Top Decile Podcast

The VC Finding Latin American Founders Before US Funds Do | Lorenzo De Leo, Enya Ventures

Lorenzo De Leo spent more than a decade as managing director at Rocker, one of Miami's leading venture studios, where he helped build over 40 companies across the US and Latin America. That operator background is now the foundation of Enya Ventures, his pre-seed AI fund targeting Latin American founders at the moment before US capital starts paying attention. We get into why Latin America is at a tipping point for founder quality, what it means to back an AI native team versus one that just bolts AI onto the product, and why in the current environment distribution and data matter more than the model itself.

Betting on AI and Blockchain Before Anyone Else | Radhika Iyengar & Jorden Woods, StarChain Ventures

Radhika Iyengar was named one of the Top 100 Women of the Future and has advised startups that generated $4 billion in shareholder value. Her co-founder Jorden Woods is a Caltech astrophysicist with her own exits and $50 million raised for portfolio companies. Together they wrote a book in 2019 predicting enterprise AI and blockchain would converge. Then, they spent six years building the track record to invest in it. We get into why they treat trust as a literal architectural requirement rather than a feature, how a portfolio company is extending hyper-personalized lending to small businesses with under a 0.2% default rate, and why micro VC math produces better returns at every performance percentile than mega funds chasing hectacorns.

Supply Chains Don't Just Fail Companies — They Fail Nations | J.P. Keating, ProChain Ventures

J.P. Keating spent 25 years inside five Fortune 500 supply chains — Boeing, Anheuser-Busch, Allstate — before deciding insiders needed to be the ones writing the check. Now, as founder of ProChain Ventures, he's backing pre-seed and seed stage founders building the technology that makes global supply chains faster, more resilient, and harder to break. In this episode, JP and Connor dig into why supply chain is less about efficiency and more about survivability, how ProChain finds the right LPs (spoiler: industry operators first), and why a self-propelled autonomous rail car might be the most exciting investment in the portfolio.

Betting on LatAm's Biodiversity Advantage | Galit Flasterstein, Danta Fund

Galit Flasterstein sold a travel company she ran in Costa Rica for a decade, then built a marketplace connecting LatAm artisans to global buyers, and concluded the real gap wasn't commerce but early-stage capital. Now she runs Danta Fund, a pre-seed vehicle backing ag tech, biotech, food tech, and climate tech founders across Latin America with a thesis built on the region's biodiversity. We get into why LatAm's biodiversity creates a scientific moat that's hard to replicate anywhere else, how a Danta portfolio company is predicting farm diseases two weeks in advance using aerial pathogen filters and AI, and why the best founders have stopped looking for generalist VCs.

The VC Fund That Sees Opportunity in Red Tape | Walid Aradi & Wes Schwalje, Red Tape Ventures

Walid Aradi and Wes Schwalje spent over 15 years at Tahseen Consulting advising heads of state, ministries, and 11 unicorns on navigating the regulatory and political realities of the MENA region, including structuring two of the region's biggest exits, Uber's acquisition of Careem and the Dubizzle-EMPG merger. Together they launched Red Tape Ventures, a Dubai-based seed fund backing marketplace and enablement technology startups across 22 countries where regulation isn't the risk — it's the unfair advantage. We get into why founders who align with government national visions end up co-creating regulation rather than fighting it, and how Red Tape made its first close during an active war (and why that's less surprising than it sounds).