🎉 Congrats to Erik Cardenas, Co-founder and CEO of Zócalo Health (port co), for completing the Reckitt Catalyst Innovator Bootcamp alongside founders from around the world! linkedin.com/posts/erikcarde…

🥹 San Diego founders and friends: thank you for filling The Sea House Encinitas on a Tuesday night! A sold-out room, empanadas from Q’ero, and a real conversation about Community-as-Infrastructure with my friend Sydney Paige ThomasThomas. 📝 Luke Barbara wrote such a good recap that I’m borrowing from his takeaways list. ICYMI... ↳ Your customers are your first fundraising opportunity ↳ The Access Tax is real ↳ Think CROI: community return on investment ↳ Get clear on what you’re building toward ↳ Lead with generosity and courage For the full Luke recap, get it here: linkedin.com/posts/lukebarba… 🙌🏽 Thank you to Hussein Yahfoufi and the Eventship crew for bringing us together, Kevin Wilson at Procopio, Cory, Hargreaves & Savitch LLP, our title sponsor and cohost, David Loseke at J.P. Morgan Private Bank, our community sponsor, and Seatrees for the space. “What Actually Matters: Startups, Capital, and the Rules Nobody Taught Us” is a book for first-time founders, angels, LPs, GPs, and ecosystem builders navigating venture without inherited access - from someone who has sat in every chair. ↳ 📘 Grab your copy: amazon.com/dp/B0H4HXS97L ↳ 🎧 Listen to the audiobook: open.spotify.com/show/5Vlcdl… ↳ 👀 Go behind the scenes: lolitataub.co/book 📸 Photo credit goes to Hussein and Luke!

☕️ Founders and funders in Mexico: I'll be at the @ganasvc x @StartupGrind Coffee during Mexico Tech Week, Oct 26, Mexico City for an informal startup-investor community hang plus a book signing. 👇🏽 Join me! RSVP: luma.com/3gpvjdzz

📊 Founders: Do you know the difference between slop and signal? 👎🏽 Slop: "We're disrupting a $10B market." 🚨 Signal: "3 paying customers at $2K MRR after 6 weeks." 😬 Investors read a hundred decks. They've heard every version of the first sentence. The second one makes them stop. Specificity is credibility. Vague claims signal you're pitching from hope. Real numbers signal you're operating from data. Now you know the difference too. 📘 I talk about this in Chapter 8 of What Actually Matters: Startups, Capital and the Rules Nobody Taught Us. The book is for first-time founders, angels, GPs, LPs, and ecosystem builders navigating venture without inherited access. From someone who has sat in every chair. ↳ 📘 Grab your copy: amazon.com/dp/B0H4HXS97L ↳ 🎧 Listen to the audiobook: open.spotify.com/show/5Vlcdl… ↳ 👀 Go behind the scenes: lolitataub.co/book

🥹 Founders, funders, and friends: so grateful for what Cara Katz at @dreamyhumans wrote in our community chat! ICYMI... "This might be the best definition of goodwill in business I've read 💡" - Cara For a first-time author, I'll take it. 📖 The line: "Not because you asked for it. Because trust compounds." 🤝🏽 Customers, deal flow, co-investors, LP intros. Most of mine didn't come from asking. They came from showing up and helping, again and again, until I was the person people thought of when something fit. ✅ Challenge to try this week: help one person in your network with zero asks attached. ↳ Make an intro. ↳ Share a resource ↳ Answer the DM you've been sitting on. Then do it again next week. That's how our community grew to 100K+ founders, funders, and friends. 📘 What Actually Matters: Startups, Capital, and the Rules Nobody Taught Us is full of rules like this one. The ones nobody handed us. 🙌🏽 Thank you, Cara, and the whole D&D crew for celebrating with me! "What Actually Matters: Startups, Capital, and the Rules Nobody Taught Us" is a book for first-time founders, angels, LPs, GPs, and ecosystem builders navigating venture without inherited access - from someone who has sat in every chair. Out now! ↳ 📘 Grab your copy: amazon.com/dp/B0H4HXS97L ↳ 🎧 Listen to the audiobook: open.spotify.com/show/5Vlcdl… ↳ 👀 Go behind the scenes: lolitataub.co/book

🎉 Congrats to Rehan Choudhry, Founder and CEO of Chptr (port co), for launching The First Call, a $1M national radio campaign with the NFDA and iHeartMedia honoring funeral directors! linkedin.com/posts/rehanc_th…

👀 Hey fam! Did you know? After I left big tech, I spent my savings on visiting nearly 20 countries and interviewing more than 100 women founders. I found the same story everywhere: the talent was there, the access was not. 🙌🏽 @dreamyhumans ran the whole story. 📰 Read it here: dreamersdoers.com/leading-vi… PS My book, What Actually Matters: Startups, Capital, and the Rules Nobody Taught Us, is a book for first-time founders, angels, LPs, GPs, and ecosystem builders navigating venture without inherited access - from someone who has sat in every chair. It's out now: ↳ 📘 Grab your copy: amazon.com/dp/B0H4HXS97L ↳ 🎧 Listen to the audiobook: open.spotify.com/show/5Vlcdl… ↳ 👀 Go behind the scenes: lolitataub.co/book

💡 Founders: Terms are where deals get decided. Quietly. 📑The same $500K SAFE can mean wildly different ownership outcomes depending on whether it has a valuation cap, a discount rate, or both. Two founders can raise the same amount and end up in very different positions at the next round. Most first-time founders learn this after the fact. 🧮We built three scenarios side by side so you can see exactly what each structure costs before you sign. 🧠That's Chapter 4 of What Actually Matters: Startups, Capital and the Rules Nobody Taught Us. 📘 The book is for first-time founders, angels, GPs, LPs, and emerging ecosystem builders navigating venture without inherited access. From someone who has sat in every chair. ↳ 📘 Grab your copy: amazon.com/dp/B0H4HXS97L ↳ 🎧 Listen to the audiobook: open.spotify.com/show/5Vlcdl… ↳ 👀 Go behind the scenes: lolitataub.co/book

🎉 Congrats to Nathalie Wilk of Neopausia (port co) on winning the FIS Women's Health Innovation Showcase and passing 100K followers on Instagram! linkedin.com/posts/nathalie-…

🌊 San Diego founders and friends: come hang with me and my friend @sydneypaige10, GP at Symphonic Capital, on Oct 13 at The Sea House in Encinitas. 🤝 We're talking Community as Infrastructure: The New GTM & Capital Playbook. My take: community is capital. It's how we find customers and investors, especially when nobody hands us a warm intro. Sydney and I will get into how to build it on purpose. 📚 The bonus: I'm bringing copies of What Actually Matters: Startups, Capital, and the Rules Nobody Taught Us to sign. Already have yours? Bring it and I'll sign it too. 🥟 Plus empanadas. Thank you, Procopio, Cory, Hargreaves & Savitch LLP and Eventship, for making this happen. 🎟️ Join us! Register here: eventship.com/event/communit… 🤔 Coming? Let me know in the comments so I know who to look for. -- 📘 What Actually Matters: Startups, Capital, and the Rules Nobody Taught Us, a book for first-time founders, angels, LPs, GPs, and ecosystem builders navigating venture without inherited access - from someone who has sat in every chair. Out now at lolitataub.co/book. 👋🏽 Hi, I'm Lolita Taub, GP at @ganasvc and author of What Actually Matters. Ganas Ventures invests in early-stage startups in the US and Latin America. Learn more at ganas.vc.

🇯🇵 Hello from Tokyo! I'm here with Startup Grind and JETRO for J-StarX, repping @ganasvc, and spending the week with 15 Japanese AI startups getting ready to sell and raise in the US. 💐 Eric Cardeña Rodríguez (Startup Grind), Sunanda Narayan (Startup Grind), and the JETRO team built this program and thought through every detail. Thank you for having me! 🙌🏽 I'm mentoring alongside James Gee (Startup Grind), Brian💥 Sparkes (Silicon Valley Venture), Caryne Say (StrataGuide), and Darshan Dave (MassChallenge). I'm learning a lot from you all. 🌏 Startup Grind and I go way back. We first met in Bangladesh. A few years later, I spoke at one of their events in Ecuador. Now we're in Japan together. It's special to see a friendship grow across three countries. 🤝🏽 Being back in Japan feels a little full circle. At IBM, Shiseido and Kyocera were my customers. This time I'm here as an investor. 🚪 BTW, my sessions are on fundraising: picking a strategy, getting meetings when you don't have a network yet, and telling your story clearly. ✅ One thing I keep coming back to: when an investor asks why you're raising, answer with three numbers. How much. What milestone it gets you to. How many months it lasts. "We're raising $4M to reach $3M ARR with 18 months of runway" tells me exactly where you're headed. I've made 100+ investments, and I still ask this every time. 💙 This week gives me the same feeling as every Ganas Global Tour (lnkd.in/gvNmnm6x) stop. Great founders are everywhere. Access isn't there yet, and I want to help change that. 📖 A lot of what I'm teaching this week comes from my book, What Actually Matters: Startups, Capital, and the Rules Nobody Taught Us. It debuted as the #1 New Release in Venture Capital on Amazon. Check it out and grab a copy: lolitataub.co/book 👀 What Actually Matters: Startups, Capital, and the Rules Nobody Taught Us is a book for first-time founders, angels, LPs, and GPs navigating venture without inherited access - from someone who has sat in every chair.

🎉 Founders, funders, and friends: this Hispanic Heritage Month, @ineventapp named me to their 100 Leading Global Voices of Hispanic Heritage - next to Miriam Rivera, Natalia Oberti Noguera, and Juliana Garaizar! 💫 They led with my parents' line: échale ganas. 🤝🏽 Lists don't create access. Introductions do. Link below. inevent.com/blog/marketing/1… 👀 PS What Actually Matters: Startups, Capital, and the Rules Nobody Taught Us is out now. Learn more and order your copy at lolitataub.co/book.

💰 Founders, funders, and friends: I sat down with Lyanne Alfaro on @MonedaMoves to talk about trust and capital. 🫆 TL;DR: You build trust yourself. Nobody hands it to you. 🫖 Also, I share why I tell first-time founders to bootstrap before they raise. Link below. open.spotify.com/episode/1zq… 👀 PS My book, What Actually Matters: Startups, Capital, and the Rules Nobody Taught Us, is out now. lolitataub.co/book

💡 Founders: The cost of getting funded isn't just the hard work. 1️⃣ It's the time you spend chasing the wrong investors. 2️⃣The equity you give up because nobody taught you the terms before you were at the table. 3️⃣The emotional labor of staying "on" in rooms that weren't built for you. That's the Access Tax. Most people pay it. Almost nobody names it. I talk about it in the Preface of What Actually Matters: Startups, Capital, and the Rules Nobody Taught Us. 📘 The book is for first-time founders, angels, GPs, LPs, and ecosystem builders navigating venture without inherited access. From someone who has sat in every chair. ↳ 📘 Grab your copy: amazon.com/dp/B0H4HXS97L ↳ 🎧 Listen to the audiobook: open.spotify.com/show/5Vlcdl… ↳ 👀 Go behind the scenes: lolitataub.co/book

😳 My book is #1 in New Releases in Venture Capital on Amazon right now. I have looked at it four times to make sure. 📚 It is also #19 on the Venture Capital bestseller list, which put it on a page with the books I read to learn this business. Venture Deals by Brad Feld. Secrets of Sand Hill Road by Scott Kupor. The Power Law. The Lean Startup. 👀 Then I counted the authors of the 18 books ranked above mine. One woman among all of them, and she is a co-author. 🇲🇽 It is Hispanic Heritage Month, so here is the rest of it. I grew up in South Central LA, the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Venture capitalists love to write books. Almost none of them have looked like us. 🚪 I am honored to be on that page. I am more interested in who is next. This book is a door I am holding open. If you are Latina, Latino, a woman, an immigrant, or anyone this business has counted out, write yours. We are not the pipeline. We are the present and the future of it. 🎁 And if you cannot buy a book right now, the 100+ resource library at lolitataub.co/book is free and always will be. 💙 If you want to help this one travel, that is how the next one gets easier to publish. 📘 Book: lnkd.in/dqnyHjUv 🎧 Audiobook: lnkd.in/dUM8N9dz ⭐️ Leave a review: lnkd.in/d2CW5N36 — What Actually Matters: Startups, Capital, and the Rules Nobody Taught Us, a book for first-time founders, angels, LPs, GPs, and ecosystem builders navigating venture without inherited access - from someone who has sat in every chair. Out now at lolitataub.co/book. Lolita Taub is a Latina venture capitalist and General Partner at Ganas Ventures.