“The best advice I got from my father was a two-part piece of advice. The first was: Work really hard, because that pays off. The second was: Surround yourself with people who are better than you, because that’s the only way you get better.”
An explanation of all that Ebetuel “Beto” Pallares is would fill pages on its own. His cross-sector career spans decades and includes venture capital, strategic advisory work, telecommunications, higher education, and Latino wealth-building. At present, he’s the executive director of the Hispanic Wealth Project and general partner of Audaz Capital.
So what isn’t Beto Pallares? If he can help it, he’s not the smartest person in the room.
“Throughout my schooling, career, and formation as a young executive, entrepreneur, and doctoral student, I always tried to be in the room where I knew—for a fact—that I was not the smartest person. My job was to find smart people and learn from them.”
As an investor, Pallares has operated on a version of the poker-room philosophy that if you can’t spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker. Pallares is no sucker, but he wants to be surrounded by people who have the capacity to make him feel like one.
“If I’m the smartest guy in the room, I’m in the wrong room,” Pallares says. “My job is to find the really smart person and facilitate capital so they can do what they need to do to make an impact.”
When you couple that kind of humility with an admitted hard time turning down opportunities, you get the kind of extensive résumé that has straddled business, academia, and nonprofit work. You also get the kind of uniting personality that drew crowds at AVANCE Global 2026, where Pallares unveiled his new book, Rich or King? An Entrepreneurial Journey Blueprint.
Presenting at AVANCE Global, Pallares says, was a chance to take the next step toward institutionalizing the strides Latinos have fought so hard for in previous decades.
“When you institutionalize something, you give it a home, structure, and an ethos so others who weren’t there at the beginning understand what that institution stands for,” Pallares explains. “When you think about NAREP, the Hispanic Wealth Project, or the many multigenerational businesses that will come because Hispanics are showing up and institutionalizing mechanisms—preserving things, naming buildings—this is why we know what we know from centuries or even millennia ago. Somebody institutionalized it. Somebody wrote it down. Somebody created a building.”
For Pallares, that is what comes next. Representation is critical, but the way to create the kind of lasting change that people look back on decades or centuries later is to institutionalize that representation, not just to make history, but to help write it.
