The ROI of Obsession

In January 2023, I posted YouTube videos that averaged 310 views per day. My friends, with the casual cruelty of those who care, asked why I was wasting my time. They weren’t wrong. In a world engineered for instant validation, spending hours crafting content for an audience that could fit in a coffee shop feels like shouting into the void.

Today, The J Curve hit 245,600 views in the last 28 days — a 28x expansion from those early days and nearly 7x from last year. But this isn't a story about viral growth or algorithmic luck. It's about the psychological architecture of compound creation and why most people quit before the curve bends.

THE TOOL THAT BECAME THE THING

When I launched The J Curve, there was no master plan to build a media brand. Fresh out of Stanford GSB, my goal was simple: fast-track trust and network building to launch a venture firm focused on backing global business models born in Brazil. The podcast was meant to be a tool, not the thing itself.

The timing seemed right. The creator economy was exploding, COVID had normalized remote interviews, and a handful of investment vehicles had successfully been built on podcast distribution. If storytelling can move capital, why not start there?

What I didn't anticipate was that I was about to enter a three-year psychological experiment in compound effects, creative persistence, and the strange alchemy of building in public.

YEAR 1: THE DEATH VALLEY OF ATTENTION (OCTOBER 2023: 8,700 VIEWS)

The first truth about launching anything new: you're not competing for attention — you're competing for behavioral change. People already have their favorite podcasts, their routines, their mental bookmarks. Convincing them to make room for you is like a startup trying to break into an entrenched category with network effects working against you.

That first year was the podcaster's version of a startup's death valley. Every episode felt like a prayer sent into the digital ether. The analytics dashboard mirrored a harsh reality: in a world of infinite content, you start as a flea.

But Death Valley teaches you one thing: your biggest competitor isn't Joe Rogan or Tim Ferriss or the Acquired podcast. It's your own complacency from yesterday. Every day you don’t publish, every moment you let self-doubt win, you lose to the self who kept going.

YEAR 2: THE GRIND AS PHILOSOPHY (OCTOBER 2024: 37,300 VIEWS)

By year two, we'd outlasted roughly 80% of podcasts launched alongside us. This is a statistical reality. Podcasting doesn't deliver the dopamine hits of TikTok or the instant gratification of a viral tweet. It's long-form, slow-build, and profoundly humbling.

You can't fake conviction in this medium. The microphone is merciless — It captures hesitation, forced enthusiasm, questions you don’t care about. You either find genuine joy in the process, or you quit. There's no middle ground.

The real skill I built wasn't interviewing. It was learning to mute two types of noise: the external chorus of "why are you wasting your time?" and the internal monologue of self-doubt. Both are equally poisonous to compound growth. The work was to show up consistently enough for the mathematics of compounding to override the psychology of doubt.

THE INVOICE ALWAYS COMES

There's a part of the journey that doesn't make it into LinkedIn celebrations — the invisible invoice that compound growth collects, paid in currencies that don't show up in your banking statement.

The financial cost of building a business is obviously high, but the real cost wasn't financial. It was the slow, almost imperceptible drift in certain relationships. Friends stop asking you to dinner. “Sorry, I have a recording” becomes your most-texted phrase. Your social life becomes parasocial. You know everything about your guests' ventures but haven't seen friends who live in the same city in months.

You can't explain this to people who haven't done it. "Just skip a week" sounds reasonable until you understand that consistency isn't about the algorithm — it's about proving to yourself that you're the kind of person who doesn't skip weeks.

Every ambitious path has its invoice. Investment bankers trade sleep, consultants trade geography, founders trade stability. The question isn't whether you'll pay a price — it's whether you're paying it for something you actually believe in.

YEAR 3: WHEN COMPOUND EFFECTS ENTER THE CHAT (OCTOBER 2025: 245,600 VIEWS)

This is the first year I mostly understand the machine I'm building. Not completely — but enough to steer with intent. My little pet project has evolved into a full-scale distribution system. Every episode spawns clips, newsletters, and connections that feed into a broader network. 

Layer AI on top, and the equation changes fundamentally. What once required a team of ten can now be accomplished by one person with the right tools and vision. We're living through a perfect storm where creativity, technology, and distribution have aligned to create unprecedented leverage for individual creators.

When you've proven you can grow 28x, suddenly 280x doesn't seem impossible — just a matter of time and continued compound interest.

THE LIBERATION OF MORTALITY

This might sound dark, but the most liberating thing I discovered in this journey is simple: I'm going to die someday, and that day isn't as far off as it feels.

As a creator, you live inside a relentless cycle of feedback. The pressure of everyone's opinions can become suffocating. But embracing your mortality breaks you out of this cage.

Once you understand that even your greatest hits will disappear, you're released from others' judgments. You can create without constantly second-guessing yourself, not because it will last, but because it won't. This lens lets you take the work seriously enough to do it well while laughing at the beautiful absurdity — temporary beings creating things on the internet, acting like it's forever when nothing is.

THE WORK WITHIN THE WORK

But perhaps the most surprising realization is that building in public isn't really about the public at all. It's about the builder. Every piece of content is a rep in the gym of clarity. Every episode forces you to articulate thoughts you didn't know you had. Every interview teaches you something about your own curiosity.

The audience growth, the views — these are lagging indicators of something more fundamental: the compound interest of becoming yourself in public. When you commit to this process long enough, you stop performing and start being. And that authenticity, paradoxically, is what ultimately breaks through the noise.

The friends who asked why I was wasting my time in 2023 weren't wrong. By any rational calculation, spending hundreds of hours creating content for 310 daily views is a poor ROI. But they were asking the wrong question. The right question isn't "Why waste your time?" It's "What if you don't quit?"

THE CEILING BECOMES THE FLOOR

At this point, I'm convinced we're just getting started. The convergence of AI, creator tools, and global distribution has turned the sky from a ceiling into a floor. What seemed like ambitious goals three years ago now feel like conservative projections.

But the real lesson is about understanding that everything meaningful in life follows the J Curve — that maddening period where effort wildly exceeds results, followed by an inflection point where results suddenly exceed effort.

Most people quit in Death Valley. They quit because the math doesn't make sense, because friends raise eyebrows, because the silence is deafening. But for those who persist through the valley, who find joy in the process rather than just the results, who understand that they're competing against their own complacency rather than external benchmarks — for those people, the curve eventually bends.

And when it does, you realize the journey was never about the views at all. What you created isn’t the project — it’s the person who can sustain it.

Building The J Curve was the most consequential decision I've made — not just for the network, but for how it's defined my thinking about what kind of VC fund Brazil needs. I’m still shaping that thesis, still defining what that fund should become. But one thing I know for sure: in a couple years, when someone asks why I'm wasting my time on a fund no one's heard of, I'll have my answer ready.

THE J CURVE HALL OF FAME

Last week we hit another milestone — 150K views in a single week for our episode with Gringo, the Brazilian super app for drivers that transformed DMV bureaucracy into a $200M business, acquired by payments giant Corpay. Caique Carvalho’s journey — from two failed startups to that $200M exit — is a masterclass in product-market fit, discipline, and the power of solving “boring” problems exceptionally well. If you haven’t watched it yet, here’s your sign.

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.