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.

Read more

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

So on Episode 4 of The Corridor, I sat down with someone who actually lives inside that number. David Olivencia is the Co-Founder and CEO of Angeles Investors, one of the fastest-growing Latino angel investing groups in the country, and General Partner of a venture fund backed by Bank of America, the State of Illinois, and roughly ninety other limited partners. He has personally invested in about 80 different startups over the past 15 years. If anyone has earned the right to explain what the two percent statistic actually means, it is him.

Why he walked away from the obvious path

David’s path was not supposed to lead here. Born outside Chicago to a family from Puerto Rico, first in his family to take the technology route, he became a senior technology executive across multiple Fortune 100 companies and earned an MBA from Notre Dame. That is a career most people protect, not abandon.

But somewhere along the way he fell in love with startups and started investing about 15 years ago. Six years ago, he and several co-founders built Angeles Investors with a simple mission: leverage the power of Latino growth to find, fund, and fuel the best ventures in America. Today that group has grown to roughly 700 members and 30 sponsors, including some of the top banks, law firms, and accounting firms in the country, with a portfolio of about 30 companies.

I asked him directly why this became the thing he could not walk away from. His answer was not sentimental. “We saw that there was a void to fill,” he said, but quickly added, “it’s not by no means charitable. We think there’s a huge opportunity to leverage the power of Latino growth to find, fund, and fuel the best ventures in America.” He believes the firm can deliver outsized returns precisely because everyone else is mispricing the opportunity.

What he understands that other investors miss

I pushed him on what he actually sees in Latino founders that other VCs do not. His answer cuts straight to the structural problem.

“They may not come from the right schools. They may have a different accent. They may have only spent a few years in the United States,” he explained. Traditional venture firms are in the business of minimizing risk, and that profile reads as risk to them, even when it isn’t. The second piece is access. Venture, at its core, runs on networks and who you know, and many founders in the Latino community simply were not handed that network growing up.

That combination, misread risk plus missing network, is the actual mechanism behind the two percent. Not a lack of talent. A lack of proximity.

The math behind the gap

I asked him to size the actual capital gap. His answer made the scale of the problem concrete in a way the statistic alone never does.

He estimated there are roughly ten venture firms focused specifically on Latino growth, with maybe a billion dollars total to deploy among all of them. Against an industry that raises roughly $300 billion a year in venture capital, with a handful of mega-deals absorbing a disproportionate share, that billion dollars barely puts a dent in the gap.

Even more striking: the number of general partners who are Hispanic or Latino is itself only around one percent. The two percent funding gap and the one percent GP gap are the same problem, viewed from opposite ends of the table.

Why pre-seed is where the real gap lives

This is the part of the conversation that matters most for what I am building with Coquí Ventures. I asked David where he saw the biggest structural gap in the Latino startup ecosystem.

His fund operates primarily at the seed stage, and roughly ninety percent of startups he sees are operating at the pre-seed phase trying to get to seed. Of those, only about ten percent make it to seed, and less than one percent reach Series A. If you are a pre-seed fund focused on Latino founders, you are pitching investors who may not be Latino themselves, because there are so few funds operating at that earliest stage.

He was candid about his own fund’s limitation here: “We don’t do pre-seeds.” That gap, the space below seed where almost nobody with cultural proximity is writing checks, is exactly the room Coquí Ventures exists to stand in.

AI is changing who gets to start a company at all

One of the more interesting threads in our conversation was about artificial intelligence, and not in the way most people expect. David pointed to something structural happening in venture itself.

With AI, the cost to start, scale, and grow a startup has dropped dramatically and keeps getting cheaper, meaning the same $50,000 or $100,000 check produces dramatically more impact today than it did five or ten years ago.

He also noted a deeper shift in what a startup team even looks like now. Roughly half of a recent Y Combinator cohort were solo founders, leveraging AI to do what used to require a full team. He went further, predicting the next evolution may be startups run almost entirely by fleets of AI agents, with perhaps just an owner and a board to guide decisions.

For underfunded founders, this should be read as opportunity. The barrier that used to require a technical co-founder, a development team, and months of runway is collapsing. The capital gap remains, but the capital required to close it per founder is shrinking.

Culture as thesis, not decoration

I asked David the question that sits underneath everything Coquí Ventures is built on: should culture itself be a venture thesis, not just a demographic detail?

His answer was a useful gut check for anyone building a culturally-rooted fund. “You gotta pick a thesis that you believe in, that you can defend, and that you’re gonna go pitch investors on, where they’re gonna believe in you and the thesis and why they should give their hard-earned money to you versus all the other alternatives.” He was direct that you do not have to be part of a culture to recognize the business case behind it, using the example that he could evaluate an Alaska-based fund with an energy or tourism thesis purely on the strength of its logic and track record.

The lesson is not that culture does not matter. It is that culture has to earn its place in the thesis the same way any other edge does, through growth, defensibility, and proof.

What it would take to close the gap in ten years

I closed by asking him to look forward. What needs to be true in a decade for the two percent to actually move?

His honest answer was that if nothing changes, demographic growth alone will move the number eventually, since Latinos are projected to make up thirty to forty percent of the US population. But waiting on demographics is not a strategy. The real lever is building more Latino general partners, more people who see venture capital as a viable career path, because right now that number is roughly as small as the funding gap itself. That means exposing more people in the community to the asset class itself, and to what a career in venture actually looks like.

That is the long game. Coquí Ventures, The Corridor, Angeles Investors, and the handful of funds doing this work today are not just deploying capital. They are training the next generation of people who will deploy it after us.

You can also find The Corridor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

She was a junior investor, holding office hours, when a woman walked in who had been a mechanic for thirty years. Her whole family were mechanics. She had built a platform to automate the entire business, from diagnosing car problems to running payments, and she had revenue. She had pitched a roomful of VCs. Every one of them passed.

That same week, Samara watched founders with nothing but a deck and an idea, the right schools, the right networks, raise three and four million dollars.

It was not a one-time observation. It was a pattern she watched repeat for years. And it became the entire thesis behind Chingona Ventures.

On the latest episode of The Corridor, I sat down with Samara, founding partner of Chingona Ventures, a high-conviction pre-seed firm based in Chicago that invests across the United States. What follows is some of what stayed with me most.

Great can come from anywhere, and almost nobody is looking there

Samara’s firm writes the first check. As she puts it, nothing is too early. Pre-product, pre-name, she only needs an idea and a human. What she is hunting for is the “chingona factor,” the badass thing in a founder’s life or business that signals they understand their problem in a way no outsider could.

Her edge is geographic and personal at once. Born in Mexico, raised in a dual-language, low-income household, an engineer by training from the University of Michigan, she sees the country from the Midwest, not the coasts. That vantage point lets her see founders who are tied tightly to the problems of everyday Americans, founders the coastal networks fly right over.

Venture capital, she reminds us, has always run on warm introductions and the same handful of networks. Her whole model is a bet that this leaves enormous value on the table. A founder in the middle of Illinois with millions in revenue and deep domain expertise, but no network, is not a worse bet. They are an overlooked one.

AI just reset the math, and most investors have not caught up

This was the part of the conversation I keep thinking about. Samara walked through how AI has fundamentally changed what early-stage diligence even looks like, and the clearest example is margins.

The old software business that signaled a great investment carried 70 to 80 percent gross margins. AI-native companies, she explained, are often running at 20 to 40 percent. That single shift changes everything about how you evaluate a company.

The downstream effects are profound. Services businesses that venture used to consider unexciting are suddenly interesting, because they can reach revenue quickly at margins comparable to AI companies. The classic moats, product, capital, speed, no longer hold the way they did. What becomes defensible instead is trust, expertise, the services layer, the regulatory complexity. Even age flips: the deep domain expert who knows an industry’s hallucinations and edge cases is now an asset, not a liability.

A new playbook for building

Samara also described a shift in how founders are choosing to build. The old model was raise a ton, hire a lot, raise again, repeat until something breaks. Increasingly, she hears founders say they never want to raise more than ten million dollars or have more than ten full-time hires, and they can still reach venture-scale returns, especially now that reaching a minimum viable product costs roughly fifteen percent of what it used to.

Why she built the structure she did

People assume a solo GP just makes gut calls. Samara is the opposite. Coming out of five years at a fund where she touched every part of the business, she deliberately built guardrails: every founder, whether a cold inbound or a warm intro from a close friend, fills out the same form and runs the same process.

That discipline is not bureaucracy. It is how she reduces bias, scales a small team, and, crucially, goes beyond her own network. She told the story of a founder who found her from a Bloomberg segment, applied cold through the website, and ended up with Chingona leading his oversubscribed round. The structure is what makes the open door real.

AI for good, and AI for us

Samara is clear-eyed that AI has a marketing problem, that roughly 70 percent of the general public does not trust it, that the environmental costs are real and cannot be ignored. But she also sees it as a leveler, particularly for communities historically locked out of capital.

She told a story I loved, about her daughter’s mysterious arm injury that the ER could not diagnose, the candle her mother lit to clear the bad energy, and her husband finally figuring out the answer (a misaligned elbow, common in small kids) through ChatGPT. “A vela and ChatGPT,” she joked, cured her daughter’s arm. Her point underneath the humor: there is enormous unexplored space for culturally relevant AI built specifically for the Latino community, tools that make us more connected and more human, not less.

The one yes

I asked what advice she had for founders who feel overlooked. Her answer was simple and it is the heart of why this show exists.

You only need one yes. You might get ten thousand no’s. It can come from a VC, a family member, a grant, a customer. You do not need everyone to believe in you. You need a few early believers who are with you.

For the Latino community specifically, she added something that hit hard: many of us are not taught to take risks. We are taught to be safe. Women especially are taught to be perfect. And failing while trying, she argued, matters more than getting it perfect. Now is the time to take the risk.

Chingona Ventures sees every deal that comes through its door and responds within 24 hours on whether to take a first call. That is the open door in practice. That is what being the first yes actually looks like.

This is a conversation about betting on the people the world tends to overlook. It is exactly why this show exists.

The full episode of The Corridor with Samara Mejia Hernandez is live now on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and here on Substack.

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.

Funds age up.

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When most of venture capital looks at Latino founders, it reaches for the language of inclusion. Representation. Access. Giving back. The words are warm and the intentions are usually good. They are also, I think, the reason this opportunity has stayed open for so long. We…

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There is a version of every investor panel you have seen before. The polite one. The one where everyone agrees that founders matter, that markets are big, that they are excited to support the ecosystem. You leave with a warm feeling and nothing you can use on Monday.

This was not that panel.

We brought four investors to one stage and asked them to tell a room full of founders what actually goes through their heads when they decide to write a check or pass. Not the version they post. The version they say to each other. What follows is what they shared, and what every founder reading this should take to heart.

They are not buying your idea. They are buying your ability to survive it.

The clearest theme of the night: at pre-seed, the founder is the asset. When there is almost no data, no revenue history, and no proof, what an investor is really underwriting is whether this person can navigate what is coming.

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Dyanis DeJesus sees something the postcards miss.

In Episode 2 of The Corridor, we sat down to talk about what might be the island’s most underestimated asset, the one that doesn’t show up in tourism campaigns or GDP headlines: its creative talent. And not creativity as decoration. Creativity as infrastructure. As the actual engine that could drive Puerto Rico’s next economy.

Beyond the cliche of “creative”

When we say creative talent, the instinct is to picture design studios and art galleries. Dyanis pushes hard against that framing, and it’s the heart of this conversation. The argument is that creativity in Puerto Rico isn’t a niche industry sitting off to the side. It’s a horizontal capability cutting through everything: tech, agriculture, energy, sustainability.

The creative professional, in this telling, is no longer a service provider you hire at the end to make something look nice. They’re moving to the center of how companies are built, how problems get solved, and how industries reinvent themselves. Storytelling, branding, and human-centered design stop being polish and start being strategy.

That shift, from service provider to strategic powerhouse, is the throughline of the whole episode.

The case studies that make it real

What makes this more than a nice idea are the examples Dyanis brings to the table.

We get into a startup that was born directly out of hurricane chaos, the kind of necessity-driven innovation that happens when systems fail and people have to build their own way forward. And we dig into a non-toxic cleaning company that demonstrates something a lot of founders still don’t fully believe: that sustainability isn’t a cost center or a marketing angle, it’s a growth strategy in its own right.

These aren’t abstractions. They’re proof points for a bigger claim, that Puerto Rico’s creative and entrepreneurial talent is already transforming real sectors, often without the outside world noticing.

Why the pandemic changed the math

One of the more interesting threads in the conversation is how the pandemic accelerated all of this. When the world went remote and distributed, the recognition of creative talent as a strategic asset jumped forward. Suddenly where talent lived mattered less, and what talent could do mattered more.

That reframing matters enormously for an island economy. It moves the conversation from “how do we attract resources” to “how do we leverage the human ingenuity we already have.” And it puts talent retention on equal footing with capital, because in a creativity-driven economy, losing your best people is losing your infrastructure.

The hide-and-seek problem

So here’s the tension we keep circling back to: if Puerto Rico’s creative ecosystem is this strong, why is it still playing hide-and-seek with the rest of the world?

Why do outsiders, investors, partners, even much of the diaspora, still not fully see it?

This is the question I care about most, because it’s the same gap Coquí Ventures exists to close. The talent is real. The companies are real. What’s missing is the connective tissue, the visibility, the rooms, the bridges between the island’s ingenuity and the capital and networks that could scale it. Puerto Rico doesn’t have a talent problem. It has a recognition and infrastructure problem. Those are very different things, and the second one is solvable.

Why this matters beyond Puerto Rico

If you’re a founder or an investor, the reason to listen isn’t only that this is a Puerto Rico story. It’s a blueprint that applies to every emerging economy and overlooked market.

The old model says an economy grows by accumulating resources. The model Dyanis is describing says an economy grows by how intelligently it leverages human ingenuity, and in a global economy increasingly driven by creativity, that’s where the real leverage lives. That reframing should change how you evaluate where opportunity actually sits, especially in places the traditional pattern-matching ignores.

It’s not about resources. It’s about leverage.

Listen to the episode

Episode 2 of The Corridor with Dyanis DeJesus is live now. If you’ve ever underestimated what a place like Puerto Rico can build, this one will change how you see it.

These are the conversations the ecosystem needs out loud. Come for the ideas, stay for the blueprint.

Dyanis’ on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dyanisdejesus/

Dyanis’ playlist pick: Debí Tirar Más Fótos (DTMF) by Bad Bunny.

The Corridor is the podcast from Coquí Ventures, where we have the real conversations about building, capital, and the talent shaping the next economy. New episodes regularly.

Read Coquí Notes: https://coquiventures.substack.com

Learn more about Coquí Ventures: https://coqui.world

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Not every room. Not every time. But enough times that it stopped surprising me and started just being part of the texture of what it means to build in this country as a Puerto Rican from the diaspora.

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Not better decks. Better process. The ones who closed had a system, a set of tools running in the background that made them look organized, prepared, and in control even when the inside felt like chaos.

The ones who stalled sent pitch decks as email attachments. They followed up with “just checking in.” They did not know which investors had opened their deck. They had no data room. When an investor asked for the cap table, it took three days.

Three days is a no.

This is the fundraise stack. The exact tools, why each one matters, and what it signals to the investor on the other side.

THE STACK AT A GLANCE

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