Five years ago, Esteban Sosnik brought me to the US, helped me get my visa, and gave me a seat at Reach Capital.
Those have been the best and highest-growth years of my life. Today his episode goes live, and I finally get to tell his story, because most people don’t know the arc.
He landed in the US at 18 with almost no English and spent his first year mostly in the library, learning the language and what he calls the OS of American culture.
In the 2000s, he ran Penguin Holdings out of Miami, a circle of young LatAm founders betting on the next generation.
Alongside Wences Casares, Micky Malka and Verónica Serra, they wrote one of the earliest checks into a small Argentine startup called Mercado Libre.
Then he spent 12 years as a founder himself, building two video game studios with Latin American talent and selling to the US, back when everyone said it couldn’t be done from there.
The first was acquired by Activision after a wall of nos, and the next one sold too.
In 2015, he co-founded Reach. The fund just closed its fifth fund at $265M.
The wildest part? He’s too humble to tell you any of this himself.
So I got it out of him on today’s episode. This was a special one for me. Hope you enjoy it!
[YouTube] → [Spotify] → [Apple Podcast]
Also in this episode:
[09:40] How Argentina’s first VC circle found and backed Mercado Libre
[45:20] Why Reach invested in Replit at pre-seed in 2016
[49:20] Why AI is raising the bar for technical cofounders
[51:55] The “bloodbath” Esteban expects as companies cut AI tools
[55:05] Who should move to Silicon Valley and how everyone else should spend time here
