Latin American Entrepreneurship

I grew up in Quito watching my father, who arrived from Iran with no capital partners and no fallback, build the first fast food chain in the city. What stayed with me was not only the work ethic. It was the idea that wealth has less to do with how much you hold than with what you can reach, which is a very Latin American lesson to learn early.

Building in this region teaches things that do not appear in the standard business literature, because the standard literature assumes a stable currency, a functioning credit market and a legal system that resolves disputes in a reasonable number of years. Take those away and you get founders who are extraordinarily good at improvisation, at operating through volatility, and at protecting what they built. You also get a set of instincts about money that turn expensive the moment the environment changes.

That is the tension running through these episodes. The caution that protected a family through a devaluation becomes the reason capital sits in an account earning nothing for a decade. The preference for what you can see and touch becomes an overweight position in one city. The reliance on a local bank that has served three generations becomes a relationship where nobody has ever explained what is not being offered. None of those instincts are stupid. They were correct once, and they are still being applied to a country that no longer exists in the same form.

The other half is practical: how capital actually crosses borders, what changes when you invest into the United States from abroad, what an international investor is genuinely exposed to and what they only think they are, and why so many families end up in Miami with a plan that was never written down.

Most of these are in Spanish because that is the language the conversation belongs in, with essays that go further than the video did.