Pod Insights a16z Podcast Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? About this episode Latin America is emerging as a tech powerhouse, but it's not a one-size-fits-all market.
In this episode, we explore why what works in Argentina won’t necessarily fly in Brazil or Mexico, and how companies are adapting to these unique regional dynamics. Join Dileep Thazhmon, Cofounder and CEO of Jeeves; Santiago Suarez, Cofounder and CEO of Addi; Gabriel Vasquez, a16z investment partner; and Angela Strange, a16z General Partner, as they discuss the future of fintech in LatAm and the unique approach required to succeed in this diverse market.
Whether you're interested in the nuances of product development, the complexities of scaling across diverse markets, or the future of fintech in Latin America, this episode offers perspectives from industry leaders deeply invested in the region's tech ecosystem who believe the next big tech giants might just come from Latin America.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Angela Strange? There was 80% smartphone penetration, I think about 20% credit card penetration.
0:05 Speaker 01 What works in Argentina doesn't work in Brazil, doesn't work globally, doesn't work in Mexico.
0:09 Speaker 02 Today, companies go global increasingly fast from day one, but banking is still country and currency specific.
0:16 Speaker 03 We're going to see the most valuable companies in the region being technology companies.
0:21 Speaker 02 There's no way to build in Brazil unless you're in Brazil.
0:25 Speaker 01 It requires a totally different mindset when it comes to product development.
0:30 Steph Smith? Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the A16Z podcast. Now, if you've been listening over the last few weeks, hopefully you followed our Olympic series. So far, you've learned how Olympian Ali Weisman has traversed the transition from gymnast to investor, but also you've explored how few technologies actually move the needle in athletics, and also we've dissected the forces behind the ongoing competition for talent across both France and the UK. Now, if you've missed those episodes, of course, be sure to go back and give them a listen. But today, we cap off the series by turning our attention to Latin America. We'll explore why the region has long been overlooked, despite a highly proficient, technical savvy, internet-penetrated population, plus the role
1:10 Steph Smith? regulation has played as a tailwind, the nuances of recruiting in the region, and much more. Our guests today are all investing in Latin America in their own way. First up, Delip Thasman, founder and CEO of Jeeves, a financial platform for global startups which operates in over 20 countries, which has recently expanded its presence in Latin America. Next, we have Santiago Suarez, the co-founder and CEO of Addi, a Colombian buy-now-pay-later fintech with over 2 million clients. We also have Gabriel Vasquez, investment partner at A16Z, where he's focused on enterprise and fintech investments, of course, in Latin America. And this conversation was moderated by A16Z general partner Angela Strange, who, of course, has also long invested in the region.
1:56 Steph Smith? All right, let's kick things off with Santiago, or Santi, who reflects on the opportunity that drove him back to Colombia, where he's originally from, after years of working in financial services in the United States.
2:11 Steph Smith? As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com/disclosures.
2:42 Speaker 01 There's a sense of duty. You know, I'm Colombian. I've had the opportunity to see many incredible things in the US, well-run companies, JP Morgan, McKinsey, some fun startup experiences. So there was a little bit of being able to go back home and contribute to the local ecosystem that I think inspired me. And then the other thing you realize is that Latin America is not China. So I'm not going to be sitting here and be like, oh, it's the new China. But it was so overlooked. You had tens of millions of people in a single country. And everyone just thought it was kind of flyover country for technology development. And then also realizing that you had an English proficient, technically sophisticated population, both on the consumer side, but also frankly on the,
3:26 Speaker 01 call it, supply of talent side, that then led me to say that I should probably move back and see what we could make happen. And in hindsight, it's always easy to see like, oh, we had a master plan. There was a vague thought, and I wouldn't call it a master plan, but enough of an intuition that there was a big thing going. That's when I needed to get myself on a plane and move back to Colombia.
3:49 Angela Strange? Yeah, I think one of the stats that really struck me back when you started Adi was there was 80% smartphone penetration. I think about 20% credit card penetration. So just a real opportunity to bring what is fundamental access to being able to run small businesses, to run commerce to the country. So Dilip, you approached Latin America from a different perspective. Like Jeeves was started right off the bat with a very global ambition. But then Latam quickly became one of your biggest markets. And I think interesting on the Jeeves website, it says Latin America is entering the golden age for tech.
4:24 Speaker 02 Sure. So we're basically building a global business bank. And the idea is that today, companies go global increasingly fast from day one, but banking is still country and currency specific. So we provide corporate cards, payments, deposits, et cetera, for business banking accounts. So when we look at a country or region to start in, there's usually about two or three things we look at. One, is it a region that's opening up to fintech? I think one of the things that's most exciting about Latin America was that there's a regulatory push to be more open towards fintech. I mean, you look at TICs in Brazil, it's just amazing what's been done in about three, four years. And so that's a pretty good indicator that you can build what I call banking 2.0 or 3.0 on top of what's already in market. So that's the first one.
5:07 Speaker 02 The second one, which I keep saying, a company like Jeeves couldn't have been built really five, six years ago because there was infrastructure components like open banking that wasn't around five, six years ago. And again, if you look at Latam, if you look at Mexico, you look at Brazil, that's at a level that's actually more sophisticated than a lot of other countries, including some parts of the US. And so that was very exciting. And then the third one, which was very, very obvious, was where's the flow of capital going? And that also correlated with Latam. And so for us, our first launch market was Mexico. Till today, it's our biggest market and it's also where we test any product that we launch. And so it made it very, very simple for us that Brazil would follow Mexico, but Mexico was the origination point. And the gap, I think, going back to what Sanki was talking about, was very, very clear.
5:52 Speaker 02 You'd seen a version of what we're building in the US. It hadn't really scaled internationally. And so we looked at this from a perspective of if you were building a global business bank, what are the regions you touch? Latam was always going to be the core of where that would sit. And then two, does it have the infrastructure that we need to be successful, which it does.
6:11 Angela Strange? That's a good tee up for talking about the region overall. So Gabe, we've been investing in Latam for probably more than five years now. And I think a lot of investors actually have gotten excited about Latam. So the secret is out. I think one of the arguments in the early days was, well, there's lots of opportunities to invest in companies closer to us, which obviously we do. What drove the interest in the region back when it was a little bit left obvious?
6:34 Speaker 03 Super excited to talk about Latam, something that I'm incredibly passionate about. So to your point, I think this is a question that companies like Nuven got a lot when people were initially analyzing the opportunities, especially at the early stages. Nuven is now a 55 billion market cap public company. And when you think about the winners in the region, you also have other players like MercadoLibre that came before, but as of last week, actually became the most valuable company in Latin America, finally surpassing Petrobras. And I think that that's a statement of the opportunity in Latin America, that eventually we're going to see the most valuable companies in the region being technology companies. We have examples of successful companies like Stone, XP, the local D-Techs, that all
7:18 Speaker 03 of them have IPO and are in the public markets right now. And that leads to the second point that is actually quite exciting, which is you have all this talent kind of being nurtured that had experience at operating in a successful technology companies in the region and now want to build their second or third company. And I'll say that the last point is there's a lot of opportunities when it comes to building in Latin America that is slightly different from countries like the United States, where in Latin America, there's opportunity to build super apps. The example that I usually like to use for this is a company called Paxaguro, based out of Brazil. This company actually is a public company that started as a merchant acquired for micro merchants in Brazil.
8:01 Speaker 03 Then they realized that a lot of the customers that they serve, they didn't have bank accounts. So they created a bank that served these micro merchants. Then they realized that a lot of the consumers that went and buy with products from these micro merchants didn't want to transact online, so they built a marketplace on top of it. And they realized that these consumers also didn't have a bank account, so they eventually developed like a consumer bank. This company basically created four different companies within one. And I think that that speaks of the opportunity of Latin America. We've seen companies like Rappi launching a bank or companies like Newbag now that have actually launched a marketplace as well.
8:38 Angela Strange? Let's stick on the talent point for a bit, which I think is the opportunity and challenge in every single market. Santi, you've built a world-class talent team based in Colombia, but you've also recruited global employees. What have been the things that have been advantageous have been in Colombia and what have been maybe some of the challenges?
8:54 Speaker 01 Things that are advantageous have been in Colombia. As a Colombian, you get to know the talent a little bit better. So you have that edge that you wouldn't have otherwise. It's a small country, certainly compared to Mexico or Brazil. So it also allows you to plug into the deep talent pools very quickly. And probably the most obvious one is you're an employer of choice. So we offer equity to every single one of our colleagues, from the call center operators to starting sales folks all the way up to senior folks. That really allows you to get like your pick of the litter when it comes to talent. The challenging part is you don't have any executive experience. And at some point, you need to balance this. So what has worked for us is kind of get the raw material here because you have very
9:38 Speaker 01 talented people and then sprinkle it with extremely competent leadership. And by the way, some of these local folks eventually become leaders. We're seeing some of them actually be transformation leaders at our company. But then that's because you pair them with product leaders with experience at a firm, advise, Capital One. So for us, that has been the recipe for success. And I think you have to be creative when you're in Latin America. So for example, our remote company in large part, so we can attract these key folks in key positions. But that has worked really well. Get the raw talent, which there's a lot, and then pair them with the right seasoned leadership to see the magic happen.
10:18 Angela Strange? Would you say a little to Gabe's point, five years ago, maybe the scaled LatAm companies didn't have as many seasoned execs. But now those seasoned executives are starting to come out of some of the large multimillion dollar exits in Latin America, so you don't necessarily have to go to the US.
10:36 Speaker 01 I think so, though I would say that's still very much in the early beginnings, early beginnings, in part because. I think it's a weird ecosystem. MercadoLib is a almost thirty year old company. So we have some great ex-Melli folks, but when they joined Meli, Meli was a twenty year old company. And then it's just interesting because I think some of the reference cases of Latam, Meli, Nu and Rappi, each has a very distinct way in which they build the culture. So you need to be very mindful of that because you get a lot more, let's say, executive variety than in the US. I think if you went to a B two B SaaS company in the US and you said,
11:17 Speaker 01 I want the VP of Product Marketing, Sirius C, you're going to get the same person. I know exactly what you're getting and you know exactly what you're not getting. I think if you get the VP of Product Marketing at Meli, at Rappi and at Nu, you're going to get three very different cats, none of whom may be the person you're looking for, because they're very unsympathetic culture. So I think you just have to be very aware of that, that you don't yet have this kind of standard. In part because the regions are varied, right? So what works in Argentina doesn't work in Brazil, doesn't work globally, doesn't work in Mexico.
11:46 Angela Strange? Makes a ton of sense. So delete, maybe if Sanji's built in Colombia, you've built primarily in Mexico, Brazil, and obviously other global regions. When you talk about this experience of scaling up in two countries that are in the same continent, but very different beyond that.
12:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, so the way our model works is we break up the functions depending on what touches the customer directly. And so usually the first hire in any region is a general manager and they tend to be fully local. I think there's no way to build in Brazil unless you're in Brazil. There's no way to really build in Colombia or Mexico unless you're in Colombia or Mexico. So that model has worked fairly well so far where anything that's customer facing is fully local. And then we build the product engineering, finance, et cetera centrally. What's changing now is as we get more into scale, we're actually starting to move some of the product components also locally. And that is a little bit different from how it was in the beginning. And by the way, we learned this also the hard way where you can sell,
12:42 Speaker 02 but then if you need to collect and you call them from Texas or Brazil, they're like, yeah, I'm not picking up your phone call. You have to be local, you have to be on the ground, you have to be collecting there as well. So anything touching the customer has to be fully local to that region. What we're learning now, and we've been in market now for about three years, is that even the product side at scale has very specific nuances that need local knowledge. And I think to the point Gabe was making, now what's interesting is you have Folks that have seen what good looks like, they've been at New, they've been at Mercado, they know a version of what this looks like. That's been really, really useful that we didn't have, honestly, even five, six years ago, where you can hire someone that's built the product. Now, leadership, I think, I kind of agree, like, you have to find the right person for the right culture fit.
13:26 Speaker 02 And we have had some success, we've had some areas where we're still working through. But you can find what I call kind of intermediate managers that are, I think, fairly consistent for the region, they know what payments looks like, they've seen it at scale, they've seen it at a public LatAm company, and that's been very, very helpful for us.
13:42 Angela Strange? You operate in three, four, five, maybe, languages? How do you manage to get smooth communication across the country? Do you hire necessarily speaking more than one or using AI translation tools?
13:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's a good question because it really affects culture. And so, one of the things that we try to do is we have people that obviously locally are fully fluent in the local language, but you have to be able to communicate in English as well, because you do have counterparts in UK, you do have counterparts in US, in Canada, etc. But everything that we do in region tends to be local, and it even took us about two years just to get the localized experience on the product.
14:21 Angela Strange? Sandy, how are you balancing Spanish and English and recruiting employees across the country who are very talented but might not speak English, which then restrains the recruiting pool for sure?
14:32 Speaker 01 We've always been extremely religious about the English-speaking requirement. We are now testing a couple of instances on relaxing it and using AI to figure this out. I agree with you, I agree with the lead, the biggest challenge here is culture. But we're actually even erring on the other side. At this point, we've actually gone almost all native, so now you need CEO approval to hire anyone that's not in Colombia. We're a single-country focus, you know, we were gonna go deep here. And what we realized is that there are certain positions for which the expertise outweighs the local knowledge, most famous to credit, but pretty much everywhere else.
15:13 Speaker 01 You want the person around, you want them using your product on any given day, you want them getting rejected, you want their app crashing, you want all of these things that are extremely difficult to achieve if you're not on the ground. And also, we now serve a broader swath of the Colombian population, including a bunch of people who don't speak English. So culturally, even just having people who speak English at your company, they may as well be from a different country, right? You just have a bunch of people out in the Presidio in San Francisco, building product for the entire United States with no real sense of what's happening and choose your favorite Midwestern state. So that's also a lesson we have recently learned.
15:51 Angela Strange? Watch out for those Presidio product managers. Agreed. All right. I want to zoom out a little bit. You guys are clearly building in financial services. I think that there is a specific opportunity for financial services in the region. And we even wrote a post together entitled for Brazil, which was that regulation is a tailwind. There are two words that you never hear in the same sentence in general, but in Latin America, you sort of do. So maybe Gabe outlined what's going on in the region there that creates a particularly interesting opportunity.
16:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, so I think that there's three main areas. The first one, I think, is less specific to the region, but more specific that fintech is a de-co local business. So there's a lot of local regulation that plays an important role when it comes to operating in different countries. There's domestic infrastructure that when you're thinking about building a business in Brazil or Mexico, you kind of have to rely on. And there's also cultural nuances. Brazil completely different from the rest of Latin America. And even Mexico is completely different from South America, even though all the countries speak Spanish except for Brazil. Brazil has actually been quite advanced. The central bank has done a great job basically disrupting the duopoly between the merchant acquirers that enable players like Nuvin to come in
17:07 Speaker 03 and take advantage of that. And then the rise of payment acquirers like Stone. And then they created open finance and from there they started the instant payment solution that now is the main payment method in Brazil called PIGS. One of the aspects is actually quite exciting as well is the smartphone penetration is quite high in the region, so the numbers vary between seventy-five and eighty percent. But when you look at the credit card penetration or even the bank population in countries like Mexico, it goes around fifty percent, which is quite low when you compare it to countries like Brazil where it's around eighty-five percent. So there's a lot of opportunities still. They basically can have a bank in their pocket. And when it comes to the size of the market, Latin America is, you know, there's six hundred
17:51 Speaker 03 fifty million people living in the region. The GDP per capita is higher, especially when you compare it to other emerging markets like India. So I think that those are the three main reasons why Latin America has become such an important hub for fintech innovation.
18:07 Angela Strange? So great from a thesis point of view. We have two people that are actually going through it, starting maybe with you, Santi, who've recently spent a lot of time with the Colombian banking regulators. Is the practicality the same as investors might perceive and what advice might you have to other entrepreneurs in the region?
18:24 Speaker 01 I would say, no, the practicality is not always the same thing as the investors might see for many reasons, obviously, and not least of which, this is still an emerging market and I think when you do venture investing, you're taking two types of risk. You're taking venture risk and you're taking emerging markets risk. But that being said, I think the situation in Colombia is extremely pragmatic, right? You've got a regulator who's issued licenses, you've got a regulator who's pushing for financial inclusion, you've got a central bank that's driving instantaneous payments adoption, following very much the playbook of Brazil. So if you're sitting here now versus ten years ago, I mean, when we started, I think they hadn't issued a single de novo banking license in God knows, like a decade.
19:09 Speaker 01 And now they issue three or four a year. Similarly with the payment side, right? Like the payment system in Colombia is still a bit of a mess, but it's much less of a mess than it was. And we're on track to launching in the next eighteen months or so. So you do see a very pragmatic regulator. And honestly, in that case, they're differentiated from the US even, which is a bit more of a unknown unknown, right? You just don't know what regulator the agenda is. You have the Fed, you have the FDC, the CFPB, the SEC. And you can't quite figure out what the boundaries are. What I can tell about LATAM, it's not like in the US where the boundaries are X, but then you've got to like interpret the key leaves or what actually X means. Here it's pretty well defined.
19:52 Speaker 01 So if you have the patience for dealing with the emerging markets environment, you have the patience of dealing with the natural challenges that come from being outside the US, it can be a very attractive hunting ground and a very attractive place to build a company.
20:05 Speaker 02 I think just touching on this point, actually, one of our big hires last year was getting the chief compliance officer from Arqueta, it's a public company, to join us. And a big reason is exactly this, which is as we scaled from a smaller company moving really fast to a bigger company. I think the biggest thing that we started noticing was that we were much more on the radar for folks locally. And so Brazil, so far, it's smaller for us as an operation compared to Mexico. With Mexico, we have invested quite substantially, even from a license perspective, but also from, let's call it light lobbying in terms of companies that we work within, such as external law firms, right? And so it's come back once or twice where we've had, let's just call it, issues that we had to work through in Mexico.
20:48 Speaker 02 And the one learning for me is as we scale and as we get bigger, whenever you think you need to do it, you probably should have done it six months before that.
20:55 Angela Strange? I think what you're both hitting on is it's still an onerous regulatory process. But unlike in the US and other regions, is at least a relatively clear onerous regulatory process, such that if you put together a very strong team, like you still need to recruit A-plus compliance people. They still need to do a lot of work to get it together. But the governments do seem much more motivated to create competition in their regions. And in particular, I think one of the stats often quoted is banks and. Brazil was a little bit different with new bank, but the banks in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, serve the top 20% of the population and the rest are very starved for good financial services. And one of the ways to solve that
21:39 Angela Strange? is to allow de novo licenses for new companies tend to the regions and provide more innovative products.
21:45 Speaker 02 They want to try to work with new entrants, whereas in the US it isn't always like that. And I'm always surprised, in a good way, in terms of the companies that we get to serve in Mexico, Brazil, et cetera. And it goes back to the same point, which is most of the options are older banks. When we were in Brazil, we had a customer that was coming to us and being like, hey, the fact that we have virtual cards, this is great. And for us, that's almost table stakes. Like, we don't even sell that because we expect that to be just an offering in market. And so that's what I keep getting reminded about, which is it's still a huge monopoly. And I think regulators do see that in a way that they don't in the US.
22:21 Angela Strange? Santi, you touched on this. I think one of the advantages of building in Colombia is you do become the employer of choice. There's not 50 oddy competitors that employees are choosing between. But then you do run into different types of challenges.
22:35 Speaker 01 The most pressing one is the mental model of most investors around TAM remains very much what it should be for about 95% of companies. I think when you combine retail and financial services, the way you think about TAM is probably a little bit different. I mean, I will tell you, even I have learned, if I look at the performance of our company today versus what we expected out of the Colombian market. And I don't think anyone would have thought we'd be here within five years, right? So I would say the first thing is your understanding of TAM, when you think about Colombia, is just very difficult. And the other piece is your product development approach has to be very different. Because what you lose by not being in the US or in Brazil, you gain by being able to go extremely deep,
23:20 Speaker 01 extremely quickly. But it requires a totally different mindset when it comes to product development. And by the way, paradoxically, the inspirations of choice are not in the US or not in the UK, but are in Central Asia, in Turkey. These are the places where people have also figured out. Small country, deep TAM equals massive successful outcomes. So when people ask us, what are you getting inspired about? We always start with Caspi, it's a $30 billion public company. That is a single country focused in Kazakhstan, GDP, half of Colombia's. So those are some of the things that you've got to start thinking about. And also recognize that even the successful models were built in a different paradigm. So Rappi was built in a zero interest rates paradigm.
24:05 Speaker 01 Nu was built, that almost 12-year-old company, built and raised in a different world. So just knowing all of these things as a founder, our important period of our work, Geo, but certainly when your geography is not Brazil, not Mexico, so to speak.
24:21 Angela Strange? Yeah, no, and hitting on the point that Gabe made also is that the products can encompass so many more, almost mini companies that the results end up being a lot bigger than you might think if you just looked at TAM. Well said. I think one of the powers of Gabe's that you've discovered is the strong need for Latin American companies to move money, both from the US into Latin America, into other corridors that might be a little bit less obvious. But along with that comes with, I think, more than just one country regional challenges, but multi-country regional challenges.
24:59 Speaker 02 So one of the things that's interesting is everything we do is B2B. And there's obviously consumer components. And I would say most fintechs tend to focus on the consumer side, which is massive. But B2B has very different problems that are also very unique to how businesses move money and spend. And so just as an example, we launched the ability to move money out of Mexico, Colombia, Brazil. One of the hardest things is if you move money out of Colombia, you're usually going to get flagged and you're not moving $50 or $100. You're moving $50,000 or $100,000. And so part of where we invest in is how do you have the ability to move that in an efficient way? So that we can actually compete with local offerings in the region, right? And so it's one of those things where you have to invest a lot in compliance. You have to invest a lot in operational efficiencies.
25:44 Speaker 02 But it is fairly untapped because it's so, so hard. I keep saying this, but for me, the difficulty is the defensibility. It's the fact that it is this hard. It's the fact that moving money, especially for B two B is very complex to do, that gives an opportunity to us to kind of succeed in the market. But it takes a lot of work. And what I'm coming back to on the payment side is how do we layer this on top of credit, which is our core offering, so that the platform becomes much more sticky. And one of the things we have started to see is that retention is actually a lot higher if a customer uses us both for cards, which I call kind of like the candy, right? It's credit. We give you the money. Everybody wants that in some sense. But then moving to payments, which is your money, and you're trusting us to move your money, which is a very different kind of
26:26 Speaker 02 go to market sales cycle. But if you can combine the two, kind of like given like a bill.com where you have Dibby, which is the spend management side, and then you have Bill, which is the payment side, it becomes a very, very powerful product. And so we're still, I'd say, in early innings on the payment side, very, very different set of problems than corporate credit. But combining those two, to me, provides much more value to the companies that we work for, especially when you come at it from a B two B angle, which is very different from consumer.
26:52 Angela Strange? Yeah, I think one of the things that you're both hitting on versus in the US, if you're going to build many financial services products or embed many financial services products, there's all of these different, now very modern companies that provide even credit as a service, KYC as a service, lots of data fraud as a service. When you go down to Latam, those, for the most part, don't yet exist. And so you end up having to build a lot of that yourself, which is, I would say, a disadvantage at the start because it takes more time, but then ends up being a significant source of defensibility.
27:26 Speaker 02 And I think one quick way to point this out is when we started, one of the hardest things was how do you actually ship cards? Because people forget the fact that cards actually have to be delivered to different countries, right? And most card operators just deliver in that single country. And so in the US, that's fine. It's a massive single geo with a single currency. You can do that fairly easily. But when you move to Latam and you're like, I need to deliver cards, the provider of the cards don't ship those cards. And so we had to go figure out like an operational way to make that easy and like bolt that on. But there wasn't a provider we could just go to and be like, hey, can you ship this for us to six countries?
27:57 Angela Strange? All right, I want to bring this back around and looking forward to the future. What are you excited about going forward? And what might other investors think about having yet invested in the region?
28:08 Speaker 03 One of the verticals that actually has been quite exciting in Latin America has been e-commerce. You've seen players like MercadoLibre come in, Rappi, iFood in Brazil, and even Calac in Mexico, which is the largest private company now. So I expect that we will continue to see a lot of this companies tackling the e-commerce opportunity as the majority of these people continue to come online. And especially as the majority of the payments go online and it becomes easier to transact. But there's a specific segment too that I think gets let's notice in the region, which is just the SaaS companies. So in Brazil, you have companies like Totos, which is a large public company going after the European space.
28:51 Speaker 03 But also you have companies like AlZero that actually started in Argentina and went global. We've met a bunch of companies that started in Latam. They signed the largest enterprise companies in Latin America. They developed product really, really fast for them. And then they're also very ambitious. And then they're like, okay, we want to expand outside of the region because our customer set is probably not as big in the region. So we're starting to see, we invested in this company called Yuno, which is a payment orchestration company, started in Latin America, specifically Colombia. They expanded to a region very quickly and now they have operations in Europe, in Southeast Asia. So I think that we will continue to see a lot of that. I think the opportunities set when you come to the region are quite different.
29:33 Speaker 03 So what gets developed in Brazil, you know, an ecosystem that the main payment method is PICS. And 85% of the population is banked. And you have regulation that is pro-innovation, it's very different. It's going to create different opportunity sets than Mexico, for example, where half of the population still doesn't have a bank account. The main payment method is cash and regulation has not been a catalyst for innovation.
29:56 Speaker 01 So it will be quite exciting to see how this innovation emerges per country. But I think with AI, we're starting to see a bunch of founders in the space that are taking advantage of these new tools to make their operations either more efficient or lever that to have a better go to market motion or actually increase even the willingness to pay for software, which I think has been one of the main challenges historically in the region.
30:21 Angela Strange? What do you think Silicon Valley could learn from Latam? And what makes you particularly excited about your regions in the next five, 10 years?
30:31 Speaker 01 One is resiliency, right? You and I have a few mutual friends who have been operating in the region for a long time. And they're nothing if not resilient and paranoid. So that resilience and paranoia is something I think comes in handy, especially in the lean years of Silicon Valley, right? So you can always do so much more with so much less. And I think that hustle and that resiliency is something you can definitely count on. And then what gets me excited, I mean, honestly, it goes back to why I moved back here, right? There's just a lot of work to be done. And I like what Gabe said, which is that this idea of whatever's happening in AI and whatever's happening in tooling and ways of company building can be quite transformational
31:13 Speaker 01 for Latin America because in a place which doesn't have a lot of capital, and let's be honest, capital has come back to Latam, but it's not what it used to be. Your ability to leverage AI, leverage no code tools is awesome. You could build companies in different ways than you could even when we built a company. You know, there were a lot of things we had to invest upfront that today I wouldn't have to do if I were building the company from scratch because you can use AI, you can use no code, you can use some companies in the stack, some of these SaaS vendors. So I get excited about that. I get excited about the fact that the job's nowhere near done and the tooling is only getting better.
31:49 Speaker 02 I think two things. So one, what I really enjoy in some senses, the ability to get things done tends to have this spirit of like just moving anything that needs to be moved to get to an outcome. And the second thing is the impact in some sense that we have even as Jeeves, we would get companies that reach out to us and were like, look, before Jeeves came along, like we weren't able to expand. And these are like companies that do can manufacturing. It's not necessarily all sexy tech companies. So its impact is different in a way because there tends to be a monopoly on banking there and actually providing, you know, credit and banking services touches folks in a way that I don't see the same impact in the US. I think those two things for me is very, very exciting and the potential to Santi's point is just getting started.
32:36 Steph Smith? All right. That's all for our Olympic series. Remember, if you missed some of our episodes on the UK or France, or the technology behind the Olympics, or even our episode with Olympian Ali Raisman, make sure to go give those a listen. But if you did like any part of the series, let us know at ratethispodcast.com/a16z, or you can drop us a line at pod pitches at a16z.com. All right, we'll catch you next time.
Previous The SSN Breach: What Now? Next It’s Time to Build in Healthcare Page updated September 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
