Julita Barreto

Being first changes what the seat does

Barreto was the first woman to sit on the investor panel of Shark Tank Colombia. That fact does a specific kind of work beyond the individual holding the seat.

Who is visibly doing an activity affects who believes the activity is available to them. For a programme watched by people considering starting a business, the composition of the panel is a running signal about who gets to be on the funding side of the table — and for most of the show's history in the region, that side was entirely male. Representation does not by itself move capital. What it moves is the set of people who imagine themselves applying, which is upstream of everything else.

A route in that does not run through banking

Barreto's background is law, with a specialisation in human resources and consultative sales — not investment banking, not a fund, not an MBA pipeline. She has since gone on to host a web series profiling young entrepreneurs.

That matters because the assumed route into investing is narrow and largely financial, and it is not the only one. Assessing an early-stage company is substantially a judgement about people: whether these particular founders will keep going, tell the truth about problems, and hire well. Someone whose career was built on evaluating people and negotiating with them is not obviously worse equipped for that than someone who was trained to build models.

If this made the sector interesting rather than the celebrity, start with how to begin investing — and, if private companies are what caught your eye, how angel investing actually works.