The Corridor

Coquí Ventures
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Technology

The Corridor is the podcast at the intersection of Latino tech and culture. Host Angel León sits down with the founders, investors, artists, and builders shaping how Latinos create, fund, and move culture across the US and LATAM, and what it actually takes to build something that lasts. Real conversations on venture, entrepreneurship, creativity, and the people the industry overlooks, from first-time founders to fund managers to the cultural leaders redefining what Latino innovation looks like. A podcast production by Coquí Ventures. coquinotes.substack.com

  1. 3d ago

    Episode 23: The Kid Who’s Always Early

    Every so often you meet someone who was standing in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, and you realize it was not luck. It was that they had been preparing for that moment since they were a kid, before they even knew what they were preparing for. Max Rivera is one of those people. He was coding as a boy in Honduras, long before it was obvious where any of it would lead. That early obsession with how things worked became the thread that pulled him all the way to a seat on one of the defining rocket ships of the last decade. This being a Halloween episode, I will say it plainly: the only thing haunting about Max’s story is how clearly he saw what was coming before the rest of us did. The rocket ship Max joined Snap and helped scale it into a billion-dollar company. We spent real time on what that actually teaches you, because scaling is a different skill than starting. He talked honestly about the growth, and about what came after. The IPO is the moment everyone romanticizes, but the post-IPO chapter is where the real lessons live. Going public changes the physics of a company. The pressures change, the timelines change, the scrutiny changes. Riding a rocket up is exhilarating. Learning to fly the thing once everyone is watching is the harder, quieter education, and it is the one most founders never hear about. Ghost Angels, and investing in your own Out of that experience came Ghost Angels, the fund Max runs with fellow tech alumni. What I appreciated is how unpretentious he is about it. It started as a side project, a way for operators who had been through the fire to back the next generation of founders with real pattern recognition instead of theory. That is a model worth paying attention to. Some of the best early capital does not come from institutions. It comes from operators who have actually built and scaled something, who know what the hard parts feel like from the inside, and who choose to turn around and open the door for someone behind them. Social media split in two Here is the idea from this episode I cannot stop thinking about. Max argues that social media has bifurcated into connection and content. For years we used one word, social media, for two things that were quietly pulling apart. On one side is connection, the part that is actually about the people you know. On the other is content, the endless feed that has far more in common with television than with friendship. Most of the platforms we grew up calling social are now, in truth, media companies competing for attention. Once you see that split, you cannot unsee it. It explains why the apps feel different than they used to, and it tells you where the next openings are. The opportunity hiding in the disruption Which leads to the part founders should really sit with. Max sees enormous opportunity for disruption as AI reshapes media, and he does not think most people are looking in the right place. When the cost and speed of making content collapse, the entire media landscape is up for grabs. The incumbents are built for the old model. The next category-defining companies will be built by people who understand that the ground has shifted and move while everyone else is still defending the old thing. That is where Max is pointing his attention, and it is worth pointing yours there too. The one trait We got to the question every founder wants answered: what makes someone investable. Max’s answer was not the idea, and it was not the pedigree. It was obsession, paired with resilience. The founders who make it are the ones who cannot put the problem down, who keep going long after a reasonable person would have quit. Ideas change. Markets shift. The obsession is the thing that carries a founder through the parts of the journey that break everyone else. For all the frameworks in venture, it keeps coming back to something that simple and that human. Why this conversation matters Max Rivera is proof of something our community needs to see more often. A kid coding in Honduras can end up helping build a rocket ship and then financing the next ones. The path is not a straight line and it is not reserved for people who started with every advantage. It is built, obsessively, one hard lesson at a time. Put on the episode, grab whatever candy you have left, and listen to how he saw it all coming. Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Max Rivera. Seguimos. 🎃🇵🇷 — Angel León, Coquí Ventures Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies. Get full access to Coquí Notes at coquinotes.substack.com/subscribe

    Episode 23: The Kid Who’s Always Early

  2. Oct 21

    Episode 22: The Things That Don’t Exist Until You Make Them

    There is a specific kind of thrill that almost nobody gets to feel. Luis Martinez has felt it. It is the moment you make a molecule that has never existed anywhere in the universe, and you realize you are the first and only reason it is now real. “It was like this did not exist until I physically made it,” he told me. That sentence is the whole man. Luis is a first-generation college student who went from Trinity to a PhD in organic chemistry at Harvard, held patents, worked at Scripps, taught, consulted, and eventually became an investor at Capital Factory. On paper it looks like a series of career changes. Listen to him talk and you realize it was one continuous act the entire time: making things that did not exist before, and owning what happened next. Chemistry was never just technical Most people file organic chemistry under “hard science” and move on. Luis files it under creative work. He describes it the way a sculptor describes stone. There are rules, there are materials, there is a long tradition you are working inside of, and within all of that constraint you are still making something new. The lab coat fools people. What is actually happening is invention. That reframe matters, because it explains why the jump to startups was not a jump at all. A founder works exactly the same way. Rules, materials, tradition, and the stubborn attempt to bring something new into a world that did not ask for it yet. The flask he dropped My favorite story in this episode is a small one. As an undergraduate, Luis made a brand new molecule, and then he dropped the flask. Gone. Which meant he had to make it again. I love it because it is the entire founder experience compressed into one moment. You do the impossible thing, you lose it, and the only option is to go back to the bench and do the impossible thing again. Nobody claps. You just start over, because the work is the point. The only one in the room We did not skip the harder part. Luis talked honestly about what it felt like to rarely see a Hispanic surname in the rooms he was walking into, graduate school, academia, consulting, venture. The isolation was real at every stage. He did not tell that story for sympathy. He told it the way someone tells you about terrain they crossed so you know it can be crossed. For every scientist and every Latino founder who has been the only one in the room, that honesty is worth the listen by itself. “It isn’t that I lost, it’s that I gained” When Luis left chemistry, the easy narrative would be loss. He spent years becoming world-class at one thing and then walked away from it. He refuses that framing completely. “It isn’t that I lost, it’s that I gained,” he said. Every skill carried forward. The patenting and tech transfer, the teaching, the consulting, the discipline of designing an experiment and reading the result honestly. All of it turned out to be exactly what venture diligence requires. He did not abandon the scientist. He gave the scientist a bigger lab. Science project or business This is the line every technical founder needs burned into their memory, and Luis says it plainly. A promising scientific idea is not automatically a company. Both science and startups run on experiments that might work or might fail. But a founder has to do something a researcher never has to do: connect the work to a customer, a market, and a model that pays for itself. The experiment can succeed brilliantly in the lab and still be a science project, not a business. Knowing the difference is most of the job. Build boldly Luis has helped more than 200 founders over the years, not through one program but through decades of mentoring students, early founders, and portfolio companies. Ask him what he loves and he does not say deals. He says teaching. Helping a founder reflect on what they just learned, name the next experiment, and take the next step. His parting charge was simple. “We need more founders building boldly.” At any scale, from any background, out of any discipline. Especially the people who are used to being the only one in the room. If you have ever wondered whether your training in one world could matter in another, this conversation is your answer. Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Dr. Luis Martinez. Seguimos. 🇵🇷 Angel León, Coquí Ventures Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies. Get full access to Coquí Notes at coquinotes.substack.com/subscribe

    Episode 22: The Things That Don’t Exist Until You Make Them

  3. Oct 14

    Episode 21: The Cost of Being Early

    There is a lesson that only founders who have been too early ever really learn. Being right about where the world is going is not enough. You also have to be right about when it gets there. Show up with the correct answer a few years before the market is ready for it, and the market does not reward you for your foresight. It just lets you run out of money while you wait for everyone else to catch up. Domingo Guerra has lived both sides of that clock. In this episode of The Corridor, he traced a path that started in Mexico, ran through the hard middle of building and eventually selling a company, and landed where he is now, as Managing Partner at Chispa VC, writing checks into the founders building the next generation of security. What makes the conversation worth your time is that he does not tell the story the way most investors tell it, cleaned up and inevitable. He tells it the way an operator remembers it, with the scars still visible. The move that started everything Domingo’s journey from Mexico to Silicon Valley is the kind of story our community knows well, even when the specifics differ. You leave what is familiar, you carry more than your fair share of doubt, and you arrive somewhere that was not built with you in mind. That experience does not disappear when you succeed. It becomes the lens you see everything else through, including, years later, the founders sitting across the table from you asking for money. He is clear that the outsider’s path was not a disadvantage he overcame. It was part of what taught him to see opportunities other people walked right past. What bootstrapping teaches that a term sheet cannot Before Domingo was an investor, he was a founder who had to make payroll. We spent real time on what that actually teaches you, because it is the part that gets romanticized and then forgotten. Bootstrapping forces a kind of discipline that funded companies often skip. Every dollar has to come from a customer who chose to pay you, which means you learn very quickly whether anyone actually wants what you are building. There is no runway to hide behind and no narrative that substitutes for revenue. Domingo talked about timing and market readiness not as abstract strategy but as something he felt in his own cash flow, the difference between a product the market was ready for and one it simply was not yet. That is why he keeps coming back to founders and sales. In the earliest stage, the company is the founder, and the founder’s ability to sell, to a customer, to a hire, to an investor, is often the whole business. Everything else is still a promise. The operator becomes a sharper investor There is a reason the best early-stage investors tend to be people who have built something themselves. When you have sat in the founder’s chair, you stop grading the pitch and start reading the person. You know which problems are survivable and which ones quietly kill a company. You know the difference between a founder who is early and a founder who is wrong, because you have been both. Domingo’s operator experience shows up in what he chooses to back. He is less interested in the company that looks finished and more interested in the one solving a problem that genuinely matters, where impact and return are not at odds but point in the same direction. Why security is the fight that defines this era Then we got to the work he cares most about, which is cybersecurity in the age of AI. The uncomfortable truth is that AI does not just help the defenders. It arms the attackers at the same time, and often faster. The same tools that let a small team build remarkable things also let a bad actor generate attacks at a scale and sophistication that used to require a nation-state. The gap between offense and defense is widening, and the people working to close it are doing some of the most consequential building happening anywhere right now. Domingo’s view is that security is no longer a feature you add at the end. In the AI era it is the foundation everything else stands on, and the founders who understand that early, there is that word again, are the ones building the companies that will matter. Why this conversation matters Domingo Guerra’s story is a reminder that the lessons you earn as an operator do not expire. They compound. The founder who learned the hard way what it costs to be early became an investor who can spot the founders who are early in the right way, at the right moment, on the right problem. In a moment when everyone is chasing the same AI narrative, that kind of judgment is the rarest thing there is. Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Domingo Guerra. Seguimos. 🇵🇷 Angel León, Coquí Ventures Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies. Get full access to Coquí Notes at coquinotes.substack.com/subscribe

    Episode 21: The Cost of Being Early

  4. Oct 7

    Episode 20: The Night We Built a Room of Our Own

    There are nights you know, even while they’re happening, that you’ll carry for a long time. A few weeks ago in New York City, we had one of those. We gathered an intimate room of Latino founders, investors, operators, and cultural leaders for the first-ever live episode of The Corridor, a fireside conversation with Luis A. Miranda Jr. Founding president of the Hispanic Federation. Author of Relentless. One of the most consequential builders of Latino civic and cultural power this country has ever produced. And for one evening, he sat down with us and told the truth about what it actually takes to build something that outlasts you. Today, that conversation becomes Episode 20 of The Corridor. And whether you were there or you’re hearing it for the first time, I wanted to share a little of what that night meant. What it felt like to be in that room I’ve hosted a lot of conversations. This one was different. There’s a particular kind of energy that happens when our people gather with intention, when founders, investors, and builders who are usually scattered across the city find themselves in the same room, looking around and realizing how many of us there are, and how much we’re building. You could feel it. People stayed long after the conversation ended, trading stories, making introductions, exchanging the kind of “we should work together” that actually turns into something. That energy is the whole reason The Corridor exists. For too long, our stories got told by other people, or not at all. That night, in that room, we told them ourselves. What Luis gave us Luis didn’t give us a keynote. He gave us honesty. He talked about what it takes to build institutions that outlast the people who start them, the patience, the sacrifice, the willingness to play a long game whose payoff you may never fully see. He talked about moving between culture and capital across decades, about Puerto Rico and the responsibility he carries for it, and about the generations coming up behind him. He reminded a room full of ambitious people that the point was never just to succeed. The point was to open doors, and to make sure someone walks through them after you. For those of us building, raising, creating, trying to prove that our community belongs in rooms it was long kept out of, it was exactly the reminder we needed. That it can be done. That it has been done. And that it’s our turn to do it. Gracias An evening like this doesn’t happen alone. To SomosVC and José Piñero, thank you for partnering with us and believing this was worth building. To Silicon Valley Bank, thank you for opening your doors and giving us such a beautiful space. And to Jennifer Mendez, thank you for helping make every detail run seamlessly. To everyone who filled that room: thank you. You didn’t have to be there, but you were, and your presence is what made it what it was. The messages I received afterward, from people who said it didn’t feel like a traditional event, that it felt real, that they left inspired, meant more than you know. And to Luis: thank you for your generosity, your honesty, and your time. Interviewing you had been a goal of mine for years. Getting to do it, surrounded by our community, is something I’ll never forget. For those who missed it If you weren’t in the room, I’m glad you’re here now. Because the whole point of recording it was so this conversation could reach far beyond the people who could fit into one evening in New York. Episode 20 is live today. I hope it gives you what it gave all of us that night, a little more belief that where we come from is not a limit, that our stories are worth telling, and that the room we’ve always deserved is one we can build ourselves. Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Luis A. Miranda Jr. This is only the beginning. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts, and watch the full conversation on YouTube. Seguimos. 🇵🇷 Angel León, Coquí Ventures Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies. Get full access to Coquí Notes at coquinotes.substack.com/subscribe

    Episode 20: The Night We Built a Room of Our Own

  5. Sep 30

    Episode 19: From the Fields to the Stars

    There is a version of this story that gets told as a highlight reel: migrant farmworker’s son becomes astronaut. It’s the kind of line that fits on a movie poster, and in fact it became one. But the real story, the one José M. Hernández shared on The Corridor, lives in everything between those two points. The fields. The doubt. The eleven times someone told him no. That’s where the lesson is. José grew up working the fields alongside his family, part of the migrant stream that follows the harvest across California. School was interrupted constantly. And somewhere in that childhood, watching the Apollo moon landing on a black-and-white television, a boy who had every reason to believe the stars were not for him decided that one day, they would be. This episode is about how he got there. And it’s less about space than you’d think. The five ingredients The heart of José’s story is a recipe, literally. His father gave him a five-step formula for success, a simple, repeatable roadmap that a kid in the fields could actually follow. It’s the framework that carried him from farm work to orbit, and in the episode he walks through all five. I won’t lay them all out here, because hearing José explain them, in his own words, with his own life as the proof, lands far harder than any summary. But the first one is worth sitting with, because everything else is built on it: determine your purpose in life. Before the education, before the applications, before the rejections, José had a clear destination. The purpose came first. The roadmap followed. And that clarity is what made the years of grind survivable, because he always knew what they were for. That’s the part most people skip. They chase the goal without ever defining the purpose underneath it. José’s father understood that the purpose is the engine. Everything else is just steps. Eleven times NASA rejected José Hernández eleven times. Think about what that actually means. Eleven times, he prepared an application, sent it in, and waited. Eleven times, the answer came back no. Most people quit after the first. Many never apply at all, because the fear of the no is enough to stop them. What José does in this conversation is explain what he did between those rejections, because that’s the real story. Each no wasn’t a verdict. It was information. He’d look at what he lacked, go improve exactly that, and come back stronger. He treated rejection as a roadmap of its own, a list of what to fix before the next try. That reframe, that a no is a diagnostic and not a death sentence, is the single most useful thing a founder or a dreamer can take from this episode. His line says it better than I can: never give up. Perseverance is key. It sounds simple until you remember he said it eleven rejections deep. The choice most people never talk about One of the most human moments in the conversation isn’t about triumph. It’s about a trade-off. At one point in his journey, José faced a decision between advancing his career, an international training assignment most people in his position would never turn down, and being present for his family. And he chose family. He’s honest about what that meant, and why he made the call he made. In a story that could easily be told as pure ambition, this is the moment that reveals the man underneath the achievement: someone who understood that the purpose his father told him to find was never just about him. For every founder and builder listening who wrestles with the cost of the climb, this part of the episode is worth the whole thing. Where you start does not define your destination If there’s one line from this conversation that belongs on a wall, it’s that one. Where you start does not define your destination. José is living proof. The distance between a field in California and the window of a spacecraft looking back at Earth is not a distance most people can imagine crossing. He crossed it, not because the odds were with him, but because he had a purpose, a roadmap, and the refusal to let eleven rejections be the end of the sentence. And what moves me most is what he’s doing now. He didn’t take that story and disappear into it. He turned it into a mission, through his foundation, his books, and his work inspiring the next generation of Latino kids who are sitting in front of their own black-and-white TVs, daring to dream something the world says isn’t for them. He’s spent his life since becoming the proof he needed to see as a boy. That’s why I wanted him on The Corridor. Because this show exists to put stories like his in front of the people who need them most, the founders, the builders, the kids in the fields, who need to know that the no’s are survivable, that the purpose matters more than the odds, and that where you start is not where you have to finish. Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with José M. Hernández. Seguimos. 🇵🇷 Angel León, Coquí Ventures Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies. Get full access to Coquí Notes at coquinotes.substack.com/subscribe

    Episode 19: From the Fields to the Stars

  6. Sep 21

    Episode 18: The Insider Who Knows Why Startups Die

    Everyone wants to fix healthcare. Almost nobody understands it from the inside. That single gap, between the outsiders trying to disrupt the system and the reality of how the system actually works, is where most healthcare startups quietly die. And it’s exactly the gap Martha Mercogliano has spent her career standing in. Martha spent more than two decades inside the healthcare industry before she became an advisor and an investor. She knows the regulation, the payers, the providers, the machinery of Medicaid and Medicare, not from a case study, but from the inside. Today she helps startups navigate that machinery, and she evaluates them as an angel investor. This episode of The Corridor is a rare thing: an honest look at healthcare innovation from someone who has seen it fail up close, and knows why. Why healthcare breaks good companies Martha is direct about something founders underestimate constantly: healthcare may be the most complex industry in the world to build in. It isn’t one market. It’s a tangle of regulators, payers, providers, and patients, each with different incentives, different timelines, and different definitions of success. A product that would thrive anywhere else can die here, not because it’s a bad product, but because the founder never understood the machinery it had to move through. As Martha puts it, understanding the complexities behind the scenes takes time, effort, and capital. Founders who treat healthcare like any other software market, build it, sell it, scale it, run straight into a wall they never saw coming. That’s the first hard truth of this episode: in healthcare, understanding the system isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the entire game. The years inside are the edge What makes Martha’s perspective valuable is that she isn’t theorizing. Her two decades inside the industry are exactly what let her see what founders miss. She knows how a payer actually makes decisions. She knows what a provider needs before they’ll adopt something new. She knows where the regulatory landmines are buried, and how long it really takes to get a solution accepted into the flow of how care gets delivered and paid for. That inside knowledge is the difference between a founder who spends two years learning these lessons the expensive way and one who navigates them from the start. It’s also, she explains, exactly what she brings to the startups she advises and backs, the map of a system that outsiders keep trying to cross blind. What actually makes a healthcare startup investable For the founders listening, this is the part worth studying. When Martha looks at a healthcare startup as an investor, she’s evaluating more than the product. She’s looking at whether the team has the resilience and the networks to survive a long, hard, relationship-driven industry. Healthcare doesn’t reward the fastest mover; it rewards the one who can endure the slow grind of pilots, approvals, and trust-building without running out of money or will. As she puts it, team resilience and networks are critical for startup success. The technology gets you in the door. The team’s ability to withstand how long everything takes is what determines whether you make it through. The trap of the trend One of the sharpest warnings in the conversation is about founders who build on top of a temporary market trend rather than a durable problem. Healthcare, like every sector right now, has its waves, the hot category, the buzzword, the thing everyone’s funding this quarter. Martha is wary of founders who ride those waves, because trends fade, and a company built on a fading trend fades with it. The founders who last are the ones solving a problem the system will still have long after the hype moves on. It’s a discipline that separates the durable companies from the ones that raise on momentum and disappear when it stops. Build for the system that exists Another theme Martha keeps returning to: the best healthcare solutions are built within the reality of the existing system, not around a fantasy of how it should work. The infrastructure has to be ready to receive your technology. The pilot has to be designed to actually prove something to the people who make adoption decisions. Founders who understand this, who design their pilots and their go-to-market around how healthcare truly operates, dramatically improve their odds. Those who build for an idealized version of the industry, one without the friction, the approvals, the entrenched incentives, tend to learn the hard way that the system doesn’t bend to a good idea. It has to be worked with, on its own terms. Fall in love with the problem If there’s one line from this episode that founders should write down, it’s this: fall in love with the problem, not the solution. It sounds simple, and it’s the quiet cause of more startup failures than most people admit. Founders who fall in love with their solution defend it even when the market tells them it’s wrong. Founders who fall in love with the problem stay flexible, they change the solution as many times as it takes, because what they care about is solving the thing, not being right about how. In an industry as unforgiving as healthcare, that flexibility isn’t a soft skill. It’s survival. The bigger lesson Martha’s episode is about healthcare, but the deeper lesson reaches every founder building in a hard, regulated, insider-driven industry, the kind of overlooked, unglamorous markets this show comes back to again and again. The most valuable opportunities are often guarded by complexity, and the founders who win are the ones who respect that complexity enough to actually understand it before they try to change it. She spent twenty years learning how the system really works. This conversation is a chance to borrow some of that hard-won knowledge, and maybe save yourself a year of learning it the expensive way. Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Martha Mercogliano. Seguimos. 🇵🇷 Angel León, Coquí Ventures Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies. Get full access to Coquí Notes at coquinotes.substack.com/subscribe

    Episode 18: The Insider Who Knows Why Startups Die

  7. Sep 14

    Episode 17: From Her Grandparents' Ledger to the Series A Table

    Some people learn venture capital in a boardroom. Adrianna Samaniego started learning it as a kid, at her grandparents’ side, watching a small business get built the hard way. That’s where this whole conversation begins, and it’s where her entire investing philosophy is rooted. Adrianna is a Partner at Cherryrock Capital, where she leads Series A and B rounds into the founders the market keeps overlooking. But before the term sheets and the fund, there was a family business, and a lesson that shaped everything. This episode of The Corridor traces the line from that lesson to the checks she writes today, and along the way she makes one of the sharpest cases for backing underrepresented founders I’ve heard on this show. The ownership mindset Adrianna keeps coming back to a single idea: the ownership mindset. And for her, it isn’t a business-school concept. It’s something she watched up close and absorbed early, from a family that built something of their own. When you grow up around people who own the business, who carry the risk, feel the cash-flow gap before anyone tells them it’s coming, and understand that every decision lands on them, you learn to see companies differently. As she puts it, that ownership mindset is in our DNA. It’s the lens she now brings to every founder she evaluates: does this person think like an owner, carry the weight like an owner, understand their numbers like an owner? Because that mindset, she argues, is one of the truest signals of who will actually make it. From operating to investing That instinct is what carried Adrianna from operating into investing, and eventually into building at Cherryrock. Earlier in her career she built a scout program specifically to find Black, Latina, and Indigenous founders that no one else was looking for, to help them reach the seed stage and beyond. Cherryrock, she explains, is the same bet made at a different altitude. Instead of writing small early checks and hoping someone else leads, Cherryrock leads rounds at Series A and B with larger checks. It’s a deliberate choice about where the opportunity compounds. The same conviction, applied at the stage where conviction turns into ownership and real returns. Not a favor. An arbitrage. Here is the reframe at the heart of the episode, and the one I most want people to sit with. When most people talk about funding underrepresented founders, they reach for the language of fairness, of doing the right thing. Adrianna reaches for a different word: arbitrage. To her, this isn’t charity, and it isn’t a favor. It’s a mispricing. The market has consistently undervalued these founders, and the investor who sees that clearly is looking at an opportunity the rest of the market is walking past. And her argument isn’t sentimental. She points to something concrete: that underrepresented founders often prove more efficient and exit faster, doing more with less because they had to. That’s not a diversity talking point. It’s a returns argument. The bias in the system creates the discount; the discount is the opportunity; and Cherryrock is built to capture it at the stage where it compounds most. What actually makes a founder investable For the founders in the audience, this is the part worth studying. Adrianna is clear that reaching Series A is a real bar, and she’s specific about what clears it. It comes down to operational discipline, authenticity, and command of your own numbers. Founders who understand their data cold, who can show a repeatable, scalable model, and who carry themselves with genuine ownership are the ones who earn the check. She’s honest that the market has changed, and that founders’ strategies have to change with it. The bar that worked two years ago isn’t the bar today. Understanding your numbers and building something genuinely repeatable isn’t optional anymore; it’s the price of admission. The gap where good companies die One of the most useful stretches of the conversation is about the jump from seed to Series A, the stage where so many promising companies quietly stall out. It’s a brutal gap, and Adrianna, whose whole focus is leading at exactly that transition, understands why. The companies that make it aren’t just the ones with a good idea. They’re the ones that built the operational muscle, the discipline, and the command of their metrics that a Series A investor demands. For founders sitting at seed and wondering what it takes to get to the next round, her answer is a roadmap: stop performing traction and start proving it, with numbers you own and a model that scales. AI, and the shifting ground She doesn’t shy away from the elephant in every founder’s room right now: AI. Her framing is balanced, it’s both a challenge and an opportunity, reshaping funding dynamics and market expectations at the same time. The founders who treat it as a genuine tool for building a more efficient, more defensible business will find advantage in it. The ones who treat it as a buzzword to raise on will get exposed. Either way, the ground is shifting, and standing still isn’t a strategy. The advice that ties it together Adrianna’s message to underrepresented founders is the throughline of everything she believes: trust yourself, and build the rooms you want to exist in. Don’t wait for permission from a system that was slow to see you. Understand your business better than anyone, carry it like an owner, and create the spaces, and eventually the capital, that the next founder will need. That’s really the whole arc of her story. A kid learning ownership at a family business became the investor writing the checks that let the next generation own something too. The ledger she read as a child, and the term sheets she signs now, are the same instrument, pointed at the same belief: that the talent was always there, and the market just hadn’t priced it yet. Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Adrianna Samaniego. Seguimos. 🇵🇷 Angel León, Coquí Ventures Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies. Get full access to Coquí Notes at coquinotes.substack.com/subscribe

    Episode 17: From Her Grandparents' Ledger to the Series A Table

  8. Sep 7

    Episode 16: She Was a Farmer First

    Most people building financial technology have never lived the problem they’re solving. They study it. They model it. They interview people who’ve felt it. Victoria Tostado didn’t have to. She was the one feeling it, for seven years, in the field. Before she was a founder, before MIT, before any of it, Victoria was a farmer. And that single fact is what makes this episode different from any other conversation about fintech you’ll hear this year. Because she isn’t solving an abstract problem she read about in a pitch deck. She’s solving the one that nearly broke her, and every farmer she knows. The wait that doesn’t make sense Here’s the tension at the center of this episode, and it’s one most people have never thought about for a single second. A farmer needs credit. Their land is producing. Their operation is real. And yet, getting a loan can take somewhere between thirty and ninety days, buried in paperwork, waiting, while the season moves on without them. In an era where you can get approved for almost anything in minutes, why does the industry that literally feeds us still move at the speed of fax machines? The answer is more frustrating than you’d expect, and Victoria explains exactly where the system breaks. There’s a gap, she told me, between what’s actually happening on a farm and what a lender is able to see. Bridging that gap has always required something the industry never had enough of. What that missing ingredient is, and why it’s kept an entire trillion-dollar industry stuck, is one of the most clarifying things she says in the whole conversation. From months to minutes Then there’s the number that made me stop the recording in my head. What takes the traditional system thirty to ninety days, Victoria’s company, Agxes, can do in a fraction of that time. Not a little faster. A different order of magnitude. The way she and her team pulled that off, what they actually feed the machine, how it reads a piece of land, and why it can suddenly see what a human loan officer never could, is the part of this episode I won’t spoil here. It’s better heard from the person who built it. I’ll just say this: once she explains how it works, you’ll wonder why nobody did it sooner. And the answer to that question is the whole reason this episode matters. Why nobody else could have built this There’s a reason this company came from a farmer and not from a room full of engineers in San Francisco. Victoria understands something about lending to farmers that you cannot learn from a spreadsheet, that the same crop, in two different places, under two different sets of local conditions, is two completely different risks. That kind of ground-truth knowledge is exactly what the industry has been missing, and it’s exactly what she carries in her bones from those years in the field. In the episode, she gets into why local understanding is the difference between a good loan and a bad one, and why the people who’ve only ever looked at agriculture from the outside keep getting it wrong. It’s a quiet argument for something bigger than farming: that the best person to fix a broken industry is often the one who lived inside it. The part founders need to hear If you’re building something, especially in an old, overlooked, unglamorous industry, there’s a stretch of this conversation that’s worth the listen on its own. Victoria is honest about how hard it is to build trust in a traditional industry that doesn’t move fast and has every reason to be skeptical of a newcomer. How she earns it, what she has to prove before anyone will change how they’ve done things for decades, is a real lesson for any founder trying to sell something new to a world that likes things the old way. And her advice for founders building in the industries the tech world overlooks is the kind of thing you’ll want to write down. I’m not going to repeat it here, because the way she says it, having actually done it, carries more weight than any summary of mine could. The bigger story This is an episode about agricultural lending. But it’s really about something The Corridor comes back to again and again: that the most valuable opportunities are hiding in the industries nobody’s watching, and the best founders are often the ones who lived the problem before they ever decided to solve it. Victoria Tostado went from the field to the front of one of the most overlooked, and most important, markets there is. How she did it, and where she’s taking it, is the whole conversation. You’re going to want to hear this one from her. Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Victoria Tostado. Seguimos. 🇵🇷 Angel León, Coquí Ventures Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies. Get full access to Coquí Notes at coquinotes.substack.com/subscribe

    Episode 16: She Was a Farmer First
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

The Corridor is the podcast at the intersection of Latino tech and culture. Host Angel León sits down with the founders, investors, artists, and builders shaping how Latinos create, fund, and move culture across the US and LATAM, and what it actually takes to build something that lasts. Real conversations on venture, entrepreneurship, creativity, and the people the industry overlooks, from first-time founders to fund managers to the cultural leaders redefining what Latino innovation looks like. A podcast production by Coquí Ventures. coquinotes.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Coquí Ventures
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    23
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Angel Leon
  • Show Website
    The Corridor