YouSaid · the spoken record

Micky Malka

lines on the record: 106
first: 2024-12-10
most recent: 2024-12-10
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

“It forces This behavior that we have here that we've worked so hard to have, which is burn the bridge that got you here. Whatever got you here will not get you to the next phase. What got me to come to the US in 2007 is not what will make me be happy 2024. Just be willing to change and change and change and don't look back one day at what you did in the past. Just don't forget where you came from. Don't ever forget what you came from, but always be looking where you're going.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That concept in my mind does not allow me to even. I want to pick that I am in the cemetery, the day I die. That day I want to say this guy peaked today. So that mindset.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's being willing to kill the things I got you here. This concept about personally, I always go back to this idea, I grew up in an amazing community in Caracas, in an amazing high school. My class could not have been better in everything. Our teachers, our school, my classmates, it was literally I cannot even explain to you how good it was, how good we had it. And I always think about going back to our reunions and looking at somebody and saying, oh my God, that guy peaked in high school or that guy peaked in their five-year reunion.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you start to think like that, it's something that you don't have to give it on a particular day versus another day. You give it every day and you don't live by these principles or you don't meet somebody that does it. It's a day that you lost. That's the way we think about it. And not only it applies to the founders that we want to partner with, that we get the good fortune to partner with or the people in our team, it also applies to who do we take money from? A partner is a partner. And we think of all of them in the same way. They cannot fit this napkin. They shouldn't be our partners on any capacity.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every day. This is a daily, daily thing. In this world, if you believe that energy doesn't get created, it just gets transformed and the amount of energy that exists is always the same. It just gets moved around. The best way to capture as much as you can and recharge as much as you can is to have a purpose and a mission that you are very identified with. So when you meet people who are either tiger and you're one, Patrick, you are an Isle Tiger. Somebody had to say, what do you say about Patrick? There's a lot of things I would say, but you fit this bill. You have that energy. You have that conviction, the heart, you have the dream.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So imagine, let's say Tesla's robot accesses. The car needs to interact with third parties. The car needs to get paid, collect, define hours of work, all of those things. Now their software can do it, but if they're going to interact with the third world, there's nothing better than a blockchain smart contract to figure this out. Because at scale, you cannot do it any other way. Can the card directly talk to the Visa Rails? Not yet. Is Visa trying to do this? Yes, but what are they using? They're using crypto rails to get it done. That's why they're partnering with Solana and trying to tokenize tokens on Solana because those networks are better than the traditional Rails to do this. Those other networks are pool networks. This is push. So all of those aspects will come into this world in ways that we just don't imagine.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Follow the young minds. A lot of the young engineers that started with crypto when they were in college are now moving to AI because it's where the attention goes. But both of them combine have the knowledge now. And you're starting to see people that understand both worlds and starting to interact in those”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's so much. It's such an exciting time to be doing this. I think there's an intersection between AI and crypto that is really exciting to us how those worlds collide. AI will need crypto. Crypto definitely needs AI to really build the future because AI in many ways generates so much more content and so much more tokens that you have to be able to regulate and tokenize and use and apply into smart contracts. And there's no tech better than the crypto rails to do that. That intersection is super powerful to us. We're spending a lot of time trying to understand who and how and where. And funny enough,”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The castle, which they have to do, it's their mandate. He's doing what he needs to do. There's nothing wrong with what he says. But that's the battle between the established nation states or to the new network states.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think for them it's a problem. And people like Visa led by Ryan understand this and they're probably doing an amazing job on trying to be present in the crypto rails and make the network connect efficiently and tokenize dollars and be part of this and make sure not to lose that business. Time will tell. But they get it. He gets it. But when you listen to the other extreme to Jamie Diamond saying, this is all evil, this doesn't work. I do it myself. I have our own JPM coin. I can do it on my own system. Well, they're defending.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Square cash, we have dollars everywhere. But if you're outside the US and you don't trust your currency or you want to diversify, you will love stablecoins as a way. And that was a low hanging fruit. That was the minimum use case. Funny enough, that's why when it started, it started because there were exchanges, crypto exchanges all over the world, and it was so hard to get into the fiat, rails, and come back that somebody said, we're going to put a stablecoin and people can just move it around. That was the true case. It was trading and moving dollars from one exchange to the other. Consumers took it over. What we're starting to see now is companies and treasury management companies using it. It lowers their cost of capital. It's instant. There's less resistance. They have a lot more control. So the volume of stablecoins movement on any given month is now, you can graph it against visa networks payment volume. And it's not crazy off anymore. And that's only...”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stable coins are travel checks in today's world. It is instant dollars anywhere in the world that you can control and move anytime at a cost of zero. And they're backed by guess what? Dollars in treasuries actually to the point that when you think about the size of stablecoin market right now, there's almost $200 billion of stablecoin, people are willing to forfeit making 4% or 4.5% of yield in order to have it at least saved in dollars. So imagine the opportunity costs where they're willing to sacrifice their yield just to be able to have access to dollars. So the use case of the stablecoin, first it starts with consumers always. All these cases start with consumers. Consumers, real-time, anywhere in the world, not for Americans. We can get dollars on our checking account, on our Robin Hood account, on our Venmo, on our...”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's insane. But what was it about the travel check that gave you the safety? It had the American Express logo. It was dollars. It had a serial number. You kept it. If you didn't sign it both times, it was yours.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, growing up in the early 80s and mid 80s in Venezuela, we were having maxi devaluations. Like the dollar was 4.3 bolivars to the dollar for like 30 years. And by 1983, it started to devalue by 1989 it was probably. Almost 10,000 believers to the $1. So the only way you could save my family save and there were Middle class family was we were buying American Express travel checks every week. I walk with my mom to the bank branch. We did a line and whatever Bolivarish we had in his private practice and the private practice we will buy travel checks and we will store travel checks and once a year once every couple years we'll go to the US and deposit them in a savings and loan institution. That's how we saved.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when my kids were losing their tooth, I was giving them bitcoins. And it was $20. So my oldest kid has like two or three Bitcoins just from her tooth. And my other one has less. And the third one has much less. And for them, it was automatic. And you can see it. So when you see young people understand concepts, our role as we get older is to see it through their eyes. Use our knowledge, but see through their eyes. And that's what excites me about where this is going. I think we're super early still.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never, or that countries around the world have bought it as a reserve currency in their balance sheets. It's been only 14 years or 15. It's insane. I mean, God has been here for thousands of years. And yet this instrument, this technology, this aspect is doing it in 15. I cannot imagine what the next 15 looked like. It's just a more energized. When I grew up, Venezuela, my mother gave me a little note that I wrote when I was eight or nine asking that the two fairy to give me dollars because I didn't trust my currency. This is before the first Maxi devaluation the country had in 30 years.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We started doing this. People looked at me and said, What are you doing? The only people using this are drug lords and money laundering. But yes, if you read history, money always starts with those use cases. It always finds low hanging fruits, but then over time it just gets better and it gets clean and bad actors move on to something else. And I think that's what's happened here. What is blown away, if you ask me in 2011 or 12 that in 2024, in the presidential election of the USA, the topic of Bitcoin as a reserve for the country will be a debatable aspect that candidates will be talking about, I will say no F way. Or that we had a listed ETF in the same year that the SEC chairman said.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time ever a country, even at that scale, created fingerprint to 1.2 billion people identification. Like you needed just your finger to do anything in India. When that was put together, their identity system now has OTP, it has multiple ways to connect to it, then they turn on the payment grid called UPI. And then they turn out the e-commerce grid. And then they turn out another grid in transactions between physical stores and B2B. It is all logarithmically growing. If they hadn't solved the first piece, it wouldn't happen.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The iPhone is a token instrument. It has all of those identities sitting there, but they don't talk to each other. They're silo. What will happen if Apple allows you to really use it as an identity, not as an ID? What will that do? It has most knowledge that you need to do. Will they win? Will they be allowed to win? Will it be somebody else? Will there be multiple players? So I think that if you don't have this, you're not going to be able to connect to the grid of knowledge and to the grid of wealth in the same way because you will not be able to augment yourself the best you can. So that tokenization aspect is number one. And a proxy to this, Patrick, is what happened in India? We're very active in India. We've been there for a decade. We've done a lot of investments. And when we got there in 2013 and 2014, the first thing that they built was the Adahar system. It was an ID national system. It was the first”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you listen to OpenAI when they do their presentations or you listen to the earnings calls of Visa, the payment rail network or you listen to Mars Zuckerberg Meta, anybody's using an analogy called tokenization or tokenizing data so they can compute, they're tokenizing payments, they're tokenizing other aspects. I think tokenization is still misunderstood what it truly Will become. And if we don't tokenize your identity, you will not be able to connect to all of these data sources. You will just not be able. It will mean a lot less”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They can express it visually like that. Where will it take off in businesses? So then we sort of appeal that and say, okay, what next? What are the first variables that we need? Do we need to figure out identity? Is identity a big component of society solving a lot of these things? Because right now we have ideas, but we don't have an identity that allows us to connect our knowledge to ourselves, to our money, ourselves to the grid. So can we go and find stuff happening there? Can we find the grid on financial services that will be decentralized? What will be the way it will operate? How will AI agents speak on your behalf and move money in your behalf and sign contracts? Because a piece of NFT, a piece of art that lies on an NFT, it's a smart contract. Now imagine an AI agent using that on your behalf to do something. What would it look like? So when you start to go down that path,”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI in different ways than the Silicon Valley engineers are using it. You're seeing how they are using NFTs as a method of distribution of ownership. People will read the media. NFTs are dead. I think they're wrong. When you really look at how they use, artists are using it. It's just different. And the way they're using power and knowledge to express dynamic aspects of the world. So if they can do it in art,”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I don't have a great answer. There's no light bulb that I can tell you. Hey, this is what we're doing, but there's always a but. First, you go from the macro and then you look at the micro. The most smaller aspect where I can see this happening, it's actually in art. So to me, artists are called artists because they're always ahead of society. In many ways, artists always tell you where the world is going. What they did, the best sci-fi films when we were kids shape where we are going Mars the way we think about lens I was talking to Matt Vaughn the other day with the kingsman he was saying the meta lenses on my movies 10 years ago like all of these things they'll tell you where these things are going and if you follow R today and you see how they're”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That this is going in the right direction. That's what we mean with the grid. It's probably the most exciting opportunity says that I've seen in my life.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Becoming more and more decentralized, which are powering all of those at the same time. So this moment is probably the most interesting moment of the last 100 years in terms of the opportunity sets that is going to come from it. So when you take those things and you put them all together, you say, okay, what does it mean? It means that knowledge, money, and power are interconnected in ways that allows you to create use cases that we've never seen. AI agents are going to need access to money. AI agents are going to need access to the crypto rails to do that. So when we think about the grid as a concept, we look at it and say, oh my God, how do we invest into this? How do we think about if you buy that vision of the world, which we have bought ourselves into, and then you start to ask a question, how do you deploy capital in it? How do you think about the opportunity sets? What needs to come first? What needs to come second? What are the use cases that we should expect to see in 10 years, in five years, in one year that will show.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Itself was not the event. The printing press, what it did was it allowed you to print all the knowledge that was written three, four hundred years, thousands of years before that. The same way AI right now is the printing press moment, but it's only possible because we have digitized every single piece of content for the last 30 years. So what took hundreds of years of human scriptures to write history and contents back then for the printing press to print has taken 35 years now or 40 years to digitize. So now the AI agents can actually work on it and tokenize. And so you have knowledge in ways that we've never had been tokenized. You have money getting tokenized in ways that we've never think from crypto rails, token existing rails to the way all of these aspects of smart contracts are working. And you have electrons which are”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into one. They actually need each other. There is no knowledge grid without power and there is no power without money. And if you combine them all together and you think about them as just one single grid that has to connect all of these things at the same time, it's quite rare and unique because it hasn't happened in a long time. These grids have been independent forever. The financial grid has been independent for five 600 years. The internet, the data grid has been independent for 25 years. The electric grid has been evolving for just 140 years. But now we hit a moment in time when the three of them are converging in a way that we have not seen in almost 500 years. And the last time we seen that was probably in the late 1400s with the printing press. What people have to understand is that the printing press by”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Grid is our version of the matrix of that interconnectivity of different aspects that make us who we are and how we transact and live in this world. And you could think about the grid as if you think about the internet, it's a grid of itself. It's a grid full of data and knowledge. If you think about money and wealth, there's been grids for the last 50 years that allow you to move money in real time, in delayed time, in slow times. You got visa networks, MasterCard, Pet Wires, ACH, UPI, Pix. They're all financial design grids. And then if you think about electricity, we think about the electric grid. And we think about towers and power meters and transformers and high voltage and all of those things. What will happen if you actually thought that they were all combined?”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Didn't spend enough time understanding the brand consequences that will be so long lasting for something that the entire market did wrong for one day, and Robin Hood became the child star of the GameStop saga to the point of having movies. Now there's a saying that says it doesn't matter what they say about you as long as they talk about you. So you could take that argument. But on the other hand, it took Vlad, invade you, and it took the team and it took the market almost two and a half years. Get out of that PTSD. And I think the biggest lesson is not that day. The biggest lesson is being there for those next two and a half years. As they navigate out of that cycle”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of different aspects. Number one, you always forget because I was there for a long time in that seed, it's very lonely to be the CEO. And to be there when that happens, that call doesn't happen if you are not spending time for the previous seven or eight years since we were investors, getting to know him, getting to know his family, getting to know his team, getting to know the company. Because those solutions don't come out of the blue. And if they do, they're mercenary and they try to kill you. Number one, number two is the mindset and the culture of being flexible, of taking asymmetric informed risk when you understand the variables, you sleep better at night and you're comfortable with your skin when you do end like that, when you truly deeply know what you're doing versus guessing. We truly understood what we were doing. We made one mistake in that day.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will tell you that that day I looked at my watch. I had done a full marathon walking on the phone. I had done almost 24 miles of walking in a room in an office just walking because I needed to think and react and cold. So I will never forget that day.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, there are those days that you remember where you were. Yeah, you can picture and smell everything. I tend to walk when I'm on the phone, when I speak. I'm not good sitting.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was the first bank account that Coinbase had for the first three years. I said, Well, I need one. And he says, What's up? He says, I need to overdraft every line that Rivet has for $500 million. And he says, what? By when? I said, by nine in the morning. And he says, What happened? So I explained it what happened. He said, let me call my team. And our team here, we were multitasking with Robin Hood team on the term she already had it done. We were just fitting the brackets. At the same time, talking to Silicon Valley Bank, defining how to do this, and by their credit, by 9 30 in the morning, we were wiring 500 million dollars to Robin Hood. And with that term sheet, a lot of capital followed later that day and later that weekend.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understanding this business because I had built a brokerage dealer when I was 17, I built an online broker dealer. We understood everybody here understood the business model. So we knew there was no capital risk. It was all requirement of some liquidity risk. There was no liquidity risk. It was capital constraints. So he calls me back and says, we're going to talk to them, but I need the money. So I said, okay, give me half an hour, give me an hour. Wake up the CEO of Silicon Valley Bank back then, Greg Becker. And I said, have I ever asked you a favor from you? He says, yes, once, and it was very painful. This favor was helping Coinbase get bank accounts in 2013 because no one will open an account to them.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In collateral while the trade settles. It's unheard of. So the request was for $3 billion at five in the morning before market opens. Exactly. It's insane. So I get the phone call and Vlad tells me this. I'm like, No. This is what I mean? No. No. You go back and you say no. That's crazy. That's unheard of. They're doing the math wrong. This cannot be, I mean, the customer's money was in the bank. But you can attach it. Is their customers' money? You can only attach it the day of settlement.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it could get stress if this keeps going. So nine months before, we start with Jason and Shif, which is part of the finance team. Jason is CFO and Shift works with him. And our team here, and we put together a term sheet that had all the terms with brackets ready on what it will take to put emergency capital in. We thought about it, we wrote it, we discussed it, we went back and forth, we didn't need it, and we both agreed it was perfect and we put it in a drawer. We never knew why we could need it, but it was a good thing to just know that we had it there. So you fast forward to January and GameStop happens and all these meme stocks happen, and the regulators come with this super crazy unheard rule out of the blue saying you have to put all your customers exposure that they have put on in the last day from your balance.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That January of 2020, 21, I think the story starts nine months before. There was a moment in, I think, April or May, right when lockdowns were happening where their growth, because people were starting to trade and open accounts and get into the markets because of all the subsidies and incentives, that their system went down for two days or one day of trading because they collapsed. They were just opening too many accounts. They had everybody remote. It was bad. And there are a lot of bad press. Remember having a call with Vlad that afternoon and saying, hey, is this going to happen against us? I don't think so. I think we have a solution. Okay, you're growing way too fast. What else do we need to? We always think about this framework about brand. How do you communicate about people? How do you talk to them? About how you invest your time and capital. So we went through it. And in the capital piece, we said, how is your capital base right now to sustain this level of growth? He says, we're fine.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But ITRE got into mortgages too early with a very weak balance sheet and blew up and they became as sleepy company. They had a window. They lost it because they used their capital base wrongly. Think Robin Hood is doing a much better”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they have time and they started to offer the first trading account when you needed one when no one gave you one and now they added retirement because guess what a generation that has kids and they're thinking about it and they're adding all of these products that they have a chance to wake up in 20 years and be the schwab of that generation because they grew with their customers for a very long time. That power of compounding generation-wise doesn't happen overnight. It takes a long time to build, but you can see where they're going and they're growing with their generation. And every generation, if you look in history, has one of those, or at least one of those. Very few will cover very generations, but at least there's one winner per generation. E-Trade had that chance for my generation.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First one that comes to mind is probably Robin Hood. I'm on the board, so I gotta be careful with what I said. But it's a company that every time they have time, the millennial customer in a way that they're growing with them. So think about it, Vladimir started the company when they're 26. The oldest of the millennials. They're now 37, 38. They're the oldest, probably the oldest millennials are exactly they're 40.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“License, a software, a customer base, a product that will be acquired by this compounder. So they'll be taken out one way or the other through M There was going to be another 500 companies that are going to get to profitability because liquidity was drying up, the market was starting to get out of favor for this space, moving more to AI. And those companies will get profitable and they will trade at a multiple of earnings and just do fine and private equities will buy them or they'll live in a cash flow business. And there was 1,500 that should not exist. And they will disappear over the next number of years. That thesis put all of our attention to look at, all right, who are the compounders? Are they public? Are they private? Are they both? Do we know which market who? And we spend over a year and a half just studying that and placing bets all over the world around that.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Didn't come out of the blue a year before or 18 months before we presented this pyramid and said, there's 3,000 companies I got backed in the last decade in financial services around the world. We think there's 50 winners. There'll be 50 companies that are going to compound for the next 15 years. They have asymmetric brand knowledge. They know how to use time people. They know how to deploy capital in ways that they will just be compounders for a very long time. The kind of services that the Virtual Hathaway that the world would love to have, which in many ways, if you look back at Bershire, that's why they did in the 70s and 80s when they started to buy American Express and Geico and the Wells Fargos. They looked at compounders when it was not obvious that they were going to compound for that long. And they hit the macro right. And then we said there'll be 200 companies that own an asset.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's this combination of finding amazing people that you can see through their soul, through their motivation. And you can see that they will do whatever it takes to win and to build that mission that they find themselves to. At the beginning, when you start backing them super early, you don't know. You just don't know. But you try to see signals and follow through them. Before we said to our”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Game is better play when you're trying to get ahead. Not when you are ahead and trying to avoid people from being ahead of you. So changing the rules is the best thing in life.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a slide in our annual meeting. It had this cemetery, and it said fintech, and it had a Tom and it says FinTech 2012 to 2023. And he was dead. And you could see people's faces were like, what is this team just telling me? And the reality is, I think to play an infinite game, to play a game that you get to reinvent yourself, to play a game that you enjoy, there's no winning or losing. And once you're ahead, you have to change the rules of the game so you fall behind. And we were seeing slowly and slowly that there was every other day somebody else was trying to do something else in the same space. And we look at each other and said, what is this? Should we keep doing this or should we just say, you know what, it's dead? It's done. Everything that needed to get started in this last 12 years did it. So the nice thing about our mentality is to say, yes, we were ahead for a long, long time. But let's change the rules of the game so we fall behind again.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And saw what happened in Argentina, and was in Argentina doing business when the Coralito happened, when they took the peso out of the Pego, the one-to-one or the reality because I also was there. I didn't need to go to school. I already had a life lesson on macro and governments and currencies. More than people have in a lifetime. So when we saw Bitcoin in early 2011 before even starting Rivet, it was super obvious that this was something really big. So the first business is there that we were investing in those early funds where who's going to connect the fiat rails to the crypto rails? And one of the first ones was Coinbase and Brian and Fred at that team there. And so we did all of these things that were in the early days of connecting the last mile of financial services to consumers and businesses.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To acquire attention and customers that the incumbents were way behind on. And that infrastructure that they had built in the 90s and 2000s was good enough to find bridges to connect to it and offer the last mile. So our whole thesis in the early days was let's go around the world finding the teams and the companies that are building that last mile that will touch consumers and businesses with financial services. The crypto angle came as somebody who grew up in Venezuela, as somebody who experienced over max inflation of triple digits in any given year in your teenagers as somebody who, as my first startup, I was 17 in financial services in Venezuela and when I was 20 or 21, half of the banking system collapsed and disappeared as somebody who saw the dollar devalue.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we had this thesis back then, super early. You walk back a few years before that, 2009, financial crisis, 0809, financial crisis. The trust for incumbent brands or for established brands goes to negative. Nobody trusts them. Nobody likes them. Nobody feels identified with them. They get overly regulated. And what happens is their innovation disappears. And in the late 90s and early 2000s, they were building this entire tech stack to run their back ends because before then they were paper. You walk to a branch, bank branch in the 90s with still paper-based, completely paper-based. So they had modernized the back end, but 0809 came in a moment where they never built a last mile. And when the app store shows up in 2010-11, it's a perfect storm of a mobile device with an app store which allows you to compete as a new channel.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, no matter if you join us in 2023 or 2015, you will have exposure to all of it. So it's a bunch of rules around What to invest in, what stage, how do you want to be known? We have no brand. People don't find, there's barely a website. You cannot even contact us on the website. So all of those things were by design from the beginning. They were not accidents. Some of them were, but a lot of them were by design.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feel that company that happens to be in the business of deploying capital. Let's behave like a startup. Let's build systems. Let's open anybody in Rivet can read anybody else's inbox, email from day one. Everybody at Rivet has access to the same data. When you align, and as an entrepreneur, anytime you start a company, you put a lot of your set equity and your capital equity to your startup because you fund it. So when we did that and put a lot of bunch of my capital into our first fund, we align incentives. The incentive structure of charging fees just to manage capital to me seemed completely broken. It didn't align long term with your partners the same way. So we changed that. We had a budget system. Anybody that joins a team, no matter when they join, they have retroactive looking because you have just one team.”
2024-12-10 · Invest Like the Best · Micky Malka - Building Ribbit - [Invest Like the Best, EP.401] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source