Episode 22: The Things That Don’t Exist Until You Make Them

There is a specific kind of thrill that almost nobody gets to feel. Luis Martinez has felt it. It is the moment you make a molecule that has never existed anywhere in the universe, and you realize you are the first and only reason it is now real. “It was like this did not exist until I physically made it,” he told me. That sentence is the whole man. Luis is a first-generation college student who went from Trinity to a PhD in organic chemistry at Harvard, held patents, worked at Scripps, taught, consulted, and eventually became an investor at Capital Factory. On paper it looks like a series of career changes. Listen to him talk and you realize it was one continuous act the entire time: making things that did not exist before, and owning what happened next. Chemistry was never just technical Most people file organic chemistry under “hard science” and move on. Luis files it under creative work. He describes it the way a sculptor describes stone. There are rules, there are materials, there is a long tradition you are working inside of, and within all of that constraint you are still making something new. The lab coat fools people. What is actually happening is invention. That reframe matters, because it explains why the jump to startups was not a jump at all. A founder works exactly the same way. Rules, materials, tradition, and the stubborn attempt to bring something new into a world that did not ask for it yet. The flask he dropped My favorite story in this episode is a small one. As an undergraduate, Luis made a brand new molecule, and then he dropped the flask. Gone. Which meant he had to make it again. I love it because it is the entire founder experience compressed into one moment. You do the impossible thing, you lose it, and the only option is to go back to the bench and do the impossible thing again. Nobody claps. You just start over, because the work is the point. The only one in the room We did not skip the harder part. Luis talked honestly about what it felt like to rarely see a Hispanic surname in the rooms he was walking into, graduate school, academia, consulting, venture. The isolation was real at every stage. He did not tell that story for sympathy. He told it the way someone tells you about terrain they crossed so you know it can be crossed. For every scientist and every Latino founder who has been the only one in the room, that honesty is worth the listen by itself. “It isn’t that I lost, it’s that I gained” When Luis left chemistry, the easy narrative would be loss. He spent years becoming world-class at one thing and then walked away from it. He refuses that framing completely. “It isn’t that I lost, it’s that I gained,” he said. Every skill carried forward. The patenting and tech transfer, the teaching, the consulting, the discipline of designing an experiment and reading the result honestly. All of it turned out to be exactly what venture diligence requires. He did not abandon the scientist. He gave the scientist a bigger lab. Science project or business This is the line every technical founder needs burned into their memory, and Luis says it plainly. A promising scientific idea is not automatically a company. Both science and startups run on experiments that might work or might fail. But a founder has to do something a researcher never has to do: connect the work to a customer, a market, and a model that pays for itself. The experiment can succeed brilliantly in the lab and still be a science project, not a business. Knowing the difference is most of the job. Build boldly Luis has helped more than 200 founders over the years, not through one program but through decades of mentoring students, early founders, and portfolio companies. Ask him what he loves and he does not say deals. He says teaching. Helping a founder reflect on what they just learned, name the next experiment, and take the next step. His parting charge was simple. “We need more founders building boldly.” At any scale, from any background, out of any discipline. Especially the people who are used to being the only one in the room. If you have ever wondered whether your training in one world could matter in another, this conversation is your answer. Listen to the full episode of The Corridor with Dr. Luis Martinez. *Seguimos.* 🇵🇷 Angel León, Coquí Ventures *Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Latino founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.* Get full access to Coquí Notes at coquinotes.substack.com/subscribe