Lessons From Backing The Best Founders In Fintech | Micky Malka

Micky Malka is the founder of Ribbit Capital and helped create Node, which he describes as the first digital art studio designed for digital artists. He calls himself “an entrepreneur at heart and an investor by design”—a deliberately broad description that allows him to resist labels, which is precisely the point. The one label he wants on his tombstone: “He was a rebel.” In his mid-20s, Malka and his partners put all the proceeds from their first dot-com exit into starting Lemon Bank in Brazil. He says they nearly lost everything when the economy failed to take off. At its peak Lemon Bank operated roughly 7,000 locations and served 50 million customers while targeting Brazil’s large unbanked population. He later sold it to Brazil’s largest bank. Years later, after meeting Walmart CEO Doug McMillon in 2019, Malka proposed that Walmart and Ribbit build a better financial-services business together. That effort became OnePay, which now provides payments, debit, credit and lending products across Walmart’s ecosystem. At Ribbit, decisions are made as a group, no single partner is assigned to a company, and the team shares calendars, inboxes and emails. Malka confirms that Ribbit is his sixth company and says he intends to keep building it indefinitely. As he puts it, “The best entrepreneurs never have to sell their company.” Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/micky-malka Made possible by Ramp: https://ramp.com Deel: https://deel.com/senra AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) Why Micky Malka Refuses to Be Labeled (00:03:00) Writing Your Way to Conviction (00:05:41) Buying Berkshire at 13 and Learning Buffett's Operating System (00:11:48) Token Factories, AI Bankers, and the Future of Money (00:18:38) The Infinite Game: Why It's Better to Be Behind (00:22:09) Gen Z Founders and the Chaordic Company (00:29:00) Why Young Founders Want to Build Atoms, Not Just Bits (00:34:29) Bringing Beauty and Taste Back to Technology (00:36:56) Revolut, Founder DNA, and Earning Deep Trust (00:45:54) Building OnePay With Walmart (00:50:53) From Lemon Bank to OnePay: A 20-Year Idea (00:56:00) Compounding Trust and Protecting Your Reputation (01:00:30) Node and the Rebel Case for Digital Art (01:07:34) What It Means to Live as a Rebel (01:10:50) Why Ribbit Is Built Like a Startup (01:14:41) Charlie Munger and the Power of Time Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Senra?

  Thanks for doing this, Mickey.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  David, it's a pleasure to be here with you.

• 0:05David Senra?

  There's so many times in our previous conversations where I'm listening to you speak and I'm like, shit, Mickey really does think and act a lot, very similar to like a lot of history, great entrepreneurs that I read all these biographies about for Founders Podcast. And one thing that I think you have in common with them and that you said before to me is that you hate being labeled. Can you say more about that?

• 0:25Speaker 01

  I think it's a way of always growing up in Venezuela and all my life, you never had people being labeled. I never learned what that was about. And every time somebody tried to put me on a label, I fought really hard to get out of it. From, hey, are you tall, so you must be playing good at basketball? And my first answer is no, I suck at basketball. Just trying to get myself out of any particular label, all the way to, are you an investor? Are you an entrepreneur? And so what about if I'm both? What about if I'm not any? Why do I need a label? And the more you walk through life, allowing things to have label, the more difficult life is because then you cannot see through it. You just see what

• 1:09Speaker 01

  you've been told to see. So I think it's part of my rebel cause to never accept labels.

• 1:15David Senra?

  Yeah, I think if you're labeled, it means you're kind of conforming to like an existing mold. And I think the great founders, they're inherently non-conformist.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Yes. And you have to be non-conformist because the world can always be better. So why accept whatever is there today?

• 1:29David Senra?

  So when you just said, hey, are you an entrepreneur? Are you an investor? Maybe I'm both, maybe I'm neither. Like today, how do you, how do you view yourself?

• 1:36Speaker 01

  So I describe myself as an entrepreneur at heart and investor by design. Such a general line that allows me to do anything, right? Some days I can wake up and be an entrepreneur. Some days I can be an investor. Some days I can be both. Some days I can be something completely different. But at heart means that it comes from a place from inside, that if I change my heart, I can just change it. And by design means that if I learn and I keep learning how to do something, I can only get better at it. So I just allow myself to keep learning.

• 2:04David Senra?

  So there's really no, like you are completely fluid. You don't really put a like a label on yourself.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Correct. I don't. I try and I avoid it. The only label I wanna, I wanna get in life is that people say, I'm a great friend, I'm a great partner, and I'm a good father. And if I can get that label, that label I would love to have. The other ones, I don't care.

• 2:27David Senra?

  Yeah, I'm always interested in how people think about like their own perception of their work because I just had this great conversation with Rick Rubin. And I had to like interrupt him one time because he's like, yeah, I kind of think of myself as a researcher. And I'm like, what? Because you know, people think music producer, and now he's a podcaster, and you know, he's a consigliere, he's like some of the top artists in the world. And he's just like, I'm all day, I'm just like finding what I'm intensely curious about and just researching that as far as I can.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  And I think that's what it takes. And that's what entrepreneurs do every day. And that's what a great investor does every day. But you don't get labeled like that. But yes, I would agree with you.

• 3:00David Senra?

  Question. I went to your website. I've read a bunch of these like, what do you call them? They're not even manifestos. What are they, essays?

• 3:07Speaker 01

  They're essays.

• 3:08David Senra?

  Okay, so I'm very curious. You've only done a handful.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:11David Senra?

  I'm very curious like how your writing shapes not only your thinking, but also what you want to build through Ribbit.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Writing is everything. Because we can sit here and talk about ideas for hours, but if you're not willing to put them in writing, you will never learn what truly they are, how deep they are. And what I find is typically those essays that you read, they start by being probably 20 pages long. But I can actually get a napkin and explain to you each one in a napkin. And if I can do that, if anybody can explain anything complex to you in a napkin, it means that they have studied enough that they know how to articulate it. So what we do there is we start by writing our essays. And our essays, what they are allowing us to do is to not conform to what the world thinks today. It's to allow us

• 4:04Speaker 01

  to confront to what the world looks like in 10 years, 15 years. Just imagine and let it, let it flow, let it go, let that energy get out there, let that energy be taken from our brains and our Q and As and our diligence and our calls. Just put it out there and see what happens.

• 4:23David Senra?

  Why do you think that's beneficial?

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Because it gives you conviction. If you cannot have conviction, then you're gonna be going in mood swings with the markets, up and down. If something changes, you gotta be able. The only way to really have a joyful investment life or life in general is to try to play this very long infinite game. And the only way to do that well is you have to, you need conviction in whatever you do. You gotta be willing to be wrong for a long time. But if I write it, and we put it in writing, and we share it with the world, and we get feedback, it allows us to make sure that the compass is in the right direction.

• 5:02David Senra?

  How long did it take to write?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Some of them can take us a year. Some of them can take us four, five months. But the whole process to get a thesis that we like, sit down, think about it, articulate it, test it, share it, come back, work it, probably like a year, year and a half.

• 5:19David Senra?

  I know you're a fan of Buffett. You've been a shareholder for?

• 5:22Speaker 01

  All my life.

• 5:23David Senra?

  Yeah, like?

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Since I was 13.

• 5:25David Senra?

  That's crazy. I saw one of your tweets, I think it was from like 2015, and he was like, I think you were holding for like 25 years or something like that at that point. So even more now. And I know you write all his shareholder letters, which I'm a huge fan of. Did that influence your decision to start writing these essays?

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Completely. So I bought my first share of Berkshire when I was 13 years old in Venezuela. It was November of 1987.

• 5:49David Senra?

  How?

• 5:50Speaker 01

  It was my?

• 5:52David Senra?

  Why would a 13 year old be interested in Berkshire?

• 5:54Speaker 01

  I don't know. I had read a few articles in Fortune magazine about him, about American Express, about Coca-Cola, about a certain brands. And I loved the brands he had in his portfolio. I didn't know anything about float or insurance. I was not very familiar with that line of the business.

• 6:11David Senra?

  I would hope not at 13.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  And back then, what he used to say was, buy it and get it shipped mail to you in physical form. Don't leave it in a broker house so people can have margin against it. And there I was, I was 13, I had had my bar mitzvah in November of 87. The crash had happened a month before, the October 87 crash. Stock went down a lot. And I didn't collect enough money to buy one share. So I asked my grandfather for a loan, asked for a loan, which he charged me interest as a way to teach me, and bought one share. And had it mailed, in the mail, it showed up in Venezuela. Luckily, I don't know how I didn't lose it. And so since then, every year I got the annual letters by mail.

• 6:57David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  And I will read them, and I will highlight them. And then I will go and learn. That made me have to buy the little book from the Wall Street Journal called Understanding Money and Markets, because there were terms I didn't understand in the letter. And my self-learning came from doing all of that since I was 13.

• 7:12David Senra?

  Imagine what a 13 year old kid could do now with AI. Like if he wanted to, he or she wanted to go through Buffett's letters, and then now it's just this like thought partner and companion compared to you having to buy a book and look at the definition of it.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  It's insane. Like I was thinking about it, and I was saying, if I were to do it again at 13 now, with all of this, I will go to AI and tell them, write, do me, take those letters, find me the Buffett partnership letters from before, which are very hard to find, but you can find them. Read them, analyze them, come back to me, give me the, like, it will be insane what you can do. Now, I think you will lose a little bit of the nuance, because part of it, if you read them carefully enough, and you've done it, you know that there's the pattern repeats. And what you learn from it is not the decisions he makes, it's how in any environment, he repeats the same pattern of decision-making process. And that's the most important thing that you get from reading. I don't know if AI can give you that.

• 8:07David Senra?

  Wait, say more about that.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  So it doesn't matter if you were in the 1970s, when there was a little bit of inflation or high inflation in America compared to standards. And he talked there about how he treated float and how float of insurance worked, or in the era of zero interest rates on, on, and then how he talked about float and the cost of float. It didn't matter what was the macroeconomic conditions of the world or the macroeconomic conditions of the interest rates. He used the same pattern every single time to define how to think about money.

• 8:40David Senra?

  Why do you think that's so special, that he used the same pattern?

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Because I think it's the discipline that he built. He just did find, was amazing at taking all the noise away, canceling noise, and focusing on the three things that matter the most. And that only you can do if you study enough. What I learned, and I went to the annual meetings for a number of years, and I got to meet him and hang out with him afterwards and all of that for a number of years.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  To me, going there was not learning anything new. It was just seeing how he applied those principles to the new economic conditions that every year were around.

• 9:13David Senra?

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• 9:56David Senra?

  you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp and you should too. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time, save money and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. This is really special to me right now because, have you spent any time with Daniel Ek in person?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  No.

• 10:22David Senra?

  Okay. He's one of the wisest people I know. And I just did that right, like a couple of days after I filmed that episode with Rick Rubin. Who, again, like I've been making episodes on Rick Rubin forever. Like I grew up loving hip hop, so he found a Def Jam in his dorm room, which is one of the most iconic hip hop record labels. And so like, you know, for probably a decade and a half, I was a fan of Rick Rubin from afar before I got to meet him. And then I had like, probably, I don't know, a couple of days, maybe a week later, I was having a drink with Daniel. And he goes, how was the, you know, how was it hanging out with Rick? And I was just like, what was fascinating to me is just like, the aura is still there. But if you actually analyze Rick and his career, Rick Rubin and his career, it's just like, he had like, basically, when he was 19,

• 11:06David Senra?

  when he started Def Jam, and now I think he's 63, he had like four ideas. And these ideas are not fucking complicated. It's like the adherence to the love of simplicity, reduction instead of production, always working with the very best people you possibly can, building the product for yourself first. He's just making, literally, he is the patient zero.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:26David Senra?

  I'm just building stuff that I want to see. And I was like, yeah, and that's it. And I was like, it's remarkable that those are like the components of that. And I was like, it doesn't even seem that special because they're just so simple ideas. It's like, yeah, but who adheres to the same four ideas for 40 years?

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:40David Senra?

  I was like, shit, that is what's special. It's very similar to what you just said about Buffett.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  That's what's special.

• 11:44David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  And that's why their writing is special for us. You have to adhere to that.

• 11:48David Senra?

  So do you want to talk about the one that you wrote recently on tokens?

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:55David Senra?

  So I love, I love what you just said, like I can, you read it, it's very long and there's charts and everything else. But you're like, I can distill it down into a napkin. I think compression is understanding. Let's start with like the napkin version of the token essay, and then you can expand on it from there.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  The concept is very simple. The word token means something different to everybody. If we start with Ryan from Visa, the world he defines token is different than the world that Sundar has for token at Google, or the different world that OpenAI has for token or Anthropic. They're all different, but they all mean the same. It's machine readable information. So if you think about the companies, we call them token factories because just think about the industrial revolution example in this token revolution era, where every company needs a supply of tokens of information, money and knowledge. And then they do something and they deliver something new. And you need basically three components to deliver any service, any promise or any product.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  You're going to need to understand identity, you're going to need to understand value, and you need to understand the intelligence that goes into it. And right now, we're in the early innings where we're starting to see first is the frontier labs being the token factories. They're taking all information from the web, from videos, from the world, and they're finding a way to ingest it and create a different set of tokens that somebody else can consume. So they are the raw materials providers to these factories. Now, in the next few years, we're going to see that evolution go deeper and deeper and deeper. And it will be much more personalized and it will be much more complete to verticals that we haven't even touched. Like today, token factories don't touch money that much.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Money's been outside of AI and we're on year four or five. It's funny because money is supposed to be one of the first most fungible things that should be playing the game, and it's not.

• 13:45David Senra?

  Why do you think it should be one of the first things to play in the game?

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Because it's, it's one of the things that flows the most in the world. Everything flows to money. Like my, my whole life, the thing about what keeps my learning going is I follow flows. I believe that nothing's static, right? Money is never static. Money is like gravity, it always falls, it always moves. It's always going somewhere. It's like water, it's never stuck. Energy is flowing everywhere, from the lights that we're in here, but also our own energies. Right now, we're creating both energies and we're sharing that energy.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  And so I find that for something that is as, as dynamic as money, it is not attached to AI yet on anything.

• 14:35David Senra?

  So how does it get attached?

• 14:37Speaker 01

  I think it's going to be that intersection between probably what blockchains will do and AI will do, because you will need to have intelligent smart contracts that will do stuff on your behalf. And you can start to see great entrepreneurs and great founders working on it. You can, we can talk about Patrick at Stripe and how they're building all this.

• 14:55David Senra?

  Literally, when you were saying that, I just heard John Collison talk about this. And basically, he said that that's the only thing he's working on. It's like a gent, payments for agents.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's the future. You can talk to anybody in that space or Vlad Aronin who's doing the same for equities. And you can see how they're tokenizing assets. And we're in this early innings, but we're behind compared to knowledge. Knowledge went much faster. Money is behind, which is fine.

• 15:20David Senra?

  So explain, because I don't know anything about this and you study this night and day. So explain what you think is going to happen with this in like the next like year or two.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  I don't know the next year or two. It's hard to know because with the speed of AI, what happens in the next 12 months?

• 15:34David Senra?

  Or yeah, next two months, whatever.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  But what I will say is that what we should start seeing very soon is agents that are designed for specific functions that will take care of your financial life in ways that you have never been taken care of. And some of the best founders have articulated this really well. David from New Bank, David Velez said, you know, mobile was the way to put a bank in your pocket.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Now AI is going to be the way to get you the banker in your pocket. So what I expect to see very, very soon is an AI agent that can go and do all kinds of investment decisions, recommendations. He can go do all kinds of commerce decisions and recommendations. And he can start to do any kind of payment decisions and recommendations on your behalf. And you are going to start to see how that's going to free time and ideas that you don't have today. We're just starting. The signals that this is going the right way, signals prediction markets. Prediction markets, it's, it's an interesting market. People are calling, some people call it the gambling, some people call it a place where you can bet on anything 24/7.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  But here's the thing, it's 24/7. And what agents need are 24/7 rails. So all of this is building the rails to allow all of this to happen. And what we expect is that we're going to see a bunch of new companies or incumbents that are going to be shipping these features in ways that we have not experienced before.

• 17:04David Senra?

  That was going to be my next question to you. Who do you think actually wins this? Because you just named, you know, three pretty big, well-established companies, Stripe, Robinhood, New Bank. You think it comes from them or you think it comes from a startup?

• 17:14Speaker 01

  I think it comes from them. Because first, they're still founder-led, or Revolut also, they're still founder-led. Those founders are pushing the boundaries of all of this. They are at an age and they are at a place. And if you talk to them, they're still as hungry as they were on day one. They're still in that day one mentality. And they're just going faster than incumbents. For a while, I thought incumbents were going to catch up. In 2021, 22, 23, I thought they were pairing up. There was not much difference between a financial product offer from an incumbent and from one of these new brands. That's different today.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Again, AI has just become a rocket, a nitro rocket for the, for this breed of technology companies to just accelerate even faster and separate themselves again, which is the beauty of the infinite game. In the beauty of the infinite game, you never get to win or you never get to lose. You're simply ahead or behind. And they were ahead for a long, long time. And then they were, the other ones were catching up, but the rules changed. What happens? You're ahead again, or the other ones fall behind. But the game never ends. That's the way I live my life. That's the way I think about everything I do. That's the way I make decisions. I don't think about winning or losing ever on anything I do. I just think about, will this put me ahead or put me behind in the game? And then just keep playing the game.

• 18:38David Senra?

  So I know you play the infinite game, you want to play forever, but are you, do you consider yourself a competitive person though?

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Define competitor.

• 18:44David Senra?

  I guess the way I think about this internally is just like, I'm in a very positive sum industry. If you listen to my podcast today and another podcast tomorrow, I don't lose on that. But I still wake up every day trying to like do the best job I possibly can.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  Yes. So if that's a competitor, yes. I try to do the best.

• 18:59David Senra?

  But it's not relative to other people?

• 19:00Speaker 01

  No. I don't look at other people. I don't, each one is playing their own game. I have, I try really hard to not have fear of missing out. I try really hard to just make sure that I'm playing the best game I can to play this game until the last day I am alive. It doesn't matter if I win or lose because you will, that's not the game. You fall behind. Actually, I will tell you that I've learned about myself, I'd rather be behind. I'm a much better person being behind than when I had. When I'm ahead, it means, oh, you guys are doing well. This is going right direction. You were right, this happened, this, this played out. And immediately, immediately, my spider senses get all activated and said, okay,

• 19:42Speaker 01

  that means that whatever, I gotta change the rules because it's not good to be ahead. You want to be ahead for a while, but you want the rules to change to fall behind so you can innovate again.

• 19:53David Senra?

  Yeah, this is why I said that you, there's so many times where we're talking like, god damn it, Mickey sounds just like the people I read books about. I just met James Dyson, who's like a personal hero of mine.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 20:02David Senra?

  And he said the exact same thing on this podcast. He's just like, losing is so much more interesting. He's like, you just learn so much. He likes being behind. Yeah, he just has that chip on his shoulder, well, really just the desire to constantly improve. He just feels you're going to improve a lot more when you're like losing or you're behind.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  100%. I'm much better when I'm behind, I learn more, I. Everything about it just gives you much more energy.

• 20:24David Senra?

  I want to go back because I interrupted you. I want to go back to your idea of like every company is becoming a token factory.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:29David Senra?

  The only token factories that you see right now are the labs.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  No, so you're starting to see application layers that are starting to show up, that are building token factories. Think about on the voice AI, think about 11 labs or Decagon or Sierra. They're all companies that are understanding how they're creating their token factories. They're creating a service that did not exist before in a way that was not possible. We're going to a world where every single piece of information is to be read all by the machine. And that's how the world will go to the next generation.

• 21:04David Senra?

  So you finished writing the letter. What do you do next?

• 21:06Speaker 01

  We share it with our founders, people that we work with closely. And we allow them to, and our OPs, our investors. Why? Because we want them to hold us accountable. This is our thinking. You have the chance, you can walk out or you can keep believing in our thesis. So we put it out there and then we go out. And we start talking about it with the founders that we met while we wrote it. And what happened-

• 21:39David Senra?

  Is there any founders that you have not yet invested in?

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Most of them are founders that we have not yet invested in. Because as we write the thesis, we have not invested into them yet. We're learning from them. Maybe along the way, we make an investment or two, maybe. But most of the time we don't. And then after that, and what happens is some of the best founders will read it and said, oh, wow, you guys really understand it. This is deep. Let's talk about it. And that's how we build those relationships that take a long time to build.

• 22:09David Senra?

  So I know you've spent a lot of time with people in their early twenties. Do you feel that this is the way they're talking, they're thinking about building companies?

• 22:15Speaker 01

  Good question. I think some of them are. I think some others are not, like any other generation. What I believe the people in their twenties have right now is that they are the smartest, fastest learner generation we've ever had in history. They learn the fastest. And it's because they get used to listening to podcasts at one and a half, two X. They don't have to wait for the mail to arrive with an annual letter a month later. They can read it in real time, right? So they're able to process information. It's so much faster than our brains ever had been trained for. So you can see it in the way they can process.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  What I think the best ones can do also is that they can articulate a vision and a story and bring people to follow them. But not all of them have those skills yet. They haven't developed them. Because that generation, as much as they're super smart learning, they're also were not trained to be great communicators on the other side. So the few that are great communicators, I think they have it embedded in them.

• 23:20David Senra?

  How do you think they view company building differently than somebody that's say 10 years older than them?

• 23:25Speaker 01

  I think they look at org charts very differently. I think they look at functions very differently. They don't think the org chart structure that we inherited and that we grew up with, I don't think it applies anymore in the same way they did. Humans are key center and they will be for as long as we're alive in our lifetime. But org charts and the way they organize people, completely different. And you can see it. They are self-organizing. And I love studying this because one of my mentors is D. Hawk, the founder of Visa. And I spent with him almost 10 or 12 years visiting him and talking to him. And he's a creator of a chaotic organization.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  He is the believer that you should never organize. The best expression of humans are in the intersection between chaos and order. If you're too orderly, you don't innovate. If you're too chaotic, you don't communicate and you break. So chaotic is the right place to be. They're actually doing, these kids are doing a great job by pure nature of how they were trained and wired with this era of technology to be in the epicenter of chaotic. So that's how they're working and that's what's different about them.

• 24:39David Senra?

  What else did you learn from Dee? The fascinating thing, a couple of people have asked me before because I've done like two or three episodes on D. Hawk. He wrote this great autobiography, which is, you know, tells the story of Visa. But then when he was a much older man, he also has these two books of maxims. It's called The Autobiography of a Restless Mind, Volume One and Volume Two. Again, somebody can compress the language and give you a lot of ideas in like, you know, a sentence or two. A lot of people have asked me, it's like, why do you think Visa is one of the most successful companies of all time? I think one of the most profitable per employee companies in history. And yet not a lot of people talk about it. And somebody asked me one time, or a few people have actually asked me this, like, why do you think that is? It's like, because it's still very confusing on how he actually built it. I've read his book two times and I still don't really understand. So like, what else do you think you learned from D. Hawk? Did he influence the way you built Ribbon at all?

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:24David Senra?

  Okay, I want to know about this.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  And not only Ribbon, my previous startups too. Because he taught me so much about how to get people to be the best version of themselves in the kind of organizations that you have to have. Even my go-to question on interviews, it's a question he taught me on how to ask. So I've learned so much from him.

• 25:49David Senra?

  What is that question?

• 25:50Speaker 01

  I give people six words and I tell them to organize them in a certain order. And then the way they walk through that order says a lot about the person. And it was a letter that Dee wrote to his team in 1972, I think, where he articulates all of this. So I learned that from him. So spending time with Dee, what you get is that he understood human psychology better than anybody in that era in that particular space. He understood that to get bankers who by their sheer DNA are people that are tend to be risk adverse and people that care too much about their reputation. He found a way through this model of association.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  His biggest success was the legal model he used. No one had ever done a company in that structure. And the association model allowed everybody to save face, but at the same time, take the credit. And that's how he won. Because it doesn't matter who you were, which bank competed with the other one. It didn't care because each one can compete by themselves, but at the same time, when is the brand won? That was the beauty of Dee. When you spend time with him, he will say, it was the model and people don't get it. So I find that his restless mind was alive even in his early nineties.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Because I would have sworn that he could have been Satoshi Nakamoto if he had been 40 years younger. He had explained to me blockchain and what, for him, Visa was a failure. If you talk to him, because he only got to release the simple version of it, which was payments. He wanted to do a lot more, which looked a lot like blockchains and smart contracts are today. But he was probably 60 years ahead of his time.

• 27:45David Senra?

  Deal is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade. And one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, 11 Labs, Uber and DoorDash all use Deal. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deal after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deal is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deal will help your business hire, pay and manage any worker anywhere in the world. So you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers.

• 28:27David Senra?

  The founder of 11 Labs has a great description of the value Deal can give your company. He said, "We built 11 Labs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deal enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories and ideas to every corner of the world." Deal is trusted by over 40,000 businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to deal.com/cenra. That is deal.com/cenra. Let's go back to the young kids that you spend time with and the way they think about company building compared to some of your older founders.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  From what sense?

• 29:06David Senra?

  I think the founders moving forward, like obviously they're going to be way more capital efficient. I think they're going to own larger percentages of their companies because they're going to need to raise less money. I think you used the analogy of one time, if you go back and look at like some of the robber barons who owned like Henry Ford owned 100% of his company. Or some of them would go public and they don't own 70 or 80% of the company. Yeah, I'm just very curious like how you think they're going to be building companies, again, a 21 or 22 year old compared to even like a 35 year old.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  So the first thing about this generation is they understand that if they play by the rules of the game, they will not win. The rules of society right now. They will be stuck in student debt. They will be stuck in a bunch of problems that they've been watching this through YouTube. They've been reading about it on social media. They've been seeing that we have spawned an era of of elons, of innovation, of Edison people, mindsets that it's allowing the mind to really flow. And surprisingly, capital is right now historically levels of almost unlimited capital access. Especially if you're younger, there's even more capital than before.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  It's a perfect scenario for this generation to really create and take risks in ways that you cannot imagine. Funny enough, when you talk to them the most, you will find that a lot of them feel that working on software alone is boring. It's not fun. It's not challenging enough. They want to build physical objects. They want to touch materials. They want to get their hands dirty in building stuff that will actually matter and get to our hands one way or the other. Which is super interesting because that was not the generation of the last 15, 20 years. Everybody was trying to go capital light. Everybody was trying to build software only and try to go through the cycles as fast as you can. This generation is not afraid of getting their hands dirty.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  So it's super interesting to see the behaviors. What's the difference? Why? I don't know. Like maybe they just find that they grew up with a phone, they grew up with a tablet, they grew up with a computer. So it's not interesting enough to limit the world to just bits and bytes. But the more time I spend with them, the biggest thing and the biggest question that I find asking them is, because the oldest generation are probably 25, 26, the younger are 18. You ask them, what were you doing during COVID? And that is the most fascinating question. The most successful ones right now were the ones that during COVID were learning and were on YouTube.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Sucking information about anything and learning about everything in life. So when they go and build companies, they find that first they're naive, so anything is possible. Second, technology is there, so anything is possible. Third, if you're older, you got knowledge and you got wisdom,

• 32:06Speaker 01

  but you may not have the motivation. So they need to find out how to bring that from people. And so what you're starting to see is that the best ones are attracting some of the best older people to come join them because they feel that magnet.

• 32:19David Senra?

  So the younger people are recruiting the older ones?

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Yes. And they're making them work in little hubs of two or three with two young ones. They're pairing them. Two 22-year-old kids with somebody much later, working in teams together. And that's where they're jutting between their knowledge of the new ways of operating systems with the knowledge that you need from 20 years of experience.

• 32:47David Senra?

  If you play this out over the next like five, 10 years, aren't they gonna have like a massive technical advantage too? Because like me and you use AI a lot, but we have other stuff going on in our lives where like they can live and breathe it 24/7.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Yes, and they will. And we just got what this year, high school class, sorry, college class is the first one that actually went to college and had AI the four years. We're just starting. The senior class, the rising senior of college, it's the first class ever that probably used GPT to write an essay to get to college.

• 33:21David Senra?

  I keep asking questions about the young people that you hang out with because I've had founders like literally in their mid-30s and they're the technical leaders of these really successful companies. They're like, I don't know if I can do this anymore. I'm too old. Like, what do you think you're too old? You're 35 years old. Like, yeah, they think I'm gonna get smoked by a 24-year-old.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  I don't think you're too old, to be honest. And I don't feel old and I feel I can still play the game. But you gotta understand that you gotta play a different game. You cannot keep playing the same game that you were playing in your 20s or in your 30s. You gotta understand that the way these dynamics work and what you can bring to them is very different. What can you bring to them? Wisdom, knowledge, give them experiences, stuff that they don't understand. By the way, the best ones, they still lack and they have to refine its taste. They gotta be able to articulate how to build something beautiful. That's not easy. And it's something that we've lost in society, is the ability to build beautiful stuff. Silicon Valley has lost that ability a long time ago. And we have to bring it back.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  I'm hoping this generation is the one that spends time thinking how to deliver beautiful experiences.

• 34:28David Senra?

  Say more about Silicon Valley losing the ability to build beautiful things.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  So if you think about the last 15 years, the incentive systems and every metric of success was wired on scale, grow, go bigger, have a more nuance, more work. But it was kind of about building beautiful products. We have, when was the last time you bought something, a technology product that you loved?

• 35:02Speaker 01

  That you were like, wow, this is beautiful.

• 35:04David Senra?

  I don't even wanna tell you. It's embarrassing, the answer. It was a Dyson vacuum cleaner.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  That's great. But and by the way, Dyson comes up a lot when I ask this question. Also, the

• 35:15David Senra?

  Airwrap, yeah. If you have a daughter or any women in the house, like they're obsessed with Dyson's products.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  And somebody in your team here was showing us they still carry the iPhone SE.

• 35:25David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Right, the small iPhone. Why? Because it's beautiful. It was one of the first ones designed in a different way. So we have lost that ability. And because we have given a price and a reward for efficiency, algorithm, compounding of those things, and we have put aside how it makes you feel. In this world where technology is taking over a lot of our lives in the way we're going, more than any time in history, we're gonna need that feeling back again. How it makes you feel. And it's not just the brand with a TV commercial. That's the point I'm less worried about. It's more about what's authentic, what's beautifully designed,

• 36:11Speaker 01

  and what does it make you feel when you are around it.

• 36:14David Senra?

  It's the perfect time that you're bringing this up because right now, literally a few hours this morning and the last few days, I've been rereading this biography of Johnny Ive. I think it's called like Johnny Ive, the genius behind Apple's greatest product or something like that. All he talks about is feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling. He didn't think computers were for him. He thought they were ugly and tacky. He starts using a Mac. This is years before he even working at Apple. And he's just like, oh, there's a human behind this. You can tell there's a actual human that cares behind this. And all he talks about, he's talking about redesigning hairbrushes and about how it makes him feel, to your point.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  And I think that if we don't bring that back, the founders that will do that will win. And the founders that don't have that ability, they don't have a chance.

• 36:56David Senra?

  Right before you came over, I was on the phone with our mutual friend Neil Meta. And he keeps telling me about Nick from Revolut, right? And we were talking about some unrelated stuff. And I go, oh, I'm about to see Mickey Malka. He's like, you gotta ask him the conversation we had if he remembers because he said you invested way before he did. I think he's done now the last like two or three rounds. But I think he remembers calling you and passing on Nick. Can you tell, like, why do I keep hearing about Nick? And like, what do you think makes him so special?

• 37:27Speaker 01

  You gotta understand Nick for how he grew up and who he is, understand who he was. Funny enough, I was in London a few weeks ago because they finally got their bank license approved. And there was a chancellor there and some public officials speaking. And Nick was there with Vlad, the co-founder. And I was looking at my phone and I was remembering when was the first time that we had, we had handshake our Series A. And it was literally that same day 10 years before.

• 38:00David Senra?

  Oh, wow.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  And so I went to them and I showed on the phone and said, listen, 10 years ago, we were drinking vodka shots to do our A round. And what was it about them? From day one, first, the name Revolut stands for who he was. He wanted to truly create a revolution in money. Like, there was nothing in the middle about it. He had come to London. He had left Moscow. He was a trader. He was frustrated with how complex it was to move money, how difficult and how expensive and how unfair it was for everybody in the system. And he says, fuck it, I gotta change this.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  So that core DNA was there from day one. And then it went, he lived it every single day. He will wake up every day and go swimming. He will work in the office. We were the first one to arrive, the last one to leave, and the first one to arrive the next day again. And he will swim and stay fit and just relentlessly focus on getting this mission moving forward. And people just either competed with him at that level because it was a performance at a level, an execution that it was just a machine. It was non-stop. I just have this mission and I have to do it in my lifetime.

• 39:24David Senra?

  I'm glad you said the machine because I think that's what Neil described me. He's like, he's like a fucking Terminator.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  But that was Nick in his late 20s. That was who he was in his late 20s. Now, the Nick of today, 10 years later, he's getting better. He's getting better because now he can lead. He can lead by example. He can lead by mission. He's a missionary also now. He can lead by taste. He has very strong opinions on how things need to go. He still has 20 people direct report to him. And he will work seven days a week. And then every number of weeks, they two weeks off. Like, you can see that his behavior of work, he's fine-tuned to who he is now compared to who he was before.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  So consistency, what I like to do is when we back these teams, we try to understand the DNA of the founder. And we try to understand what drives them and how do they work. But more importantly, we wanna see if that DNA reflects in the offices, in the team, in the people, in the way they talk, in the way they move. And you still go to the Revolut offices, which is like now in, I don't know, 15, 20 countries. And I've been to the one in the Middle East, in Barcelona, in London in the last year and a half. You still breathe that DNA still there. So that's what keeps it going. It's a very special way that you gotta understand the founder really well to know because each org is very different.

• 40:53David Senra?

  So when you say you wanna understand the founder's DNA, how do you go about understanding that?

• 40:57Speaker 01

  You gotta spend time with them. And you gotta ask them all the questions and you gotta build a level of trust where honestly, you don't have to talk about business that much. What kind of level of trust you gotta, how do you build that trust to talk to them in a way where they feel that they can trust you back? That they can call you when they cannot sleep at night? Those are the things that you gotta, I spend most of my time in, the team at Revit spend most of the time doing, which is building that level of understanding and relationship so we know how they behave. Once you know how people behave, then everything's fine because you will see consistency or they will break it.

• 41:35David Senra?

  Explain why it's important to you to be the person that they call when they have problems? Like, you just used the example of like when they can't sleep at night.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Because all of us have something that wakes us up at night from time to time. And that particular mind problem that you're trying to solve, it's the biggest thing that you have to get unlocked to keep being the best version of yourself. And when you're there, sometimes it's really hard to trust if it's a vulnerable question. Sometimes it's really deep and has a lot of strategic consequences and you wanna be really, you're going through your mind a lot. And if we get that phone call, it means that we did 100 things right to deserve the right to be there to help this person think through it.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Never answer the question, just help him or her answer the question. And that meant that you were able to talk about life and family. You were able to talk about society and politics and you were able to talk about everything, because that's the only way you're gonna get to really help this person answer the question.

• 42:43David Senra?

  So you have, in many cases, decade-plus relationships with a lot of the founders that you back. How does, like, can you compare Nick to the other ones? Like, what are the traits that you think they share among the people that you spend the most time with?

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Well, they all want to win in their own way of being. They care about, if they are true to themselves, they still, the mission that they wrote on the first day is still present today. And when you find that authenticity, they win. So the ones that are authentic are the ones that you can keep seeing. The ones that faked it to make it and then they change and then they move and then they, those are the ones that, over time, you just don't have the appetite to spend time with.

• 43:25David Senra?

  Is it reflected in the performance of their company, too?

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Sometimes.

• 43:28David Senra?

  And you have people that fake it and then they're building massively successful companies?

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Yes, they are, for sure. But sometime, somewhere, somehow, down the line, authenticity matters. And as long as you're authentic to yourself and you keep your values authentic and you remember yourself, what you're doing, what you're doing, and you can wake up every day with that energy, you'll be fine.

• 43:51David Senra?

  So if we go back to that idea that Rick Rubin has, like, these four handful of ideas, could be four, could be five, could be six ideas that he just used for, over multiple decades, what would, like, be the list of traits that you would, if I said, hey, list out the four or five things that you want the founders, that you want to build long-term relationships with and partner with over long-term, have, what would your answer to that be?

• 44:12Speaker 01

  We have this thing called the Isle of the Tiger. It's our way of thinking about the people that we want to back and how we want to partner with them. And as I said, as I told you before, it needs to be in a napkin. So if we roll in a napkin, it means that we've thought about it long enough that we have it, right? And it's basically the energy of a scientist, the conviction of a missionary, the heart of a partner, the dreams of an athlete, the obsession of an owner. When we meet them and we spend time with them, we want to make sure those things are present. And if they are, that's the kind of people that we want to partner with.

• 44:48David Senra?

  How long did it take you to develop? Like, how many, it's over several years where you guys figured out these, like, these recurring traits?

• 44:53Speaker 01

  This is several years. This is probably a decade. To answer, we probably put it into a napkin five years ago. So it took us almost 10 years.

• 45:02David Senra?

  Do you consider yourself a patient person?

• 45:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:05David Senra?

  Several of the questions I've asked you say it's like, oh, yeah, that took a couple of years, and that took a couple of years. You started your first company when you were, what, like, 17?

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Seventeen.

• 45:13David Senra?

  And you didn't found, you founded multiple companies, but you founded Ribbit 20 years later?

• 45:19Speaker 01

  I founded Ribbit much later. I founded Ribbit almost 20, yeah, 20 years later.

• 45:26David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  21 years later.

• 45:27David Senra?

  21 years later. You've been doing it for almost, what?

• 45:30Speaker 01

  14 years now.

• 45:31David Senra?

  14 years.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:32David Senra?

  And I heard you say before, it's like, well, everybody's like, well, you guys had this fantastic record, you've done all this, you're like, yeah, it's like, super early.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  We got a long way to go.

• 45:40David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  We found amazing people to partner, we got great ideas, we're still building.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  I mean, we built a company with Walmart. I mean, think about it. It's just, it's the first time ever that that has happened.

• 45:54David Senra?

  Okay, I just heard about this. We have a mutual friend, Sebastian, founder, former founder of Rappi, and he's like, ask him about the deal he did with Walmart.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  It just speaks to a little bit of this value system of ours, David. We had a chance to meet, I've been a fan of Sam Walton all my life, right?

• 46:12David Senra?

  Same.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  And I had read every book. I had never been to Bentonville until a few years ago, but I had read everything about him and I had followed, and I remember Buffett owned the stock for a particular period of time until he sold it. And that was when I first learned about Walmart back in the day. And in 2019, through Sarah Fryer, who's now OpenAI, but she was, she was on the board, she's on the board of Walmart, she organized a dinner where I had a chance to meet Doug McMillan, the CEO at the time. And we had a lovely dinner in San Francisco, a few months before COVID. And Doug says, after dinner, he says, listen, if you ever find yourself in Bentonville, come visit me. And I'm like, I don't know what I'm gonna do in Bentonville. So I left the dinner.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  I was so impressed by Doug, his way of speaking, his understanding about macro, the world, the values of Walmart. Everything was so present in him at that dinner. It was a small dinner, so it could have been something different, but it was authentic to him. That we went as a team to a couple Walmart stores, we tried every financial product we can buy, we could, we did remittances, prepaid car bill, and we found bags and we found all these things that looked like 1990s fintech.

• 47:28David Senra?

  Were they selling them themselves? So there's, like, vendors inside?

• 47:31Speaker 01

  They had vendors and they had partners and they had their own Walmart card, it was a whatever card. So I wrote them in January before COVID and said, listen, if you're in Bentonville, I'd love to go see you. And lo and behold, he said, yes, showed up, sit down with Doug, and he introduced me to John Ferner, who's now the CEO of Walmart, who's alongside with Doug, they were there for almost 30 years at Walmart, both of them, since they were 17. And John is my age, so we're, we started at the same time in two different continents and we were sitting in the same room, talking about this. And I said, listen, you guys can build something much better with financial services here. This is not your priority number one, two, or three. It is for us, let's figure it out. And they did something that never, they had never done.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  They created a JV, a company that we both co-owned, and we went together and built a rock star team with a new brand. We bought two companies and to build the infrastructure, run by Walmart, it's mild today, and it's called One Pay. And it's one of the biggest financial brands that you've never heard of.

• 48:36David Senra?

  Operating out of all the Walmarts?

• 48:38Speaker 01

  You will see it online, on every shopping cart experience on Walmart, you will see it in the retails everywhere. If you want to pay with your phone today, the only way to pay at Walmart is with One Pay. If you want to have a debit card, it's the only way, you want a loan from Klarna, it goes through One Pay. If you want an installment loan, you want a credit card, it goes through One Pay. Every single financial product to millions and millions and millions of American consumers. And the beauty of that is that with John being, and this is the beauty of the Walmart culture, John had been in China for a number of years, that he had learned how WePay worked and how Alipay did business.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  They were investors in India and Flipkart and PhonePay, so they saw what could happen with mobile money. They have been the greatest partners to have. And so together, between the founder team, Ribbit and Walmart, we have built this amazing journey together that is quite unique for a big corporation like that.

• 49:42David Senra?

  I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book Zero to One. The quote says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas." That is exactly what AppLovin has done with their advertising platform. AppLovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers inside mobile games. AppLovin allows you to capture undivided attention. AppLovin ads are full-screen video ads that are watched for an average of 35 seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch on AppLovin in minutes. You set the goal and AppLovin achieves it.

• 50:24David Senra?

  There's no complex setup, no expertise needed, and AppLovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, have scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day and increased their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all of your competitors are on AppLovin. And you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com.

• 50:53David Senra?

  Tell me if I'm connecting things that are unrelated or not, but I don't think I am. What was the business that it was either you or your partner built? It was like this bank, this branchless bank in convenience stores or some shit like that in South America, in Brazil?

• 51:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 51:08David Senra?

  Okay. What was the name of that?

• 51:09Speaker 01

  It was called Lemon Bank.

• 51:10David Senra?

  Okay, Lemon Bank?

• 51:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 51:12David Senra?

  Is, it sounds like you almost took, like, an idea that worked at Lemon, because you guys, you were the founder of that, or?

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 51:17David Senra?

  Okay. And then you, we'll explain what Lemon Bank is, but then you sell it to the biggest bank in Brazil, right? Is this not the same idea, but kind of with Walmart?

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 51:26David Senra?

  This speaks to why I keep, I ask you if you're patient, I ask you what are the traits that, like, that you notice in greatest founders, because I noticed them in you. So like, patience, long-term thinking, reputation, which I want to get to in a minute, which is how me and you actually met, because you helped me, like, I had a big decision to make in my career, and like, your reputation preceded you, and I was like, I actually need to meet this guy, because I have some questions for him. So this is what I mean, it's like, you talked about in The Infinite Game earlier, it's like, I'm gonna do this to, like, die, which you just said, which I fucking love, by the way. And I'm hearing you talk, and I knew the rough shape of the Walmart thing, I didn't know what it was called, and I'm like, wait a minute, this sounds like Lemon Bank.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:04David Senra?

  Okay, so explain the connection between the two.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  That's the infinite game right there. You just, you just said it yourself really well. When you're playing this life game and it's infinite, being ahead or behind in 2003, when we started that business in Brazil and I lived there for three years and grinded a few times, almost died trying this business and we almost killed the business twice along the way, almost lost all the money I had ever made.

• 52:31David Senra?

  How, wait, we gotta pause there. We're gonna get to what it does. How did you almost lose all the money you ever made?

• 52:36Speaker 01

  Because when I, when we, we had sold our first dot com company and then used all the proceeds to start this bank in Brazil. I moved with my wife to Brazil, we were living there.

• 52:48David Senra?

  So you had no investors?

• 52:49Speaker 01

  No, we had no investors. It was just my business partner, Wen Cesc Cazares and myself and Michael.

• 52:54David Senra?

  So you put all your chips back on the table?

• 52:55Speaker 01

  All the chips back on the table. We were 25, 26. So, and almost lost everything because the economy didn't take off. No matter what we did, we just couldn't, which is how you learn that macro matters. And I learned that growing up in Venezuela with hyperinflation and devaluation. But then another thing is to live it also when all your money is on the table.

• 53:14David Senra?

  So wait, you're a 25-year-old kid wanting to build essentially like a branchless bank? Is that how you describe it?

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:21David Senra?

  And your idea at the time is to set these little like kiosks, what we can call?

• 53:26Speaker 01

  Yes. There were, there were, there were three models. We had a, we had a inside existing stores at checkout. We had kiosks inside stores, which was a hybrid model. And we had franchisee little stores that only did our, our payment systems. Because this is before the smartphone, right? But it was mobile or a lot of, but so we had to, it was a hybrid of 2003 to 2007 era. So we had to build all of this and run all of this. We had, at peak, we had 7,000 of these physical spaces all over Brazil. We were serving 15 million customers. Half of Brazil back then was unbanked.

• 54:03David Senra?

  Unbanked?

• 54:04Speaker 01

  Unbanked.

• 54:05David Senra?

  So that was the opportunity?

• 54:06Speaker 01

  That was the opportunity to bank them. We were the first to bank them to 15 million people.

• 54:10David Senra?

  So essentially you did like the legwork for the, the largest bank where it's like, now we've, we've attacked this customer segment that you haven't like succeeded with. We succeeded. Essentially, you know, rounded up a bunch of now customers for them. They wanna buy you.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  That's exactly it.

• 54:23David Senra?

  So you sell in what year?

• 54:24Speaker 01

  2008.

• 54:25David Senra?

  So 2008, that insight then comes into play, what is that, 12 years later?

• 54:29Speaker 01

  12 years later.

• 54:30David Senra?

  You're starting to talk to Walmart in 2020.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Yes. And that's the long game. That's the infinite game. And, and by the way, you can tie every single one of our decisions in, that we've made, like were big decisions like that in, in the rivet life to something that happened to me 20 years before.

• 54:47David Senra?

  This is really important for, especially for younger entrepreneurs, because you said earlier, like there, there's just something wrong about, you know, like we're optimizing for just like start, scale, sell, right?

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 54:58David Senra?

  Where it's like, you know, some of your partners, you've been partnered with for 20 years.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:02David Senra?

  Some of the people you've backed. You met Vlad at Robinhood when, I don't even think they had a product yet. There was not a, an app, right?

• 55:07Speaker 01

  No, there was, they were.

• 55:08David Senra?

  It's not a public facing app?

• 55:09Speaker 01

  It was not released.

• 55:10David Senra?

  No customers?

• 55:11Speaker 01

  No, no customers.

• 55:12David Senra?

  So your relationship with them was for like 15 years?

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:14David Senra?

  It's like, I always say it's like when, when I've read, you know, all these biographies for the, the other podcasts I have, it's like just stay in the game long enough to get lucky. It's like so much of this stuff is not predictable. And I think that maxim is to just like stay in the game long enough to get lucky. So you built a massive business 12, 12 years after you built, you know, a very successful business in South America. Now think about the scale of Walmart. This is like not comparable to anything else.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  And that's the power of compounding.

• 55:39David Senra?

  Yes.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  And it's compounding relationships and ethics and work and principles and love and passion and time and just don't care about the winning or losing. Just let it be because the power of compounding is the most important equation in, in society. And everything on friendships, on family, just be consistent, work every day.

• 56:00David Senra?

  Yeah, this is like a very Buffett, Munger kind of thing. Like Munger has that, that line where he's like, you know, you need to learn the big, the few big ideas in each discipline. They carry most of the freight, I think is the way he describes that. And through all this reading, I was like, my version is like, oh, time carries most of the weight. Like if you're in a good business, like just stay there and time will actually carry most of the weight to what you wanna do. And so that leads, if you're gonna play the infinite game, then, and you, you wanna do things over a long term, you have to protect your reputation, which is another thing that Buffett would repeat in his shareholder letters. Like, hey, we can lose money. We can lose a lot of money, actually. We can't lose a shred of reputation. I wanna know how you think about reputation and then I wanna know, and then I'll talk about why it's so important and how it led me to you.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  I started to go to the Berkshire annual meetings when I was 18. And back then, they were much smaller. They were a Friday afternoon and a holiday in, a couple hundred people. And as soon as they moved to the, to the bigger convention center a few years later, they had this movie clip playing in the beginning of the annual meeting with a bunch of TV commercials or, or Buffett interviews over the years. And every time, since I was a kid, young, that age, they were playing the Buffett getting deposed when he was the chairman of Solomon Brothers, saying that line that you just said. It got stick in my, in my brain.

• 57:16David Senra?

  So they replayed it every annual meeting?

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Every annual meeting. It was there that deposition, that was, that he said that line on a deposition at Congress for something that Solomon Brothers was doing with the Treasury's arbitration or taking advantage of the Treasury issuing market.

• 57:34David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  And they played it every single year. And I remember it every single year. And part of the reasons why I, I wanted to live that life is because it, it was natural to me. It was the way you wanted to live life. So yes, reputation matters more than anything.

• 57:54David Senra?

  There's a handful of people that I really trust and admire. And then the people I trust and admire, I wanna know who they trust and admire. And I had a decision I had to make and I wasn't sure how to make it. It was, there was a lot of uncertainty. I didn't have the information I needed. And realized that you were actually in possession of this information. We won't talk about like the details of this. And I actually never, almost ever asked to meet people. And I asked two separate people. I was like, do you mind making this like introduction for me? And then the first time we met, we actually went and talking for like several hours. And then we like became like fast friends.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 58:27David Senra?

  But I made a big decision in my career based on how fantastic your reputation was. And so therefore, almost like Charlie Munger has that great line where like trust is one of the greatest economic forces in the world. And it's like, the level of trust that you have built up over a successive long time with people I trust, made me be able to build a relationship and trust your judgment really fast that I could make a decision based on your reputation. And I think this is super important. It's also something that comes up over and over again. Like I, I did this episode on Jensen. There's this book called The Nvidia Way, which is kind of like half biography of Jensen, half company history. And it talks about, he pitched Don Valentine. Don Valentine's still alive, still making

• 59:09David Senra?

  the investment decisions at Sequoia. And Don's like, that was the shittiest pitch I've ever heard. I'm still gonna give you money because your reputation precedes you and it's so excellent. It's so valuable.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  It is the most valuable asset. It's the only asset we have. It's our reputation. Everything else can come and go, but that's the one thing that we have that it will always stick to us, even when we're dead.

• 59:29David Senra?

  You know who also shaped my thinking on this? It's like, have you ever heard Palmer Lucky talk about reputation? Have you?

• 59:34Speaker 01

  No, I haven't heard him talk.

• 59:35David Senra?

  So he says the exact same thing. He's like, anytime, he thinks this idea where like if people tried to destroy your reputation, like you should just, you know, rise above the fray. He's like, no, this is bullshit. He was just to fight back because the problem is it forecloses opportunities. If this person's damaging your reputation and it's not true, it's gonna foreclose future opportunities. And it's not like if somebody, and he, he sold points, like this is invisible. And I thought it was really interesting insight. He's like, if so, if somebody, I let somebody destroy my reputation and unfairly, and two years later, I asked for a meeting with a guy who took that story and believes it, he's not gonna tell me I'm not taking the meeting because your reputation sucks.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:00:13David Senra?

  He's gonna make up some other story. So he's like, you have to protect it and then fight against it. I thought it was interesting. It's very like a Ben Franklin kind of idea.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:20David Senra?

  Because Franklin would nurture and then also protect and fight back against his reputation 250 years ago. It's very fascinating.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  I love it. I didn't know that about Ben Franklin. I'm gonna read more about that.

• 1:00:30David Senra?

  So I told you right before we started recording that I got the art piece that I ordered at Node. I was, I don't even know how to describe the fact, like I could spend about an hour there with you. Can you just describe what the hell Node is and why you're doing it?

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  Yes. So I think it's in the spirit of being a rebel. So my wife and I, we love art. We find that art is beautiful. And when you find stuff that speaks to you, it has an immense value. It's been around all of us since the caves, right? It's, it's always been there. And five years ago, we stumbled upon digital art for the first time. I was on Twitter scrolling and I saw an art piece that looked something very similar to a physical art piece we had from the seventies. And then we got into it and started to find other artists in digital art that were doing beautiful stuff that matched something beautiful in history. So we started to pair them together. And that journey took us, like any journey,

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  to get to know the artists. Because what's the difference of these artists? They're alive. And, and they're all here and they're all using, they all studied computer science one way or the other, and they just decided to be artists and tell a story in a different way. Once you start to meet them, they were rebels in the.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  Complete expression of the word, the same way we were describing some of the rebels in companies. Like, think about, right now, we're running a show on people.

• 1:01:57David Senra?

  That's the one I saw.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  That's the one you show. So, think about people.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  Think about an entrepreneur who decided for 5,000 days to do an art piece every single day, post it online, so he can only get better. His goal was, he read a book that said, "If you do something every day, you will only get better at it." And he started in 2007, sketching. 2011, started to use Photoshop. 2014, Cinema 4D. And so the software evolves. And every single day, posted of image online, that no one bought. People paid attention and just made fun of it, or congratulated them, or jumped against it, until, in 21, he sells the first 5,000 days, what is it, 14 years?

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  For $69 million. And suddenly, it's like an IPO moment. No one pays attention for a long time, you sell it. What does a real rebel do? He said, "Fuck it, we're gonna double down. I'm gonna build a studio, I'm gonna start building a lot more stuff that I couldn't do before." And now he's one of the most prolific artists alive. All he does, his work is digital. And he's not the only one. People see CryptoPunks, and they see a JPEG. Actually, I see a movement. I see a cultural artifact. The first art on-chain ever created, and it happens to be portraits. Guess what? Every single art movement in history starts with portraits. They always evolve the portrait.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  So, the story is, we went to the museums, and we said, "This art should be seen." Because, at home, we posted, we put it around our house, and all my kids, when they were teenagers, and brother friends, guess where their attention went?

• 1:03:45David Senra?

  Not the art you have hanging on the walls.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  It went to this.

• 1:03:48David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  15, 20 minutes in front of it, talking to it, interacting, asking questions, no one didn't understand. We go to the museums, and I said, "Yes, we can do this, 2028, five years from now, four years from now, and we'll have to find a curator, who's gonna curate what the artist wants to do." And my wife and I look at each other and say, "No fucking way. This needs to happen today." So, Node, it's the first digital art studio designed for digital artists. It is a space where the artist is his own curator, because that's what rebels do. You design how you wanna show your art. You don't let somebody else tell you how you're gonna put your art. And it's a place where you come, and you get your hands on with the art that speaks

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  to the future. And we put this place in downtown Palo Alto for a particular reason. Because Silicon Valley needs creativity. We need to bring it back. So, our contribution to society is put it in a place where people can actually walk in and see it. And we've opened it five months ago. We had close to 60,000 people show up already. Every weekend, we're breaking records. It's free, it's open, and people are interacting. And the most beautiful thing, kids are bringing their parents. So, you told me that last time, you went to a museum where the kids are telling, "Dad, let's go in."

• 1:05:09David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Exactly. So, that is the difference. So, I think we need it, going back to beauty, to taste, to creating authentic stuff. And these artists are the most authentic people right now, using digital tools. So, let's show them, let people interact with them, and let that be the driver for entrepreneurs to use it in their own practices.

• 1:05:35David Senra?

  But this is what I meant about, like, you're way more entrepreneur than you are investor? Because, just like, when you start a bank for the unbanked in Brazil, you're like, "Well, I'm not gonna open up branches." I'm like, "What opportunity, what's the white space that these incumbents are not, I'm a rebel, what is the white space that these incumbents are not attacking?" Well, you just said, like, the museums are like, they don't even have the infrastructure to display digital art. And like, I went to Node with you. Like, the walls are, like, customizable. The next, how the people's in there for what, like, two months, something like that?

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:06:07David Senra?

  Yeah, and then the next one comes in. The infrastructure's still there, but now the artist gets to essentially use the infrastructure as a canvas for his or her art.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  We think the world will have a lot of these places. Museums will change, they will evolve, it will take a while.

• 1:06:21David Senra?

  The location that you picked speaks to, again, the, like, you're kind of just identifying, "What's the way they did it, and like, what's the way I should do it now?" Where, like, you can walk into it. It's like, in a very, like, small downtown area.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:06:35David Senra?

  It's not, it's not like a destination in and of itself. It's something you could just, it's like, part of the neighborhood, if that makes any sense.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  If you read history, which is part of the beauty of playing infinite games, where you have to live in the future, but also understand the past, this is not very different to what happened in Paris with the rebels in their art movement, when they were not accepted in the museums. And this is how the Impressionism came to be. And all the art that was a revolution, that changed the way we look at art in the last 100 years. We're living through that same moment. Funny enough, it's not in Paris. Maybe it started in Palo Alto.

• 1:07:10David Senra?

  And so you look at the first Node in Palo Alto, almost like a prototype?

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  Yes, because the name Node is meant to be a node in the network. So, we will be learning here for the next year to perfection our technology, improve our UIs. There's a bunch of engineers working on this. It's a foundation with engineers. Like, think of how different it is to traditional art, and then expand it and open it in many other places.

• 1:07:34David Senra?

  Another thing that I wanna talk to you about. What's with your fascination with rebels? It's all over your website. People who know you talk about this all the time.

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  Well, first, I'm a Star Wars generation, right? And I grew up with Star Wars, I'm a big fan of Star Wars. And to me, growing up in Venezuela, the only way to survive in that environment is you had to be a rebel. The system, the dark side was all over, the chaos was present. You had to raise above, above that. And the rebel mindset is one where you know authentically and genuinely that something can be better, and you're willing to give your life for it. To me, being a rebel is just a way of being, it's a way of looking at the world. And when you, when you see something, you can always look at it and accept, "How did you make it better? How'd you make it more beautiful? How can, what's missing?"

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  Like, just the mindset of always being willing to know that better means it can still be better.

• 1:08:35David Senra?

  I mean, 17-year-old, sort of a company.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:08:38David Senra?

  That would lead me to believe that you had this, like, rebel, you're essentially a born rebel.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:08:44David Senra?

  How did you apply that? Because people reference, it's like, one of the greatest, like, venture capitalists. I'm like, "That's not how I think of Mickey. I don't think of him as like, a venture capitalist." So, like, when you're building Ribbit, how did you apply, like, your rebel, like, your inherent rebel nature to, you're essentially, almost like, you're almost like an artist in the sense of, like, "This is the canvas that I'm building, this is how you think I should do it, but this is how I'm gonna do it." How did you think about it when you started it?

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  If I end up being labeled as a great venture capitalist, first, I hate labels, and second, I will be very depressed. Because that's not the label, I want no labels. All I want in my tombstone is to say, "He was a rebel." That's all I want to be said there. And that will say everything about me. The way I raise my kids, the way I'm associated with my wife, the way I treat my friends, the way I make business decisions, the way I change my mind, I'm willing to change my mind if I learn something that is different. That's a rebel mindset. Everything that is the opposite is a mindset that I know too well, my kids are perfect, I'm the best at what I do, and I run away from any of those things.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  Actually, I find that the rebel mindset is one that you are always asking questions. You're a rebel, you are non-stop asking questions. You wanna learn, you wanna keep, but you and I know a lot of people that get to a point in life where they stop to ask questions, and they start to preach. That's part of the rebel time. And everybody has that breaking point, somewhere in their lives. I want that to be the last day of my life. So, I need to live by that principle on everything that I do, on every behavior. And, like, I'm rebelling now against the traditional art world. I'm trying, you know, to allow artists to show art in a different way. We rebel at Ribbit, the way we design it. We were, people were asking, "What are you? Are you a venture guy? You're an early-stage guy?"

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  I'm like, "Yes." "Are you a late-stage guy?" "Yes." "Are you a fintech guy?" "Yes." "But are you doing now, defense, or..." "Yes." Like, "Yes." "What's wrong?" Like, "I'm not gonna let anyone allow that." That is the rebel mindset.

• 1:10:50David Senra?

  You are a founder, but you think so much like a founder. So, like, this decision in 2012 to start an investment firm, like, why?

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  I don't think of it as an investment firm.

• 1:10:59David Senra?

  Okay, you have to say more about this.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  To me, it's a startup, it's a company. And we build our own technology stack, and we have a small team, and we consider ourselves rebels, and our meetings are called Tattooing, and we have Jedis, and we behave...

• 1:11:12David Senra?

  I didn't know this.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:13David Senra?

  Oh, so you're really into Star Wars?

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  Yes, completely. And...

• 1:11:17David Senra?

  Are you backing Jedis, or you have Jedis?

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  We back Jedis.

• 1:11:20David Senra?

  Okay.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  And we have Wookiees, and we are Jedis. We have the whole thematic truly alive in the way we think, because...

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  It has to be authentic. And people that work with us, really the whole team feels that ownership, that teamwork. There's, investment firms are very siloed in many ways, and I don't love that. We wanna over communicate even internally. Like, right now, the entire team knows that we're sitting together. Everybody can see my calendar in my inbox. They can see my emails, and I can see anybody's emails. We share all the information so we can actually become better as a team. That mindset is very rebel in this environment. And how we make decisions. We don't make individual decisions, we make group decisions. And there's no, like, somebody asks, who's the partner responsible for that company? It's like, what partner? And you, as a founder, you say, I don't know.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  I called Mickey for something, I called Nick for something, I called Justin for something. We are just a team that works together in very different ways. So that is the joy of going to the office every day. I love being there and spending time with the team because we just have fun together.

• 1:12:28David Senra?

  What was the insight, though, that caused you to do this instead of? Because you started how many companies before this? It's your sixth company?

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:34David Senra?

  Something like that? So like, but your sixth company looks vastly different from your first five, correct?

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:39David Senra?

  So like, what was the insight between five and six, though?

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  I had to, in the infinite game, I had just had to learn how to do it right. And this time I did it right because I consider myself, even though they were successful and they created a lot of impact and changed a lot of people's lives around the world, I consider myself a failed entrepreneur.

• 1:12:56David Senra?

  That's absurd. That's why you gotta say, like, why?

• 1:13:00Speaker 01

  Because the best entrepreneurs never have to sell their company.

• 1:13:05David Senra?

  Okay, not a fist bump on that, there you go.

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  And so I had to learn for 20 years how to get to the point to design the structure, the culture, the team, the knowledge, the aperture, the brand, compound all those values to a place where we can do something forever.

• 1:13:28David Senra?

  This is the infinite game.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  This is the infinite game.

• 1:13:30David Senra?

  Nick Sleep has one of my favorite lines ever. And he goes, "The best investors aren't investors, they're entrepreneurs who never sold."

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  Hundred percent I agree.

• 1:13:40David Senra?

  So that's fascinating. Look, okay, the fact is, I'm a failed entrepreneur because I had to exit. You had crazy successful exits too, for my first five, because I didn't find the vehicle in which I can do forever. Which is, again, when, again, like, I'm like new to being relatively known in like this community the last like five years for podcasts. And I didn't understand because I sat in a room by myself for a decade and just talked into a microphone and read books. And I didn't think about the outside world at all. And then everything kind of came to me. And so now, I have to like constantly vet everybody around me. And I get a lot of advice from like, especially like older, more successful entrepreneurs, like, man, you have to be so fucking careful with like, because this goes back to Charlie Munger, it's like, most people are rat poison.

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:20David Senra?

  Right? And it's just like, and it's just like, you have to like vet them in all different directions. But when I, and even people I wanna have dinner with or talk to, like you, you ask a bunch of people, and they're just like, he's obsessed with this infinite game. This infinite game, he's like, he doesn't need more money, and he doesn't need to do another deal in his life, but he just can't stop.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  But it's this joy. It's this thing that every day you get better. And you just are improving. And, you know, I sat with Charlie Munger once, after another meeting, at the Hoppy Hollow Golf Club where Warren had this thing afterwards. And I saw myself, and I only had one stock of pressure, I was probably 24 years old and 25. And I sit next to him, well, he sits next to me, I'm sitting, he says, hey, he says, take him, I said, no, come on, sit here, Charlie. And we started to talk, and that room was everybody. Bill Gates was there, all these big CEOs of all these companies, and I was like the youngest guy by order of magnitude. And he looks at me and says, you must be very wealthy to be here.

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  And I said, actually, no, I only own one share. He says, you don't get it. You are the wealthiest guy in the room. And I said, you're wrong, Charlie. No, no, you are. Why? You have the power of time. All of us here are in our last chapter, you're just starting your time. You will compound for the next 70 years of your life. So never forget the rule I'm about to tell you. You only need to get rich once. And then, that was it. He says, and now I'm gonna eat. And just sat down and ate.

• 1:15:53David Senra?

  I love that. Time is the only true currency we have.

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  It's the only true currency we have.

• 1:15:56David Senra?

  I appreciate you spending your time giving it to us today. This is awesome.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:16:02David Senra?

  I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.