Latitud Memo

Latitud Memo

🔭
Latitud: Imagine if Stanford & AngelList had a Latin baby.

Latin America tech is attracting more funding and gaining more traction than ever before. But the inordinate friction at every step continues to present a barrier to transformative solutions.

Latitud is demolishing that barrier. We are building superhighways for tech startup growth in Latin America by helping world-class founders launch, raise capital, find customers and attract talent. Our scalable community and software products solve major pain points in a founder's journey, thus unlocking growth, economic progress and social mobility in the region.

We have witnessed remarkable network effects and are looking for the right partners to rapidly grow our product and engineering teams and hyper-scale our fellowships.

— Brian Requarth, Gina Gotthilf, Yuri Danilchenko & The Latitud Team

Executive summary

🏡  Cohort-based education

“It’s the community that leads you to the problem, which leads you to the product, which leads you to your business.” - Sahil Lavingia, Gumroad

Latitud is building Latin America’s first remote entrepreneurship education platform, reshaping how talented individuals in the region start, join and invest in tech companies.

Our cohort-based programs develop and strengthen the region's tech ecosystem, fast-tracking progress for top talent, ambitious builders and investors. This education platform has become the foundation of our growth strategy: it's profitable, self-sustaining, defensible and hard to replicate.

In only one year, Latitud has already become the fastest-growing entrepreneurship community in Latin America. As it grows, the network value for each participant increases exponentially, converting participants into promoters. This same principle has fueled the ongoing relevance and stature of established education institutions like Stanford and Harvard - and made them particularly difficult to disrupt.

Yet prestigious MBA programs are inaccessible to most people in the world, especially when coming from countries with significantly devalued currencies. Spending $150k to become a founder, or investor, or to join a hot startup, is no longer the only (or most) effective way to get ahead professionally. In fact, the idea of attending a program arbitrarily set to run 2 years reminds us of this quote from Jerry Seinfeld,

“It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper."

As the last two years have proven, knowledge and experiences no longer need be confined to a particular geographic region in California; Silicon Valley now lives in the cloud.

🏗  Digital products

The old approach startups took was to sell or license their new technology to incumbents. The new ‘full stack’ approach is to build a complete, end-to-end product or service that bypasses incumbents and other competitors.” - Chris Dixon, a16z

In the US, the idea of building startup infrastructure like banking services along with a continuous education platform may seem unfocused, but in underdeveloped markets you have to implement more vertical solutions if you want to solve meaningful problems. Going full stack allows us to better serve customers and build moats around our business.

While Latin America is entering a golden era for tech, it still lacks basic infrastructure, making it difficult to do what most people in the US take for granted. Some examples:

  • Simply opening a company can take 60 days and cost $25,000-$30,000 in lawyer fees
  • To open an international bank account that conforms to recommended offshore structures in LatAm, you need an intro to a bank representative, which can take several weeks.
  • Local bank accounts lack basic functionality to support startup founders. Transferring money from abroad takes weeks and is highly manual.
  • Cap table management software is expensive and not optimized for LatAm recommended offshore holding structures.

Latitud products will remove unnecessary barriers for top foundeFrs and investors in Latin America and become the starting point for any tech entrepreneur building a venture-backed business in Latin America.

Our first product, Latitud Go, enables easy, affordable and fast company formation while serving as a wedge into top tech startups.

As companies scale, we will continue to expand our product offering to accompany their trajectory. Leveraging our community for distribution and focusing on LatAm specific startup needs gives us a strong competitive advantage against more broadly focused competitors.

♻️  Network effects

“Latitud is a series of network effects with founders at the center. The fellowships kick off the initial flywheel." - Brian Requarth, Latitud

In just one year we have seen dozens of co-founders meet each other, widespread distribution of new products, hundreds of millions of dollars raised, many new friendships forged, hundreds of team members hired, and a true sense of community formed. But this is still day 1…

The program flywheel for founders has reached product market fit with an NPS of 91 across cohorts. This results in member-get-member organic growth where 80% of new founders are referrals. We are scaling with zero dollars invested in marketing.

Here's why this flywheel concept is so powerful:

  1. Members make a significant financial investment to join Latitud ($1,000-$5,000) which strengthens their commitment to make the most of the experience.
  2. Membership fees provide us with working capital to hire top-tier talent to build and support fellowship programs and products.
  3. Top mentors join us to share expertise during live sessions, and we help transform that knowledge into invaluable content for current and future founders and funders in Latin America.
  4. Programs are powered by a "give first" mentality, where fellows feel highly motivated to generate value for others as the main way to benefit from their Latitud experience and community. This strengthens relationships, helps hundreds of founders accelerate their progress and builds a database of knowledge, advice and connections for the LatAm startup ecosystem.
  5. As Latitud grows, the breadth of expertise and potential for peer-to-peer value does too.

Each fellowship bootstraps the supply for the demand of another program.

  • Founders need investors.
  • Investors need to find startups.
  • Everyone needs talent to build great companies.
  • Talent needs to find great job opportunities and level up their skills for quickly evolving roles.

As the community scales to tens of thousands of participants, value scales exponentially as ideas, talent, and investment opportunities find each other. This profitable education platform also gives us built-in distribution, as the community becomes the customers of our digital products and additional fellowship programs.

  • Talented early stage employees will look for help to start their own startups.
  • Founders exploring ideas will get traction and will need help scaling.
  • Builders with successful exits will invest back into the ecosystem.
image

Scaling investment in Latin America

As more startups succeed in Latin America, new angel investors will emerge. This key element to fostering a healthy startup ecosystem can be empowered by community and bespoke tools.

Successful founders have capital, experience, and a reputation to leverage, and are highly motivated to give back and empower the next generation of top startups. They also tend to see the best deals first, as they're often asked for advice.

In November 2021, we piloted our first Angel Fellowship program, bringing together the founders of top tech companies like Kavak, 99, VTEX, Cornershop, Addi, Auth0 and others.

Angel investors in our community are powerful nodes because they:

  • Become a primary source for identifying early-stage startups.
  • Refer entrepreneurs to join the community.
  • Become powerful distribution channels for our digital products.

image
image

Building the next generation of top operators

A major gap in Latin America tech is the lack of talent. To help alleviate this pain, Latitud will launch specialized fellowship programs focused on startup roles such as product design, product management, growth, engineering and engineering management.

While a large fraction of the jobs of the future are in tech, most of the smartest talent in LatAm is currently working at traditional banks, consulting firms and other businesses that comprise the old economy. Tech companies are hungry to bring on more talent and the demand will only grow, so Latitud will up-skill and help talent connect with the best opportunities in LatAm.

These community network effects power the vision to build digital products to help us 10X tech entrepreneurship in Latin America.

Solving key pain points with Latitud digital products

In addition to having great ideas, building world-class teams and leading complex strategies and organizations, founders are forced to navigate legal mazes to decide what corporate structure to use, resulting in tens of thousands of dollars paid to lawyers and accountants, dozens of emails and months lost instead of obsessing over the product.

We've identified several acute pain points, and are starting by solving a costly mistake that our own CEO made in building VivaReal. Latitud Go, launching in January, will automate company formation for startups raising capital, making it 5x less expensive and 2x faster. Here is what some of our pilot clients have to say.

image
image

By becoming the starting point for early-stage entrepreneurs, we will continuously identify problems we can solve to help founders focus on building their businesses and avoid painful mistakes.

We can share more about our product roadmap in the coming weeks, featuring key fintech and SaaS solutions for founders.

TLDR

Latitud Fellowships are the engine that builds our brand, good-will within the ecosystem, invaluable resources, and distribution for digital products. While most businesses spend significant capital on acquisition marketing, our customers pay us to join our community becoming promoters and customers of our tech products.

💰 Capital Stack

image

Increasing access to capital for founders is key to Latitud's mission.

In 2020 and 2021, we hosted demo days bringing together hundreds of investors from around the world looking to invest in LatAm tech, featuring startups from the Latitud community. We saw the potential of these early-stage founders and launched the first rolling fund in Latin America, powered by AngelList and capital raised from 76 founders and GPs of top funds.

Because we believe that the future of pre-seed and seed investing will be led by today’s top founders, we also launched our Angel Fellowship program with an invite-only pilot for 20 key players in the ecosystem, including many of its unicorn founders, as described above.

In addition to decentralizing and facilitating angel investing across the region, this is also the gateway for the launch of Latitud Funders, a 'fund of funds' that will seed the next generation of emerging investors powered by today’s top founders. In partnership with AngelList, we are automating deal management and 'back office' for busy angel investors running their own companies. Investing is not our core activity as we want to build a multi-billion dollar tech company, but we also want to be transparent about this.

💪  Team

Latitud is led by world-class operators.

image

Brian Requarth, CEO and Co-founder Brian founded and scaled VivaReal as the CEO. He orchestrated a merger with ZAP Imóveis becoming the chairman of the combined company before negotiating the sale to OLX Brasil for $600m. He is a prolific angel investor, author of the book Viva the Entrepreneur and host of the leading podcast about startups and venture capital in Latin America.

image

Gina Gotthilf, COO and Co-founder Gina helped Duolingo grow from 3 to 200 million users as their VP of Growth and Marketing. She was also part of the executive team and all board meetings, helping make key organizational decisions as the company scaled over its first 5 years.

image

Yuri Danilchenko, CTO and Co-founder Yuri was the CTO at Escale, helping scale it through a rapid growth period after raising its Series B from top VCs like Kaszek Ventures and QED. He participated on the board and was responsible for building a diverse tech team of 60+ world class software and data engineers, product managers and designers with over 35% women.

Our team has combined experience from working at the following companies:

image

🖋 Investing

We are raising capital. We love founders so we decided to set aside a portion of the round to bring on hundreds of founders to invest alongside our lead investor. We already have commitments from several unicorn founders and plan to invite Latitud fellows to invest as well. We are a community-led organization, and this will allow our members to continue being rewarded for helping build Latitud. In the first quarter of 2022, we will host an online event and share more details about our vision for Latitud and take investment commitments from founders. If you are interested, please share your email here.