Solve your own problem (Olga's version)

Back when I got obsessed about launching something in Brazil in August 2020, I had absolutely no relations to Brazil, Brazilian tech ecosystem or Latin America. But just like many other Stanford GSB students I wanted to start something new and impactful after graduation. So I thought I could put my brain, energy and capital to work in Brazil, a country that has been routinely overlooked by venture capital investors but exhibits some spectacular stories of entrepreneurship, resiliency and grit.

I have always enjoyed working with emerging markets - the scale of problems is much bigger than that in middle class societies and hence the opportunity for any given individual to drive a real change. Brazil sounded like a very exciting market to dedicate the next 10-15 years to for several reasons:

1️⃣ Fast-maturing local tech ecosystem (think decent number of early stage investors like Kaszek, Monashees, Valor Capital and Canary, strong entrepreneurial networks like Endeavor and local big techs that spin out talent like iFood)

2️⃣ Lack of capital allocation / interest from global investors. A bit ironic now, but back when I started traveling to Brazil, the most frequently asked question I got was ‘Why are you interested in Brazil, Olga? You are not Brazilian and you don’t speak Portuguese!’ 🤣 Never got that question whenI looked at India and China btw. People in those countries had a great sense of their tech ecosystem potential to deliver ROI for VC investors

3️⃣ Diversity & culture. Brazil is a melting pot nation, even more so than the US imo as ethnicities and cultures are much more integrated there. I mean, there is a reason why 6ish out of the first 10 unicorns were built by non Brazilians :)

+ I had some Brazilian classmates that were willing to make me few intros.

At first I wanted to build an early stage fund to back local Brazilian founders building tech businesses for the global markets and use all my VC experience and network I’ve built over 15 years of investing in CEE, SEA, UK and USA to help them scale. I even landed enough commitments from my professors, GSB peers and GPs of bigger US funds for the first closing - how exciting!

The idea had the real problem though: how in the world will I build the deal flow funnel and learn to recognize the patterns of the best founders in Brazil? I didn’t and still don’t speak any Portuguese and back then I had no network. Spending several million dollars of LP money without having a clear understanding of how I was going to source the winners sounded like a bad idea

So I put the idea of launching a new fund on hold and instead decided to ‘free ride’ the rapidly growing ecosystem of services around content creators and launch a podcast. I couldn’t think about a faster way to understand the market and build the network of entrepreneurs and investors. This reminds me of one of my favorite essay’s by YC founder Paul Graham ‘How to get startup ideas’. Here’s a quote 👇🏻

The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.
- Paul Graham

I remember, I had to silent that little voice inside my head telling me that I ain’t Tim Ferris and that getting into a new market and a new category at the same time was a stupid idea and just began creating and learning and dropping the episodes on the fly. An absolute crash course on entrepreneurship haha. Eternally grateful to Mike Kapps, a dear friend and the founder of Vitalk (the company I was an advisor to and which we later sold to Gympass) for agreeing to become my guinea pig and the very first guest of my The J Curve Podcast. The whole thing would not have happened without Mike.

Long story short, I ended up building The J Curve into one of the largest podcasts about entrepreneurship in Latin America in less than 3 years. I've realized that access to information about what's happening in the tech ecosystem in Brazil is a big barrier to entry for non Portuguese speaking entrepreneurs and investors alike. What’s even more surprising and somewhat counterintuitive was to discover that 65% of our audience is actually in Brazil itself so we are not only bringing awareness of Brazilian tech potential to the audience in the US but also bridging the knowledge gap within the country 🤯

Ironically, I’ve spent most of my professional career being an investor, deploying capital and managing portfolio and never even imagined that I would love being a founder so much. I’ve developed a whole new level of respect for founders and builders because building something new is so freaking hard. So much hustle, creativity and learnings along the way but that’s the topic for the next post :)

Thanks for reading,
Olga