Enjoy Christmas. We’ll figure it out on the 26th.

Ask anyone why startups die and you’ll get the same list: ran out of money, couldn’t find product-market fit, co-founder conflicts tearing teams apart. These show up in post-mortems, in LinkedIn retrospectives, in the “what went wrong” investor memos.

But there’s another way to die — one that doesn’t fit the narrative.

You can have the funding. The paying customers. the world-class team.

And watch your dream die anyway — not because you failed to execute, but because someone in a bureaucratic office you’ve never met decided your entire category shouldn’t exist.

It's December 24th. Daniel Vogel is packing Christmas gifts when his lawyer calls. The Central Bank just published a regulation that, if read correctly, means Bitso has until January 20th to shut down. Everyone's leaving for the holidays. The government offices are closed. He has customers, he has money in the system, and in three weeks, he might have to tell them it's over. 

Most founders would panic. Call emergency meetings. Ruin everyone's holiday trying to solve an unsolvable problem in real-time. Daniel told his team to go home. Enjoy Christmas. We’ll figure this out on the 26th.

That composure — the ability to accept powerlessness without surrendering to panic — is what separates the founders who make it from the ones who don't. And you can't fake it when the call comes.

FALLING DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

There’s a story Daniel tells about being eight years old.

A technician came to convert their rotary phones to digital, ran out of time, and promised to come back next week. Daniel told his mom he could finish the job. He short-circuited something in the process, but it worked.

His mother let him try.

That permissive curiosity, Daniel says, became the foundation of how he operates — the freedom to explore without fear of short-circuiting. To be obsessed with how things work, not just that they work.

Fast forward to 2013. He’s in Silicon Valley, working at a tech company, consumed by real-time auction problems. Then a Venezuelan friend asks if he's heard of Bitcoin.That night, Daniel Googles it and finds a what-the-hell-does-that-even-mean kind of line:

“Bitcoin is an economic experiment to create a decentralized currency outside of the realm of any governments.”

He understands every word individually. In conjunction, it makes no sense. And so he spends the whole night reading. He can only think about Bitcoin. What is money? Who creates it? Why does it have value? Questions he never asked despite studying economics at Stanford.

People in crypto call this “falling down the rabbit hole.”

Watching Daniel describe this, I saw the founder obsession in its purest form. But there’s a difference between the kind of obsession that leads to a company and the kind that just burns your nights.

Daniel wasn’t obsessed with Bitcoin as a technology. He was obsessed with the question it unlocked — can we build better money? Can we rebuild the financial system for people who’ve been locked out of it?

Then he met Julio — the janitor at his company who paid $12 in fees to send $300 home to Mexico. Who’d left his family behind because local opportunities weren’t enough. Who now paid extortionate rates just to move his own money.

The abstract obsession became human. The rabbit hole found its purpose.

THE INVISIBLE COMPOUNDING OF CRAFTSMANSHIP

Bitso was the first crypto exchange to launch in Mexico. But a competitor followed less than two months later — with a better product.

They'd licensed their trading platform from a US company that had been building exchange technology for years. It was polished. Professional. Everything Bitso's homegrown system wasn't.

Before launch, Daniel and his co-founders had faced the same choice: build it themselves or license the proven solution. None of them were traders. They had no experience building exchange infrastructure. Licensing would’ve been cheaper, faster, lower-risk.

They decided to build it anyway.

"We recognized that crypto was at a very early stage," Daniel told me. "There were going to be a lot of changes, and we needed to be able to iterate. We needed to build the muscle to build the platform ourselves."

At first, it looked like the wrong call. The competitor’s product was objectively better — more features, smoother experience, built by people who knew what they were doing.

The long-term advantage of that decision became obvious with time.

Bitso could iterate. The competitor couldn't.

When Bitso identified something users needed — a feature specific to the Mexican market, a payment flow that reduced friction — they could build it immediately. The competitor had to get in line. Their vendor had other clients, other priorities, other markets. Every improvement meant negotiating, waiting, hoping it would eventually get prioritized.

"They would see what we had done," Daniel said, "and they would ask the company to add that functionality. But they were in a queue."

Bitso kept shipping. The competitor kept waiting. The gap closed, then reversed.

This is the invisible compounding of owning your craft. The daily advantage of controlling your own destiny is small—almost imperceptible. But compounded over months and years, it's the difference between a company that can respond to its market and one that's at the mercy of someone else's roadmap.

The competitor eventually shut down. Bitso became Latin America's first crypto unicorn.

It wasn't because they had better technology at the start. It was because they built the capacity to get better — faster.

In a fast-moving space, the team that can learn fastest wins. And you can't learn fast if you don't control what you're building.

WHEN “KEEP GOING“ BECOMES BAD ADVICE

“What’s the worst piece of entrepreneurial advice,” I asked Daniel.

“Just keep trying.”

And this comes from a founder who’s spent ten years building through regulatory crises, market crashes, and skepticism from every direction. A founder whose company survived while competitors with better early products shut down.

But he’s watched too many founders mistake the sunk-cost fallacy for resilience. Who take “never give up” literally, even when the market is screaming it’s over.

The company Daniel started before Bitso didn’t work. It tried to solve remittances using Bitcoin, but the infrastructure didn’t exist yet. They needed an exchange first. They were too early. He could’ve kept trying. Instead, he pivoted to build what the market actually needed.

This tension between perseverance and pragmatism feels uniquely important in LATAM. Daniel and I talked about how growing up in Mexico shapes your attitude toward risk. The culture is deeply risk-averse.Families still say things like, “He ran his company into the ground — he must be stupid or irresponsible.”

But Daniel’s dad told him something different: Do your thing. And if people make fun of you, don’t pay attention.

The wisdom isn’t in going full Silicon Valley “fail fast” mode. That advice was built for a market with abundant capital and cultural forgiveness. The real wisdom is in distinguishing between resilience that comes from conviction and stubbornness that comes from ego.

Daniel has a board member who once told him entrepreneurs need to reinvent themselves regularly. For years, he didn’t understand what that meant. He thought he’d build Bitso forever with the same early team — the true believers who bought into Bitcoin when it was still synonymous with Silk Road.

But as the company scaled, enthusiasm stopped being enough. Some of those early believers couldn’t make the leap to the next stage. And Daniel, like many founders, struggled with the pragmatic decision to move them aside.

“Founders get this cheat code,” he told me. “Because you’re the founder, you get to keep playing even when you might not be the best person for the job anymore. But you’re also running the biggest job you’ve ever had.”

The people around you don’t get that cheat code. At some point, you need to replace them or top-level them. Some people thrive when you hire above them. Others build stories in their head about no longer being important — and they start misbehaving.

This is the part that broke my brain a little: the best founders aren’t the ones who never quit. They’re the ones who know exactly what to quit — the wrong people, the wrong strategies, the wrong timing — while never quitting on the core problem they’re solving.

Daniel's version of "never give up" is actually "never lose sight of the mission, but be ruthlessly pragmatic about everything else."

THE PILOT IN COMMAND

Daniel learned to fly small planes when he lived in San Francisco - It's been a hobby for years. Turns out, there are more similarities between piloting at 10,000 feet and running a high-growth startup than you might think.

"One of the things you really learn in the cockpit is that you can't lose your shit," he said. "Because if you lose your shit, you're going to die."

Engines shut off. Passengers get sick. You can't find the airport. And as the pilot in command, you need to stay composed and do what's necessary to keep everyone safe.

He's carried that training into business. When his lawyer called on Christmas Eve with news of the Central Bank regulation that could shut Bitso down, his pilot training kicked in.

You might not be responsible for the situation you’re in, but you’re always responsible for how you respond to it. And you can’t lose your shit. You step back, take a breath, regain composure, and think through the next move. You’re the pilot in command.

Every founder I talk to in LATAM eventually describes some version of this moment. When external forces—regulation, currency collapse, political instability, market crashes—threaten to destroy everything you've built. The founders who make it aren't necessarily smarter or better capitalized. They're the ones who've trained themselves to not lose their shit when the engine fails.

But composure, like any key entrepreneurial skill, is a muscle—and it dulls with time. Daniel admits he forgets his own advice all the time.

He told me about reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and how one idea stuck — the concept of “sharpening the saw.” The lumberjack who’s too busy cutting down the tree to stop and sharpen his dull blade. He thinks pausing would waste time, but it’s the dullness that’s really slowing him down. The lesson is simple: you have to step back, learn, and rebuild your edge before you go back to execute.

But it's so easy to forget when things get stressful. To grind away with a dull saw because stopping to sharpen feels like wasted time.

That’s the paradox of building in emerging markets: the turbulence never stops. The composure muscle gets tested daily. But that constant state of crisis makes it almost impossible to do the one thing that would actually help you survive it — step back and sharpen your skills.

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THE REGRET-MINIMIZATION FRAMEWORK

When I asked Daniel what he wants Bitso’s legacy to be decades from now, he gave me three things.

One: Redefine the financial system. The one we have today runs on outdated piping. Bitso’s legacy should be about rebuilding that infrastructure for the digital era — creating the rails for how money actually moves in the future.

Two: Be a source of inspiration. Show people in Mexico and LATAM that you can challenge the status quo, survive adversity, and build something truly impactful — creating the self-fulfilling prophecy of entrepreneurship.

Three: Have very few regrets.

That one lingered.

“I would love to look back at Bitso and have very little regrets — in the way I operated the company, the way we captured opportunities. Of course we’ll make mistakes. But where there’s not a deep-rooted regret — that would be very important for me.”

This is Jeff Bezos’s regret-minimization framework in action. Daniel used it when he decided to leave Silicon Valley for Mexico. For him, the decision was obvious — if he didn’t build something in crypto, he’d regret it for the rest of his life.

What’s interesting, though, is how the framework evolves. It's not just about the big binary decision of whether to start the company. It's about the thousand small decisions along the way. Who you hire. Who you fire. Which opportunities you chase. Which you let pass.

The entrepreneurs who endure aren’t afraid of the inevitable mistakes that come from a thousand small decisions; they’re afraid of betraying the things they’ll care about when the dust settles.

For Daniel, it would be looking back and knowing he could have played a meaningful role in crypto's growth, but didn't. Or knowing he built Bitso to an exit but lost himself and his values in the process. Or knowing he held back when he should have been bolder.

Different founders have different regret profiles. Understanding yours is maybe the most important work you can do.

HOW ARE YOU, REALLY?

I asked Daniel what question he wishes people asked him more often.

“A very genuine, how are you,” he said.

It’s the question founders rarely get. We ask about metrics, growth, milestones. We ask about the company, the team, the roadmap. We almost never ask about the person running it all.

Daniel told me about moments when someone finally asks—and the floodgates open. The struggles you’ve been carrying alone. The weight you didn’t realize you were holding. And then the listener says, I wish I’d known. I wish I’d been there for you.

This is the loneliness tax of building. Everyone sees the company. Very few see the founder.

The irony is that the people closest to founders—co-founders, early team members, investors, even family—often assume someone else is asking. Everyone thinks someone else is checking in. So nobody does.

Sometimes the answer is I’m great, actually. That matters too. But you only get the answer if you make space for the ask.

YOU CAN’T LOSE YOUR SHIT

Going into this conversation, I thought we’d talk about crypto, decentralization, the future of money. And we did — but what stuck with me had nothing to do with Bitcoin.

First, the LATAM entrepreneurial ecosystem doesn’t need more generic advice about resilience and hustle. We have that in abundance. What we need are more honest conversations about when to quit, how to stay composed when the world falls apart, and what conviction actually looks like when separated from ego.

Second, the stories matter more than we admit. Daniel said it explicitly: he wants Bitso to inspire others to believe they can build something that changes the status quo. This is how the self-fulfilling prophecy works. Every founder who succeeds makes it marginally easier for the next one to convince their family, their early hires, their first investors.

This is why The J Curve exists — not to celebrate success for its own sake, but to document the specific texture of building in LATAM so the next generation doesn’t have to rediscover everything from scratch.

Third, and most practically: if you’re building something that matters, you better have a mechanism for sharpening your saw. Because the grind will dull you faster than you realize — and by the time you notice, you’ll be too busy sawing to do anything about it.

Daniel’s been doing this for eleven years. Bitso is one of the most successful companies built in LATAM this decade. And he still admits he forgets to sharpen the saw.

Fourth, and most importantly: when the engine fails, you cannot lose your shit.

Bitso survived the Central Bank regulation that almost shut them down on Christmas Eve — and everything that’s come since.

Not because Daniel never felt the pressure or stress or overwhelm — but because when the engine fails, he knows he’s the pilot in command.

And he can’t lose his shit.

Neither can you.

THE J CURVE HALL OF FAME

I just saw the news about Magalu launching Lu’s app — the first fully autonomous AI commerce experience built on WhatsApp.

Within WhatsApp — through text, voice, or even images — Lu understands what customers need, chats naturally, and recommends products just like the best human salespeople.

It immediately made me think back to my conversation with Guilherme Horn, who leads WhatsApp for Brazil, India, and Indonesia. We talked about how WhatsApp isn’t just a messaging app anymore — it’s the OS of Brazil’s digital economy. Check out our conversation here

Or if you’d rather read it, The Insider edition has you covered

Thanks for reading,

Olga 

 P.S. If this issue was valuable to you please share it with a founder who needs to hear it. Let’s build LATAM’s next tech leaders—together

🎙 The J Curve  is where LATAM's boldest founders & investors come to talk real strategy, opportunity and leadership.