The Venezuela Opportunity

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Hi friends 👋 ,

Happy Thursday! We’re back with our second cossay, on a very different topic from our first on robots, but unified by the same question: What will it take to build things in the West?

One of my goals in co-writing essays is to share the unique insights and earned perspectives that I get to hear from people who learn by doing.

For example, one Friday morning in late October, in the midst of President Trump’s verbal escalation in Venezuela, I sat outside of a small cafe in Mexico City having breakfast with Forrest Heath III and Ross Garlick, the CEO and CFO, respectively, of our Colombian portfolio company, Somos Internet. We were in Mexico City for an Arc conference on building in Latin America during which Forrest and I hosted a salon on the potential for the region to be a strong energy and manufacturing partner to the United States.

During that breakfast, after niceties and microPOP logistics (you could actually, Ross said, rent space in restaurants or empty retail to serve as the mini-data-centers on which Somos’ active ethernet network relies), we started talking about Venezuela. What did they think, as people building a business next door, about potential U.S. intervention? Was it a big risk?

The conversation that we had from there, and a couple we’ve had since, have surprised me. They were more optimistic about the situation and about America’s role in it than I was. The people they’d spoken with in Venezuela told them that they all wanted Maduro out, they said, but that if any of them defected, they would be targeted and potentially killed. The U.S.’s presence might be able to break that impasse.

Their ideas were the first I thought of when the news that the U.S. had dropped into Venezuela and taken Maduro into custody on January 3, 2026 in Operation Absolute Resolve. I felt lucky to have a different perspective on the situation than the ones I was reading, not the One Final and Correct Perspective, but a differentiated one based on specific experience.

So I asked Ross to co-write an essay with me on what could go right in ...