The J Curve with Olga Maslikhova

How would you invest a fresh $500 million across public markets, private AI, venture capital, secondaries and Latin America?
Valor Capital Managing Partner Paulo Passoni reveals how he would build the portfolio today—including why he would put just 15% into public markets and where he sees overlooked opportunities in LatAm growth.
In this episode of TJC Debrief, Paulo joins Olga Maslikhova to discuss:
• Why global AI mega-rounds are creating attractive valuations in Latin America
• The LatAm businesses he is watching, including CloudWalk, Plata, QI Tech, iFood and Motu
• Why AI orchestrators such as Perplexity and Higgsfield could capture more value than expected
• The capital-intensity problem hiding behind AI gross margins
• Why distribution—not the underlying model—could become AI’s strongest moat
• How CloudWalk could evolve from a Brazilian fintech into a global AI company
• Why SpaceX could become the defining test for private-market secondaries
• Tether’s extraordinary economics and the future of stablecoin payments
• What missing Anthropic and OpenAI taught Paulo about investment decisions and sunk costs
This is TJC Debrief—a monthly conversation decoding the most important developments across technology, venture capital, Latin America and global markets.
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Brian Requarth is Founder and General Partner at Latitud — a Silicon Valley-based venture fund and platform that leads pre-seed checks into the top 1% of Latin American founders building global companies. Brian previously co-founded VivaReal, which merged with ZAP Imóveis in 2017 to form Grupo ZAP — later acquired by OLX Brazil for approximately $640M in 2020. Latitud's fellowship has accepted just 1% of 1,500+ annual applicants — harder than the Ivy League — and its 1,000+ alumni have collectively raised over $1B in venture capital. Portfolio companies include Pomelo, StarkBank, and Hyperplane (acquired by Nubank).
In this episode, Brian shares why the share of LatAm founders building globally from day one has jumped from 3% to 46% in five years, and what's actually driving the shift. We cover what Founders Fund, Benchmark, Sequoia, Index, and Green Oaks are now underwriting in LatAm — and why the bet is increasingly on the founder profile, not the market, what Brian calls "minus one to zero" investing (versus Thiel's zero-to-one) and why Latitud writes checks before there's even a deck, the ELO-style algorithmic scoring system Latitud built — inspired by chess and tennis ratings — to filter 1,500 applications down to 50, why velocity of learning is the single most important variable he looks for in a founder, and why "if I get to move twice for every one of your moves, I can beat a grandmaster," the anatomy of a great early-stage fundraising round — sharpening the ax, calendar density, signal collection from named angels, and reverse-engineering investor psychology, why "síndrome de vira-lata" (the underdog mindset) is the biggest internal blocker for LatAm founders and how Bay Area exposure rewires it, the new wave of LatAm founders Brian is most excited about — including Mateus at Enter AI, Felipe and Yuri at Camu, and Thais at Taste building taste infrastructure for the AI labs, why Latitud built its entire community on a give-first mentality — starting with 150 Zoom calls during COVID and the $300K Facebook message that once saved VivaReal, why he believes the AI super cycle plus the mindset shift is the most important convergence in LatAm tech right now, and the one piece of advice he would pass to the next generation of Latin American founders.
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Paulo Passoni, Managing Partner at Valor Capital, and Olga Maslikhova sit down with their first-ever TJC Debrief guest — Ivana Delevska, Founder and CIO of Spear Invest and Portfolio Manager of the Spear Alpha ETF (SPRX, Nasdaq), one of the best-performing actively managed AI ETFs. Ivana spent a decade at Tiger Management, Millennium, and Citadel before founding Spear, where she now runs over $100M in AUM as a one-person fund augmented by AI.
This is the June 2026 edition of TJC Debrief — a monthly show covering tech, venture, and capital markets through a global lens.
We cover where $1 of AI spend actually goes — 50% to compute, 15–20% to networking, 15% to power and physical build-out — and why networking is the most under-the-radar layer of the value chain, why behind-the-meter power and former Bitcoin mining sites (Applied Digital) are the most overlooked plays in AI infrastructure, why Latin America could become a serious data center alternative to the US given cheaper electricity and faster permits, why hyperscaler-backed offtake deals are solving the cost-of-capital problem for data center build-outs, the SpaceX IPO at $1.77 trillion and 60x forward revenue with only 15% growth — and why Paulo thinks the employee lockup wall is the biggest risk, why Anthropic at ~$1T with $15B revenue scaling to $200B in 2027 is the more reasonable bet on a 12-month horizon while SpaceX is the better 10-year hold, why the application layer is where the next wave of billion-dollar revenue companies will emerge — using Higgsfield as a case study going from $0 to nearly $500M in revenue in one year by orchestrating 30 video models, why speed and revenue per employee ($1–10M is the new bar) are the only real moats left in software, why Elon is the "king of hardware" and what the EPC contractor insourcing playbook actually looks like, why community is the anti-AI moat — from independent watchmaker collector groups to Corgi's coffee shop in Silicon Valley, why the air pocket of AI demand is the real risk to watch (token prices are the early signal), and why wealth concentration from the AI boom is the biggest macro risk of all — and what forced-savings products and intelligent wealth transfer mechanisms could prevent it.
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Felipe Carvalho is Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Camu — an AI workflow automation platform.
Previously, Felipe spent 10 years building the global go-to-market organization at Pipefy alongside founder Alessio Alionço, scaling a horizontal workflow platform that serves Volvo, Capgemini, IBM, Accenture, Visa, Santander, Itaú, and thousands of other SMBs and enterprises across Brazil, the US, and beyond.
Before Pipefy, he built and scaled the fundraising function at Hospital Pequeno Príncipe — Brazil's largest children's hospital — raising over $20M and growing a team of 50.
In this TJC Operators episode, Felipe shares the brutal sales lesson from Pipefy — why selling everything to everyone is a GTM trap that hides inefficiency through inbound demand, and why outbound exposed it overnight. He walks through the "who would be crazy not to buy this" framework from Seth Shaw (former CRO of Airtable) that reshaped Pipefy's outbound motion, how Camu got from 1–2% to 17% to 33% conversion by progressively narrowing focus to a single ERP (SAP Business One) and one specific workflow (invoice intake), why charging monthly with no strings attached was the cleanest way to validate true product-market fit, the Sean Ellis "very disappointed" PMF survey methodology and how Camu hit high-50s on a V1 product, why saying no to massive enterprise RFPs is a superpower in the early days, how Felipe now manages 68 active opportunities solo by using Claude and AI to automate 50–70% of sales back-office work (CRM updates, ROI calculations, proposal generation, deal-power scoring), the FCA (Fact, Cause, Action) framework Pipefy used to run monthly results meetings and why analyzing wins matters as much as analyzing losses, why "building a plane is different from flying a plane" — and why founders should nail the sales playbook themselves before hiring senior enterprise sellers, the shift from selling software-as-a-service to delivering recurring impact and how risk has moved from buyer to seller in the AI era, and the lesson he most wants Brazilian founders to learn about building credibility before the market gives it to you.
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Paulo Passoni, Managing Partner at Valor Capital, and Olga Maslikhova break down the two forces reshaping tech and capital markets right now — the end of 40 years of global integration as the US-China tech split hardens, and the collapse of the services moat as AI lets companies scale from $0 to $100M in revenue in 24 months by replacing labor. This is the May 2026 edition of TJC Debrief — a monthly show covering tech, venture, and capital markets through a global lens.
We cover why China blocked Meta's $2 billion Manus acquisition and what the new US-led versus China-led ecosystem split means for global M&A, how SoftBank's blocked Arm-NVIDIA sale cost half a trillion dollars in value creation and why deals like it will keep happening, Anthropic's $50B round closing in 48 hours with secondary markets pricing ahead of the primary and what it reveals about AI's escape velocity, why Anthropic and OpenAI are forming joint ventures with Blackstone, TPG, Apollo, Sequoia, General Atlantic, and GIC to lock in compute capacity and guaranteed revenue, Plata's $5B round and why Qatar Investment Authority, US endowments, and long-only funds piled in alongside Valor Capital — and what mispriced Russian and Eastern European talent has to do with it, why data is becoming the last real moat and how Nubank, Revolut, CloudWalk, Mercado Libre, and JPMorgan are racing to train proprietary models on their own customer data, the radiologist paradox and what it predicts for tax accountants, lawyers, and every services job AI is supposed to kill, the legal AI startup Enter and the wild story of prompt injections hidden in PDFs filed to courts, why humanoid robots at $600/month today and $100/month in ten years will reshape global labor markets, Elon Musk and SpaceX as the "build potential, then monetize" playbook, and the $0 to $100M in 24 months phenomenon — why early movers in vertical AI are already hitting this scale and where the next opportunities will emerge across legal, wealth management, healthcare, and security.
Subscribe to The J Curve Insider newsletter for deeper insights and follow Olga on LinkedIn and Instagram.