Ten years ago this month, Alvaro Sabido and I agreed to build Caribu together. The math was never in our favor. Latina-founded companies have historically raised a sliver of venture capital, 0.37% of total VC investment by one measure (Project Diane, digitalundivided), and Black and Latina women combined didn't cross 1% of all VC until 2021. Even the acquisitions that do happen mostly don't survive intact: a 2023 study of the software industry found 57% of acquired products get discontinued under their original name, a number that climbs to 80% when one of the biggest tech companies is the acquirer (Eisfeld, 2023, via Network Law Review). Most startups don't even make it that far. Caribu did, and it's still Caribu, still doing what I built it to do, ten years in.
People ask me why. I've got a real answer now, and it's not luck. It's a recipe, and every ingredient came from a specific place.
Two Complementary Co-Founders
Alvaro found me on a founder-dating site in August 2016, a CTO looking for someone who could sell what he'd built. He was a rare engineer who could explain his own code in plain English and understood that a CEO who doesn't get the product can't answer to her board. He built it. I sold it. Neither of us gets here alone.
A Cap Table of Cheerleaders
You need a cap table of investors who are your biggest cheerleaders. Not every investor writes a check and disappears; ours didn't. John Cooper believed in us early and never stopped giving us real feedback and real strategy. Our table looked different from most too: women, Latinas, Black men, funds, angels, all in the same round. That mattered as much as the dollar amounts.
A Community That Wants You to Win
We built Caribu in Miami, before Mayor Suarez's "How can I help?" tweet turned the city into a tech story. I named us a "Startup from MiamiTech Vintage 2," the founders who came after the ones who had to prove Miami could hold a company without forcing it to San Francisco. That community shared opportunities instead of hoarding them, vetted our earliest hires, and signed us up for coworking space before we could pay office rent.
Family Behind You in Year One
You need family that stands behind you when there's no salary in Year One. My parents watched me tell them I might end up in a cardboard box, and backed me anyway. They were my first investors, long before anyone wrote us a check.
An Emotional Support Animal
Mine was Lunita La Cubanita, my Havanese, and I mean that literally, not as a joke. Anyone who's built something from nothing for years at a stretch knows exactly what I mean.
Third-Party Validation
For some investors, you'll need to show 3rd-party validation. So thank you to Apple, TIME Magazine, Inc Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, The Today Show, Good Housekeeping, Forbes, Refresh Miami, CNBC, South Florida Business Journal, Harper's Bazaar, and many other publications that gave us some of their highest honors and awards.
A Reason to Give Back
It's imperative to give back and ensure communities have equitable access, so we partnered with Blue Star Families to give every active U.S. military member and their loved ones a free subscription. That partnership lasted for years. Thank you, Penny Bolden and Jessica Tabbert (and the ENTIRE Tabbert family) for making that a reality.
Partners Who Meant It
And you need partners who are excited to be part of your story, not just associated with it. Kevin Jonas, Baron Davis, Dr. Jen Welter, and Nick Lachey all put their names behind Caribu because they meant it. Mary Conley, Mike Conley's wife (Boston Celtics), brought us up on her own, unprompted, in an interview during the NBA bubble season, because Caribu kept him connected to his kids during the COVID quarantine. AT&T gave us a $560,000 grant to go free for a summer because they wanted families to have it, not because we asked twice. Thank you, Amy, Anne & Sandro.
That's the recipe. Not one ingredient was optional, and I didn't get lucky with any of them. I got specific, generous people who decided to bet on us.
Caribu turned 10 this year. It still exists inside Mattel, doing what I pitched in 2017, reaching families in 200+ countries who read together because of a library we built, one grueling publisher contract at a time. Most founders who sell a company don't get to say that.
Happy Birthday, Caribu! Every person in this recipe, and the hundreds I wasn't able to fit in this letter, knows exactly who they are, and I'm not done thanking you.
With gratitude, Max
A note on how this got written: I used AI to help me write this. The stories, the opinions, and the scars are all mine. I just have a very good robot assistant who helps me get them out of my head and onto the page. Which is more or less the whole point of what I do now.