Cash Pillow

When I first set foot in Brazil in 2019, I had a thesis I couldn't stop talking about: Brazilian founders should go global.

I remember sitting in Santo Grão after Santo Grão having the same conversation over and over again. Almost everyone thought I was crazy. The pushback was always the same:

"Why would I leave Brazil?"

Fair question.

Brazil has more than 200 million people. It's a $2 trillion-plus economy. Entire industries are still being digitized. You can build a billion-dollar company without ever getting on a plane.

So why take on the complexity of new markets?

At the time, I didn't have a great answer.

Today, I think I do.

But first, it's worth understanding the paradox that has always defined Brazil.

Brazil is one of the best places in the world to build a business—and one of the hardest. The market is enormous. The opportunities are everywhere. But so is the complexity.

Taxes. Regulation. Fraud. Compliance. Bureaucracy.

Every founder who survives long enough learns how to operate inside a level of complexity that would break most companies elsewhere. That's why I've always believed Brazilian founders are massively underrated globally. If you can win in Brazil, you can probably win almost anywhere.

But winning everywhere is expensive.

New teams, new compliance requirements, new regulators, new distribution channels, years of uncertainty. Historically, that meant raising money. Lots of it.

Which is why I think AI is becoming one of the most important forces shaping the next generation of Brazilian companies.

Most conversations about AI focus on productivity. I think the bigger story is operating leverage.

For decades, growth and headcount moved together. More customers meant more support, more operations, more analysts, and more managers. Revenue went up and costs followed close behind.

AI starts breaking that relationship.

Companies can generate more revenue with fewer people. They can reach meaningful cash flow faster. And for founders operating in markets where capital has historically been scarce, that matters a lot.

Cash flow creates something those founders rarely have: optionality.

The ability to make ambitious bets without asking someone else to fund them.

Take CloudWalk.

In 2019, the company generated roughly $2 million in revenue. By the end of 2025, it had crossed a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate with roughly 720 employees.

Think about that for a second.

More than a billion dollars in revenue.

Around seven hundred employees.

AI didn't just help CloudWalk grow faster.

It changed the economics of the business.

Now the company is expanding into the United States backed not by another funding round, but by the strength of its own balance sheet.

That's the shift.

Historically, investors financed global ambition. Increasingly, successful companies will finance it themselves.

And that's why this trend matters more in Brazil than almost anywhere else.

The country never lacked markets. It never lacked founders. It never lacked operational talent.

What it lacked was expansion capital.

AI is changing that.

The next generation of Brazilian champions won't raise ever-larger rounds to finance global growth. They'll build profitable cash cows at home, generate extraordinary amounts of cash, and deploy that capital into international growth on their own terms.

For years, investors looked at Brazil and saw a domestic opportunity.

I think they're about to discover something else.

A country producing companies sophisticated enough to compete globally and profitable enough to fund the journey themselves.

That's my bet.

The biggest impact of AI in Brazil won't be better software. It will be turning domestic dominance into expansion capital.

1. Neymar licensed his AI likeness for microdramas.

Brazilian soccer star Neymar signed a deal with FlareFlow that allows his AI-generated likeness to appear in serialized short-form dramas distributed across digital platforms.

The story is bigger than Neymar. For decades, celebrities monetized their time through appearances, sponsorships, and media projects. AI introduces a new model: licensing identity itself. A public figure can now participate in hundreds of stories, campaigns, and formats simultaneously without being physically involved in production.

Why it matters: We may be witnessing the emergence of a new asset class. In the same way athletes license merchandise and media rights today, creators, founders, executives, and celebrities may eventually license AI versions of themselves. The most valuable personal brands could become infinitely scalable intellectual property.

2. Disney launched an AI ad engine.

Disney is preparing to launch AI tools that generate advertising creative, including scripts, video assets, and music, allowing brands to produce campaigns dramatically faster and at lower cost.

The significance isn't that Disney is using AI. It's that one of the world's largest media companies is productizing content creation itself.

Historically, producing high-quality advertising required agencies, production companies, large budgets, and months of execution. AI increasingly compresses that process into hours.

Why it matters: The competitive advantage in marketing is shifting. Production quality is rapidly becoming commoditized. As content creation gets cheaper and faster, the scarce resources become creativity, distribution, audience attention, and brand.

3. A podcast episode is becoming raw material.

A growing ecosystem of clipping companies is attracting investment from creators, agencies, and brands. These businesses transform a single podcast, interview, or video into dozens—or hundreds—of distribution assets across platforms.

The shift is subtle but important.

Historically, the podcast episode was the product.

Today, the podcast episode is increasingly the input.

And the same now holds for almost any long-form content—a keynote, a webinar, a long interview, an essay. The source piece is no longer the deliverable; it's the raw material.

The output is a system of clips, newsletters, social posts, carousels, Shorts, Reels, and AI-generated derivatives designed to maximize distribution.

Why it matters: Content production is being industrialized. The creators who win may not be the ones producing the most content, but the ones building the most efficient distribution machines around it. Media is increasingly becoming a manufacturing process rather than a publishing process.

Read — 7 Powers (Hamilton Helmer)

The clearest framework I know for what actually makes a business defensible: scale economies, network effects, switching costs, brand, counter-positioning, cornered resource, process power. What's fascinating to revisit now is how many of these will need to be rewritten for the AI era. When execution becomes nearly free, process power and scale economies start to erode, and the durable moats shift toward the ones AI can't manufacture — network, brand, trust, a genuinely cornered resource. Read it as a map, then redraw it.

Listen — 20VC with Aravind Srinivas (Perplexity)

Perplexity's founder makes the case that the AI model itself is becoming a commodity, with the value moving up to the product layer built on top of it. He argues power — not chips — is the real bottleneck now, with data-center buildouts increasingly stalled by permits and public resistance, and that the next wave of value shifts from chatbots that answer questions to agents that go and do the work. He even predicts Micron could be worth more than Meta within a year. A lot to think about.

Read — How the Knicks finally got here

For the first time since 1973 — fifty-three years — the Knicks are NBA champions, and I was jumping up and down with the whole city. If you want to understand how a franchise finally ends a half-century drought, this is the writeup.

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Thanks for reading,

Olga 

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