20VC: Lessons Building Nubank to the Largest Neobank in the World, How AI Changes The Future of Finance, Leadership Lessons from Sequoia's Doug Leone & What European and US Fintech Can Learn From LATAM with David Velez, Founder @ Nubank

David Velez is the Founder and CEO of Nubank, one of the largest and fastest-growing financial institutions in the world. 1 in 2 people in Brazil alone have a Nubank account. Nubank's purple credit card in Mexico is the highest-rated NPS product of any consumer product in the world. Before founding Nubank in 2013, David was a partner at Sequoia Capital between 2011 and 2013, in charge of the firm’s Latin American investments group. Before Sequoia, David worked in investment banking and growth equity at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and General Atlantic. In Today's Episode with David Velez We Discuss: 1. From Sequoia Partner to Creating One of the Largest Financial Institutions: What was the Sequoia interview process like? What questions did Doug Leone really dive into when hiring David? What impressed David most about how Sequoia interview and win talent? What are 1-2 of David's biggest lessons from working with Doug Leone? 2. From a Small House to a $BN Public Company: What does David believe are the 1-2 core but non-obvious reasons why Nubank scaled so fast? What does David believe are the most non-obvious but massive opportunities Nubank has to 10x from here? Why does David believe emerging market fintech providers will be more valuable than Western fintechs? What does David believe Western fintechs and regulators can learn from BRIC economy fintechs? 3. How AI Changes The Future of Financial Services: How does David believe AI will change financial services? What products are the lowest-hanging fruit? Which products will be harder for AI to serve? How will AI handle the ambiguity of which master to serve; the consumer and their experience or the bank and their fees and profit motive? Will banks need to own and operate their own models? If using other models, what will differentiate them when they are layers on top of someone else's technology? 4. David Velez: The Leader and Father: What does it mean to be a great listener? How does David approach it? What has been David's biggest lessons from Sequoia on culture? What works? What does not? What are David's biggest pieces of advice to raise kids that are not spoiled and are hard-working and humble? How does David think about "efficient giving" with the philanthropy he does today? What is the big paradox and challenge in philanthropy today?

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Fifty percent of the Brazilian adult population is a customer of New Bank. We have the primary bank account for close to thirty percent of adult Brazilians. If the smartphone was the bank in every pocket, AI is the bank and the banker in every pocket. We're building a company for decades. We're running a marathon, not a sprint.

• 0:19Harry Stebbings?

  Welcome back to 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. And today we feature one of the great founders of a generation, David Velez. He has built New Bank to be the largest neo-bank in the world. One in two Brazilians have an account with New Bank and their credit card in Mexico is the highest rated MPS for any consumer product in the world. I've studied every interview David has done and I've never seen him open up as he did today. This was such an incredible discussion. I want to say a huge thank you to Doug Leoni at Sequoia. Some amazing questions in preparation for this episode. It really did make such a difference. But before we dive into the show today, this episode is brought to you by Tegus, the go-to research destination for bold investing. Tegus curates expert insights, analysis and financial data to give you powerful perspective for your investment decisions.

• 1:04Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:09Speaker 02

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:12Harry Stebbings?

  David, I am so excited for this. We did ask the first one a while ago, but thank you so much for joining me again today.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  Ah, thank you, Harry. Great to be talking to you again. It's exciting.

• 3:22Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I would love to start, we were talking about Doug before the show. Doug told me that I had to start with the Sequoia interview process, which I haven't heard about before. He said, you've got to ask him, like, how did we run it? What was the process like? And what was it like from your perspective? Can we start there?

• 3:38Speaker 00

  Sure, yeah. It's a great question. I get introduced to Doug via mutual friend. I go to Sequoia and meet Doug. And from that moment on, everything was different about that interview process. And given the interview process was different, it just made me realize how different Sequoia is as a firm ultimately. But I'll just give you a couple of that points. So the first thing that came to mind was the first interview was with the head of the firm, not with the youngest analysts. In most firms, you start from the bottom and then you go up. At Sequoia, it's the opposite. You go from the top and then you go down. And so if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense, because that first impression of meeting the head of the firm from a candidate, it's like, hey, this is important. A lot of firms say that talent and people are important, but you spend a lot of time interviewing a lot of people

• 4:23Speaker 00

  that are just beginning to understand the firm. Speaking with the head of the firm made a lot of difference. Then all of the questions that I had with Doug were very, very different questions, questions that nobody had ever asked me in any interview before. There was very little questions around your CV or your experience. There maybe there were about five minutes of that. Everything else was about me, it's trying to get to know me as a person. And so a lot of questions around personality, character, questions like, tell me about your dad. What does he do? How is your mom? How's your relationship with your mother? Is she pretty strict? He's gonna answer, but there's no way to game those questions, right? There's no way to game those answers, there's not a right answer.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  But somehow Doug has developed an entire philosophy around what different answers to those questions actually mean? And how those questions will lead you into the right kind of answer. I'll give you one final data point. I finished the interview with Doug and he tells me, I would love for you to meet more people at Sequoia. I leave Sequoia and from the time that I went from leaving the office to getting to my car, which was about a minute. I turned on the car and I had already an inbox from Mike Moritz asking me to go back and meet with him. So it took Doug about a minute to go talk to Mike. Mike to when I interview me, to send me an email and to be ready to talk to me again. So that just tells you so much about the firm in so little details.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  That was just kind of the beginning of understanding how different Sequoia was as a culture firm. But all of those elements made it a very interesting interview and experience. In hindsight, makes a lot of sense to structure it that way.

• 5:57Harry Stebbings?

  It's so funny listening to you. I remember when I met with him and he dug in deep on my relationship with my brother. And he told me that it's one of the most revealing traits, which is how you describe your relationship with your siblings. I always remember that. He told me that you had crazy trips in Latam when you were building out Sequoia Latam. What one sticks out most in your mind?

• 6:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, the tax brings was a bit crazy. I was in business school. I was about to start my two-year vacation, as sometimes they call business school. About a month in, I go meet Doug and three months in, I find myself working again. Doing business school and working for Sequoia. Since I was looking at investing in opportunities in Brazil, I had to wake up at four in the morning to be in the office at four thirty, do prospecting calls to Brazil firms. Brazil is was four to six hours ahead. California, working for Sequoia from four, five AM to eight AM, then going to business school, then back in the office at two PM, working until seven, eight, then go home to do homework.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  So it was super intense, but it was incredibly stimulating because I was almost like living these two lives with really amazing people. And then there were these trips where Stanford Business School doesn't have classes on a Wednesday. So at about three PM on Tuesdays, Doug would pick me up at business school. I felt like a little bit like that was picking me up from school. We would drive to San Francisco Airport, get into Doug's plane and fly to Sao Paulo about fourteen hours. And I remember just waking up, almost like lost where I was and I was find myself like flying to Brazil, about landing in Sao Paulo, pinching myself like, what is going on here? What is this experience? I'm in business school.

• 7:36Speaker 00

  And then that Wednesday, meeting about seven firms, I just, I remember specifically one trip where we signed three term sheets. We went and it was boom, boom, boom. We felt like cowboys, meeting all these companies, signing term sheets, flying back so that I could be on time Thursday at eight AM back at Stanford. So the entire thing was, was just amazing and having to be able to spend time with Doug and, and getting to know him so, so well, was an amazing just opportunity and experience that I, that I cherish a lot.

• 8:05Harry Stebbings?

  That one-on-one time is so unique and so rare and so few people have had that chance with your Doug's of the world, with your Mike Maris of the world, but specifically with Doug. When you reflect on that, what are one or two of your biggest takeaways and how did they impact how you think?

• 8:19Speaker 00

  I think the first thing was, I don't think I have the people raider that Doug has. He has an uncanny ability to read people. I think he's, that's his single biggest superpower. And if you think about it, that is one of the most valuable superpowers for any type of business. Either you're running a business, running a business about hiring and managing the right type of people. In the investing business, it is the ultimate superpower because ultimately you're, especially in the early stage, you're, you're investing in people. I don't think I have quite a great raider as he does. He's a student of people, but working with him, I understood how important it is to develop that raider. I do as much as I can. My interviews today are not interviews about career experience.

• 9:02Speaker 00

  They're all the interviews. When I interview somebody at a new bank, it's all about character traits. I don't really wanna spend time asking you about what school did you go to? It's about what's really driving that person. There are certain type of people that have very strong strengths in certain areas and also very strong weaknesses in certain areas. Valuing those type of people over the people that are simply just good at everything has been a really interesting insight and has been a combination of kind of that Sequoia experience with New Bank experience around how to build teams. I'd rather have the people that have this incredible strengths and the weaknesses than the people that are okay in just certain areas. Those tend to be, if you manage them adequately, those are much more powerful type of hires. So that entire read about people and asking the right questions and valuing the right character

• 9:47Speaker 00

  was a great learning from Doug. I was an intern at Sequoia. And since the very beginning, as I mentioned in the interview, I was treated as a partner. I was treated as an equal. I sat down in the investment committee of Sequoia next to Doug and Doug asked me, "What do you think, David, of this investment?" And the first time, he caught me off guard. I didn't know that I needed to even speak. I was ready to listen in and keep my mouth quiet. The second time, I was informed. I had read, I had done my homework and I had a point of view. And that level of treating me like partnership, of having a seat on the table, I think was ultimately what pushed me to get a level of motivation that I hadn't felt anywhere else in any previous career that I had. That was an insight that I took to New Bank.

• 10:30Speaker 00

  That was a foundational insight around the culture that we have today, where we wanna treat everybody as a partner. Everybody needs to feel that they have a seat at the table. The youngest, the oldest, the person that has joined, the engineer, the data analyst, everybody will be asked, "What do they think?" And they have to have an important point of view. It's important because then that means skin in the game and we wanna prepare people. And that ultimately means that motivates the right type of people. It's a lot of work, but the just understanding of what partnership really means, even in a big organization, was a great insight I got from Doug and from Sequoia as a whole.

• 11:04Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, my word, that must have been a really Nervracking moment though, when you're asked by Doug, what do you think? And you're like, I haven't prepped shit. But I didn't want to ask you, post that amazing experience, flying in the jet to Sao Paulo, doing deals, Sequoia then decide to pull away from Latam and not open up the office. That's an oh shit moment for you personally in your career. Talk to me about that moment for you. How did you handle that?

• 11:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was a big shock. So I had been working for Sequoia for almost two years, setting up what would be the basis of Sequoia Brazil, Sequoia Latin America. I had rented a small office, had started interviewing people for the team. And then I remember very specifically, the day before my birthday in October 2012, I was preparing this big trip. Doug was coming to Brazil with a number of our partners of Sequoia. And Doug calls me and, you know, Doug, no BS, no time for chit chat. He straight up said, we had a conversation and we had decided there won't be any office in Latin America. Straight up. It was a big bucket of ice water at that moment. And, you know, I said, okay, I understand Doug. And he gave me a reasons.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  I thought, let me, let me digest this a little bit and I hung up the phone and I thought a lot about it. And I understood completely. I understood the reason. I agree with the reason. It was unfortunate. We had spent 18 months looking at a bunch of startup opportunities, at entrepreneurs. And honestly, there were just not that much, anything that got anybody excited. And it was a faraway place, 16 hours away from San Francisco. Why would Sequoia, who had access to the best entrepreneurs in the world in Silicon Valley, spend time, at that point, obviously, things have changed a lot in 10 years, but would spend time just going and investing in some of these businesses that in a way were just wanted to be clones of Silicon Valley businesses? They were not really shooting that high. They were not really thinking that high. So after a bit of digestion, I understood it.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  I was so appreciative of Doug of just give it to me straight. No, ah, let's think about it. Let's wait another month. Let's wait six months. I think most people would want to kind of like sugarcoat it. By him, just give it to me straight, made it very crystal clear to me what I needed to do. I had two options. I could continue working for Sequoia, but I I needed to go move to California. I was going to be an investing partner in the growth fund. I think it was a great opportunity for me, but for me, this was also the moment where I finally got to pursue what I had been trying to pursue for 15 years, which was starting a business. That was what I always wanted to do. I always wanted to start a business. In a way, he made it very easy for me. This is it. This is the moment. Just go do and and start it.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  And after some time thinking about it, I said, this is it. Let's go for it. Let's go start a business.

• 13:43Harry Stebbings?

  Now, David, when we last did our show, I was very placid as an interviewer and I kind of just went along with a lot of things. I actually had Marcelo on the show from Bicycle recently and I disagreed with him in the show, which was a little bit courageous, I think of me. But I said, no, there's not enough depth in the Latam market for a growth fund. Because when you look at the liquidity environments, respectfully, New Bank alone is really the only one that's generated true, true venture scale returns. When you look at your other D-locals of the world, they're good, but they're not true, true venture. And you can't have a portfolio alone on that. Am I wrong?

• 14:21Speaker 00

  I think you're wrong now. I think things have changed a ton since 2012, 2013. I think from a very high level, and this is the analysis that's equated in 2012, like from a very macro perspective, this region has to be really important. Latin America's a region is the third largest GDP in the world. It's a region that has 650 million people, GDP per capita that is three to five X India. Already significant internal penetration, smartphone penetration, and a lot of really big problems that need to be solved and that technology could move the needle. Now, when we went back to 2012 and we're looking around, I think the problem was entrepreneurs were not looking at solving the main issues.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  The entrepreneurs were looking at solving the California engineer issue. The California engineering issue is, I want somebody to bring the food to my house. That's not really the issue in Latin America. There are bigger issues. There are problems in financial services. People don't have access to healthcare. People don't have access to education. So there was a disconnect between what the entrepreneurs were doing versus where the market opportunities were. We were one of the first ones that said, hey, guess what? Like, financial services is the single biggest Market cap in the region, there's gotta be an opportunity there. Overall conventional wisdom when we started was impossible. You're gonna get crushed. You can't compete with the biggest companies in Latin America. The big banks will crush you. So it was interesting to see a bit of it.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  There was a cultural barrier that we had to break through to create new bank. That hopefully today, as we've broken through that barrier, more entrepreneurs are starting to questioning the conventional wisdom in other big, big markets. And the market today, I think, is at a point where those big market cap opportunities exist. If you look at the biggest companies in Latin America today, they're mainly still very much incumbent companies. They're not digital native. If you look at the NASDAQ, about 25, 30% of companies in the NASDAQ today didn't exist 23 or 30 years ago. If you look at IBOV, Vespas, Brazil and Mexico, there are still incumbents that existed 100 years ago. So the opportunity for disruption, a lot of these markets, exist today. The culture has changed, the capital exists.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  And so I do think now the setup for more new banks in the region exists. And you'll see them over the next five to 10 years.

• 16:33Harry Stebbings?

  Where do you think liquidity comes from? Does it come from going to the US like you did and IPO-ing in the US? Does it come from local markets? Is it M&A? How do you solve that core question of, okay, but where does liquidity actually come from?

• 16:47Speaker 00

  There is a fair of liquidity in the Vespas, in the Brazilian stock exchange. When we're looking at this 2007, 8, there were 45 different IPOs in just the Brazilian market. About 2018, 2019, you had a lot of different exits. So these are exits that are meaningful for companies in their market caps, let's say between 300 to a billion dollars of exit type of market cap businesses. So you have liquidity locally. If you go above the billion dollar market cap, then obviously New York IPO becomes a real entry as an opportunity of liquidity. And then you have a very active M&A environment. There's recently a very big exit, Visa bought this fintech called Pismo as a billion dollar plus exit. One out of many. So I think there is fair amount of liquidity locally in Brazil.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  Mexico should have more, Colombia, Peru, Chile. I think you run a little bit into more in the liquidity constraints when you see businesses just building for Chile or building just for Colombia. Those tend to have much harder exit opportunity. But when you really get Brazil and Mexico, you'll find enough market cap to find liquidity.

• 17:50Harry Stebbings?

  I felt a bit guilty writing this question, if I'm going to be honest, but I'm going to go for it anyway. When you reflect with the benefit of hindsight, Neobank is unwaveringly the winner, not just of the fintech space, but also of the region. If we think about specifically of the space, with the knowledge that you have now, why do you think Neobank has been as successful as it has been? Why did Neobank win where so many others didn't?

• 18:13Speaker 00

  I don't think we've won. And the first thing I want to lay very clear is I get nervous when anybody says we are the winner. We still have so much to prove. We say internally, we are obviously always using the soccer analogy. You gotta use always go back to soccer in Latin America. We're still very much playing the first minute of the first half of the game. We're proud of where we've gotten the business today. Just to give you one data point, we're getting to a point where almost 50% of the Brazilian adult population is a customer of Neobank. That's a level of access. I don't think JP Morgan can say that about customers of theirs in the US.

• 18:50Harry Stebbings?

  Why is the other 50% not, do you think?

• 18:52Speaker 00

  We're missing product still for a lot of different segments. By the point where you get to a certain size, your product is good for certain subsegment, but then your product is really bad for a subsegment. So as we get to half of the population, then there are the high income consumer in Brazil that looks at our product and says, you know what, there's something that I like, but you're missing a lot of different products. So we have to build much more for that product. There are customers above 60 years old. We have a lot of customers, we have customers in their 80s, but they say, you know, your product is okay. It's still not clear enough, has a lot of complexity. We have to invest a lot to make it the very best digital banking experience for people in their 60s, 70s, 80s. So once you start attacking so many different subsegments,

• 19:34Speaker 00

  you have to customize the product almost to N equals one eventually. That's almost like the goal. N equals one, your product is fully segmented to that customer.

• 19:44Harry Stebbings?

  How do you think about that difficult decision of customization to different segments versus copying the product for different geographies? If you are great for middle to affluent segments of like mass market, you can just take that to Chile, to Colombia, to Mexico, and expand geographically where the product is relatively the same versus creating entirely new products for children, for old people, for super rich people. How do you think about that decision between product expansion versus geo-expansion?

• 20:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, so one of the sort of product principles or strategy principles that we went after since the very beginning is we've always seek to be the primary bank account of our customers. We want to replace the bank. We want to be the primary bank. We don't want to be just a little side wallet where you leave some cash to make some payments or to buy some stuff in e-commerce or pay your routing bill. We want to be your primary account. That's what we've always been going after. Once you make that decision, there are a bunch of other downstream decisions you need to make. One of them is you need a banking license. You cannot build this by just having a banking partner, by trying to do like a bank without being a bank. We've embraced the bank pros and cons of being a bank since the very beginning.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  And once you have a banking license, this means your business becomes less internationalizable. It becomes much more localized. You start executing a strategy of going very deep in fewer markets. That has meant that in about 10 years, we've only done three countries. But when we go to these three countries, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, we go after big markets where we see a path to probably the largest financial institution in each one of these countries eventually, because we are the primary bank account. We become the primary financial relationships of these consumers. And so, once you make that decision, then it's very much about customization and also very much about segmenting your product to the different subsegments versus trying to do 10, 15, 20 countries very quickly.

• 21:38Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask a really hard question? And your team are probably going to kill me for most of these questions, but editing is a real thing. Of the 50% of, you know, bank accounts that you have in Brazil today, how many are primary accounts of those 50%?

• 21:52Speaker 00

  About 60% of that 50% are primary bank accounts.

• 21:57Harry Stebbings?

  Wow, so one in four essentially.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  So if we have 50% of adult population and 60% are primary bank account, we have already close to, we have the primary bank account for close to 30% of adult Brazilians, which by the way, is now the highest among any bank in Brazil. We are now the most frequent primary bank account above incumbent banks. This is what traditional incumbent banks have said it's impossible for fintechs to do. They've always seen these fintechs adjacencies or ancillary wallets, things, side products that you have. And given the strategy we pursued, we have gone in the middle of what we think is the most valuable place to be, primary banking relationship.

• 22:35Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask you, what do you think is the biggest threat to Neobank today?

• 22:39Speaker 00

  Thinking that we have won, your question. Thinking that we made it, thinking that we're good. Because the opportunity ahead is so big. And just to give you a couple of data points, we have a large customer base, but when we actually look at the market share we have in every single one vertical, in credit cards, we have about 15% market share in credit cards. But in personal loans, we have 5% market share. In investments, we have about 2%. In insurers, we have 1%. We're in the early days of using this 85 million digitally only consumer base to build a marketplace, to go beyond financial services and enable our customers to access non-financial services products. So this is almost a redefine of what Neobank is. More a consumer platform than a bank.

• 23:24Speaker 00

  There will be more countries. I'm saying we'll go slowly, but there'll be more countries over the next five, 10 years. And we're still in the early, even earlier days in Mexico and Colombia. So again, we're in the first minute of the first half. And if for one second, we sit down and we give, you know, a lot of hats to ourselves and as we call it internally at Neobank, we rest on the laurels, that is the first day of the last day. That is the first minute of the second half of the game. And we just lose the opportunity of building something that will be an amazing, amazing type of company for your region.

• 23:56Harry Stebbings?

  How do you instill that in a team? The team reads the newspapers, the team have families that go, wow, you work at New Bank? The team see the cards everywhere. How do you instill that startup mentality now that you're an incumbent?

• 24:08Speaker 00

  It's a challenge. It's a really hard question. I don't think there is a single silver bullet. And it's a number of different small things. It begins from going back to Doug's interview questions. It begins by finding the right type of people that come in, having the right filter. We work very hard to try to identify the people that want to come to New Bank because they want to have New Bank in their CV, because they want to be here for two years and then go and do something else, versus the people that want to come here attracted by the opportunity to build something transformational. And you find these types of DNA. We started the business in a very small house in Sao Paulo. We paid, remember the partner at Sequoia, Michael Abramson, who was there? His mind was blown when I told him we paid $500 per month in rent and we had 20 people working out of the house.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  And it was a house that from the outside, you would say like, this is crazy. This is the last thing that would look like a bank. And I said that that was the best interview filter because the people that wanted, that was very much focused on their career, on their CV, on collecting LinkedIn acolytes, would see this house and would run away. They wouldn't even come in and have an interview with us. And then you would have a different type of people that would see the house, they would come in, they sit on the floor because we didn't have a chair. We would tell them we wanted to build the largest financial institution in Latin America. And then after a while, they would say, we'll be here on Monday, I'll be here on Monday. So in the early days, it was easy to do that filtering. Today it's harder, but we have a bunch of questions using Doug's psychological profiling to try to capture that at the interview process.

• 25:37Speaker 00

  And then there is the culture itself around how do you instill certain values that enable people to realize that this is the beginning and that there's so much work ahead, that there is so much that we need to build. We under-celebrate. Some people complain that we don't celebrate enough. They're probably right, but you know what? That's probably a feature at the end of the day, not a bug. It's uncomfortable at times because we celebrate very quickly a victory, but then 30 seconds after, we are asking, what's next? What is the next challenge? What is the next milestone that we need to do? And there are a number of other cultural kind of attributes and way we do things that at least try to maintain the level of sense of urgency

• 26:16Speaker 00

  that at least we had in the very beginning, regardless of how many, you know, newspapers or positive mentions we get in the news in social media.

• 26:25Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned the different products that you haven't really touched on or haven't penetrated as much as you'd like to. You mentioned the different geographies where you haven't. What do you think is the most non-obvious but biggest opportunity that New Bank has?

• 26:37Speaker 00

  I think this expansion beyond financial services is probably the most non-obvious. I think you've seen a lot of examples globally of large commerce businesses going into financial services or large social media businesses going into financial services. So Alibaba is a great example, Tencent is a very strong example. Southeast Asia, you see ride-hailing apps or some of the commerce businesses going to financial services. You haven't seen that much the opposite direction, financial services going into broader commerce businesses. But if you think about it from first principles, there is no reason why that reverse migration cannot happen. In fact, I would I would claim there is a bigger case to be made

• 27:17Speaker 00

  that is better or easier for financial services firms to go beyond financial services for a number of different reasons. The first one is trust and brand. In financial services, when you're the primary bank of a customer, you have to work 24/7 every single time. You're not simply just delivering somebody's shoes faster. If you fail on a transaction, it's not simply you delay the transaction. You are handling people's life savings. So the importance of the need to be operationally effective 24/7 is very, very high. We cannot get this wrong. And that means a higher necessity to build a stronger brand and trust with consumers.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  So financial firms that have become primary bank accounts have generally higher net promoter scores and have generally high trust with their consumers. And we see today, especially especially in net promoter score. Guess what is the highest net promoter score of any consumer product in the world today? This is going to be surprising to you. It's not the Tesla, it's not. The iPhone, the best, highest rated NPS consumer product in the world in any category is Nubank's Purple Credit Card in Mexico. It's a 94 NPS. It's strange that that's the case, but that just tells you to think, that tells you something about the market and the problem and tells you something about the solution and the strategy that we've chosen to build this consumer brand. So very quickly, go back to your question. In financial service, you need to build brand, you need to build trust, you need to build

• 28:42Speaker 00

  very strong technology and platforms. By now, we have one of the largest digitally native consumer bases in Latin America with 85 million customers. And we have a lot of data that we need to use to give people trust, which is credit. Once you add a lot of these assets and you put them under one roof, a very large base, a very strong brand, a higher NPS, there is no reason why this consumer platform cannot offer other products beyond financial services to consumers. That's kind of the most interesting and non-obvious opportunity we're trying to chase today.

• 29:13Harry Stebbings?

  What are some examples of those services outside of financial services that you think are most available?

• 29:18Speaker 00

  We're in the early days, but our marketplace is up and running today. We have several million daily active users today on our marketplace where our customers are consuming, are buying goods or services from over 180 different partners. Could be e-commerce businesses, could be ride-hailing apps, gift goods, could be a number of different products. They go into a marketplace, they buy there because not only we use our scale to give them better products, to give them discounts, but also we use our data capabilities to give them access to credit so they can purchase more. And if you know anything about retail in Latin America, one of the key issues around selling is providing credit.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  And this is an area where we built probably the best infrastructure in Latin America. We're the best at pricing credit and providing credit for a number of different capabilities. So these million of consumers would would decide to shop in our marketplace. We're not the e-commerce. We don't wanna be the e-commerce. We don't wanna get into logistics. But we are a platform that cross-sells all our products to these consumers. We give them better products and services, better discounts. And then for the merchants, we tell them, stop spending money with Google or Facebook. Stop spending a lot of marketing investments. We bring you eighty-five million consumers to your doorstep. And by the way, we help you sell faster and better within this marketplace. So this is the very beginning of building that business.

• 30:44Harry Stebbings?

  My question to you is prioritization and resource allocation. Someone once said on the show that the number one role of a CEO is to be the best resource allocator in the business. There are so many different things that you could do, from insurance to mortgages to student loans, to financial products which have very high margins and are very accessible to you. Why do this?

• 31:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. The first point is, we're not doing all of these different verticals, right? We're not doing ride-hailing. We're not doing e-commerce. We're a platform that connects with the right architecture through providers of these services. That's one point I think to leave pretty clear, because if we were to actually go on the other end and actually start trying to build all of this, then I completely agree with your concern around prioritization. But then to your main question, why do this? We think this is the next ten years of growth for us. And this is the opportunity to really solve complexity for our consumers. As the mission of the company since the very beginning has been to fight complexity to empower people. We found initially a lot of complexity in financial services. And financial services continues to dedicate, we allocate today about eighty percent of all resources and energy to financial services.

• 31:46Speaker 00

  So that core continues to have most of the allocation of resources. But when we think about the next five years and if we think about the opportunity, what we can do to fight that complexity and pursue that mission, we think there is a bigger opportunity to increase the concentric circles and provide more products and services to our consumers by fighting that complexity. So it's thinking about the big opportunities that we have ahead. And also diversifying away from credit, diversifying away from financial services, providing another types of revenue sources to the business and ultimately making it a much more resilient model beyond the ups and downs of financial services in Latin America, which is historically very cyclical.

• 32:24Harry Stebbings?

  I do have to ask you, when we look at the success of New Bank, the thing that I find striking is actually something that you said to me beforehand when we were going back and forth, which is actually that the US and Europe can learn a lot from India, from China, from Brazil, when it comes to financial services in particular. What do you think Europe and the US can learn in particular, when you reflect on your own journey?

• 32:44Speaker 00

  So I think what I perceive a bit, and especially in financial services in the US and Europe, is a bit what we were discussing about what is the biggest landmine or the biggest challenge for New Bank is, there is a sense that they have won. It's a problem that is solved. US seems to think that, Europe seems to think that, that there is no need to really try more. And as a result, you end up with a regulatory environment that seems pretty adverse to innovation. Crypto, BID, fintech, when I talk to colleagues or founders of fintechs in the US and Europe, it just feels like they're always going against, the regulator is always this headwind that they're trying to consistently fight against, and somehow they gotta figure out how to break it.

• 33:28Speaker 00

  When you look at India, China, Brazil, it's the exact opposite. All these countries, there was no sense that they have won, right? It was clearly that they hadn't. The lack of access was significant. In Latin America, you had 250 million people completely unbanked, 60 million people in Brazil, Brazil charging one of the highest interest rates in the world. For regulators, it was clear that they needed to do something, and the concentration of the system, the fact that you have about 85, 90% of the entire market in the hands of banks, was something to be solved. And so that created an environment for fintechs like us to actually go and compete. And ultimately, the consumer won, because you had incumbents, you have fintechs, everybody actively fighting for better products to consumers, and consumers having a lot of alternatives.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  So the first thing I think is, and because of that, you've seen a lot of leapfrog. Today, how Brazil payments operate tells the future, right? You go to Sao Paulo today, you see how people are transacting. It feels a bit like when I first went to China in 2017 and people were transacting, it's like, that felt like the future. You don't see cash anymore. That's not what you see in Europe or US today. So I think that level of complacency in this industry In these big countries has stopped innovation and have permitted that a lot of these emerging markets, a lot of these technologies have leapfrogged to a place today where Brazil, China, India are ahead of US and Europe. And this is just the beginning. You'll see this trend just accelerating, I think, over the next five, 10 years, when you start thinking about open banking, when you start thinking about the uses of crypto,

• 34:56Speaker 00

  when you start thinking about how what AI could do in financial services.

• 34:59Harry Stebbings?

  What would you advise then? What would you advise founders who are in these more regulated markets who agree with you, but are going, what the fuck can I do? And then what would you advise regulators who are going, haha, we have our stronghold?

• 35:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a hard problem. Maybe two small insights. The first one is, in the early days of fintech, in 2012, 2013, 2014, when Nascent, a lot of people were starting globally around this idea of the future of financial services is of technology companies. We made a very different decision than a lot of businesses in some of developed economies. As I said to you earlier, we embraced the financial, the banking space with all the pros and the cons. We went and wanted that banking license. The sense is that in a lot of our geographies, entrepreneurs try to almost do everything except embracing the space, except becoming a bank, because of some arguments that if you became a bank, then your valuation multiple was going to be lower and you're going to be valued less. I remember discussing that argument and saying, who cares?

• 35:57Speaker 00

  First, we have to build this business and then we will care about valuation. It doesn't, it doesn't really matter. That has partly been one of the reasons why a lot of these businesses have become in backlash, because regulators have seen businesses doing financial services that really look like banks. And in reality, they should have just embraced the space since the very beginning. That's one specific decision, I think, that we made that a lot of people didn't make. But from the regulator's perspective, it's not visible today, even for the big regulators, how much empty space and opportunities there is to improve efficiency in financial services, even in markets as sophisticated as the US. US is 50% of the world's financial services space. But when you look at the subsegments, you find a lot of lack of access to good financial services.

• 36:40Speaker 00

  There's a lot of niches, a lot of subsegments that are not getting good access to product. They don't have good access to credit. They are not simple products. And so I wish regulators realized that fintech could provide a lot of solutions and that they were ready to embrace new entrants as a way to close some of those gaps versus the existing status quo, which almost seems as if they were protecting and benefiting the traditional incumbents.

• 37:07Harry Stebbings?

  I'm just throwing a grenade in here. Will New Bank or will any startup bank be able to disrupt the truly high net worth banking segment? When we look at the Goldman's, the Pictet's, the true ultra-high net worth, will they ever be displaced?

• 37:24Speaker 00

  One of those developments of technology where it's first very slowly and then very fast. First, it will begin by the high-income population, not necessarily the top 1%, but the top 5%. It will begin in products that are very simple to manage, where you need less access to your private bankers. So credit cards, personal loans, investments access. Today, you don't really need a very sophisticated personal banker to tell you where to invest. If you realize that almost all returns comes from having a very well-diversified investment portfolio and fixed income and equities, you should just do that yourself and stop paying commissions to a lot of brokers or middlemen. So it has begun, I think that kind of evolution has begun in very simple products. They don't require middlemen.

• 38:09Speaker 00

  I think then AI and this vision around AI really private banker could become the catalyst for accelerating the migration towards a fully digitalized private banker. And at that point, then you really start attacking the 1%. You really start offering products to the wealthiest of the wealthiest because you have an algorithm that is 24/7 available, that give you actually better advice than the human, that gives you access to products that the human is not giving you. And finally, it doesn't take a toll. It's not taking a lot of commissions in the middle and has no conflicts of interest, which a lot of the times, some of the bankers that you mentioned do have conflicts of interest embedded in the business model. So I wouldn't discard it that we will see this happening, not in the next two years,

• 38:53Speaker 00

  but maybe in the next five to 10 years.

• 38:55Harry Stebbings?

  When you think for your hat with New Bank, how do you think AI changes financial services for you, both short and long term?

• 39:02Speaker 00

  I think that the shift towards digital banking that we saw happening in 2012, 2013, got us very excited because in that platform shift towards their smartphone, we saw the opportunity, as we used to call it, putting a bank in everybody's pocket. And that meant that we were really able to increase financial inclusion because the moment we don't need to put a banking branch in every quarter, the cost to serve a customer goes down by 20 to 50x. The cost to serve somebody goes close to zero. So we created a model that is much more efficient than the incumbent, which means much more access and lower prices for everybody. However, this view around the fully democratization of financial access, it has a limit to the smartphone as a platform.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  What we realized is that you still have a mass of, let's say, 50, 60% of the population that fundamentally doesn't really understand how to invest, that in an environment that is very complex, where you have very complex concepts like compound interest, where had very complex issues around what is the most tax-efficient investment fund? How do I invest much money? They don't really know how to do it today. The response has always been, oh, financial education, financial education. But guess what? There is a limit to financial education. This is very complex stuff. People don't necessarily want to learn it, don't necessarily have the energy to learn it. And so there's been a limit in how much this democratization of financial access have happened. We think that AI is now the second platform shift

• 40:28Speaker 00

  that might actually be able to take it to its final conclusion. And so if the smartphone was the bank in every pocket, AI is the bank and the banker in every pocket. And that really is the catalyst to enable 100% of the population to invest, to get credit and do the right financial decisions. And in a way, allow the bottom half of the pyramid to bank the same way that the PICTET customer is today back. It's really democratizing the access and the service of the 1% to the other 99%.

• 41:00Harry Stebbings?

  Does AI change how you think about structuring your org? In terms of functions, in terms of your product teams? Do you want to have a specific like science and research team? How do you think about AI impacting your org design?

• 41:13Speaker 00

  We are asking ourselves actively this question. We are structured in a way to follow our strategy, which is we want customers to love us fanatically. We win when customers love us fanatically. Our entire strategy is get customers to like us. It's as simple as that. And we are organized in a way that we can build products and services to get customers to like us. And so we think AI will be one more platform to help customers like us. Either because we give them better products or services, or because we charge them less. So don't think we need a corporate reorganization. We just need to figure out how AI is embedded in everything we do. And then some cultural decisions.

• 41:53Speaker 00

  This actually has been a very interesting debate we've had over the past few months with our teams is what is the purpose of AI? Is AI's purpose today to get to cross-sell? So you're going to see a private banker of New Bank actively telling you, Harry, get this loan. Harry, get this insurance product. And then become almost like this salesperson selling on behalf of New Bank. Or we want to create an entity that will maintain almost a neutrality. Because we think that that neutrality will be the way to optimize loyalty for the consumer. AI that will tell you, hey, Harry, guess what? New Banks actually doesn't have the best product for you today. You should go get it from Itau because they have a better product. And having New Bank recommend somebody else's product because they have a better product than we do.

• 42:37Harry Stebbings?

  How does AI deal with intense ambiguity of financial services? And what I mean by that is if you have an AI banker, it could legitimately say to me, hey, you should place more trades. Because you're taking a clip, you're taking a transaction fee, even though it may be better for you, but worse for the customer. How does AI know who the boss is and where the incentives lie?

• 42:56Speaker 00

  That's exactly the key debate. And it's actually the same answer than your banker today, your human banker or your broker. What is the incentives of that broker? Is the incentive of the broker that is calling you to say, hey, you should buy this stock and then sell it? At the end of the day, because he's incentivized to make a lot to get it to do a lot of the trades because he's getting a bonus at the end of the month based on the trades. Or is that broker really neutral and has aligned incentives with you in that if you make good investment decisions, the broker will will make a big bonus. The same right of incentives need to be programmed inside the AI. That is, I think, where we're spending a lot of time. And for us, it's very clear. We want to optimize consumer satisfaction in the long run. And for us, any conflict of interest will be a detractor from building that

• 43:41Speaker 00

  that loyalty with the consumer that we want to do over the long term.

• 43:44Harry Stebbings?

  Do you not have to own the models yourself then? Because if you think about relying on any existing, either closed or open models, whether it's your OpenAI or your LAMAs or your anthropics of the world, you won't be able to have that control. The only way you'll be able to have that control really is if you actually own the models yourself. How do you think about that debate?

• 44:01Speaker 00

  I see the existing LLMs, the OpenAI, the Entropic as sort of the base infrastructure. They give you the data, they give you the model. But where you really create that type of incentive, where you actually define the behavior of that AI is when you start programming the behavior of your AI private banker, right? If you're telling him, your objective function is to get consumers to get a lot of loans, that banker is going to go and push a bunch of notifications around get that loan, get that loan at that very high interest rate or get that trade. Or if you tell that AI private banker, your objective function is to get the net promoter score of every single customer to be 110. Year from now, then that's going to be a completely different behavior. So I don't think you need to own the model,

• 44:44Speaker 00

  but I do think you need to own and be very thoughtful around what are the incentives? And what is the objective function of that algorithm when you start actually programming it?

• 44:53Harry Stebbings?

  I have to ask you, we speak about kind of how you're integrating AI into Neobank today. Nigel Morris told me that you're the single best listener or one of the best listeners that he's ever encountered. What does great listening mean to you? And how do you think about your approach to it?

• 45:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, listen, they tried to start a bank in Brazil without being Brazilian, without being a banker, without ever having ever worked for a credit card business, without having any network in Brazil, without knowing anything about regulatory in Brazil. I remember a conversation that I had with an old partner, Sequoia, said like, "These are really interesting business, but you're not an engineer, you're not Brazilian, you don't speak Portuguese, you don't know this, you don't know that, like you have all these like gaps." And it was one of those type of feedback that that it felt a bit like a punch in the stomach at first, but made me realize that he was right and that my job number one was to go find people that fill all the gaps in knowledge and experience that I had. That forces you to listen, to learn to be a good listener, because by default, you just do, you know that you don't know.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  And I say even part of a foundational aspect of Nubank's culture, it's discomfort of the beginner's mind. We like to hire people that have disability, that has more questions than answers, that are able to look at a problem with a bunch of questions versus the traditional experienced person that said, "I've been doing it for 30 years, and therefore I know the answer." For those people, there are no real alternatives. You know everything, so how can you even innovate? So Nubank has this view around having a lot of questions. You have to be a good listener. Me personally, given my background, I had to listen a lot. I had to ask a lot of questions because there was a lot that I didn't know. That has almost shaped the culture of how we think about building products, where we have this level of epistemic humility. We know that we don't know a bunch of stuff,

• 46:33Speaker 00

  and so we're actively seeking to find why we might be wrong or why we might be right.

• 46:39Harry Stebbings?

  When you listen as deeply as you do, you seek out the truths to get to the best outcome. Final two questions before we do a quick fire. I just want a review of decisions. When you review the decisions that you've made, what has been the single best decision you think you've made in the Nubank journey? And how has that impacted your mindset first?

• 46:58Speaker 00

  The early setup, one of the things I got, I remember getting from Sequoia was how important the first 90 days of a business are. Those are like the initial set conditions, the first team, the first culture, the same value. We were very deliberate around the type of people that we attracted, my co-founders and how we picked them and how you spent a lot of time trying to find them, the values that we set up, the way we organize ourselves, we put all our values in a culture deck. That has allowed us to scale this culture again and again and again, because we have a lot of clarity around where we stand for it and how we make decisions. And having focused a lot on that consumer obsession since the beginning, having created values around bringing diverse people, diverse from

• 47:39Speaker 00

  a mental perspective, diverse experiences, creating an idea meritocracy where the best idea wins, building that concept of partnership, of flatness in the organization. All of those elements, I think, have been the key core elements that had allowed us to ultimately make a lot of right decisions from a product perspective, from a strategy perspective, from a hiring perspective. Those are the top decisions that kind of keep paying even as we scale.

• 48:03Harry Stebbings?

  Everyone makes bad decisions. What has been the single worst decision you've made in the new bank journey and how did that impact your mindset?

• 48:10Speaker 00

  Perhaps the worst decision from a product and kind of strategy perspective has been when we enter investments via a big acquisitions. We enter via an acquisition versus organically. And I think we underestimated, or I underestimated, how hard was going to be the integration. We did everything we could to do diligence that, and I remember we've been comfortable enough, but it ended up being harder than we expected. The other thing that, the other mistake that we did was, it was a decision that was made in a rushed environment that was very much momentum driven. Interest rates in Brazil in 2018 were coming down very fast. And so there was this massive movement towards equities. We saw a lot of people buying into equities. And we remember saying, we have to be there in the market now with

• 48:53Speaker 00

  an equities product. Everybody's doing it. We cannot be late. We have to do it now. And that's what we have to do via an acquisition. In hindsight, that was a bit of departure of the way we generally like to make decisions, which is, we're building a company for decades, we're running a marathon, not a sprint. We'd rather be a little bit slow to a market, but do it well versus a company that tries to do too many things too fast and launch a bunch of stuff. Since it was a bit momentum driven, I think it was a little rushed. In hindsight, I probably would have decided to be a little slow, build it organically. From now on, I think this means a bias, even a bigger bias to build organically versus an M and A driven strategy as we think about the next five to 10 years of growth in the business.

• 49:34Harry Stebbings?

  Did you always know you'd be successful? I speak to some of the biggest founders in the world. Some have an innate feeling that they would be successful when they were younger, some don't. Did you always feel that you would be successful or not?

• 49:46Speaker 00

  I think it's a tricky question because I think it depends a lot on your definition of success. To me, success was going to be having the journey and adventure of my lifetime. We were about to go against the biggest companies in Latin America. That was a great adventure. I recently reread The Odyssey and the Iliad from Homer. That was a great adventure. There's a lot of poetry around why it was all about the journey, not the destination, right? For me, a new bank was always about the journey, not the destination. And so success for me was having the journey of my lifetime, doing something hard, challenge myself, doing it with great people. If we failed, that was still success because we did a great journey. The journey was fun. I learned a lot. I challenged myself.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  So from that perspective, when we chose this idea of banking, which by the way, at that point was, I remember thinking, this is the single hardest thing I can possibly imagine myself doing. Building a bank from scratch in Brazil is the hardest thing I can do, and that's why I wanted to do it. From that perspective, I define success that way. I thought I was going to be successful because it was going to be a great adventure, no matter if we made it or if we didn't.

• 50:50Harry Stebbings?

  Final one, I promise, I promise. But one of my great friends is a very successful hedge fund manager and billionaire. And he said to me the other day, Harry, the thing with giving, it's harder to give money away efficiently than it is to make it. And the important word there is efficiently. It's harder to give money away efficiently than it is to make it. On the philanthropy side, you're doing a lot. Why you're doing it and how you think about efficient giving versus giving?

• 51:14Speaker 00

  It's a phenomenal question. My mind is split on this debate right now. It's something that I'm actually thinking about. I understand the concept of efficient giving. I think a lot of what we've been doing on the philanthropy side is figuring out, how do you maximize impact per dollar spent? Where is the maximum point of leverage? You can give a lot of money, you can write a lot of checks, but are you really creating impact? And we've created a strategy within our foundation, very focused on areas where we think there is a lot of leverage, specifically areas like education and building leadership, public and private leaders. If you educate somebody, you create a lot of impact. They're going to go and build companies. You give them an opportunity to create more wealth for them and for their society, and you create systemic impact. Now, I think that sometimes feels almost contradictory

• 51:59Speaker 00

  to the reality that you see in Latin America, where you actually see millions of people that are hungry today, millions of people that are waiting to get a surgery in a hospital. And so in a way, it's like, yeah, fine, you want to create all these very sophisticated models around impact and leverage in society, and because of that, you're not giving enough. But at the same time, people need the money now. Like, if you want to create impact, go buy somebody's food. Go make it easy for them to get the surgery that they need for their friends, and stop overthinking this. You're overthinking this. The problem is now, there's a sense of urgency. Just go do it. And if you make one person today directly better off, that might have actually more impact than coming up with like these systemic models that ultimately, as a philanthropist, you're not even touching people's lives.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  So it's a bit of a contradiction that we are in the middle right now. And honestly, I think both are probably true, but I haven't really figured out how to solve that contradiction.

• 52:54Harry Stebbings?

  Final, final one, and you're going to cringe at this, but you are a billionaire now, on paper at least with New Bank, and you also have four children. It's very hard to bring children up in any situation. It's also hard to bring them up with the same humility, hunger, work ethic, when life is different financially. How do you bring children up with hunger and ambition when brought up in a very affluent environment?

• 53:15Speaker 00

  It's a challenge and it's a question that I think a lot about. I've talked about it with Doug, we talked to Mals about Doug. He has some very strong views. I think the most important thing is make sure that they don't realize they have one. If the children think they have one, which basically means they are complacent. They don't really have try hard to anything. They raise their hand and everything appears next to them. Then you are stealing from them probably the single most valuable asset that anybody can have, which is this need to become a better person. This need to prove themselves and to everybody that they have something to prove. It's almost like a bit of inferiority complex. It's almost a bit of a lack of self-confidence where you have to go try.

• 53:57Speaker 00

  There has to be some struggle because they have to prove themselves that they can struggle, they can fight and they can win. If there's nothing to struggle with, then there is no victory. There is no opportunity to build self-confidence at the end of the day. And so when my wife and I think actively, it's like, how do we create a bit of a struggle for them? They cannot be too easy. They have to have responsibilities. They have to have chores. They're still young, but they need to know that they need to make their bed every morning and they need to clean up after themselves and they need to wash the car every weekend. And they need to do a bunch of different stuff so that they can be a good participant of the family, a good participant of the community. And so we are still trying to figure out the right answer for that. But I think the core insight, I think, is there's gotta be a little struggle.

• 54:42Speaker 00

  We cannot remove everything from them. It cannot be too comfortable because otherwise they lose the need to separate themselves and to prove themselves even more.

• 54:51Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, if you want to give them struggle, you could just give them an incumbent Brazilian bank account.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  What a great idea. They're not, they're not open an account there, but maybe, maybe they should start there once they get their first account.

• 55:04Harry Stebbings?

  Listen, I want to do a quick fire round. I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

• 55:09Speaker 00

  Okay, let's do it.

• 55:09Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so what single things do you know now that you wish you'd known when you started new?

• 55:14Speaker 00

  The importance of bringing people with more experience sooner. I was a bit dogmatic in trying to get people that did not have experience, that had their head full of questions. It is also important to have head with some answers. So I would have balanced it better.

• 55:28Harry Stebbings?

  What's the most vivid near-death experience you have with Nubank?

• 55:32Speaker 00

  I think in 2017, Friday morning, I wake up, I read the news that the government is about to change the liquidating timeline for credit cards. In Brazil, you have about 27 days to pay merchants as a credit card issuer. They were going to do it to two. That meant we were going to need to raise a billion reais overnight, and that was going to be quickly the end. So it was a tough weekend. We rallied hard. We went up to regulators. Monday morning, there were 15,000 customers on Twitter of the Central Bank of Brazil saying, "You cannot do this. Nubank is finally bringing competition." At 2:00 PM, we met with the president of the Central Bank of Brazil, and he tells us, to me and my co-founder, "Don't worry. You're good. This is not going to happen." But that was very close.

• 56:14Harry Stebbings?

  What was the biggest lesson from taking Nubank public right before a big market correction?

• 56:19Speaker 00

  We could not see that market crash. We were a bit lucky and a bit good in terms of the timeline. I remember debating with my partner, saying, "This is a capital-intensive business. No matter how well we do it, we're going to need capital, and the best way to get access to capital is in the public market. So we're going to have to be a public company soon, number one. And number two, around 2020, 2021, I remember having the conversation, saying, "Everything is looking so good. The entire environment is so positive. There is only downside from here, which means this is the perfect time to go public." And so we went public end of 2021, and then beginning of 2022, everything changed. So timing was good, preparation was good. What the insight or what lesson we got from that was

• 57:02Speaker 00

  very quickly realizing that there were a lot of things that we could control from that reaction, or stock took a hit very fast. That created a lot of internal stress. But we spent some time figuring out what could we control, which was our execution. What cannot we control, which was US interest rates, US inflation, things that were affecting us that were outside our control. And then quickly enough realized, let's just focus on what we can control.

• 57:25Harry Stebbings?

  You have four children, as we mentioned, you can call David Velez up the night before your wife gave birth to your first child and you can give one piece of advice. What would you call David up and say, you should know this before you're first?

• 57:38Speaker 00

  I would say how unbelievably rewarding it's going to be being a father and investing time and also how unbelievably tiring it is going to be also being a father and also how valuable a good night of sleep becomes. Sleep just becomes this an amazing, amazing valuable asset. So enjoy while you can.

• 57:58Harry Stebbings?

  Are you back in the office and do you believe in remote? More and more of the people I interview don't.

• 58:04Speaker 00

  I'm still making my mind about it. I think our reality is very different than the reality of the typical Silicon Valley business. We being in Brazil and being in Latin America means we have to have a global footprint to get some of the best access and talent in the world. There is a lot of talent that we need to get access to that is simply not in Sao Paulo, it's not in Mexico City, it is in Berlin, it is in San Francisco. If we were to say everybody has to be in the office, we would gain a bit in terms of faster decision making, faster ability to innovate. I believe in all the pros of being in the office, but we will lose a lot of the incredible valuable talent that we have. So for now, we are operating hybrid. We get to be, have to be in the office, all teams at Nubank have to be in the office

• 58:47Speaker 00

  for a week, every six to eight weeks as a minimum. Some teams decide to be more in the office, but as a minimum, you have to spend some time in the office and you know what, we're looking at a lot of metrics from efficiency to productivity to engagement. And so far, I think we are navigating this kind of dichotomy satisfactorily.

• 59:07Harry Stebbings?

  David, you can have dinner with anyone dead or alive. Who do you have dinner with and why?

• 59:12Speaker 00

  Steve Jobs, Karl Marx and Nietzsche to dinner. Steve Jobs, because I think he's the most incredible entrepreneur in history and I would want to get into his head and I would want to ask him a lot of questions. I would ask him, look at Apple today, is this what you would have built? I'm very curious about that question. I would bring Karl Marx because I really want to get into his head and say, look at what you're... Marxism has done or did in the 20th century. Is this where you expected it to happen? And would this change your mind about what you wrote? I mean, I think clearly, I think a lot about kind of political philosophy. And it was a very pernicious philosophy. But when you read, I don't think he necessarily expected a lot of what actually happened, especially the 20th centuries.

• 59:55Speaker 00

  I would, we want to have that debate with Marx. And I would want to talk to Nietzsche because when I read Nietzsche is fundamentally the most intellectually stimulating conversation I could imagine having. There is so much geniality in that brain. And when I read Nietzsche and I reread it five times to try to understand it, every single time I reread it, I just get surprised. And so that would probably be the most, be the most exhilarating dinner I could imagine having.

• 1:00:19Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, I just choose Doug Leoni, so I mean, you sound far more.

• 1:00:24Harry Stebbings?

  And this episode was brought to you by Socorro Capital. Uh, penultimate one, what activity are you bad at, but still continue to do?

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  I like to sing opera.

• 1:00:35Harry Stebbings?

  You do?

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  I do, and I'm a very bad opera singer. But when I feel good, when I'm excited, I sing. And my kids just immediately jump over me and say, just dad, please shut up. And I have to shut up.

• 1:00:46Harry Stebbings?

  I love that. I had no idea about that, by the way. That's a fun fact for all pub quizzes. Now, his five years for you and for New, when we do this again in 2028, where's New then?

• 1:00:56Speaker 00

  I think we would have become the leading financial institution in Latin America, especially in these three markets, clearly. We kind of checked that box. We've gone beyond Latin America, not sure exactly where, but we've gone beyond in terms of international expansion. And we've gone beyond financial services into this vision around consumer platform and consumer services. And on top of that, AI, the AI private banker, the self-driving banker is the leading platform, the leading way where consumers are interacting with us, probably even beyond the smartphone. Those would be the key pieces of that.

• 1:01:30Harry Stebbings?

  David, I've absolutely loved this. Thank you so much for putting up with my prior questions and you've been an incredible guest.

• 1:01:36Speaker 00

  Thank you, Harry. And I like the grenades, so keep, keep sending them, keep shooting them.

• 1:01:42Harry Stebbings?

  That was such a special show with David. If you want to see more from us behind the scenes, of course you can by searching for us on YouTube, that's 20VC. But before we leave you today, this episode is brought to you by Tegus, the go-to research destination for bold investing. Tegus curates expert insights, analysis and financial data to give you powerful perspective for your investment decisions. With lightning-fast access to over 60,000 transcripts across 20,000 companies, you'll discover a wealth of unique insights to fuel your fundamental research, gain perspectives, synthesise information and even model outcomes, all on Tegus. As a 20-minute VC listener, try it for free at tegus.com/growth and speak of tools we can't live without like

• 1:02:24Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:03:08Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:03:52Harry Stebbings?

  Vendor and risk management and more to make compliance uncomplicated. Secureframe makes it fast and easy to achieve and maintain compliance so you can focus on serving your customers. Automate your security and privacy compliance with Secureframe and you can schedule a demo today at secureframe.com. As always, I so appreciate your support. Now stay tuned for an incredible episode coming on Wednesday. The story of Dubsmash scaling to 43 million users in just 10 days and then three acquisition attempts, one successful with Reddit.