Brian Requarth is Founder and General Partner at Latitud — a Silicon Valley-based venture fund and platform that leads pre-seed checks into the top 1% of Latin American founders building global companies. Brian previously co-founded VivaReal, which merged with ZAP Imóveis in 2017 to form Grupo ZAP — later acquired by OLX Brazil for approximately $640M in 2020. Latitud's fellowship has accepted just 1% of 1,500+ annual applicants — harder than the Ivy League — and its 1,000+ alumni have collectively raised over $1B in venture capital. Portfolio companies include Pomelo, StarkBank, and Hyperplane (acquired by Nubank).
In this episode, Brian shares why the share of LatAm founders building globally from day one has jumped from 3% to 46% in five years, and what's actually driving the shift. We cover what Founders Fund, Benchmark, Sequoia, Index, and Green Oaks are now underwriting in LatAm — and why the bet is increasingly on the founder profile, not the market, what Brian calls "minus one to zero" investing (versus Thiel's zero-to-one) and why Latitud writes checks before there's even a deck, the ELO-style algorithmic scoring system Latitud built — inspired by chess and tennis ratings — to filter 1,500 applications down to 50, why velocity of learning is the single most important variable he looks for in a founder, and why "if I get to move twice for every one of your moves, I can beat a grandmaster," the anatomy of a great early-stage fundraising round — sharpening the ax, calendar density, signal collection from named angels, and reverse-engineering investor psychology, why "síndrome de vira-lata" (the underdog mindset) is the biggest internal blocker for LatAm founders and how Bay Area exposure rewires it, the new wave of LatAm founders Brian is most excited about — including Mateus at Enter AI, Felipe and Yuri at Camu, and Thais at Taste building taste infrastructure for the AI labs, why Latitud built its entire community on a give-first mentality — starting with 150 Zoom calls during COVID and the $300K Facebook message that once saved VivaReal, why he believes the AI super cycle plus the mindset shift is the most important convergence in LatAm tech right now, and the one piece of advice he would pass to the next generation of Latin American founders.
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