YouSaid · the spoken record

Joaquín Rojas

lines on the record: 74
first: 2026-02-18
most recent: 2026-02-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Know that kid or that founder for that certain stage is always there. And you're always going to have that as your instant. An instant is really important in decision making. But now it's guided towards a framework of what the company needs from you and the stage, what your employees need from you, what your family needs from you, what your stakeholders need from you. For certain, if you talk to my employees, my family, my stakeholders, they definitely want a different carlos every year, right? And they're excited about past Carlos, afraid of past Carlos as well. My job is to make sure that I get myself in a position where I can continue to deliver an amazing company for all of us.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You sort of have to get into a character because when you're doing this woman in time, you have to get away from that character and realize, what's the new persona that is needed for this new face? And they go of a lot of the things that make you and build new things, build new skill sets, build new ways of thinking. So I go through that process a lot. So far, I've been hiring myself back to do it. And I really want to do this for the rest of my life. But it doesn't mean that I don't have to go through that process. It doesn't mean that, you know, the best person needs to be on the field operating. So that's something that I would recommend people to do. And you'll mature through that process. You'll change through that process. But ultimately, you're always that person that you are.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you go through that process of letting go of certain initiatives, of letting go of certain pieces of yourself, certain belief. Because in order to build businesses, you have to become a persona. You're like this. You're always like that, you know, these actors that are always in like Jarrett Leto, you know, that they're always in character.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The pros of hiring myself back to do that is one, there's a huge probability that I'm going to care more than anybody else about it. And caring is important. You have a pattern recognition that nobody else is going to have. Because you build it from scratch, so like you can probably see certain things and solve them quicker than anybody that you're going to bring in. But the most important thing is you're going to have to hatch yourself, okay, in order to deliver what you want that CO to deliver, what do you have to let go of?”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I go to the next, and this is hard because it puts all of your, you have to put everything, all of your emotions and everything in check, right? Like you're always, as a founder, you're sometimes doing things that you shouldn't be doing. You're trying to do too many things at once instead of sequencing things. You get impatient. Like you have all of these things that as a founder and operator you go through. This is a time where you can, I take a time to like take a step back and make sure that I think about it a little bit more coldly, listen more to like all of the inner voices of my stakeholders, my users, my employees, my family, and like all of the things that are out there. And I figure that out first. Then I ask myself, can I hire myself back to do that? Right.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What would you hire for? Like, what would you ask him or her to do that's relevant? What are the risks that you know that they need to be taking? What are the things that you know that they need to protect and compound? What would you lay out like the job? And how would you guide them through the next year of their role to make sure that they're successful? And I spent a couple of weeks just thinking about that.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you have to balance your role as a founder, stakeholder, and as an operator, right? And we do this, I do it myself, we do it with our management team and team members. Every year or so, I fire myself. And I go through this exercise that is really painful, you know, firing yourself, it's really painful because your business, if you do well, is going to grow faster and it's going to be than you can ever grow as a human. So the process that I go through is Sometimes it happens every three months, sometimes it happens every couple of years, but I definitely go through it a lot. I just fire myself and lay out. You know, if you're going to hire a CEO to build that vision that you laid out.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little on the Zoom out, I think one of the things you shared when you were talking before that's unique about you is this annual process that you go through of self introspection, which essentially is you ask, am I still the right CEO for this phase of the company? Yeah.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're not excited about doing that, what are you doing then? Like every time you solve a problem, you make it, you build these barriers, this defense. So you need to enjoy it. That's the job. Look at my story. I come from Carac, from Venezuela. I'm a glitch in the system. Like, I'm not supposed to be here talking to you guys about building this business. I'm so fortunate about having this opportunity. And you need to acknowledge that every single day, you know?”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reality is, I make a decision today. And I need to factor the fact that I will show up in 24 hours to reassess that decision. Sometimes you make a decision and you let it out there roll for 15 days. And I know when I do that, it's wrong. You know, if I make a decision, I need to get on a call the next day and say, how is this going? And reassess. And you have to be comfortable with being wrong. So I think enjoying the micro of it is very important. Treat problems as a protein bar. Our job is literally to solve problems. If you're not excited about solving a problem, if you're not excited about hitting complexity,”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to figure it out, right? My job is cleaning cars. At the end of it, we're building all of these. We're building all of this, but at the end of the day, it's delivering a car that's clean. So even in the worst day, I could just go and wash a car and feel good about myself, right? So it's making sure that you find that friction and you take it away. Like great people clean the car, amazing people build systems that can do the scalability for millions of people, right? I would say that gets me through a lot of it just understanding that we're at year nine. So none of our value has been created yet. And we just need to take frictions away. And when you do that, skilling is easier. You know, four years ago, we didn't have a fintech arm in our business. It was very hard to do what we do because a lot of people needed financing and we couldn't control that piece of the business. Now we do. And it's thriving and we're helping a lot of users out.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because there was nothing that I could actually do that would make everybody comfortable more than just get profitable and go through it. And we were definitely working towards that, that objective. But the most important objective was not just getting profitable, it was getting significantly profitable on the other side and being able to deliver more impact for our users. So we had that opportunity to make bets. And you made a big one. And we made a big one. We continue to make it, right? But we definitely knew that We needed to become do this transition where we were streaming. And I believe that any company right now, any CEO right now, if you're not thinking about it in that way, they're going to be up for a world of slow death and pain. So we're forced into that transition.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We knew that we had something special And we were also building these AI capabilities in the midst of it that we also saw as very special, especially as operators, because the scalability of it, the thing that we were suffering through the growth phase, that's never ended. We knew that it could probably be easier on the other side. I would say when you have everything coming at you with that level of intensity. Expectations all of a sudden lowered.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything was very heightening. And when you mark it down, there's no decisions. When your market goes down 99.9%, there's no decision that's making anybody comfortable, right? Because for us, we knew that we had something special. You know, we were not just building a business that people wanted. We were building a business that people needed. The metric that makes us more proud is that 40% of our customers are buying their car for the first time in their life. This is because.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things, you know, like should I just push for growth? Should I slow down and just buy time? We were in a really interesting pickle because we couldn't just shrink to profitability. We needed to grow while becoming more lean and efficient at the same time. And the company from there, you know, we went on to grow four times to where we were at that place and time and we went on from burning a lot of money to becoming profitable in that frame of time. But it was.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had everything, you know, just ready to go really quick. And all of a sudden, markets employed and you have to change your strategy. You don't know, and more so if you're building a latam, you know, like capital comes in in Latam. Well, it never came in at the speed that it came in in 2021, and it never left so fast as well, right? So you have to just rethink your whole strategy, right? It's like, you know, capital is not going to be here forever. And we just need to make sure that we make the shift. But when you're making that shift, remember that it's like, you know, you're at full speed going ahead of some. It's like taking off on a plane, right? Like that's the worst time to slow down. You need to get yourself to like 10,000 feet up in the air before you start to make sane decisions. And we needed to slow down while we were sort of like going through that takeoff process. You were facing so many.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were scaling, we were building the infrastructure, a lot of infrastructure into scale, we had more than enough infrastructure to grow four times where we were at that point in time, growing really quickly from going to 200 people to 10,000 people like in 24 months time frame. The business went from zero to billions in revenue at that same speed with a lot of complexity behind how you deliver that revenue, right? You know, you're moving cars.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe set that backdrop of where you were. Like, come back, I think, at that time, had 10,000 employees. Like it was the 2021 22, right? There was a very high flying time. So 10,000 employees, like you were burning a million a day. Market implodes.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“99.9. A lot of businesses went under. So it was literally nothing I can do or say to anybody. That made them feel comfortable, right? You know, like when your interest is down, 99.9%. You could, like, everybody's going to be uncomfortable.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And underwriting online and everything. And then moving to AI is sort of like that streaming transition. You know, when you're doing a transition of the shift, you need to make sure that everybody understands that we're going to go streaming or die. One of the things that we had going for ourselves is that our market imploded. I don't know if you remember what happened to the autospace market in 2022.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It comes ultimately to what we believe the world is going to look like in a few years, right? You know, we think that this is the biggest technological shift that's ever happened to humanity. And our responsibility as leaders in this time and for our company is to make sure that we're not only on the other side of the shift, but we're thriving. And I like to go back a lot to like Netflix. Like I love Netflix because they started out as a videotape company, right? And then they went to streaming. Well, let's unpack that. You have Blockbuster. Then these guys innovated and you had videotapes delivered to your house. So assortment wasn't an issue anymore. And then you had streaming. The way that I like to think about Kabak is that incumbents or blockbuster, Kabak was videotapes sending to your user. And that's probably traditional software and selling online.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was always the same pattern. It goes down before it goes back up, and we slowly started to sort of become more confident about that strategy. And up until a point where we decided, well, you know what, we need to burn all the ships and just do this for the whole organization, right? Which is different. Today we managed like 90%, 95% of every human interaction with our users with an AI agent in the middle. But that's not a reality for all of our backend, right? Pricing, invoicing, all of these things. We have ML, you know, we have all of these systems. Now we're building sort of like the agents to manage these systems so they can also converse with all of our other agents. And it's just you just have to have the patience of it. But it took us, you know, like it was a year of flat, a lot of under a lot of pressure, you know.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up until it doesn't. And then you start to, it starts to go back up. And we got to a place in the first funnel that, you know, we were like 1.5 times better than our best human. And a certain place. And at that point, we said, okay, let's not focus on making it seven times better because the models will get there. And we have an amazing philosophy in the company that is we don't build for chat GPT four. We build for ChatGPT 7, right? Or we build, we know that the models are going to move faster than what we can move. So we try to like anticipate what needs to be done. So when that technology is there, our infrastructure and our architecture sort of can actually take advantage of it. And we started to work on market share of this interaction with our customers. So we went, when we saw funnel like delivering parity or a little bit better than parity than human, we went to the next friction, so on and so forth.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, we had a year So we were growing like the business was growing 300%. Like 2022 was growing 100%. In 2023, we were flat. So the reason behind that was we were just restructuring everything below the line. And when you start to put these systems in, what typically happens is your customer experience starts to deteriorate at the beginning because you're not delivering at the same level that a human could deliver. Your sales is dropping because we're not doing customer service. We're doing sales. We're doing purchases. We're doing financing. So you're seeing all your output KPIs just deteriorate. I think that the resilience that we had at that moment was, you know, we didn't have for a certain funnel, not for the whole company, we didn't have a plan B. The plan A was we need to make this work and we got our engineers, our teams, and everybody just making sure that these agents could perform at least parity to what we were performing before. And it was in a certain funnel, you see a drop.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that I think is what is unique you had weeks or maybe even a couple of months where various functions were underperforming the humans and you just had the sort of confidence that you were going to get there and resisted the temptation to hire more humans back or give up on certain tasks.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Symbiotically with humans in the organization and some things humans solve, some things agents solved, depending on a complexity. And we had an orchestrator in the mix that was sort of like guiding who was going to solve which. And we started very slowly with one funnel, one process, create a skill set, and we started to see how, you know, agents could perform better than humans on certain tasks and started to scale it from then. And for the past three years, we've just been creating all of these skill sets that have been able to empower a lot of our AI agents and build the architecture that allows them to communicate with each other for us ultimately be able to orchestrate something simple for our user. But we put the agents in front of our users really quickly. It was very painful.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We knew that even if you had the right information, even if you had the correct highway or database for people to find out what they needed, they were not going to do it. So we went funnel by funnel, putting agents in front of critical aspects of the business. So it started by we didn't like every, most people attacked it back then just trying to like solve customer service. We didn't like we for us the issue was not customer service. For us, the issue was underwriting your loan. It was if your car broke down, what do we do then and at that moment? So we went and tried to solve the hardest thing first. That was those edge issues that our customers were having. We had all of the information of our users. We just needed to build sort of like the right skill sets to solve that. And we created this process where we built agents working.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we made a typical mistake that everybody's making that is we build this co pilot tools to give them to our teams so they could just use them and just provide a better customer experience or just have the information to provide a better solution to our customers. And we did just that in 2022, early 2023, we spent a lot of time building these tools for everybody in our organization, and we gave them to them. And we realized very quickly they didn't adopt them. And when we saw that,”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thousands and millions of information lines about our users of what they were navigating, how they were chatting with us, where we were failing them, where we were succeeding. And the first thing that we did was we just built the system that allowed us to understand everything about every user Right? And that's something that you couldn't do prior to that chat GPT era, where you had the information, but you couldn't sort of like extract an automatic system, contextualize it, right?”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And build them in a way that they can communicate with each other. And it started from the recruiting process. Every time we had a friction or we had a need, we started to think about, well, can this be solved with humans that have blood or can this be solved with agents that have electricity going through their veins? And we started slowly just thinking about like, where do we need to put an agent? Where do we need to put a human? But the first thing that we built out was that Operating system that allowed us to know what to do next. And when you're building AI, The first thing that you need to build is the brakes of the system, it's the understanding on where you're going to deploy it and how you're going to deploy it.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We needed to make a decision on how we viewed our organization going forward with this technology, right? And we knew that we couldn't scale the way that we were scaling. We had too many people. The highway of information of things was not optimal, so we were not delivering a great customer experience or that customer experience that we wanted to deliver on these edge cases. And we knew that if we wanted to scale, we needed to change that immediately. So we started to think about more of that architecture of how can we make sure to build agents.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there were different places where it worked more or less pretty well. Rear conditioning and it worked pretty well, underwriting it work pretty well. But the biggest challenge that we were facing was customer interactions, right? Like those edge cases. The beautiful thing That happened was, you know, we started this in 2000 thinking about this and building the ontology and building of our systems together in 2017. So by the time that ChatGPT came out. You know, we were ready. We were really ready from an ontology perspective. We had all our systems connect. It was really, we had the systems in the right place to sort of like extract information, to start to build agents”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is notoriously difficult in this industry. So then, if we take to your micro decision point, you started, like many companies, like, all right, we will have AI tools, we will give them to our smart employees. It's going to make everything more efficient. But as you talk about that actually did not work. And so you pivoted more towards AI is just going to have to do this. And there might have been two strategies, test it a little bit here and there. But you guys pretty famously went all in, just assuming it was going to work and then working really hard to get it up to human level and then past human level. How did you manage the... The organization in that direction because it's not just technology, it's also the people challenges, as you point out”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't know anything about cars back then. So the only way for me to learn about cars was not about how I inspected them and then sold them, reconditioned and sold them. The only place where you can learn about a car was when it failed. And this was something that was not popular back in the day because everybody was someone else. Well, why are you going to own the warranty? There's no sense in it. On one end, there wasn't an infrastructure in the markets that we serve to delegate it. So we needed to own it just to be able to solve the problem. But the most important thing is that by owning the warranty, you own the data at moment of failure. And we build all of our systems, just learning sort of like from that failure. And every day just making the inspection, the reconditioning and servicing the post sale of it better just by sort of like learning that process. And that's a daily decision that you face that you needed to replace with data on your right.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Learn every day, and each car that we bought to make sure that we bought the car, the next car better. And you have 60,000 unique SKUs with unique features that you need to price at a given time with a macro happiness around you. So we knew that we needed to put AI in data in terms of how we thought about pricing. And we knew that we needed to do that on a daily basis. Humans cannot scale that decision. We also knew that cars”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that you need to make a lot of bad micro decisions. Every day and show up to see what happened to have a great macro outcome after compounding sort of like these decisions. And in Quebec, we have what we call the four places where business will succeed and fail every day. If we do it well or we do it bad. One place is pricing. If I buy a car. I buy it at the wrong price, or I buy the wrong car. I'm going to lose money That's a fact. So we knew that. We knew that in order for us to do pricing well, we needed to be able to”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Within the organizations to solve a determined issue. It could be an operational issue. It could be an innovation issue. But if you manage to get that communication flowing, the velocity that you can innovate, the level of service that you can deliver was huge. And we saw that because it was hitting us in the face every day. I don't think there's many companies out there that have to manage so many edge cases. So I wouldn't give myself too much credit. It was just about facing that problem on a daily business and then just pushing, you know, towards building the ontology because the only thing that I knew that was going to get us on the other side was the data piece of it and how we connected all of these businesses. That's where when you think about my business particularly, I only learn through trial and error. That's my way of learning. And everybody has their different ways of learning.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A virus hits humanity, and what the virus And in real time, they can connect all of the information of humanity and just deliver an output or a communication or an innovation, right? AI is a lot about that, right? And building a business is around the best businesses will communicate really well.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around all of our different businesses or business lines for them to be able to communicate together. And you see it today, right? Like when you scale a business, what's the issue when you scale a business? You have many people everywhere, right? And they cannot communicate in the way that they communicate it before. So if you're in the invoicing team and you need to invoice a car for a customer and you have a doubt with the auto parts piece of the invoice, you have no way to know who to call. If you have a doubt with the price of the car, you have no way to know who to call. And that was challenge that I was seeing at that time, you know, was like, how are we going to create this highway of information where we can sort of like talk to everybody? And I think that there's a show that I just watched a couple of episodes last week that can help me land this. But this show called an apple called Plutobus, right? Is this show about...”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I started to see in 2017 in our company was that that highway of information, it worked really well when we were really small. Because we were all in a room when something like this happened and we can make decisions really quickly, and we had all of the information, and we were able to develop an amazing experience. But what was really clear to me at that point in time that if we scaled and if we became a company that's doing hundreds of thousands of transactions every year or millions of transactions every year, that was not going to be true anymore. And that's the moment where we sort of like when I send out that memo and that communication was just projecting ourselves into the future that this was what we were going to be trying to solve at scale. So for me, it was all about building from day one the right ontology.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We knew that we were building this really complex business. We were building, as we mentioned before, a business that was vertically integrated, had many sort of different businesses layered into it. And we were dealing with real edge cases. When you're trying to solve lifetime value for customers related to their car, you're always dealing with an edge case. It's not a straightforward solution for any given problem. You know, it's the most important purchase a user is going to do. They're probably financing themselves for the first time. It's probably their first car. And their car is going to break down at some point and it's going to break down in places where you don't want it to break down. So you're always dealing with different situations. We're the master of edge cases. And when you're dealing with an edge case, what happens is that it requires a lot of information and communication from the company to be able to solve that in a way that the user is satisfied.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not just establishing a global presence. It's about getting, investing, and seating these markets for the first four years, follow the data and try to make sure that you build the right data capabilities to scale those markets. And what we see in every single one of them is that after a certain amount of years that you build all this infrastructure below it, that scalability becomes a lot easier and replicates what we saw in Mexico. So it's never been the ambition to build a global company. The ambition is to solve this global issue. And we're trying to pace ourselves into that.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That are going through all these things. And that's how we mapped out the cities that we're in. And sometimes we went in really not aggressive. We just went in slow and learned. Other times we went in a little bit more aggressive and we got the learnings through sort of like just doing this in several cities throughout the past years. But it's always been about”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's, you know, one thing that was really relevant for us is the size of the overall market, so we were looking for cities that it was bigger than a $20, $40 billion opportunity as a city, as its own in terms of transactions to how deep the problem is that we were solving, you know, whether it had, what was the fraud rate, what was the financing penetration, you know, the more problems that it had, the more frauds, the less financing availability, the better for us and for what we were building. And also the size of the ticket of the car, right? Like economics play a big, it's really important at the beginning that you have the right unit economics to sort of be able to continue to fund your growth. Any ticket size that was below $10,000 didn't make sense for us as an expansion city at the beginning. So when we mapped out those cities, you have very few cities left.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To scale them. So, like, when we started to expand, we expanded under the same philosophy, our home ground and what we're building and what's getting big, it's Mexico. But then we saw cities like S ⁇ o Paulo. Cities like Buenos Aires”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we actually, when we started the business, we went, no, let's go into the place where we can just spend a lot of time trying to understand the problem without expanding and just building everything. And that was Mexico City for the first four or five years. And we didn't have a lot of money to begin with as well. So we couldn't build all of that infrastructure that I mentioned that I was going to build out. We just had to put all of our time in building sort of like the data capabilities to be able to scale that. So at the beginning, we actually just spent a lot of time in Mexico building this, building a product that had product market fit, profitable product, you know, in the first four years and growing. And then we realized was that for us to launch this in any other market and do it well, it takes you four years of just building the basic little things so then you can think to start.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the whole logic was the complete opposite, right? Like on how we think about sort of like expanding, how we think about market. First, we're not thinking about markets. We're thinking about the problem that we're solving. You know, we wanted to like make sure that we could provide as much impact as fast as possible for our users. So the way that we think about markets and why we launched in Mexico City is because Mexico City is the largest city in North America. The market size of Mexico was huge. And in Latin America, people concentrate around the biggest cities. So 60% of the opportunity of Mexico was in one city. So when you're starting a business, the last thing that you want to do as you're going for that product market fit, as you're building all these infrastructures, go to broad, too quick.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we knew that we needed to do that to really provide that amazing solution for the end user. And we knew that our life was going to be living hell for the first few years because nobody was going to appreciate the infrastructure piece of it.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or factory reconditioning, warranty machine, where we could come at scale and really fix these cars or recondition them, get them into hand of another user. And when it fails, make sure that we were there. And this was a big undertaking. Used cars is usually anywhere between three to seven times bigger than new car sales. So if you're successful, your factories are going to be three to seven times bigger than all the OEMs combined. And you're dealing with edge cases, right? You're not dealing with a linear manufacturing process. So we needed to figure out how to build a machinery that could do that at scale for hundreds of thousands of cars. The regular mom and shop does 20 cars in a given month, right? We needed to build the financing engine. How are we going to underwrite these clients? How are we going to get the capital to finance them? How are we going to collect?”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest question that I had back in 2016 when I started the business was why do I need to build? What are those pillars that I need to build to make this business work, right? And I didn't want to do what we did in our previous company that was figured out as we go. I needed to strategize really well because this time where the Uber without cars, slide is out there, Airbnb without hotels. And I'm telling the ecosystem, hey, I'm going to have infrastructure. It wasn't popular back then. And still, it isn't really popular. But in Latin America, it was needed. So for us to sort of like solve that issue, we needed to build four different businesses below our business to make our business work. The first thing is we needed to build that e-commerce platform so people can come, sell their car, and buy a car. We needed to build their operational...”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source