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

“Getting the cash and getting that cash back into the system, which was very tough. You didn't have trucks. You didn't have DHL FedEx in this market, so we needed to buy our trucks, build the software, build the systems to be able to do this. We basically didn't have anything, right? So we spend a lot of our time building the basic infrastructure to do that last mile thing that's selling online. And when you're in the US, you're not facing that issue. You're just trying to make one process that doesn't work 15 times better. I learned through that experience that you need to build a whole infrastructure behind it. And when I was thinking about Kabaka, I was a little bit older. I have gone through that experience and I knew that in order for me to solve this fundamental issue that is how can I get more people in my lifetime into the middle class and sort of like be a part of their life through their car.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marker of place. Yeah. So when you're building, when we went out to build that, we were very young. We were in our 20s. I was one of the oldest one or the oldest one. And we went out to build Amazon. And what we realized very early on that if you're going to build a business in Latin America, you need to build like 10 different businesses to make your business work. And I'll give you some examples, right? We needed to buy these products and sell them online. But to do that, you needed to have payment rails. And you didn't have Stripe back then. So we had to build our own sort of like payment systems to be able to transact. And you had like 70% rejection rate. And you need to take that to where it is today, right? Half of the people didn't have credit cards, so they wanted to pay cash. So we needed to build cash on delivery options, which meant getting to people's homes with the product.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I saw this opportunity, the opportunity was not to just go and try to solve the buy and sell process of it, solve the sort of like the lemon or the warranty coverage part of it. It was very important to find ways to get people into cars. And to get people into cars, you needed to make sure that the transaction was safe, that you could provide the proper coverages, and that you can get financing for your users to be able to buy this car. My whole goal became how can I get people into the middle class through the car. And having built Lenio, This is business that started in Latam in 2012, right? This was very back in the day where”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was the real sort of like opportunity that I saw that I could relate to as well. When you live in Latin America and you use public transportation, you take two hours to go into work, two hours to get back, you're using this really unsafe public transportation system, that the moment that you get yourself in a car, you change the life of your family forever. And I went through that myself. I bought my first car in my 20s. The biggest, you know, I've built Kabak, I've built all of these companies. And the biggest change that I saw in my life was when I got myself into that first car. My business started to do better. My social life started to do better. And in Latam, when you're thinking about these economies that are so polarized and, you know, there's no middle class. There's just people that are struggling, people that are doing really well, and very few people in the middle class. When you think about what's that one thing that gets you into the middle class or that separates you, it's a car.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The proper warranties for somebody when they buy them, I can be there when it fails. But imagine in that world you're able to also solve that. The biggest thing that we saw was that nobody was financing this asset. So to put it in perspective, in Mexico particularly, only 5% of the market is finance of the used car market. That, when you compare it to the US, the US is closer to 90%. So this means that in the US out of 10 people, seven have a car. In Latin America out of 10 people around two have a car.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the most interesting piece about it was, yeah, imagine a world where you can solve that fraud, where you can, you know, figure out how to get the information, make sure that people don't have to go through this fraud. And imagine a world where you can also back the lemon issue. You know, if a car breaks down. And one thing that's true about used cars that I've learned after the years is that they're going to break down. There's no way around it, right? Like, it's like humans. At a certain point, we were going to break down.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I went into one of these classifieds, got a car that I liked. It was a used car, bought it, and after two months, the police taught me and they would throw me into prison because all the documents were forged. So, the whole process of discovering Kabak was just by me, you know, being at probably the most naive person in La Tam. And that's sort of like the thing that I needed to figure out at that point, you know, whether I was an idiot and I got defrauded twice or there was a bigger problem. And that's when I learned sort of like those stats that that level of informality, that level of fraud.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That exists in the system, that make it very unsafe for normal users to go out and just transact among each other. And I was part of that trying to sell my car. But the interesting part was that when I landed in Mexico and after a year, I was probably the worst type of citizen in Mexico. Venezuelan, an entrepreneur. So no bank wanted to give me access. Nobody was going to underwrite you. Yeah. Nobody was going to underwrite me. But I still needed a car in Latin America, you need cars. So when I landed and after a year, I bought a car.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To launch Lino and that sort of like it was in the back of my mind. You know, like I'd just been through this terrible process. And I started to work on a solution to sell my car in a different way. So when you think about the market in Lat Tom, you have, it's very informal. 90% of the market is informal. It doesn't happen in dealers. It doesn't happen in a formal space. All transactions happen between peers. People like you and me that don't know what they're doing and have no information. The problem with this informality is that 40% of every single transaction ends up in fraud of one way or another. And this is not the lemon issue that you find in the US. This is literally getting kidnapped, killed, being defrauded the way that I was. Buying a car that has forged documents that is stolen. So you have all this fraud.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I go out and try to sell my car, there was no place where I can just go and sell my car. It was very informal market. So I had to, you know, join a classified, put my car online, and then meet up with a bunch of people to get that transaction done. I ended up settling something with a person there. sold the car to that person and I got defrauded in that process. It was a nightmare. And I lost a car. I moved to Mexico.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, it all builds up to sort of like that moment. I left Venezuela, first went to Italy, ended up doing an MB in Oxford, worked at Amazon for a while in the UK. And I think that this is the first time that I see a digital business at scale and how it's impacting the users. And I returned to Latin America, obsessed with Amazon. I went to work for McKinsey for a while because I needed to pay for my MBA, but I ended up leaving to join Lino and build a marketplace side of Lino, which was, you know, it's a business very similar to what Amazon had, where you had retail and your marketplace business. And we launched it out of eight countries in Latin America. And while I was, you know, and we can unpack that and talk about that and that journey. But while I was doing that, I was moving from Colombia to Mexico. And I needed to”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moving a lot. So I'm writing letters to my grandmother, to my cousins, and all of a sudden, you know, you go from letters to email. That was a magical moment for me as well. That also seated another obsession that was internet. And I think I was really early for a Venezuelan guy into seeing how magic worked and the combination of those two things of operational intense understanding what your product actually is, which is not Molly Lawn's. It was just making sure that people were satisfied with how their garden looked and having the workforce incentives in a place where it would go. It led, it continued to compound and to work into what we're doing today.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just seeded it into the next business and so on and so forth. Some of that capital actually came into Kabak, right? It just, I never stopped building after that. I just learned that you need to put that money to work. That was the same year that I also like, this was 1996. I opened up my first email. It was magic. You know, like I went to my father's office.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And like at 14, and I had like $20,000 in my pocket. And that sort of like, it was crazy, you know, a 14-year-olds. It's a lot of money, right? I don't know if it was 14. Like, I don't, the exact amount, but it was a lot like it was a lot of money.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Muslim lawns. And for me, the business there wasn't mowing the lawn, was just knocking on doors and asking people to mow their lawns and just getting a big enough demand and figuring out how to fulfill that demand. Anything that was very early learning. But what really hit me was that most of these kids didn't show up at the time that they needed to mow that lawn. So I was always under delivering to my users, to my customers. And I ended up changing the whole system to becoming sort of like a subscription system where I would tell the owner that their loan would get covered every month for a 20 buck fee and that I would just get there and mow it. And every month it will be in the right sort of condition. And that allowed me to think about it very differently. And it ended up becoming something really big for me at the time. So, you know, it started there. I went back to Venezuela.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I went back to my house and asked for my dad to dad, I need you to loan me some money so I can buy a few more lawnmowors and I need to recruit a team to do this. So I went back to the basketball court. I convinced a bunch of kids to”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, this zero technology into the mix, right? But it was actually at 12. My dad had been sent to Newport, Rhode Island. And I remember in the US, when, like, if you wanted to work at McDonald's or Walmart packing back, you need to be 14 years old. I wanted to have some money to buy some Michael Jordan cards. This is 1996, so you have to remember the whole Chicago Bulls phenomenon, and you're going through that. And I remember that the house that we moved into had a lawnmower. And I just went and just knock on the door, ask the person that owned the house that I can mow their lawn. And she said, yes. And I started to do that. And at a certain point in time, I didn't have enough time to mow all the lawns that I was getting. And I was getting paid like 20 bucks to do this.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I lived in and I had a life where I've seen different socioeconomic ecosystems and that sort of like provides a level of empathy that few have. But on the other hand, you develop, when you're changing so much, the only thing that's constant is human beings, is people. You start to learn how to read people and you start to see the common threats around your world. And I've developed sort of like, it would probably would have been a defense mechanism, but I developed a formula on how to make sure to create win-win scenarios with everybody around me, right? Like how to go that formula of building relationships where one plus one equals four and not two. And as I got older, I became really good at making that formula work. So I started to take more and more control of the narrative than I thought I had.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he decided, just state his position there, and that it got him prosecuted. It took his freedom away. He lost his job and he eventually had to move from Venezuela. And I saw him as well and my mom do the right thing every single time. And if it was inconvenient for them and I stayed in Venezuela, they had to leave the country. And the next chapter of my life came without that constant from on a physical constant. We still had the fortune that we could see each other every year. But I saw that, right? I saw them just do the right thing no matter what and be optimistic about the world that they wanted to live in no matter what. And the third thing about those years is the pattern recognition that you develop. You know, like I have the advantage and the privilege that I went to public schools in Venezuela and to Oxford.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That remained constant, and that allowed me to value what was important. My dad was in the military, so we had everything that we needed growing up as kids, the basic things. My dad and my mom just gave us so much love and they put ourselves, me and my sisters first on everything that they did. But I think the biggest thing that sort of like shaped me back then was just watching them. Like every time we changed from a place to another place, they were excited about it. They were very optimistic about it. And they were always excited about what's next. They were always dreaming. We were always talking about all these dreams of the things that we wanted to do and how we want to spend our time together. Everything that we did, my parents sort of like took it upon them to just make it great and fun. And that continued, right? You know, in 2002, my dad was an admiral in the Navy and didn't want to be a part of what was happening in the country. And he was against the government.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're not having fun. It's not good. But all of a sudden you move and you get an opportunity to reinvent yourself. And this is something that I've been unpacking over the years, right? Because when you're building a startup, when you're building a business, it's exactly like that. You sometimes are on the top of the world, but the next day you're in the bottom of the world and vice versa. Learning that and having gone through that so many times changed the way I see things. And I think that shaped my ability to build companies and build them with all these changes that happen as you do it. I think that's one. The second thing when you're changing, you always have to have something that doesn't change. And that was for me, my family. And the inception movie, you know that he had his totem to understand whether he was in reality or not or in a dream. For me, that totem was my family, was my mom, my dad, and my sister. Throughout all of those moves, up until the time I was 17.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, Wow, it's a good question. Let me try to unpack that, right? There's like a lot of the learnings and a lot of what I am today come from those years and from my family. So yeah, I lived in up until I was like 17, 18, I've lived in Venezuela and the U.S., moved a lot. And I think three things sort of like came out of that that still stay with me. The first thing is getting used to change, right? And changing 14 different schools meant that sometimes in the same city, I would go to a different school. You're always moving. My parents were always trying to find the best things for me. So the first thing that I learned, I think about change was how can life be at a certain point in time really great? And then all of a sudden, it could stop being great because you were in a school, you had great friends, like you were enjoying everything that you had to just move and start all over again. And I started to see sort of like that pattern of everything could be great one day and then all of a sudden not great. And the same way the other way, right? You get to a certain place where”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me here. It's amazing. Cavac is an all-in-one marketplace to do anything related to your car. So we work out of Latin America. We work at Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina. We also have operations in the Middle East. And what we essentially do is we manage the lifetime of our users from the moment that they want to sell their car to the moment that they want to buy a car. If their car breaks down, we're there as well. So we manage the end-to-end process of a user's journey while they own their car. And we do everything. We buy these cars. We recondition them. We then sell them online. We provide the financing to our users as well. We manage their warranties, their services throughout the process. We pay their tickets for them. If they want us to do that, and we just make sure that we're just building that relationship with our user as they go along. In terms of scale, well, the business is probably the biggest e-commerce out of business in Latin America. We do around 10,000 transactions every month.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. We had thousands and millions of information lines about our users. And the first thing that we did was we just built the system that allowed us to understand everything about every user. We built these co-pilot tools and we realized very quickly they didn't adopt them. So we went funnel by funnel putting agents in front of like critical aspects of the business Put the agents in front of our users really quickly. It was very painful. If you see the best companies out there, 97% of their value gets created after year 15, year 15. 97% of their value.”
2026-02-18 · a16z Podcast · From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source