How a Global Listening Tour Led Lolita Taub to Build a Venture Fund
After leaving her big tech job at Cisco, Lolita Taub used her savings to do something most people only dream about: travel the world.
Over the course of a year, she visited nearly 20 countries and interviewed more than 100 women founders. No matter where she went—from the Americas and Asia to Oceania and Africa—she kept hearing versions of the same story. Brilliant, ambitious entrepreneurs were building meaningful businesses, but many were doing it without access to the knowledge, networks, and capital that make growth easier. Too often, they were forced to navigate entrepreneurship without a roadmap.
Those conversations became a turning point.
For Lolita, the experience crystallized a powerful belief: underestimated founders don't need more inspiration—they need access, orientation, and opportunity. That insight shaped her path from big tech to startups, then venture capital, and ultimately to founding Ganas Ventures, a venture fund investing in early-stage startups across the U.S. and Latin America.
What makes her story even more remarkable is how she built it. Without friends-and-family capital or a network of well-connected insiders opening doors, Lolita spent years building relationships, learning the industry, and laying the groundwork for her future fund while working nights and weekends alongside her full-time job. That persistence has since translated into millions of dollars deployed into the next generation of founders.
Here, Lolita shares what she learned from her journey around the world, the unconventional path that led her into venture capital, and the lessons she's gathered while building opportunities for founders who are too often overlooked.
Did you always know that you wanted to be an entrepreneur?
No! I spent nearly a decade in big tech at IBM and Cisco, where I consulted on and sold hardware, software, and services across industries, from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies. I was good at it. But the more time I spent with founders, the more I saw the gap between what they needed and what the industry offered them.
I didn't set out to build a fund, but to close a gap I couldn't stop seeing. The entrepreneurship came from the mission, not the other way around—and I think that's true for a lot of women in this space. We're not always chasing a vision of ourselves as founders. We're chasing a problem we can’t walk away from.
What’s the biggest misconception others have around entrepreneurship?
That it's a meritocracy. It's not. There's what I call the Access Tax: the invisible cost of not having proximity to the right networks, mentors, and information. Someone whose uncle knows a GP, who grew up attending industry events, who went to the school with the alumni network—they don't experience those things as advantages. They just think they worked hard. Someone without them spends years paying the tax: time, energy, money, and missed opportunities, figuring out what others already knew for free.
The misconception is that if you're smart and work hard enough, the doors open. Sometimes they don't. But once you understand the system you're actually navigating, you can stop blaming yourself and start working it.
We dare you to brag: What achievements are you most proud of?
Building Ganas Ventures from scratch—no check from friends or family, no inherited network—into a fund backing underestimated founders internationally. Running a newsletter for founders, funders, and friends that now reaches more than 23,000 subscribers with double the industry average open rate. Building a community of over 100,000 founders, funders, and friends, especially since it started as an experiment and became its own infrastructure. Watching The Startup-Investor Matching Tool—a global investor and founder intro platform—help founders raise over $30,000M over the years. And writing What Actually Matters: Startups, Capital and the Rules Nobody Taught Us, which I did because the information gap is real and closing it shouldn't require knowing the right people first.
What have you learned about building a team and a support network around yourself?
The people who changed my career didn't wait for me to ask. Silvia Mah gave me one of my earliest platforms before I had anything to prove. Arlan Hamilton gave me my first U.S. venture job. Hugo Perozo told me to pay it forward at IBM, and that one sentence is part of why Ganas exists. I've been part of Dreamers and Doers since 2016, and this community is proof of what happens when the right people build infrastructure for each other on purpose.
The lesson: don't wait until you have something to offer before you step into a room like this. The room is part of how you build what you have to offer.
Has your definition of success evolved throughout your journey as a founder?
Early on, success was external validation: the LP who said “yes,” the deal that closed, the press mention. Now it's simpler and harder: did the work matter to the people it was meant for? Are the founders I back building something real? Is the community stronger because I showed up? I used to optimize for what I could point to. Now, I optimize for what I can build toward.
What’s next for you and your career?
What Actually Matters: Startups, Capital and the Rules Nobody Taught Us launches on September 15, which is the first day of Hispanic Heritage Month. The book is the next chapter, not just for founders, but for every chair in the ecosystem: angels writing their first check, GPs building their first fund, LPs navigating a new asset class, ecosystem builders keeping the whole thing running. Ganas continues—supporting our portfolio, deepening community globally—and the work is expanding beyond the portfolio to serve the whole ecosystem that makes startups and venture possible. The community doesn't stop at the cap table.
