YouSaid · the spoken record
Philippe Gelis
- lines on the record
- 42
- first
- 2024-08-24
- most recent
- 2024-08-24
- sittings or episodes
- 1
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- 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
“Ability to get things done tends to have Of just moving anything that needs to be moved to get to Second thing is the impact in some sense that we have even as Jeeves, we would get companies that reach out to us and we're like, look, before Jeeves came along, we weren't able to expand. And these are like companies that do. So its impact is different in a way. Tends to be a monopoly on banking there and actually providing credit. So I think those two things for me is very, very exciting and the potential, Desanti's point, is just getting started.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could build companies in different ways than you could even when we built a company. There were a lot of things we had to invest upfront that today I wouldn't have to do if I were building the company from scratch because you can use AI, you can use their code, you can use some companies in the stack, some of these SaaS vendors. So I get excited about that. I get excited about the fact that the jobs nowhere near done and the tooling is only getting better.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is resiliency, right? You and I have a few mutual friends who have been operating in the region for a long time. And there are nothing if not resilient and paranoid. So that resilience and paranoia is something I think comes in handy, especially in the lean years of Silicon Valley, right? So you can always do so much more with so much less. And I think that hustle and that resiliency is something you can definitely count on. And then what gets me excited, I mean, honestly, it goes back to why it moved back here, right? There's just a lot of work to be done. And I like what Gabe said, which is that this idea of whatever's happening in AI and whatever's happening in tooling and ways of company building can be quite transformational for Latin America because in a place which doesn't have a lot of capital, and let's be honest, capital has come back to Latin, but it's not what it used to be. Your ability to leverage AI, leverage no code tools is awesome.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How this innovation emerges per country. But I think with AI, we're starting to see a bunch of founders in the space that are taking advantage of these new tools to make their operations either more efficient or lever that to have a better go-to-market motion or actually increase even the willingness to pay for software, which I think has been one of the main challenges historically in the region.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Develop a product really, really fast for them. But then they're also very ambitious. And then they're like, okay, we want to expand outside of the region because our customer set is probably not as big in the region. So we're starting to see we invest in this company called Uno, which is a payment orchestration company. It started in Latin America, specifically Colombia. They expanded to a region very quickly. And now they have operations in Europe and Southeast Asia. So I think that we will continue to see a lot of that. I think the opportunity said when you come to the region are quite different. So what gets developed in Brazil, you know, an ecosystem, the maintainment method is PICS. And 85% of the population is banked. And you have regulation that is pro-innovation. It's very different. It's going to create different opportunity sets than Mexico, for example, where half of the population still doesn't have a bank account. The main payment method is cash and regulation has not been a catalyst for innovation. So it will be quite exciting to see.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the verticals actually has been quite exciting in Latin America has been e commerce. You've seen players like Merkel Lever come in, Rapi, iFoot in Brazil, and even Kalak in Mexico, which is the largest private company now. So I expect that we will continue to see a lot of these companies tackling the e-commerce opportunity as the majority of these people continue to come online and especially as the majority of the payments go online and it becomes easier to transact. But there's a specific segment too that I think let's noticed in the region, which is just the SaaS companies. So in Brazil, you have companies like Totus. It's a large public company going after the European space. But also you have companies like Outero that actually started in Argentina and went global. We've met a bunch of companies that start in Latin. They signed the largest enterprise companies in Latin America.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think one quick way to point this out is when we started one of the hardest things was how do you actually ship cards? Because people forget the fact that cards actually have to be delivered to different countries, right? And most card operators just deliver in that single country. And so in the US, that's fine. It's a massive single geo with a single currency. You can do that fairly easily. But when you move to Labm and you're like, I need to deliver cards, the provider of the cards don't ship those cards. And so we had to go figure out like an operational way to make that easy and like bolt that on. But there wasn't a provider we could just go to and be like, hey, can you ship this for us to six countries?”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think one of the things that you're both hitting on versus in the US, if you're going to build many financial services products or embed many financial services products, there's all of these different now very modern companies that provide even credit as a service, KYC as a service, lots of data, fraud as a service. When you go down to Latam, those for the most part don't yet exist. And so you end up having to build a lot of that yourself, which is, I would say, a disadvantage at the start because it takes more time, but then ends up being a significant source of defensibility.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially for B2B, it is very complex to do that gives an opportunity to us to kind of succeed in the market. But it takes a lot of work. And what I'm coming back to on the payment side is how do we layer this on top of credit, which is our core offering, so that the platform becomes much more sticky. And one of the things we've started to see is that retention is actually a lot higher if a customer uses us both for cards, which I call kind of like the candy, right? It's credit. We give you the money. everybody wants that in some sense but then moving to payments which is your money and you're trusting us to move your money which is a very different kind of go-to market sales cycle but if you can combine the two kind of like given like a bill.com where you have divi which is the expend management side and then you have build which is the payment side it becomes a very very powerful product and so we're still i'd say an early innings on the payment side very very different set of problems than corporate credit but combining those two to me provides much more value to the companies that we work for especially”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the things that's interesting is everything we do is B2B, and there's obviously consumer components, and I would say most fintechs tend to focus on the consumer side, which is massive. But B2B has very different problems that are also very unique to how businesses move money and spend. And so just as an example, we launched the ability to move money out of Mexico, Colombia, Brazil. One of the hardest things is if you move money out of Colombia, you're usually going to get flagged. And you're not moving $50 or $100. You're moving $50,000 or $100,000. And so part of where we invest in is how do you have the ability to move that in an efficient way so that we can actually compete with local offerings in the region, right? And so it's one of those things where you have to invest a lot in compliance. You have to invest a lot in operational efficiencies. But it is fairly untapped because it's so, so hard. I keep saying this, but for me, the difficulties, the defensibility, is the fact that it is this hard. It's the fact that moving money.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no one hitting on the point that Gabe made also is that the products can encompass so many more almost mini companies that the results end up being a lot bigger than you might think if you just looked at TAM. I think one of the powers of Jeeves that you've discovered is the strong need for Latin American companies to move money both from the US into Latin America into other corridors that might be a little bit less obvious. But along with that comes with, I think, more than just one country regional challenges, but multi-country regional challenges.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Built into different paradigm. So Rapi was built in a zero interest rate paradigm, new was built with an almost 12-year-old company built and raised in a different world. So just knowing all of these things as a founder, our important period of our webio, but certainly when your geography is not Brazil, not Mexico, so to speak.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has to be very different because what you lose by not being in the US or in Brazil, you gain by being able to go extremely deep, extremely quickly. But it requires a totally different mindset when it comes to product development. And by the way, paradoxically, the aspirations of choice are not in the US or not in the UK, but are in Central Asia, in Turkey. These are the places where people have also figured out small country, deep tam equals massive successful outcomes. So when people ask us, what do you get inspired by? We always are about CAS feeds, a $30 billion public company that is single country focused in Kazakhstan, GDP, half of Colombia's. So those are some of the things that you've got to start thinking about and also recognize that even the successful models.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was the pressing one the mental model of most investors around TAM remains very much what it should be for about 95% of companies. I think when you combine retail and financial services, the way you think about TAM is probably a little bit different. I mean, I will tell you, even I have learned, if I look at the performance of our company to date versus what we expected out of the Colombian market, I don't think anyone would have thought we'd be here within five years, right? So I would say the first thing is your understanding of TAM when you think about Colombia is just very difficult. And the other piece is your product development approach”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On to you touched on this. I think one of the advantages of building in Colombia is you do become the employer of choice. There's not 50 Addie competitors that employees are choosing between. But then you do run into different types of challenges.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to try to work with new entrants, whereas in the US, it isn't always like that. And I'm always surprised in a good way in terms of the companies that we get to serve in Mexico, Brazil, et cetera. And it goes back to the same point, which is most of the options are older banks. When we were in Brazil, we had a customer that was coming towards me like, hey, the fact that we have virtual cards, this is great. And for us, that's almost table stakes. Like, we don't even sell that because we expect that to be just an offering in market. And so that's what I keep getting reminded about, which is it's still a huge monopoly. And I think regulators do see that in a way that they don't in the U.S.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we were both hitting on is it's still an onerous regulatory process. But unlike in the US and other regions, it's at least a relatively clear onerous regulatory process such that if you put together a very strong team, like you still need to recruit A-plus compliance people, they still need to do a lot of work to get it together, but the governments do seem much more motivated to create competition in their regions. And in particular, I think one of the stats often quoted is banks and Brazil, what's a little bit different with New Bank, but the banks in Brazil, Mexico, Columbia serve the top 20% of the population and the rest are very starved for good financial services. And one of the ways to solve that is to allow de nova licenses for new companies to enter the regions and provide more innovative products.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think just touching on this point, actually, one of our big hires last year was getting the chief compliance officer from Arquetta as a public company to join us. And a big reason is exactly this, which is as we scaled from a smaller company moving really fast to a bigger company, I think the biggest thing that we started noticing was that we were much more on the radar for folks locally. And so Brazil so far, it's smaller for us as an operation compared to Mexico. But Mexico, we have invested quite substantially, even from a license perspective, but also from, let's call it, light lobbying in terms of companies that we work with, such as external law firms, right? And so it's come back once or twice where we've had, let's just call it issues that we had to work through in Mexico. And one learning for me is as we scale and as we get bigger, whenever you think you need to do it, you probably should have done it six months before that.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the next 18 months or so. So you do see a very pragmatic regulator. And honestly, in that case, very differentiated from the US event, which is a bit more of an unknown unknown, right? You just don't know what regulator the agenda is. You obviously have the Fed, you have the FAC, the CFPB, the SEC, and you can't quite figure out where the boundaries are. What I can tell about Latam, it's not like in the US where the boundaries are X, but then you've got to like interpret the tea leaves or what actually X means. Here it's pretty well defined. So if you have the patience for dealing with the emerging markets environment, you have the patience of dealing with the natural challenges that come from being outside the US, it can be a very attractive hunting ground and a very attractive place to build a company.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say no, the practicality is not always the same thing as the investors might see for many reasons, obviously, and not least of which this is still an emerging market. And I think when you do venture investing, you're taking two types of risk. You're taking venture risk and you're taking emerging markets risk. But that being said, I think the situation in Colombia is extremely pragmatic, right? You've got a regulator who's issuing licenses. You've got a regulator who's pushing for financial inclusion. You've got a central bank that's driving instantaneous payments adoption following very much the playbook of Brazil. So if you're sitting here now versus 10 years ago, I mean, when we started, I think they hadn't issued a single de novo banking license and God knows, like a decade. And now they issued three or four a year. Similarly with the payment side, right? Like the payment system in Colombia is still a bit of a mess, but it's much of a mess than it was and we're on track to launch.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A grant from a thesis point of view, we have two people that are actually going through it, starting maybe with you, Santi, who've recently spent a lot of time with the Colombian banking regulators, is the practicality the same as investors might perceive and what advice might you have to other entrepreneurs in the region?”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That now is the main payment method in Brazil called PIX. One of the aspects that's actually quite exciting as well is the smartphone penetration is quite high in the region. So the numbers vary between 75 and 80 percent. But when you look at the credit card penetration or even the bank population in countries like Mexico goes around 50%, which is quite low when you compare it to countries like Brazil, where it's around 85%. So there's a lot of opportunities still. They basically can have a bank in their pocket. And when it comes to the size of the market, Latin America is, you know, there's 650 million people living in the region. The GDP per capita is higher, especially when you compare to other emerging markets like India. So I think that those are the three main reasons why Latin America has become such an important hub for fintech innovation.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so I think that there's three main areas. The first one, I think, is less specific to the region, but more specific that fintech is a decolon local business. So there's a lot of local regulation that plays an important role when it comes to operating different countries. There's domestic infrastructure that when you're thinking about building a business in Brazil or Mexico, you kind of have to rely on. And there's also cultural nuances. Brazil completely different from the rest of Latin America and even Mexico is completely different from South America, even though all the countries speak Spanish except for Brazil. Brazil has actually been quite advanced. The central bank has done a great job basically disrupting the duopoly between the merchant acquirers that enable players like Nuva to come in and take advantage of that and then the rise of payment acquires like stone. And then they created open finance and from there they started the instant payments.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Extremely religious about the English speaking requirement. We are now testing a couple of instances on relaxing it and using AI to figure this out. I agree with you. I agree with Delib. Here is culture. But we're actually even erring on the other side. At this point, we've actually gone almost all natives. So now you need CO approval to hire anyone that's not in Colombia. Country We were going to go deep here. What we have realized is that there are Positions. Wish the expertise. Ways the local knowledge. Pretty much everywhere else. The person around, you want them using your product on any given day, you want them getting rejected, you want their app crashing. You want all of these things that Difficult to achieve Or not on the ground We now serve a broader swath of the Colombian population, including a”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a good question because it really affects culture. And so one of the things that we try to do is we have people that obviously locally are fully fluent in the local language, but you have to be able to communicate in English as well because you do have counterparts in UK. You do have counterparts in the US, in Canada, et cetera. But everything that we do in region tends to be local. And it even took us about two years just to get the localized experience on the product.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been in market now for about three years is that even the product side at scale has very specific nuances that need local knowledge. And I think to the point Gabe was making, now what's interesting is you have folks that have seen what good looks like they've been at new, they've been at Mercato, they know a version of what this looks like. That's been really, really useful. We didn't have honestly been five, six years ago where you can hire someone that's built the product. Now, leadership, I think I kind of agree like you have to find the right person for the right culture fit. And we have had some success. We've had some areas where we're still working through, but you can find what I call kind of intermediate managers that are, I think, fairly consistent for the region. They know what payments looks like. They've seen it at scale. They've seen it at a public Latin company. And that's been very, very helpful for us.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the way our model works is we break up the functions depending on what touches the customer directly. And so usually the first hire in any region is a general manager, and they tend to be fully local. I think there's no way to build in Brazil unless you're in Brazil. There's no way to really build in Colombia or Mexico unless you're in Colombia and Mexico. So that model has worked fairly well so far where anything that's customer facing is fully local. And then we build the product engineering, finance, et cetera, centrally. What's changing now is as we get more into scale, we're actually starting to move some of the product components also locally. And that is a little bit different from how it was in the beginning. And by the way, we learned this also the hard way where you can sell, but then if you need to collect and you call them from Texas or Brazil, they're like, yeah, I'm not picking up your phone call. You have to be local. You have to be on the ground. You have to be collecting there as well. So anything touching the customer has to be fully local to that region. But we're learning now.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A ton of sense, so delete maybe Fasanti's built in Columbia, you've built primarily in Mexico, Brazil, and obviously other global regions. When you talk about the experience of scaling up in two countries that are in the same continent, but very different beyond that.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“None of whom may be the person you're looking for because they're very idiosyncratic cultures. So I think you just have to be very aware of that, that you don't yet have this kind of standard, in part because the region is so varied, right? So what works in Argentina doesn't work in Brazil doesn't work in Colombia, doesn't work in Mexico.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think so, though I would say that's still very much in the early beginnings, early beginnings, in part because I think it's a weird ecosystem. Mercado Leaver is an almost 30-year-old company. So we have some great XMLy folks, but when they joined Melly, Melie was a 20-year-old company. And then it's just interesting because I think some of the reference cases of LATOM Melly knew unrappy. Each has a very distinct way in which they build the culture. So you need to be very mindful of that because you get a lot more, let's say, executive variety than in the US. I think if you went to a B2B SaaS company in the US and you said, I want a VP of product marketing, serious C, you're going to get the same person. I know exactly what you're getting. I know exactly what you're not getting. I think if you get the VP of product marketing at Melli, at Rapi, and at New, you're going to get three very different cats.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would you say a little to Gabe's point five years ago, maybe the scaled Latam companies didn't have as many seasons execs? But now those seasons executives are starting to come out of some of the large multimillion dollar exits in Latin America. So you don't necessarily have to go to the US.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leaders out or company, but then that's because you pair them with product leaders with experience that affirm advice, capital one. So for us, that has been the recipe for success. And I think you have to be creative when you're in Latin America. So for example, our remote company in large part so we can attract these key folks in key positions. But that has worked really well. Get the raw talent, of which there's a lot, and then pair them with the right C-SON leadership to see the magic happen.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That are advantageous over being in Colombia. As a Colombian, you get to know the talent a little bit better. So you have that edge that you wouldn't have otherwise. It's a small country, certainly compared to Mexico or Brazil. So it also allows you to plug into the deep talent pools very quickly. And probably the most obvious one is you're an employer of choice. So we offer equity to every single one of our colleagues from the call center operators to starting sales folks all the way up to senior folks that really allows you to get like your pick of the litter when it comes to talent. The challenging part is you don't have any executive experience. And at some point you need to balance this. So what has worked for us is kind of get the raw material here because you have very talented people and then sprinkle it with extremely competent leadership. And by the way, some of these local folks eventually become leaders. We're seeing some of them actually be transformed.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then they realize that a lot of the customers that they serve didn't have bank accounts. So they created a bank that served this micro merchants. Then they realized that a lot of the consumers that went and buy with products from these micromerchants didn't want to transact online. So they built a marketplace on top of it. And they realized that Consumers also didn't have a bank account. So they eventually developed a consumer bank. This company basically created four different companies within one. And I think that that speaks of the opportunity of Latin America. We've seen companies like Rapi launching a bank or companies like Nubac now that have actually launched a marketplace as well.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of opportunities when it comes to building Latin America that is slightly different from countries like the United States where in Latin America there's opportunity to build super apps. Example that I usually like to use for this is a company called Paxagu based out of Brazil. This company actually is a public company that started as a merchant acquirer for micro-merche.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you think about the winners in the region, you also have other players like Merkel Lever that came before. But as of last week actually became the most valuable company in Latin America, finally surpassing Petrobras. And I think that that's a statement of the opportunity in Latin America that eventually we're going to see the most valuable companies in the region being technology companies. We have examples of successful companies like Stone, XP, the local, VTEX, that all of them have IPO and are in the public markets right now. And that leads to the second point that is actually quite exciting, which is you have all this talent kind of being nurtured that had experience at operating a successful technology companies in the region and now want to build their second or third company. I'll say the last point is”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Excited to talk about a lot of something that I'm incredibly passionate about. To your point, I think this is a question that companies like NUVAN got a lot when people were initially analyzing the opportunity, especially at the early stages. Nouveank is now a 65 billion market public company.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Retest any product that we launch. And so it made it very, very simple for us that Brazil would follow Mexico, but Mexico was the origination point. And the gap, I think going back to what Santiago was talking about, was very, very clear. You'd seen a version of what we're building in the US. It hadn't really scaled internationally. And so we looked at this from a perspective, if you were building a global business bank, what are the regions you touch? LADAM was always going to be the core of where that would sit. And then two, does it have the infrastructure that we need to be successful, which it does? That's a good TF for talking about the region overall. So, Gabe, we've been investing in Latam for probably more than five years now, and I think a lot of investors actually have gotten excited about Latam. So the secret is out. I think one of the arguments in the early days was, well, there's lots of opportunities to invest in companies closer to us, which obviously we do. What drove the interest in the region back when it was a little bit less obvious?”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We look at one is it a region that's opening up to fintech? I think one of the things that's most exciting about Latin America was that there's a regulatory push to be more open towards fintech. I mean, you look at picks in Brazil, it's just amazing what's been done in about three, four years. And so that's a pretty good indicator that you can build what I call banking 2.0 or 3.0 on top of what's already in market. So that's the first one. The second one, which I keep saying company like Jeeves couldn't have been built really five, six years ago because there was infrastructure components like open banking that wasn't around five, six years ago. And again, if you look at LADAM, if you look at Mexico, you look at Brazil, that's at a level that's actually more sophisticated than a lot of other countries, including some parts of the US. And so that was very exciting. And then the third one, which is very, very obvious, was where is the flow of capital going? And that also correlated with Latim. And so for us, our first launch market was Mexico. Till today, it's our biggest market, and it's also where.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think one of the stats that really struck me back when you started Adi was there was 80% smartphone penetration, I think about 20% credit card penetration, so just a real opportunity to bring what is fundamental access to being able to run small businesses to run commerce to the country. Philippe, you approached Latin America from a different perspective. Like Jeeves was started right off the bat with a very global ambition. But then Latam quickly became one of your biggest markets. And I think interesting on the Jeeves website, it says Latin America is entering the golden age for tech. Sure. So we're basically building a global business bank. And the idea is that today companies go global increasingly fast from day one, but banking is still country and currency specific. So we provide corporate cards, payments, deposits, et cetera, for business banking accounts. So when we look at a country or region to start in, there's usually about two or three things.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had a master plan. There was a vague plan, I wouldn't call it a master plan. But enough of an intuition that there was a big thing going, that's what I needed to get myself on a plane and move back to Columbia.”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sense of duty. I'm Colombian. I've had the opportunity to see many incredible things in the US, well-run companies, JP Morgan, McKinsey, some fun startup experiences. So there was a little bit of being able to go back home and contribute to the local ecosystem that I think inspired me. And then the other thing you realized is that Latin America is not China, so I'm not going to be sitting here and be like, oh, it's the near China, but it was so overlooked. tens of millions of people in a single country and everyone just thought it was going to fly over country for technology development and then also realizing that you had an English proficient technically sophisticated population both in the consumer side but also frankly on the call it supply of talent side that then led me to say that I should probably move back and see what we could make happen and in hindsight it's always easy to see like oh we”
2024-08-24 · a16z Podcast · Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source