The catalyst problem

A decade of designing venture ecosystems and what I'd build differently

Looking back, I don't think the hardest part of building a venture ecosystem is finding entrepreneurs. Nor is it raising capital. It's creating the conditions under which both continue to reinforce one another long after the original catalyst disappears.

I've spent more than twenty years working across almost every layer of the innovation economy. I've had the privilege of helping shape public policy, working alongside entrepreneurs, partnering with corporations, supporting emerging venture funds, serving on investment committees, and today building a venture firm with my anchor investors and partners.

For much of that time, I believed the central question was how to create more startups. Today, I think I was asking the wrong question. The real challenge has never been creating startups. It has always been creating systems capable of producing great startups repeatedly.

That distinction matters, because startups can be financed. Ecosystems have to compound and share a purpose.

When people describe successful venture ecosystems, they usually point to what is easiest to observe. The billion-dollar companies. The large exits. The celebrated founders. The record fundraising rounds. Those moments matter because they make progress visible, but they are rarely what created the progress in the first place.

The real work happens quietly. It happens when experienced founders mentor first-time founders. When operators become angel investors. When successful GPs back emerging managers. When universities produce entrepreneurs alongside researchers. When corporations learn that innovation is something to build with rather than buy from. When governments stop trying to manufacture outcomes and instead focus on creating stable conditions that allow markets to evolve.

Those relationships rarely appear in ecosystem reports. Yet they are the infrastructure that determines whether innovation compounds over decades or constantly starts over.

Latin America has experienced remarkable progress over the last 20+ years. According to LAVCA, venture capital investment in the region expanded from less than one billion dollars annually to peaks above fifteen billion during the 2021 cycle. Hundreds of venture-backed companies were created. Entire generations of founders gained experience that simply didn't exist two decades ago. The region demonstrated that entrepreneurial talent had never been the constraint.

That, however, is only part of the story. Capital can accelerate an ecosystem. It cannot replace one.

Some ecosystems continue producing founders, companies, investors, and innovation long after periods of abundant capital have passed. Others seem to restart every cycle, rebuilding many of the same institutions from scratch.

The difference isn't money. It's memory. Healthy ecosystems accumulate institutional knowledge. They develop trusted relationships. They create feedback loops through which every success and every failure, makes the next generation slightly better prepared than the last.

That compounding of experience is, in my view, venture capital's most underestimated asset. If I were asked today how to strengthen an emerging ecosystem, I wouldn't begin by asking how to finance more companies. I'd begin by asking how to shorten learning curves.

How do founders gain access to experienced operators earlier? How do first-time fund managers learn from those who have already navigated multiple cycles? How do corporations become meaningful customers instead of occasional innovation partners? How do universities remain connected to industry? How do family offices evolve from passive capital providers into long-term ecosystem participants?

Those questions sound less exciting than talking about unicorns. They are also far more consequential. One lesson surprised me more than any other over the years.

The greatest bottleneck in venture capital isn't capital allocation. It's coordination. Every participant usually wants the same outcome: better companies, better returns, better jobs, better innovation.

Yet founders, investors, governments, universities, and corporations often operate as if they belong to entirely different ecosystems. The highest-performing ecosystems aren't necessarily those with the most resources. They're the ones that create the least friction between people who need one another.

Looking back, I realize that this lesson profoundly shaped how we eventually built 1200vc. From the outside, people often describe us as a hybrid venture platform. 

Internally, we've always thought about ourselves differently. Our objective wasn't simply to invest across the Americas. It was to learn across the Americas.

Every specialist GP we partner with expands our understanding of frontier technologies. Every founder teaches us something about where industries are heading. Every corporate relationship reveals adoption patterns that rarely appear in market data. Every investment committee conversation exposes a different way of thinking about risk.

Over time, those perspectives begin to reinforce one another. The result isn't simply a better portfolio. It's a better judgment. That realization has become even more relevant as venture capital enters the era of deep technology.

Artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, robotics, biotechnology, defense technologies, and energy infrastructure are forcing institutions that rarely collaborated before to work together again. Governments, universities, industrial companies, venture investors, and entrepreneurs are becoming participants in the same innovation process because none of these technologies can scale independently.

Ironically, that may become one of the greatest opportunities for the Americas. Many of the necessary ingredients already exist. The challenge is no longer creating them. It is connecting them. If I could redesign an ecosystem from scratch today, I would spend far less time trying to produce the next unicorn. I would spend considerably more time designing the conditions under which extraordinary founders, investors, researchers, operators, and institutions naturally find one another.

Because ecosystems don't become exceptional when they produce one extraordinary company. They become exceptional when producing extraordinary companies becomes normal. After more than two decades working across venture capital, entrepreneurship, public policy, and innovation, I've come to believe that ecosystems are never transformed by a single fund, a single government program, or a single entrepreneur. They are transformed when enough people begin solving problems together instead of independently; when all the diverse actors of the ecosystem share a purpose, with intention.

That is the catalyst. And unlike capital, it compounds indefinitely.

Adriana Tortajada
Summer 2026

Disclaimer:
Text written by human, cover picture generated by AI