Brian Requarth on picking 15 founders out of 1,500, and why Latitud took no equity for five years

The J Curve is an English-language podcast and newsletter covering Latin America's technology and venture capital ecosystem, hosted by investor Olga Maslikhova. In this episode: Nigel Morris, who co-founded Capital One inside a small Virginia bank in 1994 and grew it from roughly $1 billion to nearly $20 billion in market value, then co-founded QED Investors and backed Nubank before it existed — after David Vélez pitched him "a Capital One in Brazil" over breakfast in Mexico City. He explains why Nubank, Revolut, Klarna and Monzo are all now aiming at the same market, why banks structurally cannot innovate, why a company growing 40% with an NPS of 89 currently cannot raise growth equity, and what he thinks genuinely changed in Latin America — which is not capital, regulation, or technology.

Why are Founders Fund, Sequoia and Greenoaks writing Latin American checks now?

Requarth's answer is that they are not, particularly, writing Latin American checks. They are writing checks to Latin American founders building for the largest markets on earth, which is a different proposition, and the two companies Maslikhova opens with make the point. Enter, the legal AI company co-founded by Mateus Costa-Ribeiro, and Pax, the AI-native public safety company founded by David Peixoto, are both attacking what he calls cornerstone industries.

His breakdown of what those firms are underwriting has three parts, and only one of them is the market. Talent first: he calls both founders magnetic, outlier people, and thinks credentials of that kind are probably what got them in the door. Then execution — specifically velocity, which he is careful to separate from speed. And only then the market, which has to be large enough to justify the price.

"At the early days you can get away with underwriting the founder and not the market, because good founders find the market. But when you're talking about the terms we're talking about, obviously it's the combination.'

Brian Requarth

He is candid about the deals he saw early and hesitated on. He met Mateus at the house Maslikhova first visited him in, and says he was “a little cheap, I think.” He did not hesitate on the next one: Latitud wrote the first check into Taste Labs.

What changed in the founders themselves?

The size of the ambition, and he can date when he first noticed the gap. He travelled to China with a delegation of sixty people organised by monashees, met entrepreneurs there, and came away with one thought: in Brazil we are thinking far too small.

His model for how that changes is the four-minute mile. It stood for years, someone broke it, and then it fell repeatedly — not because human bodies changed in the interim, but because the ceiling turned out to be in people's heads. Nutrition and other variables contributed at the margin, he allows — but a lot of it, he thinks, is the mindset of what is possible.

Two things are converging now, on his reading. The AI cycle is collapsing borders and making it easier than ever to build from anywhere. And Latin American founders are spending time in San Francisco and reaching a conclusion about the people they meet there: I'm not different.

What is síndrome de vira-lata, and why does he say removing it is the whole game?

It is the Brazilian phrase for a national inferiority complex — literally the mongrel, or stray-dog, syndrome, coined by the playwright Nelson Rodrigues in 1958. Requarth's gloss corrects the usual translation.

"It's the underdog mentality, but it's not the underdog mentality of "I can do it, I'm the underdog." It's the underdog mentality of "I don't know if I totally belong here.”

Brian Requarth

It is imposter syndrome operating at the scale of a country. He says he carried it himself for so long that he could not, in the moment, retrieve the English term for it — and that he has since removed it entirely. This is also the answer he gives in the final rapid-fire question: if he could pass one lesson to the next generation of Latin American founders, it would be self-belief, and the ability to dominate the internal voice rather than be governed by it.

What does "global from day one" actually mean in practice?

Two distinct company shapes, and he says the DNA is different from the first hire.

The first starts local and spreads. His example is BeConfident, the English-learning company: build in Brazil, expand across Spanish-speaking Latin America, founder Robson Amorim moves to San Francisco and goes deep on the AI stack, and the product now sells into more than forty countries. What has changed, he argues, is the clock: the speed of building has dramatically reduced what that sequence used to take. BeConfident did it in two and a half years.

The second never has a home market. You are sleeping on a friend's couch in San Francisco, your first customers are American, and your team is straddled between there and wherever you came from. Taste Labs is his example on the far end of the range — founder Thais Castello Branco selling taste infrastructure to the frontier labs, which is a business with no Latin American component at all beyond where she is from.

His examples of range include a biotech founder from the south of Brazil building computational models of organs to accelerate drug testing. Maslikhova frames the contrast: a decade ago they were building the next Mercado Libre, the next iFood, the next Nubank. His one-word answer to what they are dreaming about now is everything.

Does a founder have to move to the Bay Area?

If your customers are in Brazil, he says, you should be in Brazil. A company deep in Brazilian tax workflows gains nothing from being permanently in San Francisco and loses proximity to the people it sells to. If you are working closely with the labs, there is no other place to be.

But he separates relocating from being exposed, and the second is where his conviction is. He lives in wine country, north of the city, and says he did not feel the same urgency himself until he had spent days, weeks and months in the Bay Area. He hosts portfolio teams at his house and watches the same thing happen to them — not a new strategy, a new clock speed.

"They say in hockey you've got to skate to where the puck is going. The puck is heading over there, you're over here."

Brian Requarth

How do you get from 1,500 applications to 15 founders?

The top of the funnel is handled by a proprietary ranking model built on an analogy from two rating systems.

The first is chess ELO: if your rating is 1,600 and mine is 1,800, the probability of me beating you is calculable from past games. The second is the tennis ladder, where beating a player rated above you moves your own number up.

Latitud built a simulated environment on the same principle, scoring applicants against the variables it believes are salient to founder success — where they worked, what they built, who they are already connected to. The output is not a decision. It is a shortlist of fifty to a hundred, out of the fifteen hundred.

"It's not perfect, but it's pretty good at reducing things down into a balsamic reduction sauce of quality."

Brian Requarth

Everything after that is qualitative, and he says the last cut — down to the final fifteen — is where it gets genuinely hard and where they will be wrong. He names the two limitations honestly. Network and pedigree are the signals the algorithm reads best, and those are exactly the signals that will miss a diamond in the rough. And applicants now use AI to write their applications, which compresses the written signal toward the mean and pushes more weight onto the conversation.

The backstop is structural rather than clever: Latitud writes a check at the fellowship and can write a separate pre-seed check into founders it passed over. Missing someone in the funnel is not the same as losing them.

Why run an accelerator that takes no equity?

Because of one insight he had at the start, which he says he is glad they got clarity on early.

"If you launch an accelerator without having a brand or a demonstrated track record, you're basically going to get adverse selection."

Brian Requarth

The logic is uncomfortable and correct. A new program with fixed terms attracts the founders who cannot raise elsewhere, because the ones who can will not pay the price to an unproven brand. So Latitud removed the price.

The fellowship ran equity-free for five years — more than a thousand founders through it, who he says have raised over a billion dollars between them, with Latitud holding nothing in many of them.

He anticipates the objection out loud: that it looks foolish to do all that work with no economic participation. His answer is that they slid a few checks in where it mattered, and that the reputational asset compounds. Pomelo was in the second cohort. Latitud asked Gastón Irigoyen to let them write the first check before there was a PowerPoint. Kaszek later led the company's Series C — a bookend Requarth points out himself.

On fixed terms, Gastón would have said no. He had access. He did not need an unproven accelerator. Five years of goodwill is what bought the right to be in the room.

What is he underwriting when there is no product and no revenue?

Latitud's framing for its own stage is a deliberate inversion of the most quoted phrase in venture.

"Everyone talks about zero to one, Peter Thiel. We talk at Latitud about minus one to zero."

Brian Requarth

Minus one to zero means the founder may still be employed somewhere else. There may be an idea and no product, or no idea yet. So there is no revenue to underwrite and no market to underwrite, because the market can change and good founders find a different one.

What is left is the person: demonstrated ambition, what they have built before, a unique insight, and — the variable he puts first — motivation. He tells it through the biotech founder whose grandparents died of cancer and whose long-term goal is to solve it. He is careful to add that not everyone needs a story like that. But the founders with a reason that outlasts money are the ones who do not stop, and he treats obstacles as a certainty rather than a risk.

He also warns against a single template. He describes the persona he himself was not — the young, technical founder with high IQ and high EQ, the physics dropout — and says Latitud tracks several personas without having named them. On being compared to Founders Fund, he declines the flattery: that is a thesis-driven fund making very few, very concentrated bets, and Latitud is not that.

What is one of the biggest variables he looks at?

Velocity of learning — one of the biggest variables he looks at, in his own framing — and he means the derivative rather than the level. The test is what happens between two conversations: talk to a founder, talk to them again two or three weeks later, and the difference between the ones who are stuck and the ones who have arrived at a new stage is stark.

"If I'm playing chess and you're a grandmaster, and I get to move two times to your one, I've got a pretty good chance of beating you even if I'm a mediocre player."

Brian Requarth

He returns to the speed-versus-velocity distinction each time it comes up, and it is not pedantry. Speed is a scalar; velocity has direction. Move fast in the wrong direction and you arrive at the wrong destination faster than anyone else.

What is the anatomy of a good fundraise?

He begins by rejecting the premise most founders operate under. Fundraising is not a personality trait you either have or do not.

"Fundraising is a teachable skill. […] We've gotten pretty good at understanding what the anatomy of a good fundraising process looks like. And if you can't learn that, then you're not really someone we would back."

Brian Requarth

The frame for the whole process is a line he attributes to Abraham Lincoln: if you have six hours to chop down a tree, spend the first five sharpening the axe. Most founders skip the five hours and go straight to market with no system.

What the preparation consists of, at pre-seed and seed specifically — he flags that a Series B is a different exercise — starts from an observation about what is actually being judged. At the earliest stage, essentially the entire investment decision rests on the quality of the person, their story, the first hires they are making, how they articulate the market, and their unique insight. Traction and growth only take over that weight later, round by round. So the preparation is about the impression and the energy you can generate, which means knowing precisely who each investor is and what they have backed.

Then the piece almost nobody sequences deliberately: calendar density. List every plausible investor across Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and the US, then compress the meetings into a short window so they run back to back. The reason is not efficiency. It is that a compressed process creates competitive dynamics between investors and inertia for you — the same conversations strung out over months produce none of it.

What is retrospective rationalization?

His term for the story founders tell afterwards about a plan they did not have — and he applies it to himself first, which is what makes the section usable.

The unvarnished version of his own history: he struck out for four years. He pitched the five investors who existed and none of them said yes, so he went back to building and generated revenue to fund his own growth. What he did do, once fundraising started working, was pinpoint the highest-signal early believers he could get. Simon Baker, who had built what was then the largest property portal in Australia. Micky Malka, before Ribbit Capital existed. Greg Waldorf, then an executive in residence at Accel. Wences Casares.

He is explicit that he was not executing a strategy at the time. He was collecting two kinds of signal at once — people who unlocked downstream capital, and people with operating experience in the same business — and only saw the shape of it later.

The payoff is the best line in the fundraising material, and it is a reframe rather than a tactic. Walking into monashees and Kaszek to raise what was then called a Series A, he had an argument available that had nothing to do with his metrics:

"Look, your LPs are already investors in me. […] The people who invest in your fund, they're already directly coming to me. Maybe you should also be investing in me.”

Brian Requarth

How do you get chased instead of chasing?

The distinction comes from Jason Yeh of Adamant, who runs fundraising sessions for Latitud's fellows: two scenarios, one where you are chasing investors and one where you have orchestrated things so you are being chased. Requarth's contribution is what actually produces the second.

Partly it is brand, and he is unequivocal: founders should lean into whatever they are naturally good at. If you can hold an audience, be visible — on LinkedIn, on X, on a podcast — and be a thought leader. He calls that critical, and he is a fair witness given how he built his own position.

But brand is not the only route, and his second example is the more useful one for founders who are not performers. Pull the best CTO out of the hottest AI company — someone walking away from millions in equity to join you — and that single fact, he says, has investors drooling. His word for it is a flex — and he presents it as a complement to brand rather than a substitute for it.

Underneath both sits how he says he actually listens to founders. He describes himself as a kind of therapist in the conversation, constructing a narrative about the person while they talk, because he knows what a narrative does to a seed or Series A investor's attention. He reaches for wine to explain the role, having grown up in it: Robert Parker puts his stamp on a bottle and the bottle is made. He says Latitud aspires to that arena rather than claiming to be there — the evolution from a firm with a large network to one whose selection is itself the signal.

Why lead pre-seed and nothing else?

Asked what he is proud of, he does not name a company. He names a constraint held for close to six years: Latitud leads pre-seed, exclusively, and he says very few funds do only that.

The financial argument is arithmetic. It is far easier to return a small fund than a large one, and he points out that he is not sitting on a mountain of management fees. He funded a good deal of the firm's early operations himself, because a new fund has to hire before it has money, which he calls an unfair game and harder still when the fund is small.

The strategic argument is about where the gap is widest. When he started, he could count the region's funds on one hand. Now there are seed funds in Latin America he has never heard of, and thousands in the Bay Area. The stage with the most competition is not the stage with the most opportunity, and staying locked in on the first institutional check is his answer to a market that has filled in behind him.

Why is a Latin American fund now based in San Francisco?

He draws the contrast with the rest of the region's funds sharply. A lot of them, he says, build a thesis around LatAm-specific moats — advantages that only exist because of how a particular market mechanically works. Latitud did not do that.

"We have just followed the talent."

Brian Requarth

The trade he describes is explicit and he calls it what it is: arbitrage between talent and capital. Take two founders at the identical stage starting at the identical time. The one raising in the Bay Area gets there faster and raises more — sometimes by three or four times, is how he puts it. If Latitud can find the Latin American founder first — through six years of regional network — and then supply the connection to the American process, it captures a spread that exists purely because the two markets price the same person differently.

There is a second bucket where that framing does not apply, and he is careful about it. Some founders are already connected and have no shortage of options; Taste Labs is his example, where the relationship came through the fellowship and the trust preceded the round. Speaking the language and knowing the culture helps, he says — and he is precise that it is not why she chose them.

He is equally careful to say what this is not. It is not an exit from the region; Latitud keeps investing there, and it is now an Americas fund rather than a Latin American one. And on why the US pull is so strong, he gives the fact rather than the theory: he is watching companies go from zero to ten million dollars of revenue in months rather than years, which he says he rarely sees in Latin America.

What separates a community from a network?

His answer arrives before the question is finished: you have to cultivate a give-first mentality, and that is the whole of it. A willingness to create value for someone with no expectation attached is the DNA of a community; without it you have a network, which is a different and lesser thing.

He did not arrive at this abstractly. It started as need. Alone in São Paulo, knowing few people, he joined a group of five founders holding breakfasts — he is quick to say the idea was not his — and found the thing he was short of. Not advice. Kinship.

"Your best day and your worst day are the same day."

Brian Requarth

After signing the sale of his company in March 2020, with no idea what came next, he made it a mission to help as many founders as he could while expecting nothing. That turned into about a hundred and fifty Zoom calls — with people who had term sheets pulled during Covid, who had fired ninety per cent of their teams, or whose businesses were suddenly taking off and could not cope.

And the reason he believes it works is his own origin story running in reverse. VivaReal's first serious investor was someone he reached with a Facebook message. That man wired three hundred thousand dollars when the company had eighty-seven dollars in the bank and twenty-five employees, and changed the trajectory of the business. Requarth still answers cold messages from strangers on LinkedIn for that reason — though he concedes he can no longer answer all of them, and deletes AI-written pitches on sight. What gets his attention is evidence the sender actually read the book or listened to the episodes.

Maslikhova pushes on how any of this scales past dinners and DMs. His answer is one line, and it is not a framework: you work your ass off.

Why did he go back to being an operator?

Because he felt stale, which is his word for it. He carved time off from the fund and took the driver's seat at Camu, the Brazilian tax-software company, for something between twelve and eighteen months — doing customer discovery calls, more than a hundred of them in Portuguese with tax professionals.

His reason for doing something he did not need to do: he did not want to become the investor who talks about how it was in his day. Things had changed since VivaReal, and the only way to speak with credibility to founders going through it was to subject himself to it again from day one.

He then handed the company to Yuri Danilchenko, and says why: Yuri is the better CEO for this stage, having built machine learning since before it was called AI, and Requarth is in the Bay Area and not ready to move back to Brazil. He is equally plain about the mistakes — he started a company inside Latitud and raised capital into the holding company, which he mentions in the same breath as the things he has messed up.

The general point he draws from it is about the region's investor base rather than about himself: there are very few founder-led venture firms in Latin America. He names Kaszek as the outstanding example, and notes it is also one of the only ones.

What is his most contrarian belief about venture capital?

He prefaces it by saying it does not serve his cause, which is accurate.

"Contrary to every single investor you talk to who thinks that they add a lot of value — they don't. In most cases."

Brian Requarth

The argument is that for the genuine outliers, no investor and no outside factor determines the outcome. Those founders were going to get there. The honest position for an investor, on his account, is that you are fortunate to be along for the ride — which requires a detached ego, because the alternative is believing you are the reason things happened.

He hedges it himself, in the same breath, wondering aloud whether it is contrarian at all. It sits alongside the rest of the episode rather than against it: the entire Latitud model is built on being useful at the one stage where he thinks help still moves the needle, and honest about the stages where it does not.

Should a founder sell secondary?

A little, and for a specific reason that is not the obvious one. Asked about the first time he made real money, he describes selling some secondary at VivaReal — enough for a house and a car, at a point when he was drawing a five-thousand-dollar monthly salary with a child on the way. He remembers a dinner in Pinheiros where founders at a similar stage were astonished that anyone had put money in their pocket at all.

Part of it was wanting to show his wife the thing was real. But the argument he makes for it is about what the money does to your thinking, not your comfort. Once the baseline is handled, you can afford to be ambitious again. Before that, a founder is quietly managing personal risk with every decision.

He is precise about the boundary. Selling twenty per cent of your company at a Series B is a bad signal. Tucking away enough to take care of yourself is not the same transaction and should not be read as one.

And he closes it with the counterweight, which he learned the expensive way. After the sale he sat at the Four Seasons in Baja for a couple of weeks with no purpose, gained weight, and found himself asking what he was doing — the opposite of what he expected. He calls the belief that the next milestone will make you happy a hedonic treadmill and a false game.

"Money doesn't buy happiness. It buys comfort."

Brian Requarth

What was he actually ambitious about at the start?

Asked whether he foresaw any of this, he refuses the flattering version of the answer. He was a founder chasing a girl, living in a country he liked, trying to make enough money to pay rent. A backpacker who could not get an apartment or open a bank account.

What he describes next is a lesson about the size of a starting ambition rather than a triumphal story. He was selling English classes on the street in Bogotá, looking up at a thirty-storey building on the main avenue, thinking that one day he wanted to own one. The immediate obstacle was smaller and more literal: he could not get inside. So he put on a seven-dollar suit that was short in the cuffs, worked out how to get past security, and sold his classes.

"My big dream was to get in the building. It's not exactly ambitious. It was enough so that I could extend my stay in Colombia and pay rent for a little while."

Brian Requarth

Once inside he closed a deal with a brokerage, hired a teacher, and made a little money — and only then did the ceiling move. That is the mechanism he generalises later: ambition is not something the best founders begin with at full size. They discover what they are capable of and revise upwards, repeatedly.

The high-conviction test he applies to other founders is the same story a few years on. He was sleeping on his co-founder's couch in Brazil with his wife in the living room, trying to start a family, in a country where neither of them spoke the language, having sold the only asset he owned. He could have gone home to California and a comfortable job in his family's business. He puts the question back to Maslikhova rather than answering it: do you think that's high conviction?

Rapid fire: mentors, whether drive can be manufactured, and the one lesson

The most practical advice he ever received. Not from an investor. From his father, who ran a small paving company in Santa Rosa, the city next to Sebastopol — the town of seven thousand people, on an apple farm, where Requarth grew up. He was in a bad office in Bogotá, barely making payroll, with a customer he was failing. The advice was to deliver — and where you are in the wrong, own it, be accountable, and then work to make the situation right. He can still remember the phone call, and says he has built a reputation on it since.

Can entrepreneurial drive be manufactured? His split is between motivation and ambition. Motivation he thinks is innate. Ambition has levels, and those unlock over time — a process he says can take longer in Latin America. Almost nobody arrives with a fully-formed vision, and he offers his own Bogotá office building as evidence. He reserves the born-with-it category for a fraction of a fraction of a percent, naming Elon Musk, and is clear that this is not the standard the top decile of founders is held to.

The one lesson for the next generation. Self-belief, and specifically the courage to face the internal voice rather than pretend it is absent. He does not tell founders not to fear failure. He tells them to stare it down, acknowledge it, and beat it — and says the caliber is already there, whether the founder is in New York or San Francisco.

The conversation ends with Maslikhova telling him that the humility and introspection in this episode are not the Brian Requarth the ecosystem usually sees — the cheerful Californian success story attached to VivaReal and a book. His reply is the closing line of the episode, and a fair summary of what a good long-form interview is for: "You got to show a side of me that I don't get to share."

COMPANIES AND INSTITUTIONS

Co-founder of Latitud, which he built with Tomás Roggio, and a general partner of its venture arm, which leads pre-seed rounds across the Americas. He arrived in Latin America as a backpacker selling English classes in Bogotá, co-founded the property portal VivaReal and moved to Brazil to build it, and stayed through the merger with ZAP Imóveis and the sale of the combined group to OLX Brasil. He is the author of Viva the Entrepreneur: Founding, Scaling, and Raising Venture Capital in Latin America. He now lives in the Bay Area, where he grew up.

Paulo Passoni, Valor Capital — why speed is the last moat, and the CloudWalk–Ramp gap · Hernán Kazah, Kaszek — building Latin America's $100B+ companies · Pedro Conrade, Neon — building a $760M bank for the customers investors avoid

🎙 The J Curve  is where LATAM's boldest founders & investors come to talk real strategy, opportunity and leadership.