, opposite experience. And that gap, between the founders who inherited the rules and the ones who have to reverse-engineer them, is one of the quietest and most powerful forces deciding who succeeds.

Lolita’s own path through it involved things most founders from outside the network will recognize immediately: the education and persistence it took to get in the door, the code-switching required to move between worlds, the constant low-grade question of whether you actually belong in the room you fought to enter.

Meritocracy is a myth

The hardest truth in the conversation was also the most freeing.

Lolita is direct about it: meritocracy is a myth. Not because talent isn’t real, it obviously is, but because opportunity is distributed unevenly, and the story we tell ourselves that the best simply rise erases everything that actually determines who gets a shot. Who you know. Who vouches for you. What you were taught before you ever started.

Why does that matter for a founder? Because if you believe the meritocracy myth and you keep getting passed over, you draw the wrong conclusion. You assume the problem is you, your idea, your ability, when often the real issue is access you never had. Naming the myth is what lets a founder stop absorbing the system’s bias as a personal verdict and start solving the actual problem, which is access.

Community as a moat

So if access is the problem, what’s the answer? Lolita’s is the throughline of her entire investing thesis: community.

For founders who didn’t inherit a network, community becomes the thing that replaces traditional access. It is not a soft, nice-to-have add-on. She frames it as a genuine moat, a durable competitive advantage. When you build real relationships and real proximity to the people who move capital and make decisions, you unlock the things a warm network hands other founders for free.

And the return on community is concrete, not sentimental. She breaks it down into real ROI: insight, the information and pattern recognition you’d otherwise never get; operations, the help and hires and know-how that flow through relationships; and even revenue, because community becomes customers, referrals, and distribution. Community isn’t where you go to feel supported. It’s where the business actually gets built when you started without the playbook.

The practical order matters too. You don’t start by chasing capital. You start by building community and relationships, and the access, and eventually the capital, follows from proximity rather than cold outreach.

Authenticity is the edge

Here is the reframe I most want founders to hear.

So many people from outside the network are taught, explicitly or not, that their background is something to manage, minimize, or code-switch away from. Lolita’s argument is the opposite. Authenticity and staying true to your roots are assets, not barriers. The specific perspective you bring, the community you understand that others don’t, the market you can see because you come from it, that is edge, not baggage.

This connects directly to how she thinks as an investor. The Latino market is enormous and systematically underestimated, and founders building for it with genuine understanding are looking at real opportunity that biased evaluators keep walking past. She’s blunt that this isn’t philanthropy. It’s not about doing anyone a favor. It’s about building big businesses in a market the rest of the industry misprices. The bias is the mistake. The founders who understand the market are the opportunity.

What actually matters

That phrase is her book’s title, and it’s the quiet argument underneath the whole conversation. Fundraising is not the goal. Building a real, successful business is the goal, and too many founders confuse the two, optimizing to raise money rather than to build something that works.

For the Latino founder building right now without an inherited playbook, Lolita’s message is clear and generous. The rules are learnable. Community can stand in for the access you weren’t born into. Your roots are an asset. And the market’s blindness to founders like you is not a wall, it’s the very thing that creates the opportunity, for the founders and the investors willing to see it.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Lolita Taub.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

Lister went from junior partner to sole owner of Idea Fund Partners, and that single decision, to own the thing outright, reshaped everything about how he invests and what he’s willing to believe in. As he put it in our conversation, ownership changes what you’re free to bet on. That line is the whole episode.

The freedom hiding inside ownership

When you don’t own the firm, your convictions are negotiated. You can believe in a founder, a region, a thesis, but you still have to move it through partners who see the world differently. Owning the firm outright removed that filter for Lister. It let him build a thesis that was entirely his own, one he couldn’t have pursued with other partners in the room.

And the thesis he chose to build was personal. He could invest in underrepresented founders. He could invest in underrepresented regions, choosing to build in North Carolina rather than chasing Silicon Valley. The kind of investing he wanted to do was the kind that reflected his own conviction, and ownership is what made it possible.

That’s a trade most people don’t see clearly. Ownership comes with real costs and real risk, the exposure of being a solo GP, the weight of every decision landing on you. But what you buy with it is the freedom to bet on what you actually believe, instead of what a committee will approve.

The distinction most people miss

The most important idea in the conversation was a distinction Lister drew carefully, and it’s one more investors should sit with.

When we talk about why entrepreneurs of color and women struggle to access capital, the instinct is to reach for the word discrimination. Lister pushed past that. A lot of the problem, he explained, is not necessarily upfront discrimination. It’s systemic bias.

The difference matters. Discrimination is a decision someone makes. Systemic bias is a default that runs quietly underneath the whole system, who gets the warm introduction, who fits the pattern an investor has been trained to recognize, who gets read as fundable before they’ve said a word. It isn’t always someone choosing to exclude. It’s a machine that was never built to see certain founders clearly in the first place.

And that distinction is exactly where Lister sees opportunity.

Not fairness. Math.

Here is the part that separates Lister’s approach from the way this conversation usually goes. He does not frame backing underrepresented founders as an act of fairness or generosity. He frames it as math.

If systemic bias causes good founders to be underpriced and overlooked, then the investor who can see past that bias is looking at mispriced opportunity that the rest of the market is walking past. It’s pure math, not about fairness. The bias creates a gap between what a founder has actually built and what the market is willing to pay for it, and someone is going to capture the return in that gap.

That reframe is powerful because it takes the conversation out of the realm of charity, where it too often gets stuck, and puts it where it belongs: in the realm of returns. You don’t back overlooked founders because it’s noble. You back them because the market is wrong about them, and being right before everyone else is how investors make money.

Building where nobody else is looking

Lister’s choice of the Southeast, and North Carolina specifically, follows the same logic. The region has a diverse, growing tech landscape that doesn’t get the attention, or the capital, that the coasts do. That’s not a disadvantage to him. It’s the same mispricing, applied to geography instead of founders. Less competition for great companies, and access other investors don’t have.

And as AI reshapes what’s possible, he sees that edge compounding. The next generation of companies won’t all be built in the obvious places by the obvious people. The investors positioned to back them will be the ones who built conviction, and access, where others weren’t paying attention.

The throughline

What ties it all together is conviction earned through ownership. Lister could build a personal thesis because he owned the firm that let him. He could bet on overlooked founders and overlooked regions because he had the freedom to act on what he actually believed. And he could frame all of it as math rather than charity because he understood that being right about mispriced talent is the entire game.

For any founder building outside the obvious rooms, and for any emerging investor thinking about what kind of firm they want to build, it’s a reminder worth holding onto. The freedom to bet on what you believe is worth what it costs. And the market’s blind spots are not a reason for despair. They’re where the opportunity lives.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Lister Delgado.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

She is honest about the timing in a way most founders aren’t. She didn’t see the crash coming and position herself for it. She left because she was passionate about something, and then the world fell apart around her decision. What she did next is the part worth paying attention to.

The idea, and then the fear

Leah had the idea for TaskRabbit before the crash: new technologies were emerging, social, location, and mobile, the iPhone was only a few months old, and as an engineer she became obsessed with using them to connect real people in the real world to get real things done. Then everything crashed, and the fear arrived. She had left a high-paying, stable job. She cashed out a $27,000 pension from IBM to fund the first version of the company.

But the recession did something unexpected to her thinking. She watched capable people, former lawyers, teachers, people with good jobs, get laid off and start looking for new, flexible ways to earn. And she realized the thing she was building could help. It was a new way to work, a way to make money, at exactly the moment a lot of people needed one. That realization became the gig economy.

Building trust nobody was ready to give

Here is what people forget now that it’s normal. In 2008, the core premise of TaskRabbit was unthinkable. Invite a stranger into your home to organize your bookshelf? Jump into a stranger’s car and let them drive you somewhere? Leah points out that if you had proposed either one in 2008, people would have thought you were insane.

So before the marketplace could work, trust had to be built, and she saw technology as the way to build it. The early idea was to use the Facebook platform and social networks to create trust between people. If you hired someone to install your bookshelves, rated them well, and you and I were friends, I’d feel comfortable hiring that same person. It started as an experiment. It became the foundation of an entire economy. Now, as she notes, we jump into strangers’ cars without a second thought.

The phone call where the weight lifted

Leah built TaskRabbit for nearly a decade and sold it to IKEA in 2017. Everyone celebrates the exit. Almost nobody talks about the letting go.

She told me about the board call where they voted to sell. The outcome was certain; she expected the whole thing to take two minutes. Then the Series A investor got on and, instead of a quick yes, launched into a speech about how proud he was of what they’d built. The Series B investor did the same. By the time it reached Leah, she was in tears, realizing this was the closing of a major chapter, not just for her, but for the team and the investors who’d been on the journey with her.

When she hung up and the sale was official, she cried. Not from sadness. From release. In her words, it felt like a weight she’d carried for a decade had finally lifted. She had been in survival mode for ten years, and suddenly she had survived, and it was over.

That freedom is what moved her to the other side of the table. And she has come to a clear realization about herself: she is built to be an investor, to back the next generation of founders. TaskRabbit is no longer her identity. It’s her credibility.

The leverage point most people miss

This is the part of the conversation I keep thinking about.

Most people who care about diversity in tech focus on getting more diverse founders funded. Leah went a level up, and then another. She founded Precedent Collective to support investors from underrepresented backgrounds, because she believes the real leverage isn’t who gets funded, it’s who controls the capital.

Her logic is a ladder. GPs decide which founders get funded, through the lens of their own experiences. Go up a level, and limited partners decide which GPs get capital to deploy at all. The whole system revolves around who holds the check-writing power. So the more people you put into check-writing roles, as investors and as LPs, the more you change who builds companies and who gets funded, because every person brings a different lens, a different network, and assesses companies differently.

The lens as an edge, not a talking point

For her fund, Precedent VC, she backs early-stage consumer companies, category-defining, precedent-setting businesses, at what she sees as a massive inflection point, where AI is changing consumer behavior faster than ever and the next iconic companies are about to be founded.

And she’s clear-eyed about how her identity sharpens her investing. She points out that the Spanish-speaking community is the largest population group in the country, over 20 percent, with enormous purchasing power, and that founders building for that market with that lens are going to build massive businesses. She gave a concrete example: MeSalude Health, a B2B telehealth service for native Spanish speakers, paid for by employers who want to keep their workforce healthy. To her, that’s exactly the kind of company that should be funded, and the kind an investor without her lens might not see.

The advice

I asked her what she’d tell a founder building right now from a background investors overlook. Her answer was simple and hard-won, because she had to do it herself: get connected. Get into a network. Find your communities, through places like Endeavor, through your own circles. And the tactical piece that actually compounds: for every person you meet, ask for one more introduction. Great to meet you, who else should I know? That’s how you build the network that gets you in the room.

It’s fitting advice from someone whose entire career has been about connection, first between strangers who needed to trust each other to get work done, and now between capital and the founders who’ve been waiting for someone with the right lens to finally see them.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Leah Solivan.

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Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Marcelo came to the US from Argentina and built a career across consumer goods, automotive, and professional services before becoming a senior digital transformation executive at ThoughtWorks. He described his role the way only someone who lived between two worlds could: he was the person who knew the most about technology in a room full of business people, and the most about business in a room full of technologists. He spent a career in that gap, and always focused on one thing, value.

AI is not different. Except in one way that changes everything.

I asked him what makes this technology wave different from the internet, cloud, and mobile waves he has already lived through. His answer was clarifying: they are all the same, except for pace.

Every wave follows the same pattern. A new technology arrives, you pilot it, you fail at some of it, you realize you lack the talent, the governance, the ability to manage it properly. That happened with the internet, with cloud, with everything digital. What makes AI different is speed. He pointed at the last two weeks alone, new models, new legislation, new features shipping every other week, and reminded me that ChatGPT only reached our phones about thirty months ago. There is a clear before and after that moment, and the pace no longer gives anyone time to learn, reflect, and adopt before the next thing lands.

The question every investor should ask about an AI startup

Marcelo’s investing discipline comes down to one question he asks himself before writing a check: is this a business, or is this a feature the large AI labs will ship over a weekend?

If it is the second, it is probably not a good investment. He has watched companies show strong early results and then die when a major lab absorbed their entire value proposition. So what makes a company defensible? His answer was blunt and repeated: data, data, data. Models are becoming a commodity, closed and open source alike are converging and none are far apart. If you do not have a unique dataset that augments the model, anyone with access to the same model gets the same answer you do. Knowledge, he argued, now has a short shelf life. You prompt, you get an answer, and then it is on your judgment to know if it applies. The dataset is the only thing that creates lasting value.

“Do you need money, or do you need a partner?”

Here is the part I keep thinking about, because it is the pattern I have heard across almost every conversation on this show.

As AI turns diligence signals into a commodity, something every investor can access equally, Marcelo believes the firms that win will be the ones built on relationships. Not as a slogan. As the actual asset. He told me that every time a founder approaches him, he asks one question: do you need money, or do you need a partner? If the answer is just money, he sends them to a bank, it is a better, easier deal. If they want someone to open doors, make introductions, and help them grow, that is when he is the right person.

And trust, he emphasized, cannot be manufactured on demand. You do not hold a ceremony and agree to trust each other. It comes organically, through time and interactions, which is exactly why he invests in relationships with an open agenda, trying to understand the person in front of him, contributing where he can, and expecting nothing. Sometimes something comes of it in five years. Sometimes nothing does. Either way, he met the person.

Why the argument still has to be made

I asked why, in 2026, the case for underrepresented fund managers still has to be made explicitly instead of simply being assumed. He named the elephant in the room directly, the current pushback against anything labeled diversity, and then reframed it entirely as a marketer would.

Coming from consumer goods, he sees the Latino community not as an ideological question but as a business one. It is a mosaic, US-born Latinos, immigrants, people from Puerto Rico, Colombia, Venezuela, Uruguay, Brazil, even Spain, and you do not sell the same product the same way to all of them. To capture a segment growing this fast, you need a team that actually understands it. To him, that is not diversity as ideology. It is common business sense. The segment is growing. Do you want to be part of it? Then build the team that can win it.

The advice, and the moat nobody is building yet

His advice for founders was clean: do not fall in love with your idea. AI lets you prototype almost anything in twenty minutes, so get in front of real customers fast, take the feedback seriously, and iterate. At the end of the day it does not matter whether your idea is good or bad. It matters whether customers love it, buy it, and buy it many times over.

And his largest idea, the one most people in venture are not yet paying attention to, was about what actually becomes a company’s moat when AI agents run most of its operations. When agents handle eighty percent of a company’s processes, the only thing left that differs from one company to the next is its corporate DNA. How it makes decisions, what it values, when it takes risk and when it does not. That institutional context, the thing that decides to keep a struggling customer’s account open because you believe in their future even when the numbers say close it, is what no agent can supply on its own. That context is the moat.

We closed, as two people from this part of the world eventually must, on whether Argentina takes the World Cup. He would love it. He is realistic about Spain, Colombia, and France. And he reminded me that in the final against France, Argentina was one French goal away from losing the whole thing. Sometimes you are good. Sometimes you also need to be lucky.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Marcelo DeSantis.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

That is not luck. That is what happens when someone with the right skills is in the right room at the right moment and is ready when it comes.

Edgardo has said his whole career runs on a simple idea: you have to know the right people, but you also have to be the right person at the right time. He studied sociology and anthropology, taught himself graphic design on the side, and spent twenty-five years building Somos Arte as a creative director for clients like Sony, Marvel, and Columbia University. Then, ten years ago, he did the hardest thing a service business can do. He decided to become his own client.

That decision became La Borinqueña.

The character was never the point. The mission was.

Here is what makes this story matter for anyone building something of their own. Edgardo does not own the name La Borinqueña. It is the national anthem of Puerto Rico, drawn from Borikén, the name the Taínos gave the island, land of the valiant lord. He built his intellectual property on top of a shared inheritance, and then used it to give money away.

Through the Borinqueña grants, Somos Arte has awarded more than a quarter of a million dollars to nonprofits across Puerto Rico. That is the model he wanted that never existed before: a superhero series whose entire reason for being is charity. His characters fight for a better world on the page, and the business behind them funds real people doing the same off it.

That included the Heroína del Pueblo Award, created by his wife Kyung Jeon-Miranda, which recognized ten women leading their own organizations, gave each of them a grant, and celebrated them in San Juan.

Why she is Afro-Latina, on purpose

We spent real time on this, because it is the most intentional design choice in the whole project.

Edgardo made La Borinqueña an Afro-Latina woman because that is what he saw when he looked at his own family, and because media has spent generations underrepresenting, misrepresenting, or erasing how diverse Latinos actually are. He pointed out something worth sitting with: we are literally the product of colonization, most of us can trace our DNA to several places at once, and the medium that has always been most honest about that mix is music. Fania in the 1970s celebrated our African heritage in a way film and television never did.

He wanted to do that in comics. And he has watched it land far beyond Puerto Rico. People of African heritage anywhere, he said, see his character and immediately see themselves, and through her they learn about Puerto Rico and about our shared identity. When a little girl can hold a doll with thick curly brown hair and brown skin and say she looks like me, and she is beautiful, that is the whole point.

The DC collaboration that should not have happened

After Hurricane María in 2017, the disaster that caused the longest blackout in US history, Edgardo met the publisher of DC Comics at New York Comic Con, where the man had stood in line at his table. That conversation became something almost unheard of: a multi-billion-dollar studio gave a tiny independent studio access to its entire catalog of characters and talent, for free, on one condition, that the proceeds fund charity.

The resulting anthology, Ricanstruction, hit number one on Amazon for four months and raised $150,000 in pre-orders alone. It earned Edgardo an Eisner Award for his humanitarian work. He called it a once-in-a-lifetime project, and he is right, because corporate leadership turns over constantly and that exact window of the right person, the right access, and the right skills rarely opens twice.

The line that this whole show is about

Late in the conversation, Edgardo said the thing that ties his work to everything we care about at Coquí. Art for the sake of art, he argued, will never reach the masses if there is no business behind it. Storytelling and entrepreneurship have to be balanced, because a graphic novel is a commercial form of art, and understanding that it is business-minded is what lets the story survive and keep being told.

That is the intersection. He is a storyteller who had to become an entrepreneur to protect the story. It is the exact same structure a technology founder navigates: the fundraising, the rooms where no one looks like you, the yeses and noes, the constant question of how you keep the thing alive. Different medium, identical spine. Both come down to access, ownership, and who gets to control the narrative.

Are we winning?

I asked him directly whether Latinos are winning the narrative or still playing catch-up. He did not soften it. We are playing catch-up, he said, because he does not walk into Comic Con and find himself surrounded by thousands of storytellers who look and sound like him. We are still underrepresented, still under-resourced, and still carrying powerful stories that have not been told.

But his close was pure optimism, and it earned it. Every one of us, he said, has a story that has yet to be heard, and no moment in time can keep that story from being told. What we are going through is just a moment, and it will pass. The people who persevere, who hold on to what ties them to their family and their heritage, will find the superpower to outlast it.

He is a superhero storyteller. He writes in the framing of optimism. The hero does not win every battle, but in the end they save the day.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Edgardo Miranda-Rodríguez.

Get La Borinqueña Here

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

When she and her brother moved back to Puerto Rico in 2010, they were working internationally, a management consultant and an attorney, both stuck working from home with no place to find the energy and the connections that serious work needs. There was no coworking space on the island to walk into. So they built one.

That is the whole origin, and it is more serendipitous than the finished story suggests. The family had a distressed building on Calle San Francisco in Old San Juan. A tenant took the third floor and asked what they planned to do with the first two. Sofia and her brother looked at each other and said the thing founders say right before their lives change: coworking. Three months later, Piloto 151 was born.

Being first is a tax before it is an advantage

In this episode we spent real time on something most founder interviews skip: what it actually costs to be first.

Sofia described early tours where people walked into the space and asked, “But where are the offices? Can I just see the offices?” The concept of working in an open room with other people did not compute yet. Being first meant she was not just running a business. She was educating a market on something it had never seen and did not yet know it needed.

First-mover advantage is real, and she benefited from it for years. But she paid for it up front, in the slow work of teaching an entire island a new way to work.

The community was never the product. It became the product.

Here is the part I keep thinking about.

Piloto 151 sold desks and space. What it produced was a community that did not exist before. The startup and tech ecosystem in Puerto Rico in early 2013 was, in Sofia’s word, nascent. There was nowhere for entrepreneurs to convene, learn, and talk through shared problems. So the coworking space quietly became that place.

Then history intervened. When Puerto Rico’s bonds were declared junk in 2015, Sofia watched a before-and-after happen inside her own events. People who had lost jobs, market share, and certainty started showing up trying to reinvent themselves. A space built to solve a personal need for a desk turned into the place a community reinvented itself.

That is the lesson buried in the Piloto story. You do not always build the community on purpose. Sometimes you build the room, and the community builds itself, if you are paying attention.

Innovation inside 250 years of history

One thing I did not want to skip: Sofia and her brother deliberately built innovation inside Puerto Rico’s heritage, not in some generic glass tower.

The location she spoke from is over 250 years old. The Miramar building is over a hundred, designed by a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright. Building and renovating in historic zones is harder, more regulated, slower, and more expensive, often without the benefit of existing architectural plans. They did it anyway, because a 300-year-old building being an innovation hub is not a contradiction. It is the point. You spend more waking hours at work than at home. Doing it somewhere that exudes that much history, a three-minute walk from El Morro, is its own kind of advantage.

The side problem that became the business

Every member needed an address. Government agencies, the IRS, packages, all of it still runs on postal mail. Piloto’s virtual office product grew until it was around 40% of revenue, and with it came a mail problem so large it eventually drew an undercover FBI agent as a member, which is its own reminder of what scale on a tax-haven island can attract.

The existing tools were legacy and did not handle the mountain of postal compliance that comes with managing mail for third parties. So in 2020, mid-pandemic, Sofia built the software herself. That became Piloto Mail, which now serves clients across the US, Europe, and Asia. A side problem, solved properly, became a second company.

And true to form, she insists the community did not disappear into the software. A mailroom, she argues, is a touch point. Members come to pick up their mail, and that becomes a conversation, a chance to ask what they need. She built that same surprise-and-delight into the product.

What the mainland keeps getting wrong about Puerto Rico

We closed on the thing I care most about.

Sofia is clear-eyed that the tax incentives are world-class and real. But she is adamant there is more to the equation than incentives and beaches. Puerto Rico is a uniquely good place to test and pilot ideas: an island, somewhat isolated, still under US jurisdiction and rule of law, with real talent, support organizations, mentors, and increasingly capital. It is a launch pad in both directions, Latin America into the US, and the US into Latin America.

So why has the capital infrastructure not caught up to the talent? Her answer was honest. Puerto Rico is small, and mainland investors stay focused on major hubs. What is changing is the number of organizations connecting island founders to mainland capital, which is exactly the gap she has spent her career closing, from directing one of Puerto Rico’s first multi-stakeholder ecosystem projects, to bringing Founder Institute to the island, to co-founding Colmena 66 to connect support organizations to each other.

The number, and the argument about it

We got into the funding gap directly. Latinos receive somewhere around 2% of venture capital, and as Sofia pointed out, if you are a Latina founder it is closer to 1%, and a Puerto Rican Latina founder is a fraction of that. We are one of the least-funded communities in venture, and the population is growing fast.

But Sofia pushed back on the scarcity mindset, and she was right to. The instinct to guard your investor relationships because everyone is fighting over the same 2% assumes the 2% is fixed. It is not. It is 2% because access is missing, not because the ceiling is set there. The move is not to hoard the door. It is to open it for the founder coming up behind you, make the warm introduction, and expand the pool. Do business with each other, and get business for each other, as she learned at Stanford’s LBAN program. That is how 2% becomes 20%.

Why this conversation matters

Sofia Stolberg is one of the people who started entrepreneurship in Puerto Rico, and she did it the way the best builders do, by making the infrastructure first and letting everything else grow out of it. Accelerators, programs, and organizations across the island trace back to rooms she helped build.

Her parting advice was simple enough to be a thesis: plug into the network, get connected, and connect others. Do not let being Latino set you back. Use it. Other Latino entrepreneurs want to open doors for you, so go knock.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Sofia Stolberg:

https://thecorridor.carrd.co

Seguimos 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

Two co-founders, ideally from the same lab or the same trading desk. A logo you recognize on the résumé. A warm intro from someone already in the fund’s network. A story that sounds complete before the company has done anything at all.

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Alejandro leads the West Coast for JP Morgan’s Global Passport program, the team built to bank foreign owned startups scaling into the US. Born in Puerto Rico to a Cuban mother and a Spanish father, he came up selling daily deals door to door in Miami before Hurricane María sent him to Washington, DC, then to the Aspen Institute working Latino majority cities from El Paso to Chicago, and eventually to JP Morgan, first running Hispanic and Latino sponsorships, now sitting inside the bank’s most global unit. His path started in Puerto Rico. It went national. Now it is global.

That arc matters more than a résumé line. It is the same arc Coquí Ventures is built around: proximity to the community first, access to capital systems second, and the conviction that those two things are supposed to connect and mostly do not.

What Global Passport actually unlocks

Here is the plain language version, because most founders listening have never heard of this program and would not think to ask their bank about it.

Two and a half years ago, JP Morgan noticed a gap. Series A through D companies were too complex for a retail branch and too early for the traditional multinational corporate banking mandate. So the bank built a small, specialized team of bankers trained in cross border currency, FX, and transfer pricing, essentially a fractional CFO function for founders who are not yet ready for a full corporate banking relationship but have already outgrown Chase retail.

Most of Global Passport’s clients are European. A meaningful share come from Latin America, companies scaling through the region and trying to figure out when, and how, to enter the US market. Alejandro’s job is not banking. It is ecosystem. He connects founders to tax, legal, accounting, and insurance partners, and spends real time advising on the mechanics founders rarely get taught: the flip, the holding company structure, go to market sequencing, when to use the bank’s own buildings for investor and client meetings.

Every sector qualifies except fintech, since anything touching cross border money movement sits under a separate, heavily regulated KYC track. AI, biotech, deep tech, agtech, health tech, all in scope.

The trust question, asked directly

I put it to him plainly: there is a documented, historical distrust between Latino founders and large financial institutions. Where has the bank fallen short, and what is it doing differently now.

He did not deflect. He pointed to sponsorships and activations at community events that have existed for twenty, thirty, even a hundred years and were never funded before. He pointed to JP Morgan’s aggressive Chase retail expansion, much of it concentrated in high Latino majority communities, as evidence the bank understands showing up in person matters as much as showing up in a press release.

Whether that is enough is a fair question to keep asking. But the specificity of the answer, sponsorships that exist, branches that are opening, a DEI function that still exists inside the bank, is worth more than a general commitment to inclusion.

Where the energy actually is

I asked him where the global Latino founder ecosystem is moving that New York and San Francisco investors are underweighting.

Brazil, without hesitation. He described a market getting stronger by the month, with US investors growing more comfortable writing checks into LatAm as company quality improves. The broader signal: international founder offices in the US are declining year over year, even as US VCs increase their investment in international founders. Capital is following talent globally faster than talent is relocating physically.

The harder truth came next. On the fund side, the tier two through tier five managers, the ones actually positioned to find and back this talent, are the ones getting squeezed. Distributions back to LPs are at what he called an all time low. The largest funds can absorb that. The smaller, emerging managers cannot as easily. This is the exact seam Coquí Ventures is built to sit in: not the sandhill road allocators, but the founders and the funds underneath them that the current cycle is making harder to sustain, not easier.

The rule: come early or come late, never in the middle

When I asked what he wants every early stage Latino founder to walk away with, his answer was structural, not motivational.

It has never been easier to build a global company without a US office on day one. Companies like Lovable prove it, a US topco with the team based in Stockholm. But if a founder decides the US market is the target, his rule of thumb is simple: come early or come late, do not come in the middle. He has watched too many founders, including from Puerto Rico, drift into that middle zone, present in the US market without being structurally built for it.

His advice for founders scaling out of LatAm specifically: build the holding company as a real operating entity from the start, not a shell. Billing, invoicing, receivables, actual activity inside the topco, so that when a bank eventually looks at the company, there is something bankable there. This is the same gap that quietly kills deals in due diligence long after the pitch meeting goes well: no cap table discipline, no legal structure, no operating history in the entity that is supposed to raise the money.

And if a founder is building in AI specifically, his framing was blunt. Roughly seventy percent of AI funding deployment right now concentrates within an eight square mile radius of San Francisco. Being physically present there currently carries something close to a thirty percent valuation premium. That is not a nice to have. That is the market pricing proximity.

(Note: these figures were shared by Alejandro in conversation and reflect his professional estimate, not an audited data point; worth independent verification before citing in a deal memo.)

AI inside the bank, today

I asked him to separate hype from practice. Inside JP Morgan, deployment started in the private bank, and large language model use for summarization, notes, and deck creation is now common across the company, in line with what most Fortune 500 institutions are doing. Beyond that, use cases in customer service, risk, and wealth management are advancing, wealth management in particular, though he was careful to note the bank moves thoughtfully rather than aggressively on adoption. The honest answer: less transformation than the headlines suggest, more steady infrastructure work than most people assume.

Why this episode matters for Coquí Ventures

Coquí Ventures exists on a specific bet: that the connective tissue between talented, revenue generating Latino founders and the capital and infrastructure that should reach them is thin, not absent. Alejandro’s story is proof the tissue can be built, one relationship, one program, one branch opening at a time, and proof that even inside a hundred year old institution, someone from Puerto Rico can end up running a global function built explicitly to serve founders who look like the ones we back.

The gap he described on the fund side, tier two through five managers getting squeezed while the market simultaneously gets more comfortable backing international founders, is the exact window Coquí Fund I is built to occupy. Not by competing with JP Morgan. By being the fund that gets a founder ready for that conversation before they ever need it.

Nunca hemos necesitado que alguien nos enseñe a construir. Lo que necesitábamos era que alguien nos abriera la puerta primero. Alejandro está haciendo exactamente eso, desde adentro.

If you are building and thinking about when to cross into the US market, his rule stands: come early, or come late. The middle is where deals go to die in due diligence.

Seguimos 🇵🇷 ,

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Boricua founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

I almost didn’t bring her on. Then I sat with her story for five minutes and realized it is the most literal version of everything this show is actually about. Betting on yourself before anyone else will. Grinding through years of no. Showing up in rooms that were never built for you. Maite has been doing all of that since she was eight years old.

The first no came from home

Maite comes from a real motorsport family. Her father was a rally driver, and her brother raced Formula BMW and tested with Champ Car. When eight-year-old Maite said she wanted to race too, the answer was no. Her parents were protective of her as a young girl entering a sport with almost no female representation, and they wanted her focused on her studies instead.

She did not push back loudly. She spent the next several years getting good grades, staying home from parties, and quietly building the case that this was not a passing interest. She told me directly what she was actually doing during those years: proving she understood the cost, the risk, and what it would take, long before she ever asked again.

At seventeen, she finally asked her parents the question that changed everything: why can my brother do it and I cannot. They looked at each other. They could not push back anymore.

Seventeen is not when professional drivers usually start. Most begin karting between five and eight years old. Starting at seventeen, by her own account, is almost unheard of for anyone hoping to go pro.

Building a brand before anyone built one for her

I asked Maite how she actually funded a career in one of the most expensive sports in the world, with no institutional backing and no industry blueprint for someone like her.

She started by calling brands her family already had some relationship with. Then, as the only girl in her category and as she started finishing on podiums, the conversations got slightly easier. She would tell sponsors directly: I am the only girl racing in this category, I am podiuming, can you help me finish the season.

She was candid about the ratio. Reaching out to brands is more no than yes, and she said plainly that it still happens to her today. What changed the odds, in her words, was never the talent alone. It was showing the extra hours, the visible work, the proof that she was different from someone who calls once and disappears. That gap, the willingness to show your work consistently, is where she believes most opportunities actually get won or lost.

This is the part of the conversation I keep coming back to, because it has nothing to do with racing specifically. She said it herself: this is not just about driving, there is a whole spectrum of ways into the sport, engineering, mechanics, marketing, and you do not need to know your exact age or path before you start building toward it.

Why this isn’t really a sports story

I said this to her directly on the show: this is very much like building a startup. You are the product. Your skill set is the product. And everything around it, sales, marketing, partnerships, sponsorships, is identical to what any founder does. She agreed immediately, and added something sharper: motorsport today requires you to be good at brand deals, your image, and marketing, because the value you offer a sponsor is not just a logo on a car, it is everything around it.

What’s actually missing for Latino representation in racing

I asked her directly what needs to change structurally for more Latinos and more women to have a real shot in motorsport. Her answer started with culture, not capital. She pointed to how heavily soccer-oriented Latin American countries are from childhood, which shapes what sports feel available to kids before they ever touch a wheel.

She drew a sharp parallel to her own experience: girls are taught early that they are not the ones who drive well, the same way people once assumed about women in any sport, until visibility proved otherwise. Her answer is not abstract. She wants more visibility specifically, more female drivers, mechanics, and engineers shown publicly, because representation is what convinces the next girl it is even possible to try.

She also raised something I had not considered: how easy it is for a country to lose track of supporting its own athletes once they leave to compete internationally. She used the World Cup as the counter-example, when an entire country rallies around a flag without hesitation. She wants that same energy extended to athletes like her, competing far from home in sports that get far less attention.

Where AI is already changing her sport

Maite described how AI is now producing driver performance reports more detailed than what a human coach used to provide, analyzing throttle input, braking points, and even tire pressure recommendations calibrated to track and ambient temperature, calculations that used to be manual and prone to small but costly errors.

I asked the obvious follow-up: if everyone eventually has access to the same data and tools, what actually separates competitors? Her answer was direct. The driver is still the one driving. The tool can level the equipment, but it cannot replace the person behind the wheel.

Her advice to the next Maite

I asked what she would tell a young Latina being told she cannot do something, the way she was told for ten years. Her answer: put your dream in perspective, then build the steps backward from it. If people are telling you no, if you do not have the money or the track nearby, that does not mean it is impossible.

She was specific about what actually moves people: showing up at the track, offering to work for free just to learn, and not expecting anything in return at first. Her exact words: the one time they see how hard you are working, they are going to say, I need to give this girl a chance. And that chance, however small it looks, is what takes you further than you know yet.

Maite Cáceres is currently competing in the GR Cup North America with RAFA Racing Team, with her sights set on the 24 Hours of Daytona and eventually Le Mans, where her goal is to become the first female driver to win representing Uruguay and the Latin American community.

Full episode of The Corridor is live now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts: https://thecorridor.carrd.co