The J Curve with Olga Maslikhova

Julio Vasconcellos is the Managing Partner at Atlantico, one of Latin America’s leading venture firms, and the driving force behind the Latin America Digital Transformation Report. Now in its 6th edition, the report has become the definitive data backbone for investors and founders seeking to understand the region’s tech landscape.

Previously, Julio was Facebook’s first country lead in Brazil and co-founder of Peixe Urbano, giving h...

Tiago Dalvi is the solo founder and CEO of Olist, Brazil's leading e-commerce operating system serving 45,000+ merchants and processing 60 billion reais annually. Olist has raised $314M from investors including SoftBank, Wellington Management, Goldman Sachs, Valor Capital Group, and Accel partner Kevin Efrusy, and operates in Brazil's $60B+ e-commerce market.

The Brazilian unicorn founder discusses marketplace strategy, vent...

Why do 90% of LATAM founders struggle to raise venture capital funding? It's not their product or market - it's because they don't understand the game they're playing. This episode reveals the patterns behind every major VC success story from Nubank to QuintoAndar. I cover the fund economics that drive every investment decision, the founder profiles that get fast-tracked, the three business models that dominate portfolios, and the ...

Three ecosystem builders who created $1B+ in exits share the exact strategies behind Latin America's biggest tech wins in this rare roundtable, recorded live in São Paulo with AWS.

Daniela Binatti: Built Pismo into one of Visa's largest fintech acquisitions ($1B cash)

Romero Rodrigues: Sold Buscapé to Naspers for $374M, now Managing Partner at Headline. Early investor in Pismo and Wellhub

Carlos Costa: Valor Capital Managing Partner (...

Dr. Vitor Asseituno is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sami, Brazil's fastest-growing health insurance startup. Sami has raised $65M total funding and serves 20,000+ customers across 11 Brazilian cities in the $60B private health insurance market.

Key Insights & Takeaways:

1. The "pipeline mathematics" behind turning 100+ VC rejections into Series B success

2. Investor psychology: what resonates when pitching complex healthcare business...

Welcome to Season 4 of The J Curve with me, Olga Maslikhova.

This week, I sit down with Federico Vega, founder and CEO of Frete.com—the largest freight matching platform in Latin America.

Federico’s story is anything but conventional: he grew up in a small town in Patagonia, left a career in investment banking at JP Morgan in London, and moved—without speaking the language—to Brazil to reinvent an entire industry. What started as a F...

Welcome to this special solo episode of Season 4 of The J Curve with me, Olga Maslikhova.

Every few months, I zoom out to reflect on the lessons that stuck with me from the show. Think of this as your quarterly operator’s memo—especially if you’re building, raising, or investing in Latin America.

Q2 was full of sharp insights and real operator depth. But in this edition of The J Curve Insider, I won’t recap every episode.

I’ll go deep...

Welcome to Season 4 of The J Curve with me, Olga Maslikhova.

This week, I sit down with Caetano Lacerda and Raphael Dyxklay, co-founders of Brazilian fintech Barte, which is transforming the payments and working capital landscape for mid-to-large companies.

Barte’s journey is a masterclass in efficient growth: from zero to $10M ARR in less than two years on just $1.5M of burn—and then growing sustainably to $20M ARR. Along the way, t...

Welcome to Season 4 of The J Curve with me, Olga Maslikhova.

This week, I sit down with João Del Valle, co-founder and CEO of EBANX—one of Latin America’s most iconic fintech stories and a company that built one of the most expansive cross-border payment platforms in the world.

Founded in Curitiba—well outside Brazil’s traditional tech hub of São Paulo—EBANX was built for scale from day one. Its global-by-design approach quickly ...

Welcome to Season 4 of The J Curve with me, Olga Maslikhova.

Last week I got to spend a few days in cidade maravilhosa—Rio de Janeiro—for Web Summit, which this year attracted over 37,000 people. The event was action-packed—both inside the venue and across the city, with an incredible lineup of side events.

It was a milestone week for The J Curve. We recorded our very first live episode on stage—a conversation I’ve been wanting to ha...

Welcome to Season 4 of The J Curve 🎙️

This week, I sit down with Marcelo Lutz and Roberto Biselli, the co-founders and co-CEOs of Capim—a vertical SaaS + fintech company that started as an MBA class project and is now doing $10M+ in ARR, serving thousands of dental clinics across Brazil.

Their story breaks every rule—and proves that in Latin America’s most fragmented industries, the right wedge isn’t software. It’s credit.

Instead of...

Welcome to this special solo episode of Season 4 of The J Curve with me, Olga Maslikhova.

Every few months, I take a step back from the interviews to zoom out, connect the dots, and reflect on the themes that emerged from our conversations with Latin America’s most driven founders and sharpest investors.

This quarter, the learnings hit hard.

From Paulo Passoni’s breakdown of growth-stage capital and the M&A trap, to Roberto Olivei...

Welcome to Season 4 of The J Curve 🎙️

This week, I sit down with Gustavo Mapeli, co-founder and CEO of Kanastra — one of the fastest-growing fintech infrastructure companies in Latin America. Gustavo started out building a traditional asset manager focused on private credit and wealth outside of Brazil’s core markets. But after feeling the pain of operating in a fragmented, manual, and outdated system, he made the bold decision to ...

Welcome to Season 4 of The J Curve 🎙️

It’s rare to meet a founder who bootstrapped for two decades—then brought Warburg Pincus, SoftBank, and Microsoft onto his cap table. This week, I sat down with Roberto Oliveira, founder of Blip, the company powering billions of conversations across WhatsApp in Latin America. We covered a 25-year founder journey that began with mobile phone booths and evolved into one of Brazil’s most powerful ...

Welcome to Season 4 of The J Curve 🎙️

This week, I sit down with Guilherme Horn, one of the most influential figures in LatAm’s fintech and tech landscape. Guilherme has built and exited multiple companies, including Agora (acquired for $500M by Bradesco), which helped transform Brazil’s stock market, and Órama, the country’s first fully cloud-based bank. Now, as WhatsApp’s Head of Strategic Markets, he’s driving a major shift in h...

This week, I sit down with Andre Penha, co-founder of QuintoAndar and CEO of IBBX, for a brutally honest, founder-first conversation on building and scaling in Latin America.Andre built QuintoAndar into a $5B+ real estate giant, raised $750M from top investors, and is now betting on wireless electricity, aiming to make chargers, cables, and batteries obsolete with IBBX.Here’s what we cover:♢ Why product—not storytelling—wins in fun...

Welcome to Season 4 of The J Curve 🎙️

Kicking off this season with a must-listen episode featuring Paulo Passoni, one of the sharpest investors in Latin America. Paulo played a key role in SoftBank’s multi-billion-dollar investment in Latin America’s tech sector, serving on the boards of Quinto Andar, VTEX, and Creditas. Now at Valor Capital, he’s focused on backing and scaling the region’s next generation of high-growth startups.

T...

🎙️ No Guests, Just You & Me 🌍

Season 3 of The J Curve is officially wrapped, and I’m here to unpack the journey so far. From doubling our Spotify streams to hitting the top 5% of videocasts globally (what?!), this year has been a wild ride.

In this solo ep, I’m breaking down:

🔥 Why podcasting is THE medium of the future.

🌎 LATAM’s tech explosion—blockbuster M&As, IPOs, and a pipeline of unicorns.

💡 The 10 life-changi...

Welcome to Season 3 of The J Curve, a podcast about entrepreneurship in Latin America. Today we sit down with Allen Taylor, Managing Partner at Endeavor Catalyst, to explore his 18-year journey with Endeavor and the rise of emerging markets as thriving hubs for entrepreneurship. We discuss Allen’s personal path from California to becoming a global advocate for high-impact entrepreneurs, the creation of Endeavor Catalyst, and how th...