The J Curve
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We’re back

We’re back

Admin
February 26, 2026

Anyone doing business with Brazil knows there's a before and an after.

Carnaval, obviously. :)

Before Carnaval, you learn patience. The country collectively decides — with zero apology — that five days of samba, sequins, and pure joy outrank whatever you had on your Q1 roadmap. And if you've ever actually been to Carnaval, you get it completely.

But now the confetti has settled. The drumlines have packed up. The last float has rolled back into storage somewhere in Rio. And Brazil — like it does every single year, like clockwork — is back. Refreshed. Recharged. Ready.

And so are we.

But before we get into what's coming — I want to say thank you. This new season wouldn't exist without you. Over the past few months, hundreds of you filled out surveys, replied to newsletters, sent DMs and WhatsApp messages that said "more of this, less of that" — we read all of it. We restructured entire formats because of it. So if what you see this season feels different, that's your fingerprint on it.

So thank you. Really. Now let's get into it.

The J Curve has always existed to close a gap — between what's actually being built in Latin America and what the rest of the world thinks is being built in Latin America. Between the founder in São Paulo operating at world-class level and the growth-stage fund in New York who still thinks emerging markets means emerging quality.

Our TJC flagship series is entirely dedicated to closing this gap. We're sitting down with the founders who built billions of dollars in value from inside Latin America — and the investors, both homegrown and global, who had the conviction to back them consistently, long before this market became a talking point. And we're leaning all the way in — we're going longer, baby.

More time, more depth, more rabbit holes we actually go down. Our first episode drops Tuesday March 3rd at 7am ET — and I promise it will tell you everything you need to know about what kind of season this is going to be. Mark your calendars. You don't want to miss this one.

But that's not all. This year we're introducing two brand new formats — both built from scratch around what you told us you needed. Say hello to TJC Operators and TJC Debrief.

TJC Operators is all about the craft of building — the real stuff. How to build a high-performing culture. How to go from one product to many. How to manage your board when things get hard. How to build a lasting brand. How to know when to pivot and when to hold. And yes — how to leave well, when you feel like you no longer belong to the stage of the company you helped create. We're sitting down with the region's best tech CEOs, CTOs, COOs, CHROs — you name it — and extracting every key strategy and tactic of company building in Latin America. Expect to hear from leaders at Mercado Libre, Creditas, Uber, Coinbase and more. A lot more. This one's different.

TJC Debrief is our quarterly pulse check on Latin America's tech ecosystem. The key deals and why they happened. The most active investors and where they're putting money. New funds closing. Global giants expanding into the region. Cross-border acquisitions. Regulatory and tech tailwinds. Sector heat maps. If you want to know what's actually happening in Latin America tech — this is your quarterly essential.

Over the past few years I've watched this ecosystem grow up in real time. I watched it scale during the bonanza years — with tens of billions of dollars flowing in, soaring valuations, and everything feeling possible. I watched it survive the drought — when tourist capital fled, valuations reset, and the weak weeded out. And I watched it come out the other side stronger, leaner, more capital efficient, more profitable, and more ambitious than ever before.

I watched PIX and Open Finance rewrite the rules of financial infrastructure in Brazil. I watched WhatsApp become the operating system of the Brazilian economy — the platform layer that a new generation of breakout companies is being built on top of or leveraging for their GTM. And now I'm watching AI do something nobody fully predicted — put Brazil on the global application layer map, powered by massive industry data lakes and data moats that local tech leaders spent decades building without knowing how valuable they would become.

The growth of this podcast is not a coincidence. It mirrors the growth of the ecosystem itself. Every season we've gone deeper because the stories have gotten deeper. Every season we've expanded because the market has expanded. And this season — more than any before it — feels like a reflection of where Latin America tech actually is: past the proving stage, past the hype cycle, and into something far more interesting. The compounding phase.

We believe in what's being built here. Deeply. And we can't wait to show you why.

Here’s a vlog from my very short but incredible productive trip to Buenos Aires earlier this year

THIS WEEK’S NUMBER

Zero → 10+

A decade ago, Brazil had zero technology companies generating $1 billion or more in annual revenue — in Brazil alone. Today it has more than ten: Nubank, StoneCo, PagSeguro, Mercado Libre, iFood, PicPay and others. And if you ask me, the next ten will get there in half the time — thanks to the size of the market, deep local data moats, and AI.

SCROLL-STOPPERS

Five things Paulo Passoni said in our Season 4 finale that we haven't stopped thinking about.

"The use of horses didn't collapse in a linear way. It waited for about three decades and then fell off the cliff. The same thing is going to happen with AI. You don't see it, you don't see it — and one day your old way of doing things is going to fall off the cliff."

"If you found your calling and you are on that mission to do something for the rest of your life — the way you're going to face work is different. It's not going to feel like work. You are going to be thinking about that all the time. And there's no ending to it. You're going to work until you die."

"The only way to really understand something is to double click and be in the game. Making commentaries on social media so that you sound smart is precisely making you dumb."

"Venture and growth is about going from 0.1% market share to 20% market share. That journey is idiosyncratic. It has nothing to do with the macro. One out of ten investors in the world understand that."

"At Perplexity, only three people at the company are allowed to make hires. And if you want to hire someone, you have to prove to those three people that you really need a human being — that technology cannot do it."

Watch the full conversation here if you haven't already.

WHAT I’M LOVING

20VC: Sebastian Siemiatkowski (Klarna) — SaaS is Dead

The "AI is killing SaaS" narrative is everywhere right now. What's harder to find is someone who can speak to it from the inside, with receipts. Siemiatkowski can. Klarna has spent the last two years running the experiment at scale, and this conversation is the most detailed account of what they found.

🔗 Listen on Spotify

Invest Like the Best: Josh Kushner — Concentration and Conviction

Thrive manages $50 billion with a tiny team and has backed Instagram, Stripe, GitHub, and OpenAI. Josh rarely talks publicly — which makes this conversation worth every minute. He describes Thrive not as a fund but as an operating company whose product is partnership. And his framing on OpenAI — that we're living in a moment where private companies could be worth half a trillion dollars and it's Thrive's job to get them the capital they need — is exactly the kind of long-term, high-conviction thinking that separates the great investors from everyone else. One line will stay with me: "We're not Da Vinci. We're Medici."

🔗 Listen on Spotify

Clouded Judgement: Software is Dead…Again!

To add to the AI vs SaaS debate — this is the data layer underneath all the headlines. Jamin Ball at Altimeter tracks cloud software multiples every week, and right now the median NTM revenue multiple has hit its lowest point in 10 years. His read: it's not that SaaS businesses are broken — it's that investor confidence in their long-term retention rates has shattered. What will change the market's mind? A few quarters of stable retention in the face of AI challengers. The receipts aren't in yet.

🔗 Read on Substack

Book re-read: The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby

I first read this a few years ago — and it's worth revisiting. Mallaby spent years getting the most influential VCs in Silicon Valley to talk with rare candor about what they actually do and why. The core argument: venture capital is not about diversification, it's about finding the one bet that returns the whole fund. Most finance is about managing downside. Venture is about manufacturing upside. A book I'd recommend to every founder trying to understand how the people writing them checks actually think.

🔗 Amazon

Credit Cards Had a Good Run

In 2025, Pix officially overtook credit cards as Brazil's dominant e-commerce payment method. 42% of all online purchase value, versus 41% for cards. A system that didn't exist five years ago just dethroned one that took decades to build.

But the number that matters more isn't the market share. It's the 60 million Brazilians who never had a credit card — and who are now paying for streaming, software, and digital services for the first time.