YouSaid · the spoken record

David Velez

lines on the record: 66
first: 2023-09-11
most recent: 2023-09-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“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 our consumers are interacting us with us, probably even beyond the smartphone. Those will be the key pieces of that.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do, and I'm a very bad upper singer. But what I feel good, what I'm excited, I sing, and my kids just immediately jump on BSA, just start, please shut up. And I have to shut up.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In that brain, and when I read Nichi and I reread it five times to try to understand it, every single time I reread it, I just get surprised. And so that was probably the most be the most exhilarating dinner I could imagine having.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Steve Jobs, Karl Marx, and Nietzsche to dinner. Steve Jobs, because I think he's the most incredible entrepreneur in history, and I want to get into his head and I want to ask him a lot of questions. I would not 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 said, look at what your Marxism has done or did in the 20th century. Is this what 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. I would want to have that debate with Marx. And we want to talk to Nietzsche because when I read Nietzsche, he's fundamentally the most intellectually stimulating conversation I could imagine having. There is so much genius.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 have to be in the office all teams and Newbank have to be in the office 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 a lot of metrics from.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Execution, why cannot we control which was US interest rates, US inflation, things that were affecting us that were outside of our control, and then quickly enough realized let's just focus on what we can control?”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 time wing was good preparation was good where the insight or what lesson we got from that was 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”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 re-es overnight. And that was going to be quickly the end. So it was a tough weekend. We rallied hard. We went talk to regulators. Monday morning, there were 15,000 customers on Twitter of the central bank of Brazil saying, you cannot do this. New bank is finally bringing competition. At 2 p.m. we met with President of the Central Bank on 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.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great idea. You're not open an account there, but maybe they should start there once they get their first account.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When my wife and I think actively is 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 partition 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 got to be a little struggle. We cannot remove it, everything from there. It cannot be too comfortable because otherwise they lose the need to separate themselves and to prove themselves even more.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a challenge and it's a question that I think a lot about. I've talked about it with dogs. We talked to Moses about dog. 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 lack of self-confidence where you have to go try. 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.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He'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 their 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 this systemic model style ultimately as a philanthropist. You're not even touching people's life. 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 figuring out how to solve that contradiction.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's suffering. I don't have a 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 with creating a strategy within our foundation, very focused scenarios 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 fields almost contradictory 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,”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 at the destination, right? For me at Neubank was always about the journey, not the destination. And so success for me was having the journey of my lifetime, doing something hard, challenged 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 of challenge myself. 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.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 not 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&A-driven strategy as we think about the next five to ten years of growth in the business.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perhaps there were decision from a product and kind of strategy perspective has been when we enter investment via a big acquisition. We enter via an acquisition versus organically. And I think we underestimate or I underestimated how hard was going to be the integration. We did everything we could to due 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 burning into equities and we remember saying we have to be there in the market now with an equities product. Everybody's doing it. We cannot be late. We have to do it now. And that's why we have to do it 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”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Allow us tool to really make a lot of right decisions from a product perspective, from a strategy perspective, from a hiring perspective. Those are the type of decisions that kind of keep paying even as we scale.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 he 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 allows to scale this culture again and again and again because we have a lot of clarity around where we stand for and how we make decisions and having focused a lot on that consumer observation since the beginning, having creative values around bringing diverse people, diverse from 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”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They try 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.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See the existing LLMs, the OpenAI, the Entropic sort of base infrastructure that gives 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 100 10 years from now, then that's going to be a complete different behavior. So I don't think you need to own the model, 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.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly, I think, 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 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 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 loyalty with the consumer that we want to do over the long term.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get this insurance product and then become almost like the 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 Ital because they have a better product. And having new bank recommend somebody else's product because they have a better product than we do.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are asking ourselves actively this question. We are structured in a way to follow our strategy, which is we want customer to love us fanatically. We win when customers love us phonetically. Our entire strategy is get customer to like us. It's as simple as that. And we are organizing 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 customer 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. This actually have 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.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Concepts like compound interest were 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 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 bank in every pocket. And that really is the catalyst to enable 100% of the population to invest, to get credit, and to do the right financial decisions. And in a way, allow the bottom half of the pyramid to bank the same way.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 them fully democratization of financial access, it has a limit to the smartphone as a platform. What we realize is that you still have a mass of, let's say, 50, 60% of population that fundamentally doesn't really understand how to invest, that in an environment that is very complex where you have very complex”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 a 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.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 spacing 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. There's a lot of niches, a lot of subsegments that are not getting good access to products. They don't have good access to credit. They are not simple products. And so I wish regulators realize that fintech could provide a lot of solutions and that they were readier to embrace new interests as a way to close some of those gaps versus the existing status quo, which”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a hard problem. Maybe two small insights. The first one is in the early days of fintech in 2012, 2013, 2014, when Dallas and 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 the developed economies. As I said to you earlier, we embraced 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 multiplayer was going to be lower and you're going to be valued less. I remember discussing that argument and saying, who cares? First, we have to build this business and then we will care about valuation. It doesn't really matter. That has partly been one of the reasons why a lot of these businesses have become in backlash because”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In these big countries has stopped innovation and have permitted that a lot of these emerging market, a lot of these technologies have leapfrog 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, where you start thinking about the use of crypto, when you start thinking about what AI could do in financial services.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 that 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 had fintechs, everybody actively fighting for better products to consumers and consumer having a lot of alternatives. So the first thing I think is, and because of that, you've seen a lot of leapfrog. Today, how Brazil payments operate, does the future, right? You go to Sao Paulo today and 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 seek cash anymore. That's not what you see in Europe or US today. So I think that level of complacency in this industry.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 one. It's a problem that is solved. US seems to think that Europe seems to think 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, be it 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 regulatory is always this headwind that they're trying to consistently fight against and somehow they got to figure out how to break it. When you look at India, China, Brazil is 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.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first point is we're not doing all of these different verticals, right? We're not doing right 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 that I completely agree with your concern about prioritization. But then to your main question, why do this? We think this is the next 10 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 relocate today about 80% of all resources and energy to financial services. So that core continues to have most of the allocation of resources. But when we think about the next five years and 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.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marketplace were not e commerce. We don't want to be the e commerce. We don't want to get into logistics, but we are a platform that cross-sells other products to these consumers. We give them better products and services, better discounts. And then for the merchants, we tell them stop spending money.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 right-handing 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. And this is an area where we build probably the best infrastructure in Latin America, where it's the best at pricing credit and providing credit for a number of different capabilities. So this medium of consumers would decide to shop in our...”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, going back to your question in Fisher Service, you need to build brand. You need to build trust. You need to build very strong technology and platforms. By now, we have one of the largest data 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 or non-obvious opportunity we're trying to chase today.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Single time you're not simply just delivering somebody's shoes faster. If you fail at a transaction, it's not simply you delay the transaction. You are handling people's life savings. So the importance or 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. So financial firms that have become primary bank accounts have generally higher net promoter scores and had generally high trust with their consumers. And we see today, especially 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 Newbank's purple credit card in Mexico. It's a 94 NPS. It's strange.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this expansion beyond financial services is probably the most not 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 right 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 claim there is a bigger case to be made that is better or easier for financial service 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”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Uncomfortable at times because we celebrate very quickly a victory, but then 30 seconds after we are asking what's next? Where did 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 that at least we had in the very beginning, regardless of how many newspapers or positive mentions we get in the social media.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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'd 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 is harder, but we have a bunch of questions using Docs, psychological profiling that try to capture that at the interview process. 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 underscorerate. 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.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is 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 Dog'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 NewBank because they want to have NoBank 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 transformation. 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 blonde when I told him we paid $500 per month in rent and we had 20 people working out of the house. And it was a house that from the outside you would say like, this is crazy. This is the last thing that it would look like a bank. And I said that that was the best interview filter because the people that wanted”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thinking that we have won your question, thinking that we made it, thinking that we're good because the opportunity I had is so big. And just to give you a couple data points, we have a large consumer 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.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if we have 50% of the population and 60% of 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 this 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.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That has meant that in about 10 years, we've only done three countries, but when we go to these three countries, Brazil, Mexico, 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 and 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.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 unhailing bill. We want to be your primary account. That's what we've always been going after. Once you make the 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 with a being a bank. We've embraced the bank pros and cons of being a bank since the very beginning. 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.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Missing product still for a lot of different segments, but the point where you got to a certain size, your product is good for certain subsegment, but then your product is really bad for our 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 are some things I like, but you're missing a lot of different products. So we have to build much more for that product. They're customers above 60 years old. We have a lot of 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 or 70s, 80s. So once you start attacking so many different subsegments, you have to customize the product almost to any equals one eventually. That's almost like the goal. n equals one your product is fully segmented to that customer”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think we've won. The first thing I want to live 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 got to 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 Nubac. That's a level of access. I don't think JP Morgan can say that about customers of theirs in the US.”
2023-09-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source