Marisa Lazo

She built the thing herself, without franchising

Pastelerías Marisa grew from a home kitchen into Mexico's largest non-franchise bakery chain, with more than a hundred stores. The non-franchise part is the detail worth pausing on, because it describes a much harder path.

Franchising is how most retail chains scale quickly: someone else supplies the capital and runs the store, and the brand takes a fee. Owning every location instead means financing each one, hiring every team and carrying all of the operating risk directly. It is slower and far more capital-hungry, and it means the person who built it has done the unglamorous work of retail expansion a hundred times over rather than licensed it out.

An explicit screen, stated out loud

Lazo has backed more than thirty pitches since joining the programme and has said she favours ventures led by women or focused on sustainability. Stating a screen publicly is more consequential than it appears.

A declared thesis changes what arrives. Founders self-select toward investors whose stated preferences they match, so an investor who says what they are looking for gradually receives a different set of opportunities than one who says nothing. It also creates a public standard to be held to. Whether a screen like this improves returns is genuinely unsettled — but it reliably changes the deal flow, and deal flow is most of what determines what any investor ends up owning.

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.