The most durable startup was built 2,500 years ago. Let me explain.

What a place to be writing from. I’m at a little Greek taverna in Athens, the Parthenon floating above the rooftops, twenty-five centuries of history within walking distance.

A few hours before, I was wandering through the Acropolis, the Ancient Agora, museums, and archaeological sites, thinking less about ancient history than about startups. We have a tendency to think of innovation as something uniquely modern. AI, rockets, quantum computing, biotech. Every generation selfishly assumes it is living through the most extraordinary technological revolution in history.

And then you come to Athens.

Walk through the city for a day and you realize that two and a half thousand years ago, people were wrestling with many of the same questions we are today: how to organize talent, how to build ambitious projects, how to create institutions that outlast their founders, and how to make sense of uncertainty.

The Parthenon is probably the best example.

Most people know it as a symbol of Ancient Greece. Fewer realize what an engineering masterpiece it actually was. Construction began in 447 BC. By 438, just nine years later, the main structure was complete.

Nine years. There were no cranes, no steel, no computer models, no power tools. Roughly 100,000 tons of Pentelic marble had to be quarried, transported, carved, and assembled with astonishing precision.

What surprised me most is that almost nothing about the building is actually straight. The columns bulge slightly in the middle because perfectly straight columns look thinner to the human eye. The platform curves upward because a truly flat surface seems to sag. The corner columns are a bit thicker than the rest. Every one of these tricks was planned before the first block was laid. What looks effortless is really the work of obsessive engineering.

And when you ask how a single city-state pulled this off in under a decade, the answer looks very familiar. There was a leader with enormous conviction and the political capital to act on it: Pericles. There was the best technical talent of the era running the project: Phidias and his architects. And there was funding, famously controversial, redirected from the Delian League treasury. Vision, talent, and capital, concentrated in one place and pointed at one ambitious goal.

And then Athens fell.

Everything around the Parthenon died. Pericles was gone within a decade, killed by the plague that swept Athens. The war he led Athens into was lost. The empire whose treasury paid for the building collapsed. The democracy that voted for it was extinguished. Over the centuries the temple became a church, then a mosque, and in 1687 a Venetian shell hit the gunpowder stored inside and blew the roof off.

And yet the building survived them all. Damaged, burned, blown open — and still, twenty-five centuries later, one of the most recognizable structures on earth, and a masterclass in engineering that modern architects still study.

Which makes me wonder: what does it take to build something durable? Something for the ages?

Looking at the Parthenon, I think the answer has three parts.

The first is that durable things are excessive relative to their immediate purpose. Nobody needed the platform to curve. No worshipper would have filed a complaint about straight columns. The Athenians engineered far beyond the requirements of the moment, and that invisible margin is precisely what absorbed twenty-five centuries of earthquakes, wars, and neglect. It is the same instinct you see in how Musk builds. SpaceX spent years engineering reusability into Falcon 9 — through failed landings and exploded boosters — when every customer would have happily kept paying for disposable rockets. Starship is sized for Mars while the paying market is satellites in low orbit. Most of what gets built today, however, is engineered to the requirements of the next quarter. It works until conditions change. Durable things always have extra built in.

The second is that durable things are built around human perception. Every curve exists because the architects cared about how the building would feel to someone standing below it, not about what the geometry textbook said was correct. That is why it still moves people who know nothing about Doric architecture. Products age the same way. What lasts is rarely what looked perfect on paper. It is what was built around something permanent: how people actually see, feel, decide, and relate.

And the third, the one I find hardest, is that durable things must be able to survive the death of everyone who built them. The Parthenon did not need Pericles to keep standing. His conviction got it built; the quality of the work is what kept it up. This is the real test for founders, and I include myself. If the thing you are building only works while you are pushing, you have built momentum, not an institution. The transition from the first to the second is the least glamorous work in company building, and the results only show up after the founder is out of the picture.

Vision, talent, and capital will get something ambitious built. Athens proved that in nine years. But lasting is a different game. It takes building beyond what short-term vision can justify. It takes foundations in what never changes about people. And it takes the hardest thing of all: being built so well that it no longer needs you.

That, I suspect, is the real reason we are still photographing this building, from taverna tables, twenty-five centuries later.

Tether puts $20M into Mercado Bitcoin. The largest company in crypto is buying a bigger seat in Brazil. Tether announced a $20M strategic investment in Mercado Bitcoin, the São Paulo platform that started as a 2013 crypto exchange and is now a full-stack, regulated financial player — 4.5M users, ~$387M in tokenized assets, 10+ licenses across Brazil and Europe. Tether is wild, and we’ll be getting into them on next week’s Debrief with Paulo Passoni.

Addi raises an $86M Series D it says it didn’t need. Colombia’s BNPL leader pulled in $86M led by Citius and BTG Pactual, with GIC and Monashees along for the ride. Founded in 2018, Addi now serves 5.5M customers across 76,000 merchants and 1,034 municipalities — and it’s profitable. CEO Santiago Suárez credits AI with letting them scale engineering output without adding headcount.

Jota raises a $30M Series A — and pulls a marquee name into Brazil. Jota, a Brazilian AI-native fintech, raised $30M at a $185M post-money valuation, led by Haun Ventures — Katie Haun’s firm — in what’s notably its first-ever Brazilian investment. HOF Capital, Alter Global, and Greyhound Capital also joined. Jota offers a WhatsApp-and-app conversational banking account for entrepreneurs: you pay by text, voice, or photo, and the AI generates your cash-flow reports. Founded in 2024, ~300,000 users, targeting 1M by year-end. Founder Davi Holanda (ex-PagBank) frames it simply — the financial interface went from branches, to apps, and the next interface is AI agents.

For those who don’t know Katie: she spent over a decade at the U.S. Department of Justice, where she prosecuted organized crime, drug cartels, and gangs, and created the DOJ’s first cryptocurrency task force — including leading the Silk Road investigation and the takedown of the rogue federal agents who stole Bitcoin during it. She then became the first female GP at a16z before launching Haun Ventures.

Revisiting Meditations. This trip pulled me back into Stoicism — and there’s something surreal about studying it a few hundred meters from where it was actually invented. Zeno taught it right there on the Agora, on a painted porch (the stoa that gave the philosophy its name), 2,300 years ago.

The a16z “Goes Global” episode. Ben Horowitz with Anne Neuberger, Raghu Raghuram, and Jen Kha on why American tech has to lead globally, the role of trusted cross-border partnerships, and why helping founders expand internationally is becoming core to company-building. Relevant to anyone thinking about where the next wave of tech gets built — and, obviously, close to my own thesis about talent and opportunity outside Silicon Valley.

We launched The J Curve referral program.

Two milestones. Two rewards built for founders.

Refer 3 founders → Unlock the masterclass

Share The J Curve with 3 founders and get access to How to Build a Brand That Raises Money — my complete framework on storytelling, audience building, distribution, and investor relationships.

You’ll also get the exact 30-day execution sprint I would follow if I were starting from zero today.

Refer 5 founders → Pitch me directly

Refer 5 founders and unlock a 30-minute 1:1 fundraising and deck review with me.

We’ll go through your pitch deck, positioning, fundraising narrative, and investor messaging. I’ll tell you what’s working, what’s missing, and where I’d focus to make the story more compelling.

(Please send your deck at least 48 hours before the call.)

Your referral link is below.

Start sharing ↓

{{rp_personalized_text}}

Your link to share: {{rp_refer_url_no_params}}

Thanks for reading,

Olga 

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