The Latitud Resident Fellowship: A Diary of Our Week in San Francisco

Artificial intelligence changed everything that we knew about creating startups.

Now, founders are in a race against time to be the first to enter the market, and then hack leadership and profitability inside not only software, but also service and labor. In this battle of speed and wits, their teams and resources have to be more efficient than ever.

We believe this story has everything to do with Latin America.

Why? Because bold, scrappy, hungry talent has been here since forever. We meet it daily, from experienced operators to serial founders.

We also know how the journey of a founder is a lonely one, especially when you're just starting out. And now that everybody around you is moving at lightning speed, it's even easier for a founder to feel like they’ve already lost the battle.

We created Latitud so that founders didn’t feel that way. Since 2020, our fellowship has hosted founders who went on to collectively raise $1B+ since. With the rise of AI, we thought our program also needed to step up.

That’s how we launched The Latitud Resident Fellowship, our program for Latin America’s boldest pre-founders.

No too early, no too messy, no “come back when you have traction and revenue”: we select hackers and operators with the ambition and commitment to build with artificial intelligence from day -1.

In our first cohort of The Latitud Resident Fellowship, we selected 11 pre-founders across Latin America:

Brazil is the main target market, followed by global solutions, with Mexico and LatAm solutions sharing third place. While all of them make use of AI, their segments range from agriculture to construction, finance to sales. See the full list of the selected fellows at the end of this post.

We gave them a path from first idea to first product with speed. Their first check, with just enough capital to kick off their hustle. Clarity, community, and connection to top people and playbooks from both Latin America and the Silicon Valley.

All in eight weeks: seven weeks of grind + a final week in San Francisco focused on giving our residents world-class playbooks and warm intros in the heart of the Valley. The conclusion? They went from pre-founders to founders with clearer theses, invaluable connections, some even demos and prototypes.

Here’s a diary on our season finale in San Francisco: who we visited + some teasers on what we learned about building and launching startups in H1 2025.

Day 1: Y Combinator, Vercel

Our first stop was at the offices of Y Combinator. We met with partner Gustaf Alströmer, who shared insights taken from YC’s current batches. It was a glimpse into the state of early-stage startups in the Valley, and how some playbooks can also be applied to LatAm.

• Startups are growing twice as fast as cohorts from just two years ago. Smaller, AI-powered teams are raising less capital earlier, and moving faster to not only replace software but services (something we already see in our portfolio).
  
• Product-market fit isn’t assumed: it’s earned through relentless user conversations and product refinement. Founders often believe they’re experts too early and stop listening to users. Focus on customer discovery, and that’s not asking them about their obvious problems. That’s watching how they work, spotting unmet needs, and delivering the AI magic that they didn’t even know was possible.
  
  In that sense, building an AI company is no different from previous ones: it still requires earning its right in the user's lives, aka product-market fit.
  

Later that day, we chatted with Vercel’s CEO, Guillermo Rauch. Vercel is a developer tools and cloud infrastructure provider, with $100M+ in annualized revenue and 1M+ active developers monthly.

• From a product development perspective, AI allows founders with no coding experience to ship products in a few days, and experienced builders to use tools so they can move 10x faster.
  
• So… Have extreme focus. It’s necessary in the current environment. Pick one thing and execute it exceptionally well.
  
• Time to pitch? Build a mobile-first demo. The new elevator pitch is a one-minute live demo that you quickly show on your phone during an informal chat. Build for this reality.
  

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Day 2: NFX, Afore Capital, Mercado Libre, Reach Capital

Our first stop for our second day in SF was at NFX’s offices. We had a lecture with James Currier, and then an insightful lunch with Anna Piñol.

Being experts on network effects and global seed funding, NFX gave our residents plenty of advice on their next steps: picking their market and moving with speed.

• Tech windows open and close, so choose your market accordingly. Opportunities aren’t permanent. Pick the right idea, aligned with the open tech window. The foundation of growth is what + when you build.
  
• Fast decision-making and iteration are the #1 success predictors. How to make them happen? Speed = Culture + Talent + Clarity + Fearlessness.

• Win by building defensibility through these three moats: 1. Network effects, 2. Data advantages, 3. Brand and language.
  

We then went on to meet Afore Capital’s Derreck Li. Afore is a pre-seed fund focused on product-oriented founders. Even so, Derrick shared that your demo and the revenue you got from it are not the most important thing when pitching at a pre-everything stage.

• Ideas are expected to evolve, so founders should focus on showing investors their capacity to derive insights. Follow this simple template: what hypotheses you tested + what you learned from them.

We wrapped up the day with an inspiring chat with Daniel Rabinovich, who spent the last 25 years at Mercado Libre and is now its COO. MELI needs no presentation, but an important part of its story is how it has reinvented itself time and time again to survive and thrive.

Daniel's advice for founders looking to now surf the wave of AI?

• Do not only optimize your existing stack, but reimagine your problem. Ask yourself how many lines of code you need to shift your thinking and crack your take at AI. It will be easier if everybody is on the same page, so be transparent with your team about your struggles.
  

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Day 3: Ribbit, Stripe, Brex, a16z

Another packed day meeting top VCs and operators. On the VC side, we kicked off the day by having breakfast with Ribbit Capital’s Eva Alonso.

We then went to see partners Gabriel Vazquez and James da Costa at Andreessen Horowitz’s offices, leaving with some signals they search before writing a check:

• Your current capacity to attract great talent as first hires;
• Your capacity to iterate and ship quickly;
• Your desire to explore and keep at it;
• Your unique customer insight (can you name your first five users?).
  

On the operator side, we met Camilla Matias and Josh Ackerman, respectively COO at Brex and Product Leader at Stripe. They reflected on their early experiences in hiring, finding users, and developing their products that led Brex and Stripe to become mature fintechs.

• When attracting talent in the earlier stages, your bargaining chip is your trust as a founder. Use it, and evaluate if your hires have that same power to attract by trust.
  
• When selecting first testers, don’t chase logos. Chase customers who are willing to give detailed feedback (and that includes pricing).
  
• When thinking about your moat in this race for AI, don’t look just at the data. Also build the user experience around the use of that data.

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Day 4: Fudo, Pear VC, DST Global

Our breakfast was also a chat with Justo José Ferraro. He’s the founder of Fudo, a Latitud portfolio company that’s becoming the operational system of restaurants, bars, and cafes across Latin America. As one of the leaders in LatAm Vertical SaaS, Justo shared some next-steps advice with our residents about focusing on and seizing niches.

We then went on to meet more downstream investors. Our first stop was at Pear VC, a global fund specialized in pre-seed and seed. Ankur Jain, investor at Pear, shared insights for both stages:

• Pre-seed is all about founder-market fit (the founder and your approach to the problem). In seed, distribution is the name of the game. As you go from pre-seed to seed, show a group of people who wouldn’t live without your product + how you put your product into their hands.

Our final stop of the day was at DST Global, a firm focused on late-stage deals. VP Grace Geng shared plenty of advice, including the main thing she looks at in earlier deals:

• Clarity = credibility. VCs invest in specificity of thought. You don’t need 100 slides. You need 1 sharp story. Know your market size, your user, your wedge, and why this matters now. (By the way, we suggest wrapping that up into a memo.)

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Day 5: Open AI, Finale‍

We went out with a bang for our last day in San Francisco. We visited the offices of OpenAI, the big tech behind the transformation brought by ChatGPT. And while that was a top-secret meeting ;), we can reveal that we had an interesting debate about the role of big techs and startups, foundational models and applications, in this constantly evolving scenario for AI.

We ended the first cohort of The Latitud Resident Fellowship in a way that’ll be instantly recognized to everybody who’s rubbed shoulders with us before: sharing gratituds.

In Brian’s house, we and all residents talked about highlights, lowlights, and what we’re most grateful for in these past two months. It was a space to digest and reflect on all we’ve learned not only during the week, but the past two months of residency.

The Latitud Resident Fellowship: H1 2025 Cohort

Antía Vázquez Fernández, founder of Elvia

🇲🇽 ​Using AI to promote job matching for technical students in Mexico

Edivaldo Delgado, Founder in Stealth

🇧🇷 Building a Vertical SaaS for construction stores in Brazil

Fernando Franco, founder of CerradoX

🇧🇷 Full-stack platform for farmers in Brazil

Fernando Senna, founder of Selva

🌎 CRM killer: an agentic revenue platform for the global market

Gabriel Drummond, founder of Optimae

🇧🇷 Logistics planning platform for Brazil

Julia Almeida, founder of Sail

🇧🇷 ​AI and WhatsApp-powered sales for physical retailers in Brazil

Julian Bender and Esteban Zecler, founders of Selenios AI

💪 An AI recruiter built for LatAm

Mikael Lijtenstein, Founder in Stealth

💪 Tool for recovering failed payments across LatAm

Pedro Neira Ferrand, founder of Procurement AI LATAM

🇧🇷 🇲🇽 Estimation and bidding tool for large construction contractors in Brazil and Mexico

Rodrigo Salvador, founder of Pumaform

🌎Voice AI for client engagement, serving the global market

Santiago Jaramillo, founder of Falcon App

🌎 Fraud prevention for the global procurement sector

We left this cohort very excited about what’s happening in San Francisco, but even more excited about the next startups made by founders from Latin America.

Stay tuned: we’re already preparing our next cohort. ;)