Moneda Moves

About Moneda Moves

Telling stories about Latinos leading in business, our relationship with money and contributions to the American economy. ✊🏼✊🏽✊🏾✊🏿

Publisher

Lyanne Alfaro

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

24 Apr 2020

Latest episode

14 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

1 of 78 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   14 Oct 2026

   Building Trust Before the Proof Exists with Manuela Zoninsein, CEO and Co-founder of Kadeya

   This is the final episode of our Hispanic Heritage Month season of Moneda Moves. All month, we’ve been asking one question: who gets trusted in the U.S. economy right now, and how is that trust built? We’re closing the season with Manuela Zoninsein, a founder who won over investors, employers and the U.S. Air Force before her product had commercial proof. Manuela is the CEO and cofounder of Kadeya, a network of low-waste, high-margin micro bottling plants. Each station is a bottling plant in a box the size of a vending machine. It fills a stainless steel bottle with your drink in seconds, then washes and sanitizes the bottle when you bring it back. She calls it Divvy bikes for bottles. Kadeya has raised more than $10 million, including over $1.3 million in Air Force research grants. This year, the company is deploying its first commercial stations. Kadeya is her third company. She launched an agritech data service in China that was acquired by a partner. She built another in Brazil, funded by the Brazilian government, that grew into the country’s third-largest online marketplace for smallholder farmers. She worked in international business development at Palantir and has backed more than 30 women-led climate startups as an angel investor. Before any of that, she spent nearly a decade in China as a correspondent covering climate and infrastructure for Newsweek and Engineering News-Record. Most recently, she spoke on the TEDx Chicago stage. She’s a proud Brazilian immigrant who moved to the U.S. at seven. She’s the daughter of a Marxist economist and a feminist anthropologist, and she speaks Mandarin, Spanish and Portuguese. In this conversation, Manuela shares how growing up in a family of planners and activists taught her to think in systems. She talks about the rock bottom that pushed her into entrepreneurship. She also explains why she built Kadeya around one rule: no single-use containers. She walks us through how she sold the same product to the Air Force under two different administrations by changing the story to fit the audience. She also shares the simplest way she knows to build trust as a founder: tell people what you’re going to do, then go do it. We also get into the gap between the big vision and the day to day. That includes how far this year’s deployment goals have moved, and the decision to expand beyond industrial workplaces into schools, hospitals, hotels, airports and gyms. Then, one last Moneda Moves question for the season: what’s her biggest money lesson? Her parents never talked about money. Today, she asks a lot of questions and runs weekly budget checks at Kadeya. Recorded live in Chicago in partnership with SevenThirty Goods. Thank you for spending this season with us. Follow Kadeya on Instagram: @kadeya.club Follow Moneda Moves on Instagram: @monedamoves Follow your host Lyanne Alfaro on Instagram: @lyannealfaro

2. 

   7 Oct 2026

   How Trust Builds Interdependence with Deepa Iyer, Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives at Building Movement Project

   Moneda Moves is back for Latino Heritage Month. This season asks one question: who gets trusted in the U.S. economy right now, and how is that trust built? All month, we'll be talking with experts in business, politics, ecosystem building and social justice to dig into it. Deepa Iyer is a writer, lawyer and advocate who helps individuals, organizations and networks bring about lasting and effective social change. She's worked in the nonprofit sector for more than two decades. She moved from Kerala, India, to Kentucky when she was 12. After 9/11, she spent 15 years in policy advocacy and coalition building with Asian American, South Asian, Muslim and Arab communities. That work took her through the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, the Asian American Justice Center, South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) and Race Forward. Today she's the Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Building Movement Project, where she leads projects on solidarity and social movements. She created the Social Change Ecosystem Map, a framework of 10 roles people play in movement work. She's written three books. Her first, We Too Sing America, won a 2016 American Book Award. Social Change Now is her guide to the ecosystem map. She also wrote We Are The Builders. Most of our conversation centered on trust. Deepa explained how you build it when the institutions meant to protect you have treated you as a threat. She made the case for interdependence over individualism, and why leaning into it takes trust with community. She broke down how the ask changes depending on the role you play. And she walked me through what repair looks like after trust breaks.

3. 

   30 Sept 2026

   What It Takes To Gain The Trust of Latino Voters Today with Maria Teresa Kumar, CEO and President of Voto Latino

   Moneda Moves is back for Latino Heritage Month and this season centers on a guiding question: who gets trusted in the U.S. economy right now and how is that trust built? Throughout the month, we will be speaking with experts across business, politics, ecosystem building and social justice to explore that question more deeply. María Teresa Kumar is an Emmy-nominated MSNBC contributor and founding President and CEO of Voto Latino, who since 2004 has raised over $75 million to build the country's largest Latinx voter registration and advocacy organization, registering more than 600K new voters ahead of 2020, and whose pioneering use of technology, social media and celebrity earned her recognition from Fast Company and Elle. In our Moneda Moves conversation, we speak about how growing up an immigrant shaped her thinking about power and trust, and what makes someone trustworthy in public life. With her experience she is able to identify the intersection between politics and money and where trust is breaking down, and how institutions build credibility with historically excluded communities. This episode was recorded earlier this spring, but especially as we approach midterm elections, it connects civic participation to Latino economic power amid federal policy volatility and what comes next. Tune in to hear how Voto Latino has built trust with Latino voters over the last 20+ years and what's next. Follow Maria Teresa on Instagram: @mariateresakumar (https://www.instagram.com/mariateresakumar/?hl=en#) Follow Moneda Moves on Instagram: @monedamoves (https://www.instagram.com/monedamoves/) Follow your host Lyanne Alfaro on Instagram: @lyannealfaro (https://www.instagram.com/lyannealfaro/?hl=en) Main podcast theme song from Premium Beat.

Inside a recent episode

Business Owners Share Their Experience With Federal Aid During COVID

Published 8 May 2020 · Transcript excerpt

[…] So the idea is that you keep these employees on the payroll so they don't have to go get unemployment to the state and you pay them. But of course, the PPP, it has a lot of rules around forgiveness. So the EIDL businesses will have to pay back the paycheck protection program. The idea is that business owners will use 75 % of the funds from that loan for their employees. And then, you know, at some undetermined later date, that loan will be forgiven, you know, when this pandemic is over and the government can sort of figure out to what degree people kept their employees on and all that. So let's talk timeline. […]

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

17 ratings

Spotify

4.7 / 5

25 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 55 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

61

Social presence

94

YouTube

0

Engagement

77

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Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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