Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Twitter reportedly cuts its parental leave, Camilla is crowned Queen, and CEOs talk Latin American growth at Web Summit Rio. Have a productive Monday.
– Growth market. Last week, the Lisbon-based tech conference Web Summit hosted its first Latin America spinoff in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I had the pleasure of spending the week in Rio alongside some of the most exciting Latin American founders and entrepreneurs and leaders of global companies seeking to expand in the region.
Onstage, I interviewed Amrapali Gan, the CEO of OnlyFans, the subscription-based platform for content creators best known as a home for adult content. You may remember Gan from my Coins2Day profile of her, which published in January. The former CMO and chief communications officer became OnlyFans’ CEO at the end of 2021 and has spent the year and a half since trying to “clear up misconceptions” about the platform.
We covered much of that territory, which you can read about here. But it was also fascinating to learn more about OnlyFans’ growth in Latin America. Gan pointed out that Latin America has a strong “fandom culture”—from support for soccer teams to the famous “come to Brazil” comments on celebrities’ Instagram posts—that has helped OnlyFans secure a foothold in the region. She declined to share how much of the company’s 2021 near-$1 billion in revenue or what percentage of its 220 million users or 3 million creators are based there. But she views Latin America as a “growth region” for the platform that sees itself as a way for creators to connect more directly with fans than they can on YouTube or Instagram.
Separately, I interviewed a group of Brazil-based founders and investors behind women’s health companies. Stephanie von Staa Toledo is the founder of Oya Care, a women’s health platform for fertility and OB/GYN care in Brazil. One major challenge of building her business—and pitching to investors—is that much of the data around women’s health and the category’s investment potential is based on the U.S. And Western Europe.
That data mismatch can be consequential. For example, Brazil is a younger country than the U.S. Or most of Western Europe; the median age is 33, compared to 38 in the U.S. For anyone building a women’s health business in Brazil, that means the most salient problems to address are access to contraception, sexual health, and, increasingly, fertility, rather than aging or menopause.
Von Staa Toledo was joined by Roberta Sotomaior, the cofounder of Bloom Care, a health tech platform for women and families; Izabel Gallera, a partner at the early-stage VC firm Canary; and Fabiana Barruffini, a partner at IKJ Capital. Altogether, their insights—and Gan’s—taught us more about what it takes to build a business in Latin America today.
Emma Hinchliffe
[email protected]
@_emmahinchliffe
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ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Leave it.New York Times reporter Kate Conger reported (via her Twitter feed) that Twitter, under Elon Musk, is cutting its parental leave policy from 20 weeks to two weeks plus whatever is legally mandated in an employee's location. Glamour
- Queen Camilla. The coronation of King Charles III this weekend saw Camilla given the title of Queen—a drastic change from the days when she was denied a church wedding because of her divorce. First Lady Jill Biden represented the U.S. At the ceremony. Washington Post
- Meet Liz? A controversial new profile of Elizabeth Holmes spends time with the convicted Theranos founder before she is expected to report to prison. Now going by Liz, Holmes attempts to drum up sympathy as she prepares to part from her new baby to serve her prison sentence. New York Times
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Dr. Rochelle Walensky will step down as head of the Centers for Disease Control.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- Party time. Email is out, and texting is in. The app Partiful is an increasingly popular way to organize events, all via text message rather than email. Cofounder Shreya Murthy says most of the app's users are 20- and 30-somethings, but it's gaining adoption among other kinds of users too. Wall Street Journal
- Added benefit. Amid a labor shortage in the U.K., more companies are adding menopause and miscarriage leave as benefits to attract workers. British job postings that mention leave for pregnancy loss skyrocketed 3,000% between March of 2022 and that month this year. Bloomberg
- Sister senators. Six "sister senators" of the South Carolina State Senate are working together to block the state's GOP-controlled legislature from passing an even more extreme abortion ban, outlawing the termination of a pregnancy beginning at conception. Three of the six senators are Republicans. New York Times
ON MY RADAR
An apology for saying sorry New York Times
In the post-Roe era, letting pregnant patients get sicker by design The New Yorker
Abortion creates futures Romper
PARTING WORDS
"I'm going to appreciate having her in my life so much more than I would have before this journey."
—Television host Maria Menounos on welcoming a new baby via surrogate after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She's now cancer-free.
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