The Corridor

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.

La Borinqueña: Celebrating Puerto Rican Identity Through Superheroes and Philanthropy

Join us in this inspiring episode as we speak with Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez, Emmy-winning creator of La Borinqueña, the first Puerto Rican superhero series dedicated to charity work. Edgardo shares his journey from graphic design to becoming a cultural ambassador, using comic books to elevate Latino representation, educate globally, and support Puerto Rican communities.

In this episode:

Edgardo’s background in design, education, and how he transitioned into comic book storytelling

The significance of La Borinqueña as a symbol of Puerto Rican identity and Afro-Latina representation

The process behind debuting La Borinqueña at the Puerto Rican Day Parade in 2016

The impact of the series on international awareness and its inclusion in the Smithsonian’s permanent collection

The role of superhero narratives in decolonizing perceptions and fostering shared humanity

How the series has raised over a quarter of a million dollars for Puerto Rican charities

Collaborations with Marvel, DC Comics, Sony, and Atlantic Records

Strategies for balancing commercial work with independent storytelling

Edgardo’s efforts in using comics for social causes like climate justice and post-Hurricane Maria reconstruction

The importance of narrative control for the Latino community’s economic future

The ongoing fight for greater representation and resources for Latino storytellers

Timestamps:

(00:02) Introducing Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez and La Borinqueña’s cultural significance

(01:01) Edgardo’s background and professional evolution

(02:25) Transition to graphic novels and collaborations with major studios

(03:45) Creating La Borinqueña and its roots in activism

(04:40) Philanthropy and empowering women through initiatives like the Heroína del Pueblo Award

(05:55) Launching La Borinqueña at pre-release events and recognition from NYC officials

(07:16) The debut media coverage that propelled the series nationally

(08:27) Building a universe of Latino superheroes and Afro-Latina representation

(09:02) The cultural and historical roots of Afro-Puerto Rican identity

(11:02) The importance of authentic diversity in media

(12:26) Global perception of La Borinqueña and Afro-Latina representation

(13:51) Using storylines to reflect Puerto Rico’s cultural legacy

(16:08) Balancing commercial projects with independent storytelling

(18:48) Hurricane Maria reconstruction efforts and partnerships with DC Comics

(22:41) The series’ fundraising success and community impact

(30:17) The Smithsonian’s recognition and cultural preservation

(39:19) Edgardo’s ongoing vision for Puerto Rican storytelling and future projects

(44:42) The universal power of storytelling and community empowerment

(49:02) Advice for young Latinos and the importance of telling your own story

(50:54) Unity and collective strength in the Latino community

This episode celebrates the power of storytelling at the intersection of culture, activism, and business, highlighting the importance of authentic representation and community-led narratives.

Some founders build a company. Sofia Stolberg built the room the rest of the ecosystem would grow up inside.

When she and her brother moved back to Puerto Rico in 2010, they were working internationally, a management consultant and an attorney, both stuck working from home with no place to find the energy and the connections that serious work needs. There was no coworking space on the island to walk into. So they built one.

That is the whole origin, and it is more serendipitous than the finished story suggests. The family had a distressed building on Calle San Francisco in Old San Juan. A tenant took the third floor and asked what they planned to do with the first two. Sofia and her brother looked at each other and said the thing founders say right before their lives change: coworking. Three months later, Piloto 151 was born.

Being first is a tax before it is an advantage

In this episode we spent real time on something most founder interviews skip: what it actually costs to be first.

Sofia described early tours where people walked into the space and asked, “But where are the offices? Can I just see the offices?” The concept of working in an open room with other people did not compute yet. Being first meant she was not just running a business. She was educating a market on something it had never seen and did not yet know it needed.

First-mover advantage is real, and she benefited from it for years. But she paid for it up front, in the slow work of teaching an entire island a new way to work.

The community was never the product. It became the product.

Here is the part I keep thinking about.

Piloto 151 sold desks and space. What it produced was a community that did not exist before. The startup and tech ecosystem in Puerto Rico in early 2013 was, in Sofia’s word, nascent. There was nowhere for entrepreneurs to convene, learn, and talk through shared problems. So the coworking space quietly became that place.

Then history intervened. When Puerto Rico’s bonds were declared junk in 2015, Sofia watched a before-and-after happen inside her own events. People who had lost jobs, market share, and certainty started showing up trying to reinvent themselves. A space built to solve a personal need for a desk turned into the place a community reinvented itself.

That is the lesson buried in the Piloto story. You do not always build the community on purpose. Sometimes you build the room, and the community builds itself, if you are paying attention.

Innovation inside 250 years of history

One thing I did not want to skip: Sofia and her brother deliberately built innovation inside Puerto Rico’s heritage, not in some generic glass tower.

The location she spoke from is over 250 years old. The Miramar building is over a hundred, designed by a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright. Building and renovating in historic zones is harder, more regulated, slower, and more expensive, often without the benefit of existing architectural plans. They did it anyway, because a 300-year-old building being an innovation hub is not a contradiction. It is the point. You spend more waking hours at work than at home. Doing it somewhere that exudes that much history, a three-minute walk from El Morro, is its own kind of advantage.

The side problem that became the business

Every member needed an address. Government agencies, the IRS, packages, all of it still runs on postal mail. Piloto’s virtual office product grew until it was around 40% of revenue, and with it came a mail problem so large it eventually drew an undercover FBI agent as a member, which is its own reminder of what scale on a tax-haven island can attract.

The existing tools were legacy and did not handle the mountain of postal compliance that comes with managing mail for third parties. So in 2020, mid-pandemic, Sofia built the software herself. That became Piloto Mail, which now serves clients across the US, Europe, and Asia. A side problem, solved properly, became a second company.

And true to form, she insists the community did not disappear into the software. A mailroom, she argues, is a touch point. Members come to pick up their mail, and that becomes a conversation, a chance to ask what they need. She built that same surprise-and-delight into the product.

What the mainland keeps getting wrong about Puerto Rico

We closed on the thing I care most about.

Sofia is clear-eyed that the tax incentives are world-class and real. But she is adamant there is more to the equation than incentives and beaches. Puerto Rico is a uniquely good place to test and pilot ideas: an island, somewhat isolated, still under US jurisdiction and rule of law, with real talent, support organizations, mentors, and increasingly capital. It is a launch pad in both directions, Latin America into the US, and the US into Latin America.

So why has the capital infrastructure not caught up to the talent? Her answer was honest. Puerto Rico is small, and mainland investors stay focused on major hubs. What is changing is the number of organizations connecting island founders to mainland capital, which is exactly the gap she has spent her career closing, from directing one of Puerto Rico’s first multi-stakeholder ecosystem projects, to bringing Founder Institute to the island, to co-founding Colmena 66 to connect support organizations to each other.

The number, and the argument about it

We got into the funding gap directly. Latinos receive somewhere around 2% of venture capital, and as Sofia pointed out, if you are a Latina founder it is closer to 1%, and a Puerto Rican Latina founder is a fraction of that. We are one of the least-funded communities in venture, and the population is growing fast.

But Sofia pushed back on the scarcity mindset, and she was right to. The instinct to guard your investor relationships because everyone is fighting over the same 2% assumes the 2% is fixed. It is not. It is 2% because access is missing, not because the ceiling is set there. The move is not to hoard the door. It is to open it for the founder coming up behind you, make the warm introduction, and expand the pool. Do business with each other, and get business for each other, as she learned at Stanford’s LBAN program. That is how 2% becomes 20%.

Why this conversation matters

Sofia Stolberg is one of the people who started entrepreneurship in Puerto Rico, and she did it the way the best builders do, by making the infrastructure first and letting everything else grow out of it. Accelerators, programs, and organizations across the island trace back to rooms she helped build.

Her parting advice was simple enough to be a thesis: plug into the network, get connected, and connect others. Do not let being Latino set you back. Use it. Other Latino entrepreneurs want to open doors for you, so go knock.

Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Sofia Stolberg:

https://thecorridor.carrd.co

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 version of this conversation that stays safe. A JP Morgan executive talks about products, a founder nods, everyone moves on. That is not the conversation Alejandro Manzanares and I had.

Alejandro leads the West Coast for JP Morgan’s Global Passport program, the team built to bank foreign owned startups scaling into the US. Born in Puerto Rico to a Cuban mother and a Spanish father, he came up selling daily deals door to door in Miami before Hurricane María sent him to Washington, DC, then to the Aspen Institute working Latino majority cities from El Paso to Chicago, and eventually to JP Morgan, first running Hispanic and Latino sponsorships, now sitting inside the bank’s most global unit. His path started in Puerto Rico. It went national. Now it is global.

That arc matters more than a résumé line. It is the same arc Coquí Ventures is built around: proximity to the community first, access to capital systems second, and the conviction that those two things are supposed to connect and mostly do not.

What Global Passport actually unlocks

Here is the plain language version, because most founders listening have never heard of this program and would not think to ask their bank about it.

Two and a half years ago, JP Morgan noticed a gap. Series A through D companies were too complex for a retail branch and too early for the traditional multinational corporate banking mandate. So the bank built a small, specialized team of bankers trained in cross border currency, FX, and transfer pricing, essentially a fractional CFO function for founders who are not yet ready for a full corporate banking relationship but have already outgrown Chase retail.

Most of Global Passport’s clients are European. A meaningful share come from Latin America, companies scaling through the region and trying to figure out when, and how, to enter the US market. Alejandro’s job is not banking. It is ecosystem. He connects founders to tax, legal, accounting, and insurance partners, and spends real time advising on the mechanics founders rarely get taught: the flip, the holding company structure, go to market sequencing, when to use the bank’s own buildings for investor and client meetings.

Every sector qualifies except fintech, since anything touching cross border money movement sits under a separate, heavily regulated KYC track. AI, biotech, deep tech, agtech, health tech, all in scope.

The trust question, asked directly

I put it to him plainly: there is a documented, historical distrust between Latino founders and large financial institutions. Where has the bank fallen short, and what is it doing differently now.

He did not deflect. He pointed to sponsorships and activations at community events that have existed for twenty, thirty, even a hundred years and were never funded before. He pointed to JP Morgan’s aggressive Chase retail expansion, much of it concentrated in high Latino majority communities, as evidence the bank understands showing up in person matters as much as showing up in a press release.

Whether that is enough is a fair question to keep asking. But the specificity of the answer, sponsorships that exist, branches that are opening, a DEI function that still exists inside the bank, is worth more than a general commitment to inclusion.

Where the energy actually is

I asked him where the global Latino founder ecosystem is moving that New York and San Francisco investors are underweighting.

Brazil, without hesitation. He described a market getting stronger by the month, with US investors growing more comfortable writing checks into LatAm as company quality improves. The broader signal: international founder offices in the US are declining year over year, even as US VCs increase their investment in international founders. Capital is following talent globally faster than talent is relocating physically.

The harder truth came next. On the fund side, the tier two through tier five managers, the ones actually positioned to find and back this talent, are the ones getting squeezed. Distributions back to LPs are at what he called an all time low. The largest funds can absorb that. The smaller, emerging managers cannot as easily. This is the exact seam Coquí Ventures is built to sit in: not the sandhill road allocators, but the founders and the funds underneath them that the current cycle is making harder to sustain, not easier.

The rule: come early or come late, never in the middle

When I asked what he wants every early stage Latino founder to walk away with, his answer was structural, not motivational.

It has never been easier to build a global company without a US office on day one. Companies like Lovable prove it, a US topco with the team based in Stockholm. But if a founder decides the US market is the target, his rule of thumb is simple: come early or come late, do not come in the middle. He has watched too many founders, including from Puerto Rico, drift into that middle zone, present in the US market without being structurally built for it.

His advice for founders scaling out of LatAm specifically: build the holding company as a real operating entity from the start, not a shell. Billing, invoicing, receivables, actual activity inside the topco, so that when a bank eventually looks at the company, there is something bankable there. This is the same gap that quietly kills deals in due diligence long after the pitch meeting goes well: no cap table discipline, no legal structure, no operating history in the entity that is supposed to raise the money.

And if a founder is building in AI specifically, his framing was blunt. Roughly seventy percent of AI funding deployment right now concentrates within an eight square mile radius of San Francisco. Being physically present there currently carries something close to a thirty percent valuation premium. That is not a nice to have. That is the market pricing proximity.

(Note: these figures were shared by Alejandro in conversation and reflect his professional estimate, not an audited data point; worth independent verification before citing in a deal memo.)

AI inside the bank, today

I asked him to separate hype from practice. Inside JP Morgan, deployment started in the private bank, and large language model use for summarization, notes, and deck creation is now common across the company, in line with what most Fortune 500 institutions are doing. Beyond that, use cases in customer service, risk, and wealth management are advancing, wealth management in particular, though he was careful to note the bank moves thoughtfully rather than aggressively on adoption. The honest answer: less transformation than the headlines suggest, more steady infrastructure work than most people assume.

Why this episode matters for Coquí Ventures

Coquí Ventures exists on a specific bet: that the connective tissue between talented, revenue generating Latino founders and the capital and infrastructure that should reach them is thin, not absent. Alejandro’s story is proof the tissue can be built, one relationship, one program, one branch opening at a time, and proof that even inside a hundred year old institution, someone from Puerto Rico can end up running a global function built explicitly to serve founders who look like the ones we back.

The gap he described on the fund side, tier two through five managers getting squeezed while the market simultaneously gets more comfortable backing international founders, is the exact window Coquí Fund I is built to occupy. Not by competing with JP Morgan. By being the fund that gets a founder ready for that conversation before they ever need it.

Nunca hemos necesitado que alguien nos enseñe a construir. Lo que necesitábamos era que alguien nos abriera la puerta primero. Alejandro está haciendo exactamente eso, desde adentro.

If you are building and thinking about when to cross into the US market, his rule stands: come early, or come late. The middle is where deals go to die in due diligence.

Seguimos 🇵🇷 ,

Angel León, Coquí Ventures

Coquí Notes is th…