The J Curve with Olga Maslikhova

The #1 English-language podcast on Latin American tech, venture capital, and the founders building the region’s next generation of $1B+ companies. Ranked in the top 5% globally on Spotify. Hosted by Olga Maslikhova — venture capital investor and founder of The J Curve. New episodes bi-weekly featuring the founders, operators, and investors building and backing companies across Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and the rest of LATAM.

The J Curve with Olga Maslikhova is a business podcast hosted by Olga Maslikhova, with 116 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Olga Maslikhova hosts The J Curve with Olga Maslikhova, a business show with 116 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  Episode #11

  What Makes a Creator Business Worth $500M?

  Jul 28, 202618 minS5

  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companies • Why AI transforms one conversation into an entire content ecosystem • Why "repurposing" is becoming an outdated concept • Why judgment—not content creation—becomes the scarce resource in the AI era • Why Google partnered with Alex Cooper instead of another advertising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? Subscribe to ⁠The J Curve Insider⁠ newsletter for deeper insights and follow Olga on ⁠LinkedIn⁠ and ⁠Instagram⁠ .

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #10

  Why Global AI Mania Is Creating Bargains in Latin America / TJC Debrief

  Jul 15, 20261h 22mS5

  Paulo Passoni, Managing Partner at Valor Capital, joins Olga Maslikhova to answer a deceptively simple question: How would you invest a fresh $500 million today? Paulo explains why he would keep public-market exposure low, where he sees opportunities across AI and private markets, and how the global rush into AI mega-rounds is creating unusually attractive valuations in Latin American growth equity. They discuss: • Why high-quality Latin American companies can still be valued below 10x revenue • The LatAm businesses Paulo is watching, including CloudWalk, Plata, QI Tech, iFood and Motu • Why global funds are backing Enter AI, Pax and Taste at Silicon Valley valuations—and what they see that local investors may be missing • Why AI orchestrators such as Perplexity and Higgsfield could capture more value than many investors expect • The capital-intensity problem hiding behind AI gross margins • Why distribution—not the underlying model—may become AI’s strongest moat • CloudWalk’s potential transformation from a Brazilian fintech into a global AI company • The rapid growth of private-market secondaries and why SpaceX could become their defining test • Tether’s extraordinary economics and the future of stablecoin-powered payments • What missing Anthropic and OpenAI taught Paulo about sunk costs and investment decisions This is TJC Debrief—a monthly conversation decoding the most important developments across technology, venture capital, Latin America and global markets. Subscribe to The J Curve Insider newsletter for deeper insights and follow Olga on LinkedIn and Instagram .

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #9

  Brian Requarth, Latitud: Why ~50% of LatAm Founders Now Go Global

  Jun 30, 20261h 13mS5

  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. Subscribe to The J Curve Insider newsletter for deeper insights and follow Olga on LinkedIn and Instagram .

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #8

  TJC Debrief: Who Actually Makes Money in AI?

  Jun 9, 20261h 13mS5

  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 .

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  The J Curve with Olga Maslikhova

  Felipe Carvalho, Camu: The Brutal Sales Lesson From Pipefy

  May 26, 202658 min

  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. Subscribe to The J Curve Insider newsletter for deeper insights and follow Olga on LinkedIn and Instagram .

  ListenShow Notes

Recent guests on The J Curve with Olga Maslikhova. Study who booked and why before you pitch.

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.