Your Default Outcome Is Failure

The American Hustle myth has a seductive logic. If you believe hard enough, work hard enough, surround yourself with the right people — it’ll work. That narrative is everywhere. TED talks, Twitter threads, every third LinkedIn post. And it produces a specific kind of founder: one who is deeply committed to the idea that success is the natural outcome of effort. That belief feels good. It also makes you fragile.

Because when it stops working — and at some point, it always stops working — you have no framework for it. The funding round falls through. The product doesn’t land. A competitor raises a hundred million dollars and your team starts getting recruited. If your internal model was belief = outcome, you have nothing left to stand on.

There’s a different psychology of success though. One that starts with a simple, almost brutal acceptance: your default outcome is zero.

Sit with that for a second. When zero is your baseline, every other outcome is upside. You’ve already survived the worst version of the story in your head. The anxiety of what if this fails loses its grip, because you’ve already answered that question. And you decided to build anyway.

And this is so liberating for one simple reason: you can’t fall from the floor.

The floor becomes your foundation.

And the question stops being will this work and becomes something more useful: given that it probably won’t, what would have to be true for it to?

 THIS WEEK’S NUMBER

 2

The number of top-5 most valuable companies in Latin America that are tech companies today. Nubank and MercadoLibre. A decade ago there were zero.

COMMUNITY PICKS

Five things Hernán Kazah said in our Season 5 premiere that we haven’t stopped thinking about.

1. On investing

“To build a successful career as an investor, you need to be very, very, very right. Just a few times.”

2. On partnerships

“The most valuable information you can get about a partner is how they act and make decisions under pressure.”

3. On building

“Resist the temptation to over-innovate. Humans have a tendency to be more attracted towards change and innovation rather than results.”

4. On strategy

“You have to have lots of clarity about where you wanna go long term. And then lots of clarity about what’s the next most important thing you need to solve. It’s almost useless to define with lots of clarity what you’re going to do in between.”

5. On founders

“The founder skill most underrated in Latin America? Courage.”

Here’s the highlight reel with my favourite moments from the conversation with Hernán:

WHAT I’M LOVING 

1. The Adolescence of Technology — Dario Amodei

Anthropic’s CEO on the moment humanity is actually in right now with AI — not the dream version, not the doomsday version, but the messy, high-stakes rite of passage in between. Required reading if you’re building anything that touches this space.

Read it here

2. Ramp’s CEO on Building Zero-Touch Finance — McKinsey

Eric Glyman on how Ramp hit a $32B valuation by solving the most boring problem in finance: the expense report. A masterclass in picking an unglamorous problem and going all the way. Relevant context for anyone watching AI eat fintech workflows.

Read it here

3. The Acquired Podcast: Scaling the Mic — Harvard Business School

The most unconventional way to build a media empire. A masterclass in building value beyond mass market — and a reminder that podcasting is lowkey the stickiest, highest-intent media format alive. JP Morgan paying $1.5M for a season sponsorship is not an accident. Fascinating reading for anyone building a media business or thinking about growth vs. integrity of product.

Read it here (you’ll need to purchase the case to access the full version)

4. Endeavor Brasil Annual Meeting 2026 — Video Recap

Brazil is globally associated with culture, warmth, football. Rarely with technology. Yet its engineering already powers global systems. Loved the conversation between Mariano Gomide (VTEX) and Daniel Moczydlower (Embraer-X). One of the most underrated tech ecosystems in the world doesn’t have an engineering gap. It has a storytelling gap — and I totally agree with that.

Watch the panel here

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.