Gina Gotthilf: prediction

Transcript context

…So you referenced this company, that you started Latitud. Maybe just describe briefly, just broadly, how do you pitch what Latitud does to folks that might find it useful? I will, and I still do a pretty bad job with pitching it, but the pitch is basically we're building the operating system for Latin American early stage tech startups, and what that means is that building a startup is hard anywhere, but it's extra hard in Latin America for some of the reasons that I outlined. Some of the things that we decided to solve for are one, it's super lonely to be a founder. And if you're able to meet great founders who are just a step ahead of you in anything, be it in product or growth or marketing or incorporation or finances, you can save yourself so much time from trying to read books and Google if they can just tell you what to do or connect you with the right person, that if we were able to connect these people meaningfully, we could make a huge impact. So, that's number one, it's lonely. And number two, you build a startup in Brazil and you're like, "Wow, this is working. I'm going to go to Silicon Valley." I've seen this happen a lot in the past decade, and Silicon Valley is a completely different place. The US, it's a different place, the competition's different. 3% of people in Brazil only, and that varies in Latin America, speak English. So, the likelihood of you being taken seriously is low. Your chances of success are low, but at the same time, Latin America has so much in common as a region, but we don't actually actually see that if we're Latin Americans. We just think we're countries, especially Brazilians don't think that they're part of the rest, and Mexicans don't think about Brazil. It's so far, look at it on the map. In the US you're like, oh Latin America." But if you're there, it's just not at all connected, but the opportunities of growth are huge and dependent on whether you meet the right people are able to open doors and understand that our problems are so similar that a solution for one part of this region could potentially be great for another part of the region. I'm not doing a great job of pitching, but in addition to it being lonely and it being difficult to find the right resources and really trustworthy knowledge, it's really hard to raise capital and it's really hard to do things like incorporate and bring your money down, et cetera. So, that's what we do. First, we have a fellowship program. We have 1,500 entrepreneurs who got in, we run four cohorts a year, about 600 applicants per, and so you get in and you get access to all of these resources we've put together. You get to find out what everyone thinks about other investors in the region because I think it's important to disseminate that information. You get access to introductions to investors through each other and advice and events. In addition, we have a fund, so we've invested in 100 startups and we're raising our second fund now. It's going to be around $25 million with a $30 million cap, so that's another thing. So we invest, you figure out your investment game, but you might become one of our investments as well. d fund now. It's going to be around $25 million with a $30 million cap, so that's another thing. So we invest, you figure out your investment game, but you might become one of our investments as well. And in addition, we have products that make it a lot easier to navigate the super, in my opinion, boring and frustrating stuff behind starting a company that you don't want to think about it as an entrepreneur because you're trying to solve a problem and build a team and build a product. You're not trying to figure out what's the best incorporation method and how to open a bank account in the US and how to figure out the foreign exchange prices and bring the money down and how to manage that money or how to stay compliant in your country, and then in two other jurisdictions, if you have a Delaware and a Cayman. So, we do all of that for you and make it easy through a dashboard we built, a bank that we built, and so on and so forth. So, it's not an easy to describe business because it's kind of an ecosystem play. We're trying to elevate the tech ecosystem in Latin America, and it's a lot of moving parts.…

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