There are a ton of bright shiny lights on the way to building a startup, and it's tempting to burn through cash for the sake of rapid growth. So after getting a big capital injection, for example, it's normal for founders to get excited. But how long can you keep this up before it becomes unsustainable?

When you're playing the long term game, unit economics is something any operator should pay attention to. It not only helps you set priorities, but also build a path to profitability.

Having met hundreds of founders in the past decade she's worked in VC, Mariana Donangelo has seen healthy unit economics as a common thread among successful businesses. She also experienced the power of this tool first hand at Invoice2go, where she lead growth for 4 years and made sure to understand and have better control of the levers that eventually made the company lucrative.

Before Invoice2go, Mariana was an investor at Accel, helping close several deals in Latam. In 2020, she became a partner at Kaszek. Today, she talks to us about:

• The metrics you should look at to understand unit economics
• How they impact investment decisions
• Her own initiatives at Invoice2Go to make it more sustainable
• And her views on how the VC ecosystem changed in the past 10 years

Brian Requarth: Mariana, it's really great to have you here on the podcast, just to kind of frame the conversation a little bit, the community of startups and founders and VCs, it feels like it keeps getting smaller. In the context for us, you worked with a friend of mine and someone who's a big Latitud supporter. Kevin Efrusy ,we've had him on the podcast here before at Accel and then you went on to work with, uh, another friend of mine, Greg Waldorf, who was the CEO of Invoice2 go. And so I'm going to ask you the same question, but backwards later, so. How do you think your experience in VC contributed to your leadership role in a high growth startup?

Mariana Donangelo: Hey, Brian, well, thank you so much for having me here. I am really excited and I look forward to our talk today, and Kevin and Greg are also good friends of mine as well. And they're amazing people and I continue to learn so much from them. Answering your question now. Um, so my experience in analyzing hundreds of growth companies, uh, taught me the importance of prioritization and the power of, you know, understanding unit economics to define priorities. And I'll explain more about this in a bit, but first I thought it would be helpful to quickly give more context on my role at Accel. And it was basically two different phases. In the beginning. I was mainly focused on, you know, Brazil,LatAm investments. And then on the second phase, I was mostly doing growth stage investing in the U S so I went from looking into proven business models around the world and see how applicable they were toLatAm to then, um, finding completely brand new models in industries where tech already had a role, in these industries.

And my job was about answering questions, like from all the different approaches you may have to solve a given problem, which one we think it's going to be the winning approach. And within that, what's the team that we think it's going to be best positioned to win here. And we'll have a better way of executing on their vision.

And so most companies, we would invest, they were bootstrapping, they had already found product market fit and they were growing very nicely on their own, but we would then invest to help them accelerate that growth. So for every investment we decided to make, we looked at probably a couple of hundred companies that didn't quite make it for us.

And so over time I had the benefit of looking at hundreds of companies. And I ended up building this pattern recognition ability, and I understood some of the things that worked and the things that wouldn't work in terms of what would make a business successful. And one of the things that stood out to me in this process was that successful founders were exceptionally good at prioritizing.

And as a startup, you know, you have, you've been through this, so you have ,you know,  limited resources and you have so many different things, so many different paths you can pursue. And so prioritization is key and I saw how important deeply understanding your unit economics was to how founders and businesses prioritize.

And so just to give a more example of how you can deeply understand unit economics. So if you think about more high level there's tuning metrics, like you have customer acquisition cost, or CAC, and then you have lifetime value or OTV. So if we just focus on CAC for a second ,CAC, most founders that I talk to, most companies that I talk to, they think CAC is about  a responsibility of the sales and marketing teams, because it calculates CAC by looking at your sales and marketing costs, and you divide that by new customers. But if you think about it, it's actually an entire company's responsibility, because to get new customers, you actually need to find new leads and convert those leads to find new leads. Of course, that's marketing and sales helping you with that, but you can also have your product and growth team helping on that front, where if, you know, creating growth, viral loops. And so for example, Dropbox does that. Naturally when you're a user, you need to share your files, you need to collaborate in your files. And so you need to bring more people to use Dropbox with you so you can have a better experience. Companies can do that as well, and in other ways, we did that at Invoice2go.

And then conversion rates, right? So conversion rates, of course, if you have high intent leads and you have high quality leads that are brought by marketing, they have a better chance of converting on their own. And that's great, but you might need the sales team to convert some of the most complex customers, but then you need product and growth teams to build maybe a self-service experience so that customers can convert on their own, which we now call the product-led growth strategy, or do new features to address new pain points that they have that will make them more likely to convert.

So for example, at Invoice2go, we started allowing users to pay online with credit cards. And when we did that, we drove conversion up by a lot. And then, last but not least, there's monetization too. Right. So you always need to think about how to better match price to value. So if you're overpricing, you might be driving your conversion down, and the purchase experience is also something important.

And this is all to say that, when you drill down and you understand like you, you get to sub metrics and you get to initiatives and teams that are responsible for driving those metrics. And if you understand how you're doing on these metrics and what's the potential with each one of them, it helps you prioritize and helps you address "how can I actually move this metric from point A to point B?" The same happens with LTV. Just to summarize what I did at Invoice2go, the main thing that I tried to do there from my experience on the investing side was to deeply understand the unit economics of the business, main levers and where there were opportunities so that I could help the company execute on things that could be really impactful for the business.

Brian Requarth: I love that. I love the collective approach of not just sales and marketing. You've got the whole company and on the prioritization, there was a founder, his name is Matt Coffin. He started a company called Lower my Bills, and I met him one time at the Fasano in São Paulo, it was early in my days at VivaReal.

And I asked for his advice and he said, the number one thing founders need to get better at is prioritization. I remember him telling me that and he said, one thing you can do is you can make a list of all the things you need to do. And then literally take the ones that you're not going to do right now and physically put that in a drawer and close the door, lock it because it's so hard to focus, because there's so many interesting things and there's lots of bright and shiny lights out there. I loved hearing your experience. So it sounds like you got to see these patterns as an investor and then you've got to put them into practice, riight? So you brought it to the company, this discussion around unit economics.

What were the red flags that got you concerned? When you look at something, what's your advice to founders who are raising capital, but not maybe deeply looking into this topic.

Mariana Donangelo: So, when I joined Invoice2go, the company had just raised its first institutional rounds of capital first from Accel and then from Ribbit, and it was a total of $15 million.

So this, and this was a typical growth stage investment for Accel. So the company had been bootstrapping, growing organically. They had never invested in marketing and they had just a small product and tech team. And so the key thing we were trying to figure out was, you know, how can we accelerate growth even more, but in a way that will be sustainable in the long term.

So understanding the unit economics was a key part of that process. And so when I joined, Greg had already set up both a marketing team and a user acquisition team to help continue to improve our organic growth, but also to expand our top of funnel with paid acquisition strategies. He also had brought on board an amazing growth team that was focused on improving conversion and retention. That was all working really well. But what I noticed was that LTV was not improving our results of all of these things that we were doing. And within LTV, the main lever we were not pooling was ARPA, the average revenue per account. And so some of the things that we were testing and implementing that were bringing ARPA down and so improving ARPA ended up becoming my main focus throughout my years at Invoice2go. And that's why I'm so passionate about Monetization, and I've been talking about it on some of the Latitud workshops.

Brian Requarth: We appreciate that, we appreciate that, and so do the founders, 'cause you've got great insights there.

Mariana Donangelo: Yeah. And so I could really see them packing can turn into a business. So, my advice to founders is to, again, really understand unit economics.

What are the main levers of, and how impactful each one is? What are the initiatives that you have in place to improve each one of these levers and are you prioritizing them accordingly to the impact? And so I see many founders just, you know, looking to understand the unit economics only when they're talking to investors when they're fundraising, And I believe this is actually a tool that you framework, that you can use to define your strategy and your priorities, and also to track your performance on an ongoing basis behind, like, we have all these metrics they're behind CAC and LTV.

Brian Requarth: When you think about this, is this like, okay, I've already found product market fit. This should be an early obsession for a founder. How do you think about this? Because it's usually not the highest priority in the beginning, 'cause you're trying to get growth. Like when does this become central to a founder and when should they be kind of obsessed?

Mariana Donangelo: Yeah, I think it's something that should be considered from the very beginning.

And as an investor is something that I'm always keeping in mind. And in the beginning it will be very theoretical, right? Like you don't have numbers, but you need to understand, okay, in theory, what I need to be for this business to work and what are the levers that I need to pull, and you're going to start with some starting point of like, what do I think my cap will be? What I think my LTV will be, what I think. And within that, what are the metrics like conversion retention and all these things. And so each business is different, but understanding, okay, where I'm going to start and where I want to get to, I think it's super important. And when you get to the point that you were more of a growth stage company, like Invoice2go, and you have a lot of numbers and you have a clear product and demand for your product. Then that's the point where I think you should be more obsessed about it. And from an investing standpoint, I think later stage investor, that's when they start obsessing about that more, and that starts becoming a more important part of the investment decision too.

Brian Requarth: Agreed with. So let's talk about little bit more on Invoice2go.

What were the main measures that worked to become more sustainable and eventually lucrative for the company?

Mariana Donangelo: Yeah. So there was definitely no silver bullet, again, like I was mentioning before, it's like, so many different things that will drive one metric, but when you have healthy unit economics, that means you have the choice of becoming profitable whenever you want. And that's a very, very powerful place for a company to be. And, so for us, at Invoice2go, the key things that worked were finding this balance between improving the product, the selling experience, and what we call that the product led growth experience. And with capturing more of that value, we were bringing to, to users through monetization initiatives. Usually you think there's a trade off, you're going to raise prices and you're going to lower conversion, but there's ways that you can do to achieve both. And that's what made us very successful to be able to pull these two levers at the same time in a very effective way.

Brian Requarth: And is that just done through experiments?

Like, do you take a cohort of users and you're like, let's try this and then adjust. How fast are you to test and evaluate things?

Mariana Donangelo: There was a lot of experimentation and we had a whole plan of what are the things that are behind each metric? What would the things that we were going to test at any given moment?

Because you know, like if you test things on the top of the funnel, they may impact things down the funnel. So you have to be like coordinating all of these experiences in a very mindful way so that you understand what's going on and then you can make changes as you learn from what's working and what's not working.

And so that was definitely part of the process and that was made in a very coordinated way. And so again, if you understand the framework, if you understand the metrics, then you can have different teams testing different things at the same time in separated cohorts. So maybe for this cohort of people we are going to be testing things more top of the funnel, for this other cohort of people, we are going to test things more down the funnel, and we are going to have a set of users at all times that we're not testing anything. So we are always going to have a control group here. So we know the overall impact of everything that we

Brian Requarth: You've put the investor hat on, you've been investing and then you're operating, and now you're investing again. How deep do you look into this topic? We already established that entrepreneurs should be taking this very seriously, relatively early. Of course, you know, you need to find product market fit and you need to make sure that you've got a scalable business on your hands, and then you need to obsess about it at some point.

As an investor, how do you go in? Are you just looking at the data? Are you, is this in the due diligence phase? Like tell us more about what lens you look at it from an investor standpoint.

Mariana Donangelo: Yeah. So as an early stage investor, again, I think me and the whole Kazsek team, we're founder centric, right? So for us, the most important thing when we look at opportunities is the team and spending time with the team and, and talking to a lot of people that worked with that team before, and that's the main thing that it's relevant for us when we're making investment decisions. But that said, the unit economics of the business and how the founders think about it and, and just understanding "is this business ever going to be something that will be sustainable?" It's part of the decision-making and yes, but I think that later on for later stage investors, like I was mentioning, like, this will be more key of like, okay, like "how is this business evolving over time?" And have they been able to improve these unit economics? Are they getting better at converting users? Are they getting better at retaining users? Are they getting better at when it ties in from, from everything and understanding what are the things that work and don't work. And so, putting my early stage investor hat on, I think that that's less relevant, it's more theoretical, but as the company grows and we do more later stage investments that becomes more relevant in the decision.

Brian Requarth: Yeah, I guess an early stage company, there's just always so much room for optimization, right? Because you haven't gone through with a fine tooth comb. And if we do this is going to increase conversion. And so you probably just want to show some ability to control an outcome or improve an outcome based on a series of tests and hypotheses that you have, and be able to show a bit of control over that, maybe heading in the right direction, but not the most optimized.

Is that kinda how you would think about it?

Mariana Donangelo: Yeah, exactly. It's mostly about "what are your true levers here?" And each business is different. So maybe for software companies, like if you're a software company and you have like a 50% gross margin, that's your big opportunity to take that margin from 50 to 90%, because that's the standard for, for software companies.

And it's not about CAC. It's not about retention or anything like that. It's just like, maybe your margin is low because you're putting too many people to help serve these customers and you have to better serve these customers in a self-serve way, and so that should be your priority as a business. But then if you were, I can eat grocer and you already as a business, you have naturally low margins, maybe your main focus should be recurrence. And how can you make people buy that for the second and third and fourth time? That's the key thing that will make your business successful. The margins, you're going to get there at some point with scale and figuring out logistics and payments and other key things that will drive your margin up, but that's kind of a given that we'll just get better over time, but engaging with your customers and making them purchase again, that's the main lever. And so understanding and again, like getting this framework of unit economics helps you understand what are the big levers of your business, where you are today and where you want to get to and how impactful it will be if you get there so that you can prioritize.

Brian Requarth: Makes total sense. I'm a big fan, particularly in the early days, of OMTM: One metric that matters. What are some of the metrics that you like to pay attention to? And I'm sure that this varies based on all the array of businesses that you look at and sectors, but what are some of the metrics that just get you excited when you look at, and you're like: "Oh, this is, this is a strong signal here." Just to kind of give the audience a little bit of understanding of how you might look.

Mariana Donangelo: Like you said, that depends on the business on the stage, and like the most basic things of course are things like, you know, give me an idea of like top line growth, customer growth, gross margin evolution, but to understand more deeply if the business is getting better or worse over time, I think it's very important to look at cohorts and how they're trending. So, for example, I like to look at conversion rates over time and not only if the conversion rates are improving, so for every equal cohort leads that you're getting that you're converting them at a better rate, but also, are you converting them faster?

So, for example, like if in January of 2020, I had a thousand leads and I converted like 10% of them in month one. But then 90% were only converted within the first six months. That's your starting point. And then I look at the same cohort of users and I see that now I have the same conversion rate, total conversion rate, but I'm converting 80% of them in month one. That's a very impactful thing for your business. And so understanding cohorts and how they're trending is super important and the same thing you can do with retention of new customers and how's that evolving over time. Are you retaining them better? Are you retaining them faster? Also, revenue retention too. So things like: "Are customers buying more over time? And the ones that are buying more over time, are they offsetting the ones that churn?" So do you have net dollar retention above 100%? And so this gives you a really clear picture of where the business is going, and I think it's something that from an investing point of view, it's important to look at, but also from a business point of view, you should also be looking at that.

Brian Requarth: Yeah. I think a lot of people that are unfamiliar with the venture world don't make the connection that this investment that's happening is based on the future value. In order for you to have future value, you have to get a clear idea of like: "Okay, this is going to happen. And then this potentially could happen. And then the result is this." Because you're not investing at the value today, right? You're investing at the value of tomorrow or next year or in five years. And so speaking of investing and kind of the venture world, what drew you to joining Kazsek? You know, here you are, you went the investor route, then you went the operator route, and now you've joined Kazek who, you know, I've had the fortune of working with closely over a decade. What are your thoughts in terms of this career move?

And you're up in the bay area yet you're investing in Latin America. Talk a little bit more about your decision to join Kazsek and kind of what you hope to contribute to the firm.

Mariana Donangelo: Just a curious coincidence. I started at Accel basically at the same time that Hernan and Nico were founding Kaszek, so I have known and admired them since then.

Over the years I invested in a number of companies personally. About half of them were actually with Kaszek, including Quinto Andar, Gympass, Nuvemshop, and many other successful ones. And so,  I would always talk to a lot of founders. What I would hear from all of them in terms of feedback, is that regardless of whether I had invested in them or not, and regardless if their companies were doing well or not, it was very clear how incredible partners they were. And they were bringing this operational, like very unique operational experience to help companies navigate the ups and downs of building tech companies in LatAm, which we know is not for the faint of heart. And so when I made that decision of going back to investing full-time again and focusing in LatAm only, it was only natural to me to choose what I consider to be the best VC firm in the region and where I felt I had an alignment in terms of how we want to add value to companies and our role in helping develop the LatAm tech ecosystem as a whole. And so, yeah, I'll continue to be based here. I think when things go back to normal, hopefully we will be traveling more and we will have a lot of portfolio companies here in the Bay Area and I'll be this local support person for them. But I also want to kind of serve as a bridge for everything that is happening here in Silicon Valley with LatAm. We have so many people here working in ncredible tech operating roles, and they want to offer advice and help. They have some connection to LatAm, they want to give back and advise companies in LatAm, but some of them are willing to know, like to go back and actually do operate or start a business. And so I want to help that happen. And that's a key part of what I'm going to be doing at Kaszek.

Brian Requarth: That's great. And what's changed on your perspective as an investor after you had the experience as an operator?

Mariana Donangelo: I think that the decision to go, you know, to the operating side in order to become a better investor in the long term was one of the best decisions of my career. And I guess one of the most important things was to give me a better sense of empathy, and to truly know how entrepreneurs feel when they have so many things to do and so few resources, and to understand the importance of helping them focus on what really matters at each given time and the importance of building amazing teams and cultures very early on, and knowing what's truly feasible and what's not. So by going through what they're going through, it gave me this whole new perspective, and I feel like I can help a lot.

Brian Requarth: I love that. And I recall, I first remember one of the first board meetings I had with Kaszek right after they invested, and I remember at the time we had this very terrible problem with collections and I was like, embarrassed about it. I was like, these investors obviously knew we weren't a perfect company, but you've got to kind of expose that you don't have everything figured out, 'cause that's just life. And I remember Nico was like: "Oh, that's not that bad, at Mercado Libre in the early days we had X". And then I'm like: "Oh, okay." Like I'm actually not a total disaster. So, that empathy piece, as someone who has been in the trenches and struggled a lot as an entrepreneur, and now has the privilege of being able to invest in some of these companies, I definitely think that it allows you to connect better because you understand the hardships that exist when you're trying to build a company, right? And there's many.

Mariana Donangelo: Totally. Yeah. That's exactly it.

Brian Requarth: How do you compare this VC ecosystem today, back in, like I guess a decade ago, you said you started, right? And so, let's rewind here to 2011 when you were at Accel, and then 10 years later at Kazsek, if you were to synthesize down, what is the biggest difference that you see, besides a lot more capital? What would you say is the primary difference, maybe from the standpoint of the market, and then the job that is entailed with operating in the VC world?

Mariana Donangelo: That's right. So I think that when we talk about the VC ecosystem, there's no way to talk about it without talking about the tech ecosystem as a whole. It's just so incredible to see how far we've come in these 10 years. In 2011, you know, most entrepreneurs were first time entrepreneurs with no tech experience and, and there was also no talent for tech. We didn't have Product Managers or Designers or Data Scientists, and in companies and founders, they had to basically build and train these teams by learning about best practices around the world.

We had a few local VC investors, Kaszek being one of them, a small number of very excited growth stage investors like Accel. And at that point, my job was about finding these teams that were already gaining some traction. So it was more like thinking with more of a growth mindset and with business models that were proven in other regions, but where it made sense to build something locally.

And at that point, and in that role, I think the main challenge was how to help companies grow from 10 to a hundred. And the main bottleneck at that point was talent and senior talent because all of these senior executives, they were working in the traditional economy, the big companies with high paying salaries and, and very stable jobs. And so to convince them to bring them to the startup world and take a big pay cut and to get options on a company that was most likely going to fail was a true challenge for us. And now, fast forward to what we have now, it's just so amazing and I'm still amazed at how far we've come. Now we're seeing second time, third time entrepreneurs, but we see first time entrepreneurs with very significant tech experience. And now we have talent in all areas and we see a very important mindset shift, right? So when we look at the top students from top universities, they want to work in tech and startups are competing at the same level with the big companies, with the consulting, strategic consulting companies and investment banks. Growth capital is now following all of this with a lot more investors investing in the region, because I feel like now we've got a system that's just going to get better. And it's here to stay. I think like 10 years ago, we all had this hope that that was going to happen. It didn't happen at the pace that we were hoping for, but now, it's here and it's here to stay.

And so my role with this new reality is I think it's very different. It's a lot more broad. It goes from finding these incredible founders who are disrupting their industries with whatever business model that works best. It doesn't have to be something that is proven. So if it's something that it's only applicable to LatAm, we have a sizeable enough region that you can support business models for LatAm only. My role is also about helping them since the early stages in things like strategy, team building, fundraising. And then I also have an important role  in terms of helping the ecosystem more broadly by, you know, sharing knowledge and bringing awareness to issues that we have in the ecosystem.

Brian Requarth: That's great. And you mentioned kind of a more robust and mature ecosystem, but today was the announcement of Nubank taking on Berkshire Hathaway as an investor. It's like all of a sudden, this is an incredible milestone, right? I was talking with a friend, Chris Schroeder today, who has been an emerging markets investor for a long time, and we were chatting and he was like: "This is a huge moment for the region because you've got an investor like that. This is something that regardless of, if you're in tech or not, like Berkshire Hathaway is definitely on your radar and making Berkshire Hathaway a crossover tech investor, right? Like, this is a firm that hasn't really done a lot in tech and now they're investing in a company in Brazil.

And then the second thing, that's the repercussions of that. There are many, right? We can sit here and say, it's gonna inspire more entrepreneurs. It's also gonna mint some very successful executives that now have liquidity for their stock, that are reinvesting not only their money, but time and energy into building the next generation.

And that creates this amazing virtuous cycle, right? And that's really where the network effect kicks off. And so I think that we're at this pivotal moment. And I think this announcement is something that is going to have a generational impact in Latin America. So that's very exciting. Right? And Kaszek obviously is an early investor in Nubank and David Velez.

So we're kicking off this new cycle. Kazsek has been there for 10 years. The next 10 years, I think are pretty bright. One thing I wanted to ask you, but it's not the responsibility of women investors to solve this. I think this is a collective thing that we together need to figure out. The gender equality in VC is obviously, it's pretty embarrassing in some respects, when you look at the number of investors and not just the number of investors, but like the dollars behind. If you look at LatAm and other geographies, I've had Claire Diaz-Ortiz here on the podcast, we talked about this topic a little bit and then what can we do to get more women investing?

Mariana Donangelo: That's definitely an issue that not only women should be tackling, like you mentioned. Men also need to be aware of and trying to solve. I think awareness around this issue started in the US a few years ago, and I think it has been addressed more widely there, but I hope to see more firms like what we're doing at Kaszek.

And let me just tell you what, we're a little bit of what we're doing at Kaszek. Three senior people that we hired over the last couple of years were women, and we're now at a point where we have more women than men on the investment team. And so things like that and being mindful of that will help us as a firm to address decisions on this front.

But I think going back to where I think the issue is, I used to give this example of what happened to me during my time at Accel. I was there for five years, and during that time, I don't know, 20, 30 people reached out to me at some point, you know, like saying: "Hey, I want to get into VC. Tell me more about how you did it and what are the things that I need to do on my end to break into VC." And from these 20 to 30 people, I think there were like one or two women that reached out to me. That to me, illustrates three issues. One, women are not even considering VC an option. Two, that was probably because they were not seeing a lot of women in VC and so they didn't have good examples to follow. And then three, the few examples like me that were there, they were also not doing anything about it, and they were not proactively trying to say: "Hey, this is an option. You should do it."And bring awareness around that issue. And of course, again, this is not only a responsibility for the women, but someone had to start. I think that that, that was on us to get that started. And so fast forward to now, I'm happy to finally see that at least we're doing things about it and things are starting to change. One really cool thing that I see is that there's a lot of women investor groups in LatAm, and that focus on bringing awareness around the issue, they also help get more women into VC in a more hands-on way. They also support existing women investors with resources, access to their networks and other things like that. And so, I think that's going in the right direction. And I'm hopeful that we will be able to get to a better place soon.

Brian Requarth: I'm also hopeful and think that it helps to have, as you said, examples, right?

When you see someone that is more like you, you aspire to achieve what they've achieved and it opens up the door as a possibility because it becomes more of a reality. I think that that's something that is absolutely critical, andI'm really happy to hear that at Kaszek more than half is made up of women, which is like, that's pretty unprecedented I think actually, If you think about the typical numbers that I'm familiar with. I didn't know that and I know Kaszek super well. I think that should be something to be recognized and set an example. And let people know that Kaszek isn't doing too bad either. I think there's also something to be said for that.

Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. And also, I just want to give you a special thanks because you know, you've been a fantastic mentor. You've led a few sessions and it's one of the more popular sessions that we have at Latitud. And so, we're really grateful for your support of the community. We have some very talented people and it's great to be able to have people with your experience on the investor and the operator side sharing your insight because that's how we generate this network effect, right? Where we have people sharing and learning, and we have this collective process. So thank you for being generous with your time, and hopefully you'll find some great opportunities to invest in too, because we are a pretty curated group at Latitud. That's going to be some good deal sourcing, I'm sure.

Mariana Donangelo: Yes, I'm sure of that as well. And for me, it's a pleasure. I think that, like you're saying, tech can play a big role in driving progress for LatAm, and we're just getting started here. Big promises to all, many opportunities to go after and I can't wait to see all that we're going to accomplish in the region. Thank you so much!

Brian Requarth: Mariana, thank you so much, muito obrigado. Thank you for being on here.

Mariana Donangelo: Thank you.