The J Curve with Olga Maslikhova

Nigel Morris is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of QED Investors and co-founder of Capital One — the company that fundamentally changed consumer banking by pioneering a data-driven approach built around experimentation, risk-based pricing and the idea that virtually every decision in banking could be tested. Nigel later co-founded QED Investors, a global venture capital firm specializing in financial services that has backed more than 200 companies, including Nubank, Remitly, Credit Karma, Flywire, Creditas and Bitso.
In this episode, Nigel shares the operating principles behind Capital One and how he brought them into QED’s “full 90 minutes” approach to venture, the story of meeting David Vélez before Nubank existed — when David told him he wanted to build a “Capital One in Brazil” — and what he saw in David that made him believe. We discuss whether Nubank can win in the U.S. and why Nigel believes America is now the biggest prize for Nubank, Revolut, Klarna and Monzo, the biggest mistakes fintechs make when expanding internationally, his “Galapagos Effect” for why incumbent banks remain structurally bad at innovation, what has fundamentally changed in Latin American fintech, the hangover from 2021 venture excesses, and why today’s market is so “intoxicated” by AI that even companies growing 40% with great unit economics can struggle to raise growth capital without an AI or stablecoin story.

Partners:

Huge thank you to our partners:
iFood Beneficios
Jeeves

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AI isn't changing media. It's changing what a media company is.
For years, creators monetized through sponsorships, advertising and subscriptions. Today, the most successful creators look more like startup founders than entertainers—building software, venture funds, holding companies and entirely new businesses.
In this solo episode, Olga argues that the unit of value has changed. Content is no longer the product. Ideas are.
We explore:
• Why the biggest creators increasingly resemble venture-backed companies
• Why AI transforms one conversation into an entire content ecosystem
• Why "repurposing" is becoming an outdated concept
• Why judgment—not content creation—becomes the scarce resource in the AI era
• Why Google partnered with Alex Cooper instead of another advertising agency
• What Steven Bartlett's business model reveals about the future of creator companies
• Why venture firms like a16z and Lightspeed are investing in media as a competitive advantage
• Why every company—from startups to private equity firms—may eventually need a media arm
If content becomes infinitely abundant, what becomes valuable instead?
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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.
Subscribe to The J Curve Insider newsletter for deeper insights and follow Olga on LinkedIn and Instagram.