The J Curve with Olga Maslikhova

AI is flattening org charts. Token budgets are becoming a recruiting perk. Brex sold to Capital One for $5.15B. Regional banks "shouldn't exist." Brazil just had its first US IPOs in years with PicPay and Agibank. And Mexico is suddenly the hottest market for global capital.
In this J Curve Debrief, Paulo Passoni and Olga Maslikhova break down the new reality for tech founders, operators, and investors.

We cover:
– Why Claude 4.6 was a bigger "aha moment" than the original ChatGPT for building companies — and how it's rewiring CTO roles, org design, and the question of what a moat even is anymore
– How Nubank, Revolut, Tether, and Plata are reshaping consumer finance — and why Paulo thinks regional banks in the US are an "aberration" that "shouldn't legally exist"
– The Brex x Capital One deal, Ramp's software multiple, and what the prof stack saving late-stage LPs means for every fintech exit going forward
– Brazil's IPO window cracking open, Mexico's sudden flood of Sequoia, Founders Fund, and a16z capital — and how founders should actually think about IPO vs secondary vs M&A in a market with only four real IPO candidates
– Why Paulo thinks many employees are already "worse than AI," why every salary should now come with a token budget, and how he built a working marketplace in three hours on Perplexity Comet without ever having written a line of code
– The coming collapse of low-ROI universities, what it means for talent in LATAM, and how ambitious builders should actually learn and earn in 2026
TJC Debrief is a new monthly show where Olga Maslikhova and Paulo Passoni unpack what's actually happening in tech, venture, and capital markets — and what it means for the people building and investing across Latin America.
Subscribe to The J Curve for conversations with the founders and investors building the future of Latin American tech.
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Pedro Conrade is the founder of Neon, one of Brazil's leading neobanks and one of Latin America's most capital-efficient fintech startups.
He started the company in 2016 at 23 — frustrated with his own bank account, with no playbook, no ecosystem, and no capital behind him.
Nearly a decade later, Neon generates close to $1B in run-rate revenue, growing ~60% year over year, serving millions of Brazilians in the lower- to middle-income segments that most fintechs deliberately avoid.
The company has raised close to $1B from General Atlantic, BBVA, BlackRock, PayPal, and others — and survived multiple near-death moments, most notably in 2018 when its partner bank was liquidated overnight, giving Pedro 72 hours to rebuild the entire company from scratch.
In this episode of The J Curve, Pedro shares the non-obvious decisions behind one of Brazil's most efficient digital banks — and what it actually takes to build a unicorn for the people incumbent banks ignore.
We discuss:
• How to build a profitable neobank in an emerging market — and why serving the underbanked is a better business than it looks
• Why engagement data beats credit scoring — and what that means for fintech underwriting at scale
• The 72-hour crisis that almost ended Neon — and the decisions Pedro made in real time to save it
• How Neon uses AI agents to handle collections, compliance, and customer support — and what that means for headcount at scale
• The fundraising playbook behind $924M raised from General Atlantic, BBVA, BlackRock and PayPal
• Why M&A destroys more value than it creates — and when it actually makes sense for a startup
Pedro also shares why the constraints of serving Brazil's underbanked population made efficiency non-negotiable — and why that same constraint became Neon's most durable advantage.
This episode is a masterclass on: 
— Fintech startup strategy in Brazil and Latin America 
— Building a digital bank from scratch with no prior funding 
— Venture capital fundraising for emerging market founders 
— AI in financial services and banking automation 
— Neobank growth, unit economics, and profitability 
— Financial inclusion and underbanked market opportunities.
Subscribe to The J Curve for conversations with the founders and investors building the future of Latin American tech.
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TJC Operators opens its series premiere with one of the architects of Latin America's most consequential technology company.
Stelleo Tolda co-founded MercadoLibre in 1999 — when 80 competitors were chasing the same market, internet penetration was just 2%, and the infrastructure for e-commerce in Latin America barely existed. He ran Brazil for 25 years, orchestrated the logistics operation that scaled from 8% to 95% of packages handled in-house, and then spent three years designing his own succession before stepping back as an independent board member.
Today MercadoLibre is a $100B company, the most valuable publicly traded company in Latin America.
In this TJC Operators Series Premiere, Stelleo unpacks every key decision behind the rise of one of the most remarkable companies ever built in Latin America — and what it actually takes to build something designed to outlast its founders.
We discuss:
• How MercadoLibre outlasted 80 competitors while charging the highest fees in the market
• The dot-com crash survival playbook — and what scarcity forces you to do right
• Why MercadoLibre declared war on Amazon — and what happened in that war room
• The 2010 technology bet: throwing away everything and rebuilding from scratch
• The adjacency principle — how one marketplace became payments, logistics, credit and advertising
• Why MercadoLibre chose to build versus buy at every inflection point
• Investing in logistics CapEx as a public company — and how to bring Wall Street along
• The Champions League analogy — what it means to compete against the world's best
• How MercadoLibre codified its culture at scale without losing what made it win
• The succession playbook: advisor, then board member, then gone — and why three years made it stick • What great board members actually do — and the difference between challenging and operating
• AI in Latin America: why scarcity makes the region's builders better
Stelleo also shares why the worst thing for an entrepreneur is abundance — and why the next generation of iconic Latin American companies is being built right now.
This episode is a masterclass on:
— Building enduring technology companies in emerging markets
— Vertical integration as a competitive moat
— Operating at scale without losing culture
— Succession architecture vs. succession events
— The founder identity transition
— Latin America as a proving ground for world-class operators

Subscribe to The J Curve for conversations with the founders and investors building the future of Latin American tech.
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Season 5 opens with one of the architects of Latin America’s tech ecosystem.
Hernán Kazah co-founded MercadoLibre — Latin America’s most valuable technology company with a market cap exceeding $100B — and later built Kaszek Ventures into a multi-billion-dollar venture firm backing companies like Nubank, Kavak, and Gympass (Wellhub).
In this Season 5 premiere of The J Curve, Hernán shares lessons from building MercadoLibre from a garage startup with 80 competitors into a generational technology company — and from investing in the next generation of Latin American founders.  
We discuss:
• The early strategic decisions that allowed MercadoLibre to win
• Why the default outcome for founders is failure  
• How Kaszek evaluates founders and investment opportunities  
• The venture capital power law and why investors must be right only a few times  
• Building a generational venture capital institution in Latin America  
• The impact of AI on software and the future of SaaS  
• How great founders actually get identified
• The evolution of the Latin American tech ecosystem

Hernán also explains why building a startup in Latin America is like “climbing Everest on top of a rollercoaster” — and why the next generation of iconic companies is still ahead.  

This episode is a masterclass on:
– Building enduring technology companies
– Venture capital decision-making
– Founder psychology
– Long-term compounding
– The future of Latin American tech

Subscribe to The J Curve for conversations with the founders and investors building the future of Latin American tech.
 Follow the show on Spotify and sign up for The J Curve Insider newsletter for deeper insights and behind-the-scenes content.

At the start of the 2025 season, we released an episode that broke our Spotify records.
That single conversation was listened to six times more than any other episode we released this year.

That episode was my conversation with Paulo Passoni, Managing Partner at Valor Capital.

For this holiday special, I invited Paulo back for round two.
And this conversation goes in a very different direction.

Here’s what we explore:

– Why speed may be the last real moat left in the era of AI
– Why Anthropic may actually be a safer bet than OpenAI
– The hiring rule at Perplexity that sounds insane — until you understand what it unlocks
– The 10,000-year clock Jeff Bezos is building inside a mountain, and the founder mindset behind it
– **Ramp vs. CloudWalk: similar revenue scale, radically different multiples — what capital markets are actually pricing
– The US vs. China, and why the Mag 7 — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla — now sit at the center of global power dynamics
– Why LPs and capital allocators remain split on LATAM — who’s long, who’s short, and what each side is really optimizing for
– And finally, what it means to be deliberately more human in the age of AI — and why hobbies and community may matter more than we think

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