On a 3-week tour of Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Mexico City, as I listened to founders, LPs, fund managers, and family offices across the region, I kept coming back to one conclusion: Latin America does not need to become Silicon Valley. And perhaps the biggest mistake we make is acting and judging ourselves as if that were the goal.

LATAM is different from Silicon Valley, and that’s not a problem. The problem is thinking that a somewhat different path is a weakness.

After spending nearly three decades investing in Latin America and the last several years investing across India, Africa, and the Middle East, I am convinced that the most successful emerging-market players follow their own playbooks.

Each ecosystem evolves according to its own realities: market structure, capital availability, talent pool, customer needs, regulatory environment, and exit opportunities.

India, Africa, the Middle East — these regions are not Silicon Valley. Nor is Latin America. Learn from the US? Of course. Copy them? Why? We’ve already built a great industry on our own terms.

Our region has produced dozens of unicorns, a generation of serial entrepreneurs, and companies that have become category leaders.

More importantly, founders are no longer building from scratch. They benefit from an increasingly solid, if you will, digital infrastructure, experienced operators and serial entrepreneurs that can join their teams, and an ecosystem whose deep roots would have seemed unthinkable twenty years ago.

Certainly, many foreign investors don’t understand LATAM. Each market has its own regulations, cultural nuances, business practices, and customer behavior. That complexity creates barriers to entry, but it also creates competitive advantages for local founders and investors.

And it creates something else — Acquisition opportunities.

The most significant exits in the next decade will come from buyers seeking access to local expertise, customer relationships, regulatory know-how, and market leadership.

Which raises the question: Why do we continue to evaluate ourselves using IPOs as the metric?

Are IPOs the ultimate validation of venture capital? That may be true in Silicon Valley, but it has not been true in Latin America.

The region’s most successful exits have come through strategic acquisitions. They account for roughly 67% of all VC-backed exits in the region, with secondary sales accounting for most of the remainder. The US produces around 55 venture-backed IPOs a year. Latin America produces, on average, fewer than five.

Yet we continue to count unicorns and IPOs as if they were the only metrics that matter. We are using the wrong measure of success.

Rather than “when is the next IPO?”,  the question is “What is the best path to liquidity?” How many companies become indispensable acquisition targets for global corporations,  how much capital is returned to investors, how many founders build, exit, and build again, and how many companies create durable value?

A word on Portfolio Construction In Emerging Markets …

In LATAM, value creation is often broadly distributed. Strong portfolios are built through a combination of outcomes: a few companies that generate exceptional returns, several that produce good multiples, some that return capital, and an inevitable percentage of write-offs. The power comes from aggregation rather than dependence on a single outlier.

Of course, every investor wants a unicorn. But building an entire strategy around finding a mythical creature is not the most reliable way to generate returns.

“Camel” companies deserve more respect. They are built for difficult environments and preserve resources, withstand volatility, and continue advancing when conditions become challenging. Their founders focus on resilience, discipline, profitability, and long-term value creation.

In a region that has lived through repeated economic cycles, those traits are not signs of limited ambition. They are competitive advantages. For many LATAM investors, resilience and consistency may prove just as valuable as the elusive home run.

A New Scorecard for LATAM

May I suggest that we focus on these questions instead?

Are we building companies that solve real problems?

Are we creating durable value?

Are we returning capital to investors?

Are founders building again after successful exits?

Are our companies becoming strategically important to global buyers?

Those are the metrics that will determine whether LATAM succeeds.

The future of Latin American innovation cannot be built by copying someone else’s model. It will be built by continuing to create our own.

Let’s quash the Fear Of Missing Out that comes from constantly comparing ourselves to Silicon Valley.

Latin America has built something valuable and distinctive. We are the region that produced Mercado Libre, Nubank, Rappi, dLocal, Totvs, and many other extraordinary companies, not despite being Latin American, but because they’re Latin American.

MADE IN LATAM.