Everyone wants to fix healthcare. Almost nobody understands it from the inside. That single gap, between the outsiders trying to disrupt the system and the reality of how the system actually works, is where most healthcare startups quietly die. And it’s exactly the gap Martha Mercogliano has spent her career standing in.

Martha spent more than two decades inside the healthcare industry before she became an advisor and an investor. She knows the regulation, the payers, the providers, the machinery of Medicaid and Medicare, not from a case study, but from the inside. Today she helps startups navigate that machinery, and she evaluates them as an angel investor. This episode of The Corridor is a rare thing: an honest look at healthcare innovation from someone who has seen it fail up close, and knows why.

Why healthcare breaks good companies

Martha is direct about something founders underestimate constantly: healthcare may be the most complex industry in the world to build in.

It isn’t one market. It’s a tangle of regulators, payers, providers, and patients, each with different incentives, different timelines, and different definitions of success. A product that would thrive anywhere else can die here, not because it’s a bad product, but because the founder never understood the machinery it had to move through. As Martha puts it, understanding the complexities behind the scenes takes time, effort, and capital. Founders who treat healthcare like any other software market, build it, sell it, scale it, run straight into a wall they never saw coming.

That’s the first hard truth of this episode: in healthcare, understanding the system isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the entire game.

The years inside are the edge

What makes Martha’s perspective valuable is that she isn’t theorizing. Her two decades inside the industry are exactly what let her see what founders miss.

She knows how a payer actually makes decisions. She knows what a provider needs before they’ll adopt something new. She knows where the regulatory landmines are buried, and how long it really takes to get a solution accepted into the flow of how care gets delivered and paid for. That inside knowledge is the difference between a founder who spends two years learning these lessons the expensive way and one who navigates them from the start. It’s also, she explains, exactly what she brings to the startups she advises and backs, the map of a system that outsiders keep trying to cross blind.

What actually makes a healthcare startup investable

For the founders listening, this is the part worth studying. When Martha looks at a healthcare startup as an investor, she’s evaluating more than the product.

She’s looking at whether the team has the resilience and the networks to survive a long, hard, relationship-driven industry. Healthcare doesn’t reward the fastest mover; it rewards the one who can endure the slow grind of pilots, approvals, and trust-building without running out of money or will. As she puts it, team resilience and networks are critical for startup success. The technology gets you in the door. The team’s ability to withstand how long everything takes is what determines whether you make it through.

The trap of the trend

One of the sharpest warnings in the conversation is about founders who build on top of a temporary market trend rather than a durable problem.

Healthcare, like every sector right now, has its waves, the hot category, the buzzword, the thing everyone’s funding this quarter. Martha is wary of founders who ride those waves, because trends fade, and a company built on a fading trend fades with it. The founders who last are the ones solving a problem the system will still have long after the hype moves on. It’s a discipline that separates the durable companies from the ones that raise on momentum and disappear when it stops.

Build for the system that exists

Another theme Martha keeps returning to: the best healthcare solutions are built within the reality of the existing system, not around a fantasy of how it should work.

The infrastructure has to be ready to receive your technology. The pilot has to be designed to actually prove something to the people who make adoption decisions. Founders who understand this, who design their pilots and their go-to-market around how healthcare truly operates, dramatically improve their odds. Those who build for an idealized version of the industry, one without the friction, the approvals, the entrenched incentives, tend to learn the hard way that the system doesn’t bend to a good idea. It has to be worked with, on its own terms.

Fall in love with the problem

If there’s one line from this episode that founders should write down, it’s this: fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

It sounds simple, and it’s the quiet cause of more startup failures than most people admit. Founders who fall in love with their solution defend it even when the market tells them it’s wrong. Founders who fall in love with the problem stay flexible, they change the solution as many times as it takes, because what they care about is solving the thing, not being right about how. In an industry as unforgiving as healthcare, that flexibility isn’t a soft skill. It’s survival.

The bigger lesson

Martha’s episode is about healthcare, but the deeper lesson reaches every founder building in a hard, regulated, insider-driven industry, the kind of overlooked, unglamorous markets this show comes back to again and again. The most valuable opportunities are often guarded by complexity, and the founders who win are the ones who respect that complexity enough to actually understand it before they try to change it.

She spent twenty years learning how the system really works. This conversation is a chance to borrow some of that hard-won knowledge, and maybe save yourself a year of learning it the expensive way.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Martha Mercogliano.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

Some people learn venture capital in a boardroom. Adrianna Samaniego started learning it as a kid, at her grandparents’ side, watching a small business get built the hard way. That’s where this whole conversation begins, and it’s where her entire investing philosophy is rooted.

Adrianna is a Partner at Cherryrock Capital, where she leads Series A and B rounds into the founders the market keeps overlooking. But before the term sheets and the fund, there was a family business, and a lesson that shaped everything. This episode of The Corridor traces the line from that lesson to the checks she writes today, and along the way she makes one of the sharpest cases for backing underrepresented founders I’ve heard on this show.

The ownership mindset

Adrianna keeps coming back to a single idea: the ownership mindset. And for her, it isn’t a business-school concept. It’s something she watched up close and absorbed early, from a family that built something of their own.

When you grow up around people who own the business, who carry the risk, feel the cash-flow gap before anyone tells them it’s coming, and understand that every decision lands on them, you learn to see companies differently. As she puts it, that ownership mindset is in our DNA. It’s the lens she now brings to every founder she evaluates: does this person think like an owner, carry the weight like an owner, understand their numbers like an owner? Because that mindset, she argues, is one of the truest signals of who will actually make it.

From operating to investing

That instinct is what carried Adrianna from operating into investing, and eventually into building at Cherryrock. Earlier in her career she built a scout program specifically to find Black, Latina, and Indigenous founders that no one else was looking for, to help them reach the seed stage and beyond. Cherryrock, she explains, is the same bet made at a different altitude.

Instead of writing small early checks and hoping someone else leads, Cherryrock leads rounds at Series A and B with larger checks. It’s a deliberate choice about where the opportunity compounds. The same conviction, applied at the stage where conviction turns into ownership and real returns.

Not a favor. An arbitrage.

Here is the reframe at the heart of the episode, and the one I most want people to sit with.

When most people talk about funding underrepresented founders, they reach for the language of fairness, of doing the right thing. Adrianna reaches for a different word: arbitrage. To her, this isn’t charity, and it isn’t a favor. It’s a mispricing. The market has consistently undervalued these founders, and the investor who sees that clearly is looking at an opportunity the rest of the market is walking past.

And her argument isn’t sentimental. She points to something concrete: that underrepresented founders often prove more efficient and exit faster, doing more with less because they had to. That’s not a diversity talking point. It’s a returns argument. The bias in the system creates the discount; the discount is the opportunity; and Cherryrock is built to capture it at the stage where it compounds most.

What actually makes a founder investable

For the founders in the audience, this is the part worth studying. Adrianna is clear that reaching Series A is a real bar, and she’s specific about what clears it.

It comes down to operational discipline, authenticity, and command of your own numbers. Founders who understand their data cold, who can show a repeatable, scalable model, and who carry themselves with genuine ownership are the ones who earn the check. She’s honest that the market has changed, and that founders’ strategies have to change with it. The bar that worked two years ago isn’t the bar today. Understanding your numbers and building something genuinely repeatable isn’t optional anymore; it’s the price of admission.

The gap where good companies die

One of the most useful stretches of the conversation is about the jump from seed to Series A, the stage where so many promising companies quietly stall out.

It’s a brutal gap, and Adrianna, whose whole focus is leading at exactly that transition, understands why. The companies that make it aren’t just the ones with a good idea. They’re the ones that built the operational muscle, the discipline, and the command of their metrics that a Series A investor demands. For founders sitting at seed and wondering what it takes to get to the next round, her answer is a roadmap: stop performing traction and start proving it, with numbers you own and a model that scales.

AI, and the shifting ground

She doesn’t shy away from the elephant in every founder’s room right now: AI. Her framing is balanced, it’s both a challenge and an opportunity, reshaping funding dynamics and market expectations at the same time. The founders who treat it as a genuine tool for building a more efficient, more defensible business will find advantage in it. The ones who treat it as a buzzword to raise on will get exposed. Either way, the ground is shifting, and standing still isn’t a strategy.

The advice that ties it together

Adrianna’s message to underrepresented founders is the throughline of everything she believes: trust yourself, and build the rooms you want to exist in. Don’t wait for permission from a system that was slow to see you. Understand your business better than anyone, carry it like an owner, and create the spaces, and eventually the capital, that the next founder will need.

That’s really the whole arc of her story. A kid learning ownership at a family business became the investor writing the checks that let the next generation own something too. The ledger she read as a child, and the term sheets she signs now, are the same instrument, pointed at the same belief: that the talent was always there, and the market just hadn’t priced it yet.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Adrianna Samaniego.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

Most people building financial technology have never lived the problem they’re solving. They study it. They model it. They interview people who’ve felt it. Victoria Tostado didn’t have to. She was the one feeling it, for seven years, in the field.

Before she was a founder, before MIT, before any of it, Victoria was a farmer. And that single fact is what makes this episode different from any other conversation about fintech you’ll hear this year. Because she isn’t solving an abstract problem she read about in a pitch deck. She’s solving the one that nearly broke her, and every farmer she knows.

The wait that doesn’t make sense

Here’s the tension at the center of this episode, and it’s one most people have never thought about for a single second.

A farmer needs credit. Their land is producing. Their operation is real. And yet, getting a loan can take somewhere between thirty and ninety days, buried in paperwork, waiting, while the season moves on without them. In an era where you can get approved for almost anything in minutes, why does the industry that literally feeds us still move at the speed of fax machines?

The answer is more frustrating than you’d expect, and Victoria explains exactly where the system breaks. There’s a gap, she told me, between what’s actually happening on a farm and what a lender is able to see. Bridging that gap has always required something the industry never had enough of. What that missing ingredient is, and why it’s kept an entire trillion-dollar industry stuck, is one of the most clarifying things she says in the whole conversation.

From months to minutes

Then there’s the number that made me stop the recording in my head.

What takes the traditional system thirty to ninety days, Victoria’s company, Agxes, can do in a fraction of that time. Not a little faster. A different order of magnitude. The way she and her team pulled that off, what they actually feed the machine, how it reads a piece of land, and why it can suddenly see what a human loan officer never could, is the part of this episode I won’t spoil here. It’s better heard from the person who built it.

I’ll just say this: once she explains how it works, you’ll wonder why nobody did it sooner. And the answer to that question is the whole reason this episode matters.

Why nobody else could have built this

There’s a reason this company came from a farmer and not from a room full of engineers in San Francisco.

Victoria understands something about lending to farmers that you cannot learn from a spreadsheet, that the same crop, in two different places, under two different sets of local conditions, is two completely different risks. That kind of ground-truth knowledge is exactly what the industry has been missing, and it’s exactly what she carries in her bones from those years in the field. In the episode, she gets into why local understanding is the difference between a good loan and a bad one, and why the people who’ve only ever looked at agriculture from the outside keep getting it wrong.

It’s a quiet argument for something bigger than farming: that the best person to fix a broken industry is often the one who lived inside it.

The part founders need to hear

If you’re building something, especially in an old, overlooked, unglamorous industry, there’s a stretch of this conversation that’s worth the listen on its own.

Victoria is honest about how hard it is to build trust in a traditional industry that doesn’t move fast and has every reason to be skeptical of a newcomer. How she earns it, what she has to prove before anyone will change how they’ve done things for decades, is a real lesson for any founder trying to sell something new to a world that likes things the old way. And her advice for founders building in the industries the tech world overlooks is the kind of thing you’ll want to write down. I’m not going to repeat it here, because the way she says it, having actually done it, carries more weight than any summary of mine could.

The bigger story

This is an episode about agricultural lending. But it’s really about something The Corridor comes back to again and again: that the most valuable opportunities are hiding in the industries nobody’s watching, and the best founders are often the ones who lived the problem before they ever decided to solve it.

Victoria Tostado went from the field to the front of one of the most overlooked, and most important, markets there is. How she did it, and where she’s taking it, is the whole conversation.

You’re going to want to hear this one from her.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Victoria Tostado.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

Most investors pick a lane. Desiree Vargas Wrigley built a fund that runs two at once.

She’s the founding GP of Velocity Catalyst, and her model is genuinely unusual: she invests directly into pre-seed startups, and she anchors the emerging fund managers building around them. A fund and a fund-of-funds, working in tandem, designed not to make one good bet but to rebuild an entire regional capital stack from the ground up. This episode of The Corridor is about why she built it that way, and what she’s learned climbing from one side of the table to the other.

From founder to funder

Desiree didn’t start on the investing side. She was a founder first. She built companies and went through the raise herself, the rejection, the doubt, the grind of convincing people to believe in something that only exists in your head. She lived the thing before she ever funded it.

That order matters, because it shapes everything about how she invests now. When she talks about backing founders, she’s not theorizing about a struggle she read about. She’s remembering it. And the single line that captures what that experience taught her is the one that anchors this whole episode: no doesn’t always mean no forever. A rejection isn’t a verdict. It’s a moment in time, often about timing or fit rather than merit, and the founders who understand that are the ones who keep going long enough to get to yes.

Two lanes, one system

The heart of Velocity Catalyst is its dual structure, and Desiree is clear about why it exists.

Investing directly into startups gets you exposure to the companies. But a single fund writing checks into founders doesn’t fix the deeper problem, which is that entire regions and entire communities lack the surrounding infrastructure of capital that lets founders climb from one stage to the next. So alongside the direct investing, Velocity anchors emerging fund managers, the smaller, focused funds who will provide the follow-on capital and the local relationships that founders need.

The two lanes reinforce each other. The direct investments give her a ground-level view of the ecosystem. The fund-of-funds work multiplies her impact, because every emerging manager she backs goes on to fund dozens of founders she’d never reach alone. It’s a system designed to build a stack, not just a portfolio.

Why emerging managers

Desiree’s bet on emerging managers is a bet most large investors don’t make, and her reasoning is worth understanding.

Small, focused funds see what the big generalists miss. They have proximity, to a region, to an industry, to a community, that a large coastal fund simply doesn’t. They’re closer to the founders, they move faster, and they understand the local context that determines which companies actually work. For a region trying to build a real startup ecosystem, these managers are the connective tissue. Back them, and you’re not funding one fund; you’re seeding the infrastructure that lets a whole ecosystem compound.

That’s also why the regional advantage matters so much to her. Venture has spent decades concentrated in a few zip codes. Desiree’s thesis is that the overlooked regions, and the managers who know them, are where a lot of the next opportunity lives, precisely because everyone else stopped looking.

Not charity. Catalyst.

The part of the conversation I most want people to sit with is how Desiree frames the work of backing underrepresented founders.

She is direct that this is not charity. It’s a returns strategy built on a market that’s been misread. But she’s also honest about something more nuanced: that at the earliest, riskiest stage, philanthropic capital can be a catalyst. Certain high-risk, high-reward bets, the ones traditional capital won’t touch until someone else de-risks them, sometimes need a different kind of first dollar to get off the ground. Used well, that catalytic capital doesn’t replace venture returns; it unlocks the companies that go on to generate them.

The distinction she’s drawing is important. Treating underrepresented founders as charity cases is exactly the framing that has held the whole system back, it lowers expectations and misprices the opportunity. But recognizing that the earliest stage of high-risk innovation sometimes needs catalytic fuel is just good ecosystem design. One is condescension. The other is strategy.

What building a fund taught her that building a company didn’t

Having done both, Desiree is clear-eyed about how different they are. Building a startup and raising a fund look similar from the outside, both are acts of convincing people to believe before there’s proof, but the mechanics diverge. And underneath both, she keeps returning to the same truth about how venture actually works: it’s more network-driven and reputation-based than anything else.

That’s not a cynical observation. It’s a practical one, and it’s generous advice for anyone building without an inherited network. The relationships and the reputation you build are the real currency. They’re what turn a cold pitch into a warm introduction, a maybe into a yes, and a first fund into a second. For founders and emerging managers alike, the lesson is the same: invest in the network and the reputation as deliberately as you invest in the product.

The throughline

What connects all of it, the dual fund model, the bet on emerging managers, the catalytic capital, the emphasis on network, is a single conviction: the system is fixable, but not one check at a time. Desiree isn’t trying to fund a few great companies. She’s trying to build the infrastructure that lets whole ecosystems and whole communities climb. And she’s doing it from the belief that the talent was always there, waiting on capital and access that finally show up.

For the founder who just got a no, or the emerging manager wondering whether they belong in the room, her message is the one she opened with. No doesn’t always mean no forever. Keep building. Keep asking. The room is bigger than it looks, and people like Desiree are working to make sure there’s a place in it for you.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Desiree Vargas Wrigley.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

Walk into almost any small or mid-sized factory in America and you’ll find the same thing: decades of data, and almost no intelligence. The machines generate readings. The orders pile up in spreadsheets. The most important knowledge of all, how things actually get made, lives in the heads of the people who’ve worked the floor for twenty years. It’s all there. Almost none of it is usable.

That gap is the whole reason Corello exists, and it’s the sentence Carlos Maiguel kept coming back to in our conversation: the data exists, and the intelligence does not.

This episode of The Corridor is about what happens when you point modern AI at one of the least glamorous, most essential industries there is, and why the factories the tech world overlooks may be exactly where AI creates the most value.

Why manufacturing, of all places

Carlos didn’t stumble into manufacturing. He chose it, deliberately, after spending years in the trenches understanding it. While most of the AI world races toward consumer apps and developer tools, he went the other direction, toward small and mid-sized manufacturers, the businesses that actually make the physical things the economy runs on, and that have been almost entirely skipped by the software revolution.

That’s not a coincidence. It’s the opportunity. These factories run on legacy systems, paper, tribal knowledge, and instinct. The bigger players have the budgets for expensive enterprise software; the small and mid-sized ones have been left to fend for themselves. Which means the ceiling for improvement, in efficiency, in speed, in quality, is enormous, precisely because no one has bothered to build for them.

Data everywhere, unused

The core problem Corello solves is one Carlos describes simply: data is everywhere, but it’s fragmented and unused.

A factory’s information is scattered across machines, systems, spreadsheets, and people, none of it talking to each other. On its own, that data just sits there. It doesn’t answer questions. It doesn’t catch problems. It doesn’t help the person on the floor make a better decision in the moment. The raw material for intelligence is present in abundance; the intelligence itself is missing.

Corello’s work is to ingest that fragmented data and turn it into something usable, to close the gap between what a factory already knows and what it can actually act on. That’s the difference between a factory drowning in data and a factory that can finally use it.

The knowledge that walks out the door

The most human part of the problem is tribal knowledge, and it’s the piece that should worry every factory owner.

In these businesses, the most valuable knowledge isn’t written down anywhere. It lives in the experienced worker who knows, by feel, how to set up a machine, spot a defect, or quote a complex job. When that person retires or leaves, decades of hard-won expertise walk out the door with them. Nothing captures it. Nothing preserves it. The next generation starts closer to zero than they should.

This is where AI becomes genuinely powerful, not as a replacement for those workers, but as a way to capture and preserve what they know. Carlos frames the goal not as automation that removes people, but as AI coworkers, goal-driven team members that work alongside the humans on the floor, carrying the institutional knowledge and helping everyone operate at the level of the most experienced person in the building. The expertise stops being fragile. It becomes an asset the whole factory can draw on.

Building AI-native systems in old industries

The hard part, and the reason few people attempt this, is that building AI-native systems on top of old industries is genuinely difficult. You’re not deploying software into a clean, modern tech stack. You’re integrating with legacy systems, decades-old machines, and workflows that were never designed for digital tools. And you’re doing it for customers who, understandably, need to see real return before they trust something new on their floor.

That’s why Carlos emphasizes ROI and speed. A factory owner doesn’t care about the elegance of the technology; they care whether it saves time, reduces waste, and makes them money, fast. And trust has to be earned on the floor, with the people doing the work, not just in the front office. Corello’s use cases, things like faster quoting and clearer work instructions, are deliberately practical: real problems, real time saved, real value the moment it’s turned on.

The lesson underneath

What makes this episode matter beyond manufacturing is the founder philosophy underneath it. Carlos’s approach to building, understand the problem deeply before you build anything, and build openly by leaning on your network, is the same discipline that makes any hard company work. He spent years understanding his customer before writing a line of product, and he’s built in the open, gathering feedback and drawing on the community of founders who came before him.

There’s a bigger point here too, one that sits at the heart of why this show exists. The most valuable opportunities are often in the unseen spaces, the industries too unglamorous for the spotlight, the customers the tech world forgot, the founders the market overlooks. Carlos is building for all three at once. And the reason that’s a smart bet, not a charitable one, is simple: the data was always there. Someone just had to build the intelligence.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Carlos Maiguel.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

Most people spend their careers on one rung of the capital ladder. Laura Moreno Lucas has stood on nearly all of them. She spent years at Nasdaq, at the very top of the ladder, where companies ring the bell and become public. Now she invests at the very bottom, writing early checks into Latino founders who are just getting started. And the thing she took from that journey is a lesson most investors never get to see: the climb is the same at every rung.

This episode of The Corridor is about that whole ladder, what the top teaches you about the bottom, why visibility matters as much as capital, and how you build an ecosystem where Latino founders and investors can actually climb.

What the top of the ladder teaches you about the bottom

From where Laura sat at Nasdaq, she watched companies at the summit of the capital markets, the IPO, the moment a private company becomes a public one. It’s the outcome every founder is told to dream about. But what she came to understand is that the journey to that moment is not a series of disconnected stages. It’s one continuous climb.

As she puts it, the capital markets journey is the same at every stage. The founder raising a pre-seed round and the company ringing the opening bell are doing versions of the same thing: telling a credible story, earning trust, proving they can endure, and convincing the next set of investors to believe in what comes next. The dollar amounts change. The fundamentals don’t. That’s a genuinely useful reframe for an early-stage founder, because it means the discipline you build raising your first small round is the same discipline that eventually takes a company public. You’re not doing something different from the giants. You’re doing the same thing, earlier.

Endure and adapt

If there’s a single quality Laura keeps returning to, it’s endurance. Not the dramatic kind, the quiet kind. The ability to endure and adapt through changing times.

Markets shift. Capital gets cheap and then expensive. Sectors fall in and out of favor. The founders and investors who last aren’t the ones who caught one perfect wave, they’re the ones who kept adapting as the conditions changed underneath them. Having watched companies navigate the full arc from early stage to public markets, Laura has seen which ones make it, and endurance, the willingness to keep adjusting without losing the core of what you’re building, is the common thread. For a founder in a hard market, that’s not a consolation prize. It’s the actual skill.

Visibility is capital, too

Here is the idea that gives the episode its heart. Laura is direct that visibility is key for Latina investors and founders, and it’s worth sitting with why that matters as much as money.

When founders and investors from a community are visible, when they can be seen succeeding, writing checks, ringing bells, they change what the next generation believes is possible. A young Latina who sees a Latina investor at the top of the capital markets doesn’t have to imagine whether she belongs there. She has proof. Visibility does quietly what no amount of advice can: it removes the question of whether the door is even open.

And it works on the other side too. Visible Latino investors get seen by founders who finally have someone who looks like them to pitch. Visible Latino founders get seen by the next wave of builders. The whole ecosystem compounds on being able to see itself.

Building the ladder for everyone else

That’s why so much of Laura’s work now is about the ecosystem, not just individual deals. Through her investing, including supporting women-led startups, and through her broader work building the Latino VC community, she’s focused on the same thing from a different angle: making sure the ladder exists, and that people can find the next rung.

Because capital alone isn’t enough. Founders need the community and the networks that surround the capital, the people who make the introduction, share the hard-won lesson, and open the door to the next stage. The Latino community is building businesses fast, but building an ecosystem means making sure the support systems climb alongside the founders. That’s the work: not just funding companies, but constructing the whole ladder so the next founder has something to climb.

The throughline

What connects the opening bell to the first check is a single conviction: the climb is the same for everyone, so the job is to make sure everyone can actually climb. Laura has seen the top and the bottom of the capital ladder, and her message to Latino founders is grounded in both. The journey doesn’t change based on who you are. The trust you build, the endurance you show, the story you tell, they’re the same at every stage. What has to change is visibility and access, so that the founders who have always been capable of the climb finally have the ladder in front of them.

For anyone building right now, wondering whether they belong on the ladder at all, that’s the reframe worth holding onto. You were always meant to climb it. The work now, for all of us, is making sure it’s there.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Laura Moreno Lucas.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

There is a rulebook for the startup world. It governs who gets the warm introduction, who gets believed in the room, whose vision gets funded and whose gets a polite pass. The catch is that nobody ever wrote it down, and the people who most need it were never handed a copy.

Lolita Taub has spent her career making that invisible rulebook visible. She went from South Central Los Angeles to becoming a venture capital General Partner at Ganas Ventures, and along the way she learned the codes the hard way, by running into them. Now she teaches them, most recently in her book, “What Actually Matters.” This episode of The Corridor is a preview of why that book is going to land for so many founders building without a map.

The invisible rules

The core of Lolita’s whole framework is deceptively simple: the startup world runs on invisible rules. Not written policies, but unspoken norms about how things actually work, how you get an introduction, how you signal you belong, how you talk to an investor, what you’re supposed to already know before you walk in.

For founders who grew up inside the network, these rules are invisible because they’re second nature, absorbed at dinner tables and in dorm rooms and through family friends who happened to be in the industry. For everyone else, they’re invisible because no one ever explained them. Same word, opposite experience. And that gap, between the founders who inherited the rules and the ones who have to reverse-engineer them, is one of the quietest and most powerful forces deciding who succeeds.

Lolita’s own path through it involved things most founders from outside the network will recognize immediately: the education and persistence it took to get in the door, the code-switching required to move between worlds, the constant low-grade question of whether you actually belong in the room you fought to enter.

Meritocracy is a myth

The hardest truth in the conversation was also the most freeing.

Lolita is direct about it: meritocracy is a myth. Not because talent isn’t real, it obviously is, but because opportunity is distributed unevenly, and the story we tell ourselves that the best simply rise erases everything that actually determines who gets a shot. Who you know. Who vouches for you. What you were taught before you ever started.

Why does that matter for a founder? Because if you believe the meritocracy myth and you keep getting passed over, you draw the wrong conclusion. You assume the problem is you, your idea, your ability, when often the real issue is access you never had. Naming the myth is what lets a founder stop absorbing the system’s bias as a personal verdict and start solving the actual problem, which is access.

Community as a moat

So if access is the problem, what’s the answer? Lolita’s is the throughline of her entire investing thesis: community.

For founders who didn’t inherit a network, community becomes the thing that replaces traditional access. It is not a soft, nice-to-have add-on. She frames it as a genuine moat, a durable competitive advantage. When you build real relationships and real proximity to the people who move capital and make decisions, you unlock the things a warm network hands other founders for free.

And the return on community is concrete, not sentimental. She breaks it down into real ROI: insight, the information and pattern recognition you’d otherwise never get; operations, the help and hires and know-how that flow through relationships; and even revenue, because community becomes customers, referrals, and distribution. Community isn’t where you go to feel supported. It’s where the business actually gets built when you started without the playbook.

The practical order matters too. You don’t start by chasing capital. You start by building community and relationships, and the access, and eventually the capital, follows from proximity rather than cold outreach.

Authenticity is the edge

Here is the reframe I most want founders to hear.

So many people from outside the network are taught, explicitly or not, that their background is something to manage, minimize, or code-switch away from. Lolita’s argument is the opposite. Authenticity and staying true to your roots are assets, not barriers. The specific perspective you bring, the community you understand that others don’t, the market you can see because you come from it, that is edge, not baggage.

This connects directly to how she thinks as an investor. The Latino market is enormous and systematically underestimated, and founders building for it with genuine understanding are looking at real opportunity that biased evaluators keep walking past. She’s blunt that this isn’t philanthropy. It’s not about doing anyone a favor. It’s about building big businesses in a market the rest of the industry misprices. The bias is the mistake. The founders who understand the market are the opportunity.

What actually matters

That phrase is her book’s title, and it’s the quiet argument underneath the whole conversation. Fundraising is not the goal. Building a real, successful business is the goal, and too many founders confuse the two, optimizing to raise money rather than to build something that works.

For the Latino founder building right now without an inherited playbook, Lolita’s message is clear and generous. The rules are learnable. Community can stand in for the access you weren’t born into. Your roots are an asset. And the market’s blindness to founders like you is not a wall, it’s the very thing that creates the opportunity, for the founders and the investors willing to see it.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Lolita Taub.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

Most people in venture spend their careers inside someone else’s thesis. They invest through a committee, within a mandate, under partners whose convictions may not be their own. Lister Delgado did that for a while. Then he did something most people in his position never do. He bought the firm.

Lister went from junior partner to sole owner of Idea Fund Partners, and that single decision, to own the thing outright, reshaped everything about how he invests and what he’s willing to believe in. As he put it in our conversation, ownership changes what you’re free to bet on. That line is the whole episode.

The freedom hiding inside ownership

When you don’t own the firm, your convictions are negotiated. You can believe in a founder, a region, a thesis, but you still have to move it through partners who see the world differently. Owning the firm outright removed that filter for Lister. It let him build a thesis that was entirely his own, one he couldn’t have pursued with other partners in the room.

And the thesis he chose to build was personal. He could invest in underrepresented founders. He could invest in underrepresented regions, choosing to build in North Carolina rather than chasing Silicon Valley. The kind of investing he wanted to do was the kind that reflected his own conviction, and ownership is what made it possible.

That’s a trade most people don’t see clearly. Ownership comes with real costs and real risk, the exposure of being a solo GP, the weight of every decision landing on you. But what you buy with it is the freedom to bet on what you actually believe, instead of what a committee will approve.

The distinction most people miss

The most important idea in the conversation was a distinction Lister drew carefully, and it’s one more investors should sit with.

When we talk about why entrepreneurs of color and women struggle to access capital, the instinct is to reach for the word discrimination. Lister pushed past that. A lot of the problem, he explained, is not necessarily upfront discrimination. It’s systemic bias.

The difference matters. Discrimination is a decision someone makes. Systemic bias is a default that runs quietly underneath the whole system, who gets the warm introduction, who fits the pattern an investor has been trained to recognize, who gets read as fundable before they’ve said a word. It isn’t always someone choosing to exclude. It’s a machine that was never built to see certain founders clearly in the first place.

And that distinction is exactly where Lister sees opportunity.

Not fairness. Math.

Here is the part that separates Lister’s approach from the way this conversation usually goes. He does not frame backing underrepresented founders as an act of fairness or generosity. He frames it as math.

If systemic bias causes good founders to be underpriced and overlooked, then the investor who can see past that bias is looking at mispriced opportunity that the rest of the market is walking past. It’s pure math, not about fairness. The bias creates a gap between what a founder has actually built and what the market is willing to pay for it, and someone is going to capture the return in that gap.

That reframe is powerful because it takes the conversation out of the realm of charity, where it too often gets stuck, and puts it where it belongs: in the realm of returns. You don’t back overlooked founders because it’s noble. You back them because the market is wrong about them, and being right before everyone else is how investors make money.

Building where nobody else is looking

Lister’s choice of the Southeast, and North Carolina specifically, follows the same logic. The region has a diverse, growing tech landscape that doesn’t get the attention, or the capital, that the coasts do. That’s not a disadvantage to him. It’s the same mispricing, applied to geography instead of founders. Less competition for great companies, and access other investors don’t have.

And as AI reshapes what’s possible, he sees that edge compounding. The next generation of companies won’t all be built in the obvious places by the obvious people. The investors positioned to back them will be the ones who built conviction, and access, where others weren’t paying attention.

The throughline

What ties it all together is conviction earned through ownership. Lister could build a personal thesis because he owned the firm that let him. He could bet on overlooked founders and overlooked regions because he had the freedom to act on what he actually believed. And he could frame all of it as math rather than charity because he understood that being right about mispriced talent is the entire game.

For any founder building outside the obvious rooms, and for any emerging investor thinking about what kind of firm they want to build, it’s a reminder worth holding onto. The freedom to bet on what you believe is worth what it costs. And the market’s blind spots are not a reason for despair. They’re where the opportunity lives.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Lister Delgado.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.

In June of 2008, Leah Solivan walked away from an eight-year software engineering career at IBM. Three months later, the stock market collapsed and the country entered the Great Recession. She had already left.

She is honest about the timing in a way most founders aren’t. She didn’t see the crash coming and position herself for it. She left because she was passionate about something, and then the world fell apart around her decision. What she did next is the part worth paying attention to.

The idea, and then the fear

Leah had the idea for TaskRabbit before the crash: new technologies were emerging, social, location, and mobile, the iPhone was only a few months old, and as an engineer she became obsessed with using them to connect real people in the real world to get real things done. Then everything crashed, and the fear arrived. She had left a high-paying, stable job. She cashed out a $27,000 pension from IBM to fund the first version of the company.

But the recession did something unexpected to her thinking. She watched capable people, former lawyers, teachers, people with good jobs, get laid off and start looking for new, flexible ways to earn. And she realized the thing she was building could help. It was a new way to work, a way to make money, at exactly the moment a lot of people needed one. That realization became the gig economy.

Building trust nobody was ready to give

Here is what people forget now that it’s normal. In 2008, the core premise of TaskRabbit was unthinkable. Invite a stranger into your home to organize your bookshelf? Jump into a stranger’s car and let them drive you somewhere? Leah points out that if you had proposed either one in 2008, people would have thought you were insane.

So before the marketplace could work, trust had to be built, and she saw technology as the way to build it. The early idea was to use the Facebook platform and social networks to create trust between people. If you hired someone to install your bookshelves, rated them well, and you and I were friends, I’d feel comfortable hiring that same person. It started as an experiment. It became the foundation of an entire economy. Now, as she notes, we jump into strangers’ cars without a second thought.

The phone call where the weight lifted

Leah built TaskRabbit for nearly a decade and sold it to IKEA in 2017. Everyone celebrates the exit. Almost nobody talks about the letting go.

She told me about the board call where they voted to sell. The outcome was certain; she expected the whole thing to take two minutes. Then the Series A investor got on and, instead of a quick yes, launched into a speech about how proud he was of what they’d built. The Series B investor did the same. By the time it reached Leah, she was in tears, realizing this was the closing of a major chapter, not just for her, but for the team and the investors who’d been on the journey with her.

When she hung up and the sale was official, she cried. Not from sadness. From release. In her words, it felt like a weight she’d carried for a decade had finally lifted. She had been in survival mode for ten years, and suddenly she had survived, and it was over.

That freedom is what moved her to the other side of the table. And she has come to a clear realization about herself: she is built to be an investor, to back the next generation of founders. TaskRabbit is no longer her identity. It’s her credibility.

The leverage point most people miss

This is the part of the conversation I keep thinking about.

Most people who care about diversity in tech focus on getting more diverse founders funded. Leah went a level up, and then another. She founded Precedent Collective to support investors from underrepresented backgrounds, because she believes the real leverage isn’t who gets funded, it’s who controls the capital.

Her logic is a ladder. GPs decide which founders get funded, through the lens of their own experiences. Go up a level, and limited partners decide which GPs get capital to deploy at all. The whole system revolves around who holds the check-writing power. So the more people you put into check-writing roles, as investors and as LPs, the more you change who builds companies and who gets funded, because every person brings a different lens, a different network, and assesses companies differently.

The lens as an edge, not a talking point

For her fund, Precedent VC, she backs early-stage consumer companies, category-defining, precedent-setting businesses, at what she sees as a massive inflection point, where AI is changing consumer behavior faster than ever and the next iconic companies are about to be founded.

And she’s clear-eyed about how her identity sharpens her investing. She points out that the Spanish-speaking community is the largest population group in the country, over 20 percent, with enormous purchasing power, and that founders building for that market with that lens are going to build massive businesses. She gave a concrete example: MeSalude Health, a B2B telehealth service for native Spanish speakers, paid for by employers who want to keep their workforce healthy. To her, that’s exactly the kind of company that should be funded, and the kind an investor without her lens might not see.

The advice

I asked her what she’d tell a founder building right now from a background investors overlook. Her answer was simple and hard-won, because she had to do it herself: get connected. Get into a network. Find your communities, through places like Endeavor, through your own circles. And the tactical piece that actually compounds: for every person you meet, ask for one more introduction. Great to meet you, who else should I know? That’s how you build the network that gets you in the room.

It’s fitting advice from someone whose entire career has been about connection, first between strangers who needed to trust each other to get work done, and now between capital and the founders who’ve been waiting for someone with the right lens to finally see them.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Leah Solivan.

Follow her newsletter The Precedent Collective

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Twenty-five years ago, Marcelo DeSantis was a programmer writing every line of code by hand, no AI, no autocomplete, his full mental effort poured into the machine. Today he sits on boards, invests in startups, and spends his time helping executives separate what AI can actually do from what it is merely hyped to do. The distance between those two versions of him is the whole story of this episode.

Marcelo came to the US from Argentina and built a career across consumer goods, automotive, and professional services before becoming a senior digital transformation executive at ThoughtWorks. He described his role the way only someone who lived between two worlds could: he was the person who knew the most about technology in a room full of business people, and the most about business in a room full of technologists. He spent a career in that gap, and always focused on one thing, value.

AI is not different. Except in one way that changes everything.

I asked him what makes this technology wave different from the internet, cloud, and mobile waves he has already lived through. His answer was clarifying: they are all the same, except for pace.

Every wave follows the same pattern. A new technology arrives, you pilot it, you fail at some of it, you realize you lack the talent, the governance, the ability to manage it properly. That happened with the internet, with cloud, with everything digital. What makes AI different is speed. He pointed at the last two weeks alone, new models, new legislation, new features shipping every other week, and reminded me that ChatGPT only reached our phones about thirty months ago. There is a clear before and after that moment, and the pace no longer gives anyone time to learn, reflect, and adopt before the next thing lands.

The question every investor should ask about an AI startup

Marcelo’s investing discipline comes down to one question he asks himself before writing a check: is this a business, or is this a feature the large AI labs will ship over a weekend?

If it is the second, it is probably not a good investment. He has watched companies show strong early results and then die when a major lab absorbed their entire value proposition. So what makes a company defensible? His answer was blunt and repeated: data, data, data. Models are becoming a commodity, closed and open source alike are converging and none are far apart. If you do not have a unique dataset that augments the model, anyone with access to the same model gets the same answer you do. Knowledge, he argued, now has a short shelf life. You prompt, you get an answer, and then it is on your judgment to know if it applies. The dataset is the only thing that creates lasting value.

“Do you need money, or do you need a partner?”

Here is the part I keep thinking about, because it is the pattern I have heard across almost every conversation on this show.

As AI turns diligence signals into a commodity, something every investor can access equally, Marcelo believes the firms that win will be the ones built on relationships. Not as a slogan. As the actual asset. He told me that every time a founder approaches him, he asks one question: do you need money, or do you need a partner? If the answer is just money, he sends them to a bank, it is a better, easier deal. If they want someone to open doors, make introductions, and help them grow, that is when he is the right person.

And trust, he emphasized, cannot be manufactured on demand. You do not hold a ceremony and agree to trust each other. It comes organically, through time and interactions, which is exactly why he invests in relationships with an open agenda, trying to understand the person in front of him, contributing where he can, and expecting nothing. Sometimes something comes of it in five years. Sometimes nothing does. Either way, he met the person.

Why the argument still has to be made

I asked why, in 2026, the case for underrepresented fund managers still has to be made explicitly instead of simply being assumed. He named the elephant in the room directly, the current pushback against anything labeled diversity, and then reframed it entirely as a marketer would.

Coming from consumer goods, he sees the Latino community not as an ideological question but as a business one. It is a mosaic, US-born Latinos, immigrants, people from Puerto Rico, Colombia, Venezuela, Uruguay, Brazil, even Spain, and you do not sell the same product the same way to all of them. To capture a segment growing this fast, you need a team that actually understands it. To him, that is not diversity as ideology. It is common business sense. The segment is growing. Do you want to be part of it? Then build the team that can win it.

The advice, and the moat nobody is building yet

His advice for founders was clean: do not fall in love with your idea. AI lets you prototype almost anything in twenty minutes, so get in front of real customers fast, take the feedback seriously, and iterate. At the end of the day it does not matter whether your idea is good or bad. It matters whether customers love it, buy it, and buy it many times over.

And his largest idea, the one most people in venture are not yet paying attention to, was about what actually becomes a company’s moat when AI agents run most of its operations. When agents handle eighty percent of a company’s processes, the only thing left that differs from one company to the next is its corporate DNA. How it makes decisions, what it values, when it takes risk and when it does not. That institutional context, the thing that decides to keep a struggling customer’s account open because you believe in their future even when the numbers say close it, is what no agent can supply on its own. That context is the moat.

We closed, as two people from this part of the world eventually must, on whether Argentina takes the World Cup. He would love it. He is realistic about Spain, Colombia, and France. And he reminded me that in the final against France, Argentina was one French goal away from losing the whole thing. Sometimes you are good. Sometimes you also need to be lucky.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Marcelo DeSantis.

Seguimos. 🇵🇷

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.