#85 - Building from first principles: Francisco Larraín, Topsort

03/22/22 • 46 min

Francisco Larraín's professional journey tells a story of coming full circle.

It all started as a founding team member for advertisement network Tapjoy. Having gotten a taste for the world of startups, he went on to found payment technology solution Zappedy and to have a $30 million exit to Groupon, where he stayed as Head of Local Engineering for 3 years.

It wasn't long before Francisco got back on the saddle and founded Maxxa, the largest insurtech company in Chile, and he scaled it up to over 25,000 SMB customers before looking for a new challenge.

When he felt ready to tackle the next big thing, Francisco decided to go back to his beginnings in the monetization space: he and co-founder Regina Ye started auction-based advertisement solution Topsort in 2021 hoping to bring innovation to marketplace advertisement.

Having just raised a $8 million dollar Seed Round at a $110 million valuation from names like Pear Ventures, Quiet Capital and FJLabs, I'd say they're well on the way to accomplishing their goals.

Today, Francisco and I are going over:

His successful exit strategy for Zappedy
The challenges of tech leadership roles
Topsort's journey from idea to Product-Market fit

Building something new? Apply for the Latitud Fellowship at apply.latitud.com

Building good sh*t in Latin America?

Learn about how Latitud can help you at latitud.com
Discover and pitch Latitud Ventures, your partner from 0 to 1 and beyond
Sign up for our weekly newsletter for founder insights and some tough love
And follow us on Linkedin / Instagram / Spotify to stay in the loop

Francisco Larraín's professional journey tells a story of coming full circle.

Today, Francisco and I are going over:

His successful exit strategy for Zappedy
The challenges of tech leadership roles
Topsort's journey from idea to Product-Market fit

Building something new? Apply for the Latitud Fellowship at apply.latitud.com

Building good sh*t in Latin America?

Learn about how Latitud can help you at latitud.com
Discover and pitch Latitud Ventures, your partner from 0 to 1 and beyond
Sign up for our weekly newsletter for founder insights and some tough love
And follow us on Linkedin / Instagram / Spotify to stay in the loop

Previous Episode

#84 - The paths to founder liquidity: Pierre Schurmann, nuvini

Pierre Schurmann has never shied away from great adventure: he and his family left Brazil when he was 15 with the goal of sailing around the world, and after 4 years of traveling with them, he disembarked in the US to obtain a degree in Business Administration.

Since then, Pierre has become an accomplished multi-time founder and an established investor through VC firm Bossa Nova, which he founded under the premise of "entrepreneurs backing entrepreneurs".

nuvini, his latest venture, is a B2B SaaS platform in Brazil servicing end-to-end business needs. They're making waves with their acquisitions as a strategy, and aiming for an IPO in Nasdaq in the not-so-distant future.

In this episode, we talk about:

The early days of LatAm tech startups
The importance of experienced players in an entrepreneurial ecosystem
And the future of founder liquidity

Building something new? Apply for the Latitud Fellowship at apply.latitud.com

Building good sh*t in Latin America?

Learn about how Latitud can help you at latitud.com
Discover and pitch Latitud Ventures, your partner from 0 to 1 and beyond
Sign up for our weekly newsletter for founder insights and some tough love
And follow us on Linkedin / Instagram / Spotify to stay in the loop

Next Episode

#86 - Investing in the future of LatAm tech: Angela Strange, a16z

Angela Strange is a multiple marathon winner and once achieved 7th place in Canada's distance running national ranking, but you may know her best as an investor on behalf of Andreessen Horowitz.

Before joining the world of venture capital, Angela launched and scaled up Chrome for Android and Chrome for iOS during her time at Google, and her previous experiences have uniquely positioned her as an investor that's been in the trenches and knows what it's like to build something from scratch.

As a General Partner at a16z, Angela focuses on financial services such as financial infrastructure, insurance and real estate, and she's taken special interest in Latin America after witnessing the transformation in its fintech space in the last 5 years.

In this episode, Angela and I went over: