The rules nobody taught us

All right, welcome to the corridor. My name is Angel Leon and the startup world runs on a set of rules. Nobody writes down how you get the meeting, what you say in the room, who vouches for you. And those rules get passed through networks. And for most Latino founders, we were never in those networks to begin with. My guest today, she has spent her entire career making those invisible rules visible. Lolita Taub And please tell me if I'm mispronouncing your last name. She's the general partner of Ghana's Ventures, where she's reading $100,000 checks into more than 100, right? Community-driven startups across the US and Latin America. She grew up first generation in South Central LA. No pedigree, no warm intros, no generational wealth, right? And she still built access anyway. Now she's going to teach us all that and all these rules, right? Nobody taught her with her book that she's about to release, right? In September, What Actually Matters, Startups Capital and the Rules Nobody Taught Us. So, Lolita welcome to the corridor.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me and excited to have this conversation.

Thank you, Lolita. And your fund is called Ganas, right? And drive, desire, That's the thing that keeps you moving when the doors, right, they don't necessarily open easily. And like I mentioned, you grew up in South Central LA, first gen, no background into venture and things like that, right? So...

That's right. Echale ganas. That's where it comes from.

Take me back to that, to tell us a little bit about your background to begin with and when did you first realize there was a whole set of rules? Everyone around you seemed to know that you felt you never had access to.

feel like my whole life I've felt like, wait, do I not know how this works? And trying to observe like patterns and like how do I fit in? And am I smart enough? And do I like do I belong? Right? Especially as first gen, I think if anyone in your community is both you know, they have a ethnic background from another country and then were born here.

It's one of those things where it's ni de aqui ni de alla kind of feeling, right? And so even before getting into the world of startups and venture capital and technology, there's I think that that sense of how do I fit into all of this? And I and I think that's definitely evolved into I fit here and there. Aquí ya ya. y en todas partes. And and I think we just to start, I mean

it's so important for for us in our community to understand that that is so natural and so normal to feel, because of where we come from and colonization and nepotism and the way society works, right? And so, but yes, I started in South Central, very humble beginnings, very curious kid. I g I can vouch for being having a you know,

Mrs.

wider diversity spectrum through the neurodivergence spectrum of things. so always really curious, wanting to learn and always wanting to prove someone wrong if they said I couldn't do something, right? And and and the persistence. And so education was something that that was focused on in my house. My my parents had very little

education and they always wanted their kids to have the a chance at the American dream and so on and so forth and we all know how that story goes. People like to say, look, if Lolita made it, then the American dream is possible. But honestly, it's there's so much in the background and not everyone gets the opportunities that they need. And truthfully, talent is spread equally to b but opportunity is not. And so once I saw that

Thank you.

in my boarding school in high school, Phillips Academy, when I saw that at when I went to university, when I saw that, you know, starting in big tech at IBM at Cisco, it was very clear that there were rules and people just felt like they just knew how to act, what how to dress, how to talk, what to do. And I was there like code switching. Like so many of us need a code switch and trying to, you know, I sound different at home and I sound different at work and, you know,

Having all these things, it could be really overwhelming, but at the end of the day, it's just keeping the eye on the price, right? Let's keep our community rising, let's keep improving and succeeding. And so that's that's really what's driven me all the way to big tech to startups to venture capital and now where we are here. And writing the book because I know how hard it is, and I wanna save everybody lots of tears, lots of sweat, and lots of blood.

Really?

That's me.

'Cause it is it is it is grueling out there sometimes.

Definitely. And I can relate to that when I first went to college, I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, so I left from being a kid in an island to going to all places, Iowa. And so I felt exactly in that way in many ways, right? That how people knew how to act, how people knew where to go, what to do, what not to do. and it sort of makes you feel like, you know, alienated a little bit, right? to me, I'm a little bit more on the curious side. So I, I started thinking like, you know, I want to, I want to be, I want to understand what is it that they're doing? What is that they're thinking, right? Why are they doing the things that they do? so I can relate to that. And, and in terms of those rules, right. What do you think are so some of those rules that, that, these Latino founders, right? Nobody says out loud to them, right? Just to name a few. I know.

there are so many. I mean there's an entire book on that. But you know, I think number one is that your pedigree if if you don't have a pedigree, you don't belong. I mean, we we're just talking about the belonging, the imposter syndrome kind of thing. And and one rule is that basically if you don't fit this, then you don't belong. And and the truth is you belong no matter what. Right. If if you are building a business, which so many of us are just focused on making money, then you belong, right? Because if you're gonna be in venture capital, if you're gonna be in startups, just focus on actually creating a successful business. That's it. so that's one that's really simple, but often sometimes we forget, especially when you hear, you know, you have all these microaggressions, or or

That's good.

Different things different people say and how they make you feel. And you they make they they will gaslight you, so many, not everybody, but you will get this gaslighting and you'll be like, wait, but am I right or am I wrong? Can I trust myself? Can I not? And what I'm gonna say is yes, trust yourself, right? there's this rule of like I would say, hey, if if you work hard, then you will achieve and you will succeed. That's another one.

Meritocracy is not real. And I will say that the that it's true that those that have had access, right, especially people that that have the the last names of the families that have ruled, right? that have built so many big businesses.

Thank you.

They might not they might actually believe in meritocracy, but only because they have never seen what it really means to work hard and not achieve. And there's so many variables, so many things that that go on that in our communities and that that make it complex to be able to achieve different things. And so that's the other thing. Like, don't fall for it. it's it's really so much about being able to be

Is it?

to have the orientation is so much better than just over like beat speed basically. So knowing is so important. this concept of meritocracy versus not, that's one thing, but also proximity. So when you start, so this is all about building relationships, building community. And so, where is this there's this community that may look at you and be like, Well, if you just look the part, sound the part.

Are the part, then you belong. And if you do the work, then you'll do you'll get, you know, okay, no, that playbook does not work for us. It's like, hey, we need to build relationships so we can build proximity to capital. So be closer to capital, be closer to opportunities, and talk to those that get it. And so, Angel, like what you're doing is so great. We need more of us in this ecosystem, and that's exactly why I also wrote the book because.

We all need to know we we all deserve and belong at the table as founders, as angels, as general partners in venture capital funds, as LPs that investors in funds, and as ecosystem builders, because honestly that's how the whole ecosystem works. And at one point or another, if you're a founder or if you're an investor like yourself, it doesn't matter. You'll probably wear all of these hats. So wouldn't it be nice to just kind of know what are those pitfalls? What are these things that we need to know?

Mm.

We are not here to convince people about the fact that we belong. We are here to build businesses and make money. And that is it.

and yeah, that's that's what what actually matters is all about and really dwindling it down to like what's practical and how to think about it, because navigating the map of how this all works is most important and not just like here are the ten steps to XYZ. It's how do you think about it? How how does the world move and why? And those are some of the concepts that I explore.

Yeah, definitely. I like the navigation structure there because I feel that that's another of the main issues that we have right now with Latino founders, specifically that writers. mean, given our Latino tech or Latino VC environment is not that big in size or in players for that matter, it's hard to navigate, right? It's a big country. A lot of the founders I talk to, don't necessarily know a fund even exists, right? Even people like you, for example, with marketing and all these things, and they still, for some reason, doesn't reach them. And a lot of them don't know what to do next, don't know who to talk to, things like that, which is sort of part of my thesis, right, personally as well. And for Ganas, your whole thesis, is that basically, you know, community is capital, right? It's not necessarily, it's not a marketing channel, it's an actual moat for your thesis and growth engine for that matter. So for a Latino founder who doesn't have the network, but does have community, what does that specifically unlock for them, right? How does community become the thing that replaces

That's right, community is capital.

the warm introduction in that room that they never had access to.

Yeah, and and that's a really good question. Where do you start? and one thing that I'll say is what community replaces for a founder is a lot of things that are not said or said behind closed doors. it could be also insight into how investors r truly are.

Or what options they should even be considering from fundraising perspective, right? Because not all founders should most founders should not raise venture capital, right? If you want control, if you want equity, if you want to grow organically, venture capital is not for you. But there are different alternatives, which I cover in the book. but they include things like pitch competitions and grants and things like that.

but what community does is again fills those gaps, right? There's this orientation that helps. So how do you even get started? First of all, while we may not be greatly represented in the investor side of things, single percent digits, right? single digits. what we do have is these communities that are forming, like La Familia, Latinos VC.

you know, all these different communities that you can start joining. And they they may not give you capital, but the thing is that building relationships, especially those of us that really want to build that community and help those that come behind us and are next to us, right? And we also want support because we're always learning and we all all need help in some way, shape or form along the journey.

To be able to build those relationships, to understand and to learn from the next person over. And one thing I would say is that when you are a founder and you're like, I don't know where to go or how to do this, literally just Google, right? What organization is near me or what community is near me? Startup Grind, which I'm a a part of their community as well, is a great free community, right? Backed by Google for startups.

I'm gonna say, I'm say, I'm say, say, say,

Google themselves have different programs. So look for free programs, communities that that exist, and start integrating and start asking the questions and go to the events. And it's okay if at first you just go and you just listen, whether they be online or offline, and those relationships will start building and you'll learn the things you are not

thinking of even asking and you'll figure out the things along the way. And it's it's a work in progress. So never assume that at some point you're gonna be like, it all clicks, it all falls into place. No, because everything's always changing, everything's always evolving, but you'll have a better grasp of it. So definitely that's it's so important. And and from a business perspective, and our whole thesis at Ganas Ventures is all about being community driven and community,

ROI. Meaning, okay, so if you are focused on serving your community, which really is customers, your target customers, and you create space for them to create value for each other, what you're allowing is a couple things. One, let's start with I and ROI. I is for insight.

Is it?

So you're going to be able to gather insight of what they are thinking about as it pertains to the problem that you're solving for, and they can give you feedback as you develop your product or your service. right, since we're going backwards in ROI. For operations, so if you have an engaged community, you can find the talent that you need that already understands and believes in what you're doing.

And R is for revenue, right? So if you have an engaged community where or customers, right, you're bringing them into the fold of building and selling and upselling and scaling, then you're building this ecosystem that's a go-to-market strategy because that's actually what it is. It's a go-to-market strategy to really think about your customers and potential customers as that engine and that kicks off the marketing sales flywheel.

Very cool. And in your book, you talk about a lot of these things, I'm guessing, right? And again, it's called What Actually Matters. So let me ask it directly, I guess. So when a founder is building without this inherited playbook, without the Stanford hoodie and all the built-in network within, all these things,

what actually matters, what should they spend their energy on versus what's noise, right?

Yes, it's so important to separate the noise from the signal. And it could be so hard to do because you we're just scrolling, doom scrolling, or like looking at different articles and who raised what and how much and from whom. And you can get caught up in that. But the thing is that it's a lot simpler, right? We need to just step back and remember what am I trying to do as a founder?

And the answer is build a successful business. And what does a successful business do? Make money. So the big question is: if I'm building a business and my goal is to make money, then I need to be asking, what do I need in order to make my business successful and make a lot of money? Not how do I fundraise, not who do I fundraise from, not anything else. And so you look for people, and even if you're an SMB, a small, medium business or small business, even if you decide to stay small or grow organically and then become a venture capital funded company, like Calendly did, right? They they they grew up to 70 million before they even raised. And so because they kept getting no's from venture capitalism, that's another thing. Like if you keep you you you only have so much time and so many resources.

So think about reverse engineering. Bootstrapping is always such a great way of fundraising, by the way. in in and what I mean by that is the best fundraising comes from your own customers, right? And that c circles back to community driven. So always remember what you're doing and for what reason, right? Building successful businesses that make a lot of money.

Go for the win.

vision.

Yeah, definitely. And you said that this book is sort of like, you again, you wish it had existed, right? But when you first started and it's something that you want to sort of get forward and everything that you've been trying to figure out for so many years. So tell us who did you write it for? Right. Specifically.

Hehehe

And what do you want the founder to walk away after they read it?

Yeah, so I had the first time founder, angel, GP, LP, and ecosystem builder in mind. And I can speak to it because I've been all of those, right? And I've sat in all these seats at different times, all at once at times, which I don't recommend. but I and I wrote it for someone who didn't come with an inherited network with all this knowledge that you really started from scratch. and you're trying to figure out, first of all, like what is this world about? How does it work? And Sometimes at the beginning we can feel like there are dumb questions and that we should already know. So this book gets you to you'll know the foundation for all of these different elements. And one other thing is the other thing that folks are not thinking about is how all of these roles interact with each other because they impact how investors make decisions on on investing.

How LPs or angels make these decisions on investing if you're thinking about it from a founder perspective. But say you're kind of going, you're always curious and always growing, you can be a founder and an angel or an LP, maybe not a GP at the same time, but you've seen those, right? You you there's definitely many examples of founders that are also VCs that are also all these other things. So How do you do that? How do they all connect? How do they all influence each other? And if you're curious about moving around and trying different roles at different times, this is how you see all of them, how they all fit in as well. So whether you want to look at the book as like, okay, how do I fundraise? There's that part, of course. But so much of it is also, again, who are the players in this board game? How does this game work? What are the rules? How can you fit into this world and operate in it? But when I say fit, I have an asterisk because one thing that I made sure that I did, which has always been so important, is not to lose yourself. We come from our communities, we are Latino, you know we should not hide that. And but there there's a

And and there there could be times where it may feel that way in the ecosystem. And this is something also to cover. But honestly, it's our diff it's part of our differentiation, our ability to see the problems firsthand of the 99% for me, right? to be able to see the problems that our Latino communities in the US in particular, right? Like and if you think about broadly the Latino community being

Representing trillions of dollars, being third largest economy, if we were to stack ourselves against all the other economies, to think that we're the the the communities that are growing and building businesses the fastest. So this whole do we belong, do we not belong shouldn't even be a question. But it's understandable that we feel this way because of this ecosystem that's been old school, that has been opaque.

And a lot of the time really very much bias, right? And and in challenging times like we are now, where the administration is like, nope, we cannot use specific words because you might get sued. like or or or companies have steered away from diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and so on and so forth, we need to still stand our ground. This isn't we are not a trend. We are a business case to be made. And a massive market. So, you know, at the end of the day the book is for anyone who's in this ecosystem, anyone who wants to know how the game is played and how we can play it in our way while still being authentic, still being ourselves and not losing ourselves.

From the venture capital side, I've heard before from maybe non-Latino investors how investing in Latinos may actually be seen more of a philanthropic type of investment rather than a returns investment. What are your thoughts about that?

Yeah, I mean I've heard I've heard that. I've heard it all really again, it if you are not in this ecosystem, you may not be able to see the opportunity. What what ends up being said is for those investors that cannot see the opportunity, they basically say, this is such a niche market that you can't possibly grow a big enough business to To build a unicorn, right? A company that is producing a hundred million dollars in recurring revenue. You can't possibly do that. It's too small of a market. But the reality is no, we as Latinos can build as big as we can. And I mean, we have LPs, so for those of you who may not know what LPs are, they're investors in funds that are Latino founders of unicorn companies.

Hmm.

So we can do it. We are not philanthropy. And just you know, those people who think of us that way, I think we just need to write them off and go to the people who can see the opportunity. Because we're again, we're not here to convince people about the fact that we belong. We're here to build businesses and make money. And that's it.

Yeah, definitely. And from the Ghana side, your fun side, I know you are sort of agnostic in terms of, I know you may not necessarily do, I think, CPG, right? Specifically, or not physical products. Yeah.

No physical pro no physical products, but everything else. Yeah. So so pre-seed seed companies in the US and Latin America. and we are agnostic in terms of sector or business model or anything else. The only thing we don't do is physical products and then also like deep tech, because we just don't have the background to do the assessment. like pharma life science, that's not our area of expertise, but

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

We're we definitely will look at everything and we have in our portfolio from health tech to ed tech to you know perimenopause companies, you know, menopause companies. So it we we look at the whole spectrum.

Thanks. And I'm curious, you've been doing this for years, you've been investing for years. Have you seen any sort of waves of specific industries that the founders are building, know, they're coming through your specific deal flow?

mean I think globally what's happened is because there's so much attention with AI, a lot of companies right now they stick on the sticker of like we're AI when they may not be. And it's the same thing. So so along the the different cycles of business cycles that I've been through in in venture capital, I mean the

This is...

There's the the previous one was blockchain, right? Crypto and all of that. And now it's AI. And every technology kind of goes through their own cycles. But the one thing I will say is that technology itself is a tool to remember our number one goal, build businesses that are successful and make money. So I to me it's so you do see these trends here and there and they they're always changing. So that's the thing.

but the the core of it is that the the companies we're always looking for, and not to say we haven't invested in AI companies because we do have those in our portfolio as well. But the the thing is for me and for us at Ganas it's all about what big problems are you solving that are relevant today that that customers they they feel the pain and they're going to pay money to solve that exact problem. And why your team, what's that differentiator that you have that you're gonna be able to build this company successfully relative to everybody else? and I will say something else. I will say that while we are happy to and we have invested in pre-revenue companies, most venture capital funds that are early stage may say they do, but most don't. And and it is more of an anomaly even for us to invest in companies that are pre-revenue, pre-product, than than not, right? And and so that's something also that I think founders need to remember that we are investing in in the companies relative to all the other companies we've looked at. And that's something that I think founders need to consider as well.

Very cool. And Lolita, thank you so much for telling us your story today and talking about a little bit about what you're going to be sharing in your book. And I'd love to if you have a link or something, I know you have like it's an Amazon and you have the preorder and all that. I love to share that with my followers as well and the audience. If that's OK. And I want to do it myself, too.

Of course.

Because I do want to read it. I'm really interested in seeing how, you know, from your perspective, coming from so many years of backing early stage and pre-seed companies, you know, as a pre-seed fund myself, right? I want to learn from the best.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm excited I mean and I'm excited for for you to for your feedback. I'm sure this is just the first edition, but the the link is just lolita taub dot co slash book and you can find all the information there.

And then I mean if you just Google it, I'm sure it'll come up as well. But I I'll I'll send you some information so that just the links and that you can add to the show notes and everything. But yeah, thank you so much, Angel. It was really fun chatting with you.

yeah, definitely. one last question that I ask, you know, everyone is there's a Latino founder out there who's building right now without, again, any of this playbook that we've been talking about. And the only thing that they're running on is right, Ganas right. So what's the what's the one thing that you that you tell them, right? In terms of advice.

Hmm.

I would say, you know, always remember what you're building and for what reason. and your why. I mean, why is what drives Ghanas, right? but don't get bogged down by the noise. Just stick to the signal.

Very cool. I love the name, like ganas. It's really, it's, you know, it goes so along with your thesis. It goes so along with, you know, I can tell your personality. It's really an all inclusive sort of thing. So I love it. And I love the view. I'm a pretty visual person myself. So that pink that you use and all that is like, boom, wow, I love it. So I'm a fan of that.

thank you, Angel. Well I'm really excited to follow along with the corridor and everything you build and and the the community that you're building as well and if I'm happy to help if I can.

Thank you.

Thank you, Lolita, I appreciate it. And to everyone listening out there, this was the corridor. My name is Angel Leon, or Angel Leon, your host. And today's guest was Lolita Taub, and she is the general partner at Ghana's Ventures. Thank you again, Lolita, and thank you to everyone listening.