The Corridor

Coquí Ventures
  • 5.0 (1)
  • 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. 2d ago

    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

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. 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

  5. Aug 31

    Episode 15: No Doesn't Always Mean No Forever

    Most investors pick a lane. Desiree Vargas Wrigley built a fund that runs two at once. She’s the founding GP of Velocity Catalyst, and her model is genuinely unusual: she invests directly into pre-seed startups, and she anchors the emerging fund managers building around them. A fund and a fund-of-funds, working in tandem, designed not to make one good bet but to rebuild an entire regional capital stack from the ground up. This episode of The Corridor is about why she built it that way, and what she’s learned climbing from one side of the table to the other. From founder to funder Desiree didn’t start on the investing side. She was a founder first. She built companies and went through the raise herself, the rejection, the doubt, the grind of convincing people to believe in something that only exists in your head. She lived the thing before she ever funded it. That order matters, because it shapes everything about how she invests now. When she talks about backing founders, she’s not theorizing about a struggle she read about. She’s remembering it. And the single line that captures what that experience taught her is the one that anchors this whole episode: no doesn’t always mean no forever. A rejection isn’t a verdict. It’s a moment in time, often about timing or fit rather than merit, and the founders who understand that are the ones who keep going long enough to get to yes. Two lanes, one system The heart of Velocity Catalyst is its dual structure, and Desiree is clear about why it exists. Investing directly into startups gets you exposure to the companies. But a single fund writing checks into founders doesn’t fix the deeper problem, which is that entire regions and entire communities lack the surrounding infrastructure of capital that lets founders climb from one stage to the next. So alongside the direct investing, Velocity anchors emerging fund managers, the smaller, focused funds who will provide the follow-on capital and the local relationships that founders need. The two lanes reinforce each other. The direct investments give her a ground-level view of the ecosystem. The fund-of-funds work multiplies her impact, because every emerging manager she backs goes on to fund dozens of founders she’d never reach alone. It’s a system designed to build a stack, not just a portfolio. Why emerging managers Desiree’s bet on emerging managers is a bet most large investors don’t make, and her reasoning is worth understanding. Small, focused funds see what the big generalists miss. They have proximity, to a region, to an industry, to a community, that a large coastal fund simply doesn’t. They’re closer to the founders, they move faster, and they understand the local context that determines which companies actually work. For a region trying to build a real startup ecosystem, these managers are the connective tissue. Back them, and you’re not funding one fund; you’re seeding the infrastructure that lets a whole ecosystem compound. That’s also why the regional advantage matters so much to her. Venture has spent decades concentrated in a few zip codes. Desiree’s thesis is that the overlooked regions, and the managers who know them, are where a lot of the next opportunity lives, precisely because everyone else stopped looking. Not charity. Catalyst. The part of the conversation I most want people to sit with is how Desiree frames the work of backing underrepresented founders. She is direct that this is not charity. It’s a returns strategy built on a market that’s been misread. But she’s also honest about something more nuanced: that at the earliest, riskiest stage, philanthropic capital can be a catalyst. Certain high-risk, high-reward bets, the ones traditional capital won’t touch until someone else de-risks them, sometimes need a different kind of first dollar to get off the ground. Used well, that catalytic capital doesn’t replace venture returns; it unlocks the companies that go on to generate them. The distinction she’s drawing is important. Treating underrepresented founders as charity cases is exactly the framing that has held the whole system back, it lowers expectations and misprices the opportunity. But recognizing that the earliest stage of high-risk innovation sometimes needs catalytic fuel is just good ecosystem design. One is condescension. The other is strategy. What building a fund taught her that building a company didn’t Having done both, Desiree is clear-eyed about how different they are. Building a startup and raising a fund look similar from the outside, both are acts of convincing people to believe before there’s proof, but the mechanics diverge. And underneath both, she keeps returning to the same truth about how venture actually works: it’s more network-driven and reputation-based than anything else. That’s not a cynical observation. It’s a practical one, and it’s generous advice for anyone building without an inherited network. The relationships and the reputation you build are the real currency. They’re what turn a cold pitch into a warm introduction, a maybe into a yes, and a first fund into a second. For founders and emerging managers alike, the lesson is the same: invest in the network and the reputation as deliberately as you invest in the product. The throughline What connects all of it, the dual fund model, the bet on emerging managers, the catalytic capital, the emphasis on network, is a single conviction: the system is fixable, but not one check at a time. Desiree isn’t trying to fund a few great companies. She’s trying to build the infrastructure that lets whole ecosystems and whole communities climb. And she’s doing it from the belief that the talent was always there, waiting on capital and access that finally show up. For the founder who just got a no, or the emerging manager wondering whether they belong in the room, her message is the one she opened with. No doesn’t always mean no forever. Keep building. Keep asking. The room is bigger than it looks, and people like Desiree are working to make sure there’s a place in it for you. Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Desiree Vargas Wrigley. 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 15: No Doesn't Always Mean No Forever

  6. Aug 24

    Episode 14: The Data Exists. The Intelligence Doesn't.

    Walk into almost any small or mid-sized factory in America and you’ll find the same thing: decades of data, and almost no intelligence. The machines generate readings. The orders pile up in spreadsheets. The most important knowledge of all, how things actually get made, lives in the heads of the people who’ve worked the floor for twenty years. It’s all there. Almost none of it is usable. That gap is the whole reason Corello exists, and it’s the sentence Carlos Maiguel kept coming back to in our conversation: the data exists, and the intelligence does not. This episode of The Corridor is about what happens when you point modern AI at one of the least glamorous, most essential industries there is, and why the factories the tech world overlooks may be exactly where AI creates the most value. Why manufacturing, of all places Carlos didn’t stumble into manufacturing. He chose it, deliberately, after spending years in the trenches understanding it. While most of the AI world races toward consumer apps and developer tools, he went the other direction, toward small and mid-sized manufacturers, the businesses that actually make the physical things the economy runs on, and that have been almost entirely skipped by the software revolution. That’s not a coincidence. It’s the opportunity. These factories run on legacy systems, paper, tribal knowledge, and instinct. The bigger players have the budgets for expensive enterprise software; the small and mid-sized ones have been left to fend for themselves. Which means the ceiling for improvement, in efficiency, in speed, in quality, is enormous, precisely because no one has bothered to build for them. Data everywhere, unused The core problem Corello solves is one Carlos describes simply: data is everywhere, but it’s fragmented and unused. A factory’s information is scattered across machines, systems, spreadsheets, and people, none of it talking to each other. On its own, that data just sits there. It doesn’t answer questions. It doesn’t catch problems. It doesn’t help the person on the floor make a better decision in the moment. The raw material for intelligence is present in abundance; the intelligence itself is missing. Corello’s work is to ingest that fragmented data and turn it into something usable, to close the gap between what a factory already knows and what it can actually act on. That’s the difference between a factory drowning in data and a factory that can finally use it. The knowledge that walks out the door The most human part of the problem is tribal knowledge, and it’s the piece that should worry every factory owner. In these businesses, the most valuable knowledge isn’t written down anywhere. It lives in the experienced worker who knows, by feel, how to set up a machine, spot a defect, or quote a complex job. When that person retires or leaves, decades of hard-won expertise walk out the door with them. Nothing captures it. Nothing preserves it. The next generation starts closer to zero than they should. This is where AI becomes genuinely powerful, not as a replacement for those workers, but as a way to capture and preserve what they know. Carlos frames the goal not as automation that removes people, but as AI coworkers, goal-driven team members that work alongside the humans on the floor, carrying the institutional knowledge and helping everyone operate at the level of the most experienced person in the building. The expertise stops being fragile. It becomes an asset the whole factory can draw on. Building AI-native systems in old industries The hard part, and the reason few people attempt this, is that building AI-native systems on top of old industries is genuinely difficult. You’re not deploying software into a clean, modern tech stack. You’re integrating with legacy systems, decades-old machines, and workflows that were never designed for digital tools. And you’re doing it for customers who, understandably, need to see real return before they trust something new on their floor. That’s why Carlos emphasizes ROI and speed. A factory owner doesn’t care about the elegance of the technology; they care whether it saves time, reduces waste, and makes them money, fast. And trust has to be earned on the floor, with the people doing the work, not just in the front office. Corello’s use cases, things like faster quoting and clearer work instructions, are deliberately practical: real problems, real time saved, real value the moment it’s turned on. The lesson underneath What makes this episode matter beyond manufacturing is the founder philosophy underneath it. Carlos’s approach to building, understand the problem deeply before you build anything, and build openly by leaning on your network, is the same discipline that makes any hard company work. He spent years understanding his customer before writing a line of product, and he’s built in the open, gathering feedback and drawing on the community of founders who came before him. There’s a bigger point here too, one that sits at the heart of why this show exists. The most valuable opportunities are often in the unseen spaces, the industries too unglamorous for the spotlight, the customers the tech world forgot, the founders the market overlooks. Carlos is building for all three at once. And the reason that’s a smart bet, not a charitable one, is simple: the data was always there. Someone just had to build the intelligence. Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Carlos Maiguel. 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 14: The Data Exists. The Intelligence Doesn't.

  7. Aug 17

    Episode 13: The Same Ladder, at Every Rung

    Most people spend their careers on one rung of the capital ladder. Laura Moreno Lucas has stood on nearly all of them. She spent years at Nasdaq, at the very top of the ladder, where companies ring the bell and become public. Now she invests at the very bottom, writing early checks into Latino founders who are just getting started. And the thing she took from that journey is a lesson most investors never get to see: the climb is the same at every rung. This episode of The Corridor is about that whole ladder, what the top teaches you about the bottom, why visibility matters as much as capital, and how you build an ecosystem where Latino founders and investors can actually climb. What the top of the ladder teaches you about the bottom From where Laura sat at Nasdaq, she watched companies at the summit of the capital markets, the IPO, the moment a private company becomes a public one. It’s the outcome every founder is told to dream about. But what she came to understand is that the journey to that moment is not a series of disconnected stages. It’s one continuous climb. As she puts it, the capital markets journey is the same at every stage. The founder raising a pre-seed round and the company ringing the opening bell are doing versions of the same thing: telling a credible story, earning trust, proving they can endure, and convincing the next set of investors to believe in what comes next. The dollar amounts change. The fundamentals don’t. That’s a genuinely useful reframe for an early-stage founder, because it means the discipline you build raising your first small round is the same discipline that eventually takes a company public. You’re not doing something different from the giants. You’re doing the same thing, earlier. Endure and adapt If there’s a single quality Laura keeps returning to, it’s endurance. Not the dramatic kind, the quiet kind. The ability to endure and adapt through changing times. Markets shift. Capital gets cheap and then expensive. Sectors fall in and out of favor. The founders and investors who last aren’t the ones who caught one perfect wave, they’re the ones who kept adapting as the conditions changed underneath them. Having watched companies navigate the full arc from early stage to public markets, Laura has seen which ones make it, and endurance, the willingness to keep adjusting without losing the core of what you’re building, is the common thread. For a founder in a hard market, that’s not a consolation prize. It’s the actual skill. Visibility is capital, too Here is the idea that gives the episode its heart. Laura is direct that visibility is key for Latina investors and founders, and it’s worth sitting with why that matters as much as money. When founders and investors from a community are visible, when they can be seen succeeding, writing checks, ringing bells, they change what the next generation believes is possible. A young Latina who sees a Latina investor at the top of the capital markets doesn’t have to imagine whether she belongs there. She has proof. Visibility does quietly what no amount of advice can: it removes the question of whether the door is even open. And it works on the other side too. Visible Latino investors get seen by founders who finally have someone who looks like them to pitch. Visible Latino founders get seen by the next wave of builders. The whole ecosystem compounds on being able to see itself. Building the ladder for everyone else That’s why so much of Laura’s work now is about the ecosystem, not just individual deals. Through her investing, including supporting women-led startups, and through her broader work building the Latino VC community, she’s focused on the same thing from a different angle: making sure the ladder exists, and that people can find the next rung. Because capital alone isn’t enough. Founders need the community and the networks that surround the capital, the people who make the introduction, share the hard-won lesson, and open the door to the next stage. The Latino community is building businesses fast, but building an ecosystem means making sure the support systems climb alongside the founders. That’s the work: not just funding companies, but constructing the whole ladder so the next founder has something to climb. The throughline What connects the opening bell to the first check is a single conviction: the climb is the same for everyone, so the job is to make sure everyone can actually climb. Laura has seen the top and the bottom of the capital ladder, and her message to Latino founders is grounded in both. The journey doesn’t change based on who you are. The trust you build, the endurance you show, the story you tell, they’re the same at every stage. What has to change is visibility and access, so that the founders who have always been capable of the climb finally have the ladder in front of them. For anyone building right now, wondering whether they belong on the ladder at all, that’s the reframe worth holding onto. You were always meant to climb it. The work now, for all of us, is making sure it’s there. Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Laura Moreno Lucas. 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 13: The Same Ladder, at Every Rung

  8. Aug 13

    Episode 12: The Rules Nobody Taught Us

    There is a rulebook for the startup world. It governs who gets the warm introduction, who gets believed in the room, whose vision gets funded and whose gets a polite pass. The catch is that nobody ever wrote it down, and the people who most need it were never handed a copy. Lolita Taub has spent her career making that invisible rulebook visible. She went from South Central Los Angeles to becoming a venture capital General Partner at Ganas Ventures, and along the way she learned the codes the hard way, by running into them. Now she teaches them, most recently in her book, “What Actually Matters.” This episode of The Corridor is a preview of why that book is going to land for so many founders building without a map. The invisible rules The core of Lolita’s whole framework is deceptively simple: the startup world runs on invisible rules. Not written policies, but unspoken norms about how things actually work, how you get an introduction, how you signal you belong, how you talk to an investor, what you’re supposed to already know before you walk in. For founders who grew up inside the network, these rules are invisible because they’re second nature, absorbed at dinner tables and in dorm rooms and through family friends who happened to be in the industry. For everyone else, they’re invisible because no one ever explained them. Same word, opposite experience. And that gap, between the founders who inherited the rules and the ones who have to reverse-engineer them, is one of the quietest and most powerful forces deciding who succeeds. Lolita’s own path through it involved things most founders from outside the network will recognize immediately: the education and persistence it took to get in the door, the code-switching required to move between worlds, the constant low-grade question of whether you actually belong in the room you fought to enter. Meritocracy is a myth The hardest truth in the conversation was also the most freeing. Lolita is direct about it: meritocracy is a myth. Not because talent isn’t real, it obviously is, but because opportunity is distributed unevenly, and the story we tell ourselves that the best simply rise erases everything that actually determines who gets a shot. Who you know. Who vouches for you. What you were taught before you ever started. Why does that matter for a founder? Because if you believe the meritocracy myth and you keep getting passed over, you draw the wrong conclusion. You assume the problem is you, your idea, your ability, when often the real issue is access you never had. Naming the myth is what lets a founder stop absorbing the system’s bias as a personal verdict and start solving the actual problem, which is access. Community as a moat So if access is the problem, what’s the answer? Lolita’s is the throughline of her entire investing thesis: community. For founders who didn’t inherit a network, community becomes the thing that replaces traditional access. It is not a soft, nice-to-have add-on. She frames it as a genuine moat, a durable competitive advantage. When you build real relationships and real proximity to the people who move capital and make decisions, you unlock the things a warm network hands other founders for free. And the return on community is concrete, not sentimental. She breaks it down into real ROI: insight, the information and pattern recognition you’d otherwise never get; operations, the help and hires and know-how that flow through relationships; and even revenue, because community becomes customers, referrals, and distribution. Community isn’t where you go to feel supported. It’s where the business actually gets built when you started without the playbook. The practical order matters too. You don’t start by chasing capital. You start by building community and relationships, and the access, and eventually the capital, follows from proximity rather than cold outreach. Authenticity is the edge Here is the reframe I most want founders to hear. So many people from outside the network are taught, explicitly or not, that their background is something to manage, minimize, or code-switch away from. Lolita’s argument is the opposite. Authenticity and staying true to your roots are assets, not barriers. The specific perspective you bring, the community you understand that others don’t, the market you can see because you come from it, that is edge, not baggage. This connects directly to how she thinks as an investor. The Latino market is enormous and systematically underestimated, and founders building for it with genuine understanding are looking at real opportunity that biased evaluators keep walking past. She’s blunt that this isn’t philanthropy. It’s not about doing anyone a favor. It’s about building big businesses in a market the rest of the industry misprices. The bias is the mistake. The founders who understand the market are the opportunity. What actually matters That phrase is her book’s title, and it’s the quiet argument underneath the whole conversation. Fundraising is not the goal. Building a real, successful business is the goal, and too many founders confuse the two, optimizing to raise money rather than to build something that works. For the Latino founder building right now without an inherited playbook, Lolita’s message is clear and generous. The rules are learnable. Community can stand in for the access you weren’t born into. Your roots are an asset. And the market’s blindness to founders like you is not a wall, it’s the very thing that creates the opportunity, for the founders and the investors willing to see it. Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Lolita Taub. 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 12: The Rules Nobody Taught Us
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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
    19
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Angel Leon
  • Show Website
    The Corridor