YouSaid · the spoken record

Santiago Rojas

lines on the record: 66
first: 2026-06-17
most recent: 2026-06-17
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

“But yang, five years we should still be pushing the envelope. And if the last five years are an indication, I mean, we'll be doing crazy stuff with getbacks or whatever it is that will be there, but maintaining that sense of joy and wonder, I think it's going to be critical. And I'd love to see that again in five years.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And at that point, we may be talking about taking this interplanetarily, right? I always ask, and this is something I tell Daniel, I'm like, part of the reason you build these companies is because you always want to be pushing the envelope a little bit. I think the day I can't push the envelope, maybe the day that I'm like, I may look for a different job. But you get to, and by the way, you don't have to be in San Francisco to push the envelope. Like we're in Bogotan, we're pushing the envelope in interesting ways, different ways, obviously, than the foundation labs.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recovery serve is nuts. And we're running this because we're seeing, and it doesn't mean by the way that we are cutting heads, it just means that for the growth rate we had, right, we were growing this year again at that rate, even with AI, we're like, oh, we got to make a few hires here or there to support the thing. We're running behind. So we cut that thing and we're going to keep cutting it again. So the velocity and efficiencies we're seeing, they're real, but five years down the line, like imagine what we can do”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just have a young family and These jobs and these companies are so demanding That you just need to make sure you're doing them for the right reason, but you're having fun. So in five years' time, like I go to work, I'm so giddy. And every day there's Los Angeles. Like, there's always something, but I am so giddy. So in five years' time, we need to be giddy. Like there are a few hundred people because it'll be a few hundred people, by the way. I don't see how it'll be a thousand people. Angela doesn't know this because we haven't yet had our summer board meeting, but we're running 150 heads below our budget while exceeding the growth. 150 hits.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We should think about calling you the head of human an agentic resources. Is there a different way where you're now in charge of the productivity of the people who produce and the people who produce are people and agents? So one of the things that I get most excited about is I get to play at even within Adi in this tiny Colombian company, we get to play on the forefront of some of these things. And can we, so in five years time, we should have agents running all around the place. And that'd be. And then the third piece is have, in five years' time, we also need to be the place where people have a great time and do the best work of their lives because they're driving economic empowerment, inclusion, growth. They're playing with great technology and great technology enabling them. And they keep going, right? You know, we were talking before the podcast that I'm a rare traveler.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was selling Thousand bucks a month prey, and now they sell $30,000 a month, and we're 75% of those sales. And it's insane. It's like, you know, 300K plus a year. In the Amazon, by the way, down in the Amazon forest. Like, it's just like out in the Amazon. So in five years' time, we need to be able to do that at even higher scale, two, three orders of magnitude more and in more countries. That's the first thing that it's a very unique combination. We're not just a fintech or a retail commerce. It's just that combo. The other piece is... Not only AA first, we're probably mostly AI, AI native. You know, I was talking to my head of human resources and I said,”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the way that he's going five years from now, where he's at it was a great vision. We've been doing this now for seven and a half years. So how do I predict it we would be here in seven and a half years? I don't think I would have gotten most things. I would have gotten most things wrong, but I think I would have gotten a few things right, which I think will remain the same. So the first one is we are a force for financial inclusion and economic development, not only in Colombia, but in many countries. Like we figured out a way of packaging kind of retail and commerce technology with financial services to just drive economic activity. And that you see that that has massive impact. We have cases upon cases of people who are able to send their kids to school. We just featured this 80-year-old man two weeks ago in our merchant event who”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Person, we would just bring mellows and just have people read the thing and mark it up and ask questions. Because I think it's just all these companies are very idiosyncratic and I'm very idiosyncratic. And one of the things that drives me nuts is when people don't know why they're doing things. So then we basically said, well, you always got to be able to say why you're doing things. By the way, myself included, right? Like I will tell you once a week someone on the management team will be like, well, can you just articulate why this is a good idea? And even when we became a banks, all of the folks on the management were like, I understand you think it's a great idea. I don't understand it. So would you mind just writing a note explaining why you think becoming a bank is a good idea? So it just, so it works. And by the way, in that process, we committed to becoming a bank, but B found a few things that we otherwise would not have found out. So Santi, let's look ahead. Everything goes.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's when for us it became extremely important for everyone to write things down. And even, you know, we were always remote first for engineering and product, even pre-COVID and post-COVID when I left and it became very easy. But even when we were in.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the original insight was certainly not agents are coming. The original insight was a I had read enough about the early Amazon culture with memos, but B, Had been a consultant and I had been in enough places where PowerPoint was used to just model thinking that I was like, okay, we don't want to do that. And then C, which is, I think, where what you probably have seen is as we build a company, you know, as you build a company, you have some stated values that you're like, nah, we're actually not, that's actually not a value. Like we don't value that. But there are some even originally unstated values that become extremely powerful. And one of them was can you articulate the wise? And Kenya, the white, even if it's the most obvious why.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think the other principle that you instituted very early on and have been very systematic about enforcing it is that everything is written down. Like even obvious shit that feels like maybe it shouldn't be written down, you manage to get written down. And so let me talk through that turns out to be very precious in the world of agents. All of your SOPs are by definition written down. But what drove that before there was that kind of necessity?”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which was a great thing about profitability. And by the way, for what it's worth, I actually think one of the biggest challenges we had after we hit profitability is kind of like the dog that catched the bus. And they were like, profitable. Now what? But no, it turns out we knew it. But it was such a core thing of every weekly business review for three years. Then once we actually got there, we even had to do a lot of like company education because we stopped talking about it on a weekly basis. But we said the same way that no one says you should show up to work wearing appropriate clothing. That is profitability. It's just like an expectation. Like we've gotten because we were like, well, we don't talk about it. Can we be unprofitable again? And we're like, no, you cannot be. It just unnecessary part of what we do.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are the, but so we call them the L1 metrics, one or two, maybe three KPIs that we want to track. But even then it's three, not five, seven. Because once you get to five and seven, no one knows him. So that becomes hard.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm very little time on everything else. So I think the North Star became that because we ended up realizing against Hummer of 2022, equity capital markets are done, at least for a while, we need to make money. And it just becomes a very useful organizing principle. We're making this amount of dollars. We're losing a lot more. Is the first thing we can move to not lose money as we started with risk adjusted margin? Then we went to gross margin and we went to gross margin minus sales and marketing and finally we're like, okay, EBITDA. And now these days we even optimize our taxes because we're trying to optimize that income. Just focuses the discussion. By the way, it worked really well, but now that you have three very different business lines, we're starting to play with it a little bit more and saying,”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So the North Star metric was the foundational Guys, in principle of the company for failure time, it remains so, but we're more playing with it. But it started when we always hated OKRs because I found OKRs to be very heavy. Like just so heavy. It was like, okay, five okay hours, five cows per car. So now we're 25 things we gotta look at just to the company. And then if you're being purist and you cascade them. So you have like 150 things. And I recently read this incredible post on Twitter by this Sequoi investor Sean Maguire about why X was going to win or not. And I don't want to talk about that in particular, but it was an incredible treaty on how Elon Musk runs his companies. And what you end up realizing is he spends all his time on the most important thing.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it'd be interesting to talk a little bit more about how you're running the company now. You do a few unique things, but one of the ones that you've moved to recently is North Star Metric versus long list of quarterly OKRs.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My God, this just feels very conventionally path to getting to where you want to get. So it sounds obvious, but particularly in Latam, the conventional wisdom in that case was go to Brazil, Mexico, or thin layer across many markets. And I'm not saying our playbook is the right one for everyone. You know, there might be cases where you should go thin layer many markets. But don't let your ambition fall prey of conventional wisdom. Because then there's no alpha, right? If you're a consensus play, there's just no alpha. Those would be the three. And then maybe bonus have a great co-founder.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is very easy to forget that, and people treat technology kind of as an afterthought or as an enabler. We're like, no, no, this is like a real technology company. And that's actually where a lot of your equity value eventually compounds. The second lesson I would say is A bit slower at the beginning, that'd be great if I think about some of our early near death experiences. They could have all been avoided by going a little bit slower. We had some awful fraud experiences at the beginning, and it was because we were just going too fast. But again, remember, right, this was the go-go years. So in the GOGO years, you have to go very fast. And then the last piece is. Be very big in your ambition, but be very contrarian how you get there. Even this morning in a meeting and I was like,”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we would have some people in the management team because for about a year or three years ago, we would spend every week talking about how long it would take to compile when an engineer pushed the code into production. It had gone from some 10 minutes to 33 minutes. And we treated this as a major problem And some people were like, why are we even wasting time on this? But it's like, guess what? Like, you know, 100 engineers times 20 minutes, twice a day, that's a lot of minutes. But it just gives you a sense that you can not just one day show up and be like, oh, I'm a technology company. So I think it's something we did extremely well in part because we made some early good founding decisions, but in part because we actually knew that. And I think particularly in Latin America.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To watch out, especially for entrepreneurs that listen to the podcast and starting companies, not only in Latin America but globally. But yeah, it would be great to hear from you. The first one is remember you're a technology company There's one thing we did extremely well, but only became obvious five years down the line was our investments in technology. Like this stuff that we're talking about about having, we have over 200 agents in production. We have incredible cluster serve economics, all these things are only possible because we're a technology company.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But having it on web, great customer acquisition tool. It also allows TikTok to index you, Google to index. It's just a lot of benefits. But we would always be like, man, it takes six to nine months, five engineers, texty product engineers. Not quite sure it hits the bar. Two engineers two months. So then the speech and then the last piece, which is the one that I'm spending most of the time, even though it has the least economic impact in the short term, is changing the operating model of the company to be kind of agent and at first. And that's where we are making great inroads, but where we're further behind against the other ones. One thing that's very interesting about Adi is that, you know, it started pre-AI, we're obviously you described the opportunity in financial services in Latin America. Curious if you could share some thoughts if you were to go back to Santi when you were starting the company back then, what would be some of those lessons that”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of like our whole refactoring of the engineering code base, so we were moving away mostly from reactive Java to a more declarative language, sort of codas hardness. And we've seen extremely powerful early results. We just shipped a version of our web marketplace. So our marketplace is in our app because we're very absentric.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they'll be like, hook all these MCBs, and you're off the risk. I was like, no, I want to build my own. So I started from an MTEC2 instance. And from there, we built everything. And once I figured, okay, if this is helpful for me at this scale and if I'm able to do this kind of in between meetings basically, then the entire company should be able to do this. Working with a partner and say, God, now we've got a very powerful kind of four pillars, right? So we talk about our customer service, Audrey, we call our agents, and we talked about them. We're investing in transformers. So we're building our own transformers using own GPUs to train our own kind of like GPT of sorts. We call it addedNA with incredible early results. Obviously, we've got”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before I got conviction to push this, I built my own stock. So I got my own cloud provision. I started playing with, and I went the whole way. So I was doing my own DevOps, I was provisioning my instances, I was getting my own API keys. I just really playing with the core tooling. It was so fun because my CTO and I would text at 10 p.m. I was like, hey, this thing on Amazon is breaking. He's like, why are you doing this? Like, I was just literally asking for DevOps style support that had nothing to do with the actual AI, but I was like, I want to build the whole end-to-end stack. I don't want to just play because there's a lot of now AT& wrappers, right?”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Giving you the tools and then do it is not optional. And we have a very clear view of where we are and where we want to be. We have been extremely explicit with folks about standards and expectations. It's not going to be easy. It hasn't been easy. It has been easier than I thought. We're asking our workforce the same way everyone is asking their workforce to undertake like three High jumps in sequence in a span of months. But, you know, I send like most people do these days. I send a note to the company every Monday and suddenly it became monatic. And the other thing I did was”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the same way we've done a few of these transformations, right? Like four years ago, we're like, we're going to make money, come hell or high water in summer of 2022. I was just like, one day, I remember. And I remember why. It's like, well, this world has changed. And I think it's probably the similar thing. It just becomes the top priority for the company. Obviously, for company of our scale and our product surface, as I am reminded often by my team, there are many parities. I was like, that's fair. But this is the one I think it's basically a combination of two things. One,”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then related to that, and we were talking about this before the podcast, it is impossible not to be AI pilled if you're in the valley. Like just stand in a coffee shop. It's the only conversations you're going to hear. You walk down the street, you bump into five people from labs. That is not the environment in Bogota. So you obviously had a CTO that was leaning into it. You were leaning into it, but how did you get your organization culturally moving as quickly as you have?”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That allows agents to grab them and run with them. And then the other piece is we give people great development opportunities. So we have a model where we bring world-class leaders and we become very good at hiring them, even though each search takes like nine months, true story. And then we train young up-and-coming talent. And that combo is extremely powerful.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And my view has always been there may not be that many of them, but we only need a few hundred of them. And in whatever three, four hundred million pool of people, we should be able to get this. And that speaks to the other one, which is we hire regionally. I would also say we're also remote first company. As we think about our AI adoption, we actually think being a remote company is a huge competitive advantage because it ensures all the context is explicit and it allows agents to work on that context. Like if you want to take an extreme example, the three of us were building a company right now, we wouldn't be sending memos to each other. We would probably just be hashing things out on a board. And then we want an agent to drop on. It's just hard for the agent to have context. We have a lot of formal APIs at the company.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the fact that they get to, like it changes their mind, it's like we are here to do serious work as we're speaking in English. You know what I mean? So I was like, that was a piece. So when you run the company in English, which actually counterintuitively attracts local talent, the other thing we've done is we have a very high bar. We push the bar very high and we're very editorial and we're very editorial on what we want to see from our colleagues and teammates.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do you mean? It's a premiere. Yeah. There is a certain, and people want that. And I remember when we went back to Colombia, my co-founder and I were discussing, he's like, oh, shit, we now migrate to Spanish because there's a huge tax about running the company English. An easy one. All our copies in English and they need to get translated because our customers want to see it in Spanish. And we were discussing this, and then I was like, no, we had not quite an exec off site, but more like a manager once a year we do this thing and we brought the 400 of them. And most of them are local.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. I get to choose who I work with. And as I, you know, we hosted them last week. We meet like six times a year in person. And in real estate, I said, guys, I just have a great time working with all of you, which is true. It took me a while to get to that place. But how we thought about Talon was multiple ways. One, I think I mentioned earlier we run the company in English. And we run the company in English. The obvious reason is it allows us to attract non-Spanish speaking talent. The non-obvious reason, which we figured out later, was Spanish speaking talent wants to work for great companies. And being in English actually, there is a certain raising of the bar.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That can attract stalinity from this Yeah, it's been, I think I would say it's been a selfish focus of mine because I think one of the reasons I didn't last as long as I did in some of my jobs is I just thought my teammates were not great. So I think when I decided to start money, I was like,”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was a six month investment to build these pipelines. We built these pipelines. And then, you know, within 90 days, we had V1 of our customer service agent, which, as I mentioned, off the gate, it was crazy. Off the gate, 100% resolution, 100% net resolution, 100% handling. And off the gate, it was 60% resolution. Because if you could resolve a lawsuit, you could resolve most customer service interactions. Santi, I wanted to touch a little bit on a point that you mentioned about talent and building a great company because, you know, we invested in a couple of companies in Latin America. And one differentiation that we've seen is people that attract global talent tend to have larger success case. And I wanted, you know, from your experience, having worked in the US and also building Latin America, curious how you think about attracting the best talent and how you build an organization.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I remember when we were discussing this, I was like, but let's start with customer service like everyone else. And Carlos, my CEO, and then Mauto, they were like, no, this is the harder problem, but this is the one that scales. Because all the pipelines we need to build for the A, by the way, we are saving a few lawyers, if not more, on this because we're able to get incredible efficiencies. But B, Think about what it think about what it takes to resolve a lawsuit in 48 hours. Otherwise, the CEO is liable to go to jail where you have to pull all the right data. You have to pull all the right information, all the right pricing Great accurac”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We started with legal. Because with legal, you actually need to take this incredible foundation that I was talking about. But you now need to make sure your LLMs work extremely well. So you need to build the right rag pipelines, you need to build the right kind of feedbacks and effectively In house loops, because 48 hour clock starts, you need all the data from every customer service interaction this customer had, all the data from your financial core, all the data from the transaction history log. Then you need to package this in a way that's sensible, legally allowed with the right presidents, and then you need to get ready for fairly junior lawyer to say, yep, this looks good on print.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it sets a precedent. So, you know, there's a cottage industry in Colombia of people who will be like, oh, we'll sue the bank to get them to remove your credit report. And it takes the bank, cost the bank two cents to remove the credit report. It may cost you a few thousand dollars to fight a lawsuit, maybe $10,000. We've taken a couple all the way up to like the little below the Supreme Court because we will just not settle. Then people know.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're able to build on a very solid foundation. And then, of course, once we went in, And I'm lucky enough to work with a great team that is very anti hype. The question was, okay, where do we start? And then we decided to start counterintuitively with legal. And legal has two reasons. One, and Get sued for everything in these countries, right? So there are these things called in Colombia to tell us, which are emergency constitutional actions, and you get 48 hours to respond. And if you don't respond, the legal representative of the company, usually the CO goes to jail. Like, it is liable to go to jail. Like, it is that heist. And then, like that, you have all these consumer protection lawsuits, all these things. So with insane response times and by choice, we never settle them.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Event that happens that this comedy gets logged, and events are anything from we texted you to you add something to our shopping cart to your Bureau score to your financial, everything. You know, we generate over 10, what is it, over 10 million events per day. So those two things we were there critically, this event architectures, we used Kafka for ours, are brutal to query. So that's why most people end up moving away from this. And again, four years ago, no, five years ago now, we partnered with Databricks. So what that means is you in real time are able to ingest these events. And showcase him in vector form for LMs. SQL form for classical machine learning models. Obviously tabular forms for still the humans we've got because we do have some humans. So the whole engine and foundation was there”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hired the best CTO in the business. We're like, you know, now I can tell you exactly why, but he was like, you're all idiots. We're going to build a monorepo. And the Monorepo gives you, obviously, For folks who don't know what the Maribo is, is basically all your code is in a single repository. So for agents to read it. It's a lot easier than if you have multiple code bases in many parts of the org. They also have some extreme economic advantages because there's very little duplication. You reuse components almost automatically. We have 60 product engineers supporting a gigantic product surface. So Monoribo was kind of canonical decision one that allowed us to drive AI. And the second one is we built a company using an event sourcing architecture, which means that every single”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I would say we actually started seven years ago when we made two foundational decisions that to this day help us. The first one was we built a company on a mono repo as opposed to microservices. Monoripos today are all the rates, anthropics built in a monorepo. Google obviously famously is a monorepo company. But when we started the company Microservices was where it was at.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe just to stick on AI, I think one of the things I learned when we first started working together is unlike in the US, where you can build financial services and then every piece of the stack, there's some other company doing it as a service. Like none of that existed in Colombia, right? To your point, like KYC might be undefensible, but it's not like there was another service that you could just bolt in there. And so I think Addie has got a real history. You had to build your own loan management system of just having to build every layer of that stack. And so maybe talk about how did you approach, like I think you were very fast on we need to rethink Addie to be very AI forward. How did you decide where to start?”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very counterintuitive that you run a company in Colombia and English, but it is not once you think about where the world class mark is. So I think we're very grateful and it's pretty humbling to be in such company, but it's also just, I think, the recognition of four or five years of incredible investment spanning out.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things from AI. So we built our own in house agents that currently handle 100% of all customer service works. They handle 100%. And they resolve close to 80%. So full resolution, no human in the loop. There's not a lot of dispatching. Oh, no, full resolution. The same thing on a merchant onboarding. We have a merchant onboarding agent that allows us to abort over two to three thousand merchants a month. Same stuff. 100% handle rate over 20% improvement in conversion or launcher later this year. So a number of these things that I think when you see it, we've always benchmarked ourselves against the best. And there are a number of things we've done that I think are now putting us in that direction. I mean, there's a reason we run the company in English, which is we always want as Talon, even though we're now in Colombia.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So we've been named the thermostative company in FinTech by Fast Company Globally. Look, I think. There's obviously a little bit of power being a little more disciplined in telling our story, but the real story is in the last 24 months, a lot of our long-term investments have really paid off and have allowed us to ship extremely exciting products, right? So, you know, we built a Monorepo-based unified data architecture company that wants LLMs became workable, made it, I'm not going to say very easy, but made it feasible to like drive them at scale. So, you know, today we have a company that, as I mentioned, has the fastest marketplace, has one of the most viable and at-scale close-loop payment networks in the country. We are in over 1,000 cities on a country with 1,100 cities with our own payment rails. We do our own clearing, our own settlement, all in our own tech. And then I think, obviously, because we live in the year 2026, we've done extremely attractive and powerful.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nowadays, we modularize some of it. We keep the real valuable part, the algorithms, the software. But for a commodity run-of-the-mill biometric check, there's great providers that'll do it. And zero equity value generated there. That's just a commodity. So thinking modularly is very important, and that was another lesson there. Very productive. Yeah, very productive. And that leads you to the next trip. You're here in New York. You're receiving an award from the fast company, most innovative fintech companies in the world. How do you achieve that from Colombia? Yeah, this is a big deal. And we were talking before the podcast that we travel very rarely these days. But this was worth the exception. So yeah, we've been named.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Equity investors will not understand this. Just ignore them for five years or ten years. And then one day you'll come out and they'll be like, why didn't you call me? And you'll say, I tried many times. And there was just this clarity of purpose, clarity of focus, high conviction serving a market in a different way. And then on the marketplace in particular, CASPI has done an incredible job at owning e-commerce without logistics. And so because we're tourists, it's because you wouldn't build a social networks day like you built Facebook in 2004. You wouldn't build a marketplace like you built. And we even saw it and we were a tiny company and smaller, but like, you know, when we built Adi in the first iteration, we had to do all of our ID checks in-house. You remember this? Yep.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Literally got on the board and he's like, that's not quite the way it works. Here's how we thought about structuring our roadmap, potentially think about it. That informs a lot of our product roadmap decisions because it's very counterintuitive the work we do. We had an event last week and we announced in the same event a bank account. Next day shipping and an integration with a third of the country's entire POS device fleet. I was like, in the same event, to the same audience. That's just not very intuitive. And then the third piece which he gave us, which we always take. This is a very unusual play.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I say NPS, I don't mean it, he's actually been public about this where he's like, I think NPS for a company with less than 1,000 employees have terrible metric. You should listen to customer service calls. So, you know, weekly business reviews, we always start with what happened to the customer last week. And we have two transcripts pulled at random in addition to a number of a battery of KPIs just on customer experience. He was like, the first thing you need to think about is NPS. And in fact, they measure all their product managers on NPS alone these days. They don't have a PNL. And then the second thing that he said, and it was very useful, particularly as we think about Our own product roadmap, she was like, everyone thinks you got to do everything at once.”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then what Daniel, my co founder, and I try to do every year is we try to take a trip to see things. So we've done Wanton Elise. Obviously, the first one we did was to Brazil. And this time around, we said, well, let's go to Central Asia. Central Asia, everyone knows about Kazakhstan, but also Uzbekistan is incredible. And Uzbekistan is like three fintech unicorns, Oliver Hughes, who was the long-term think of CEO, now runs, what's the name, TBCU Uzbekistan, sort of scope. But obviously, you know, the big price is Caspi. So I started trying to get in front of this guy in many ways. Ping one of the investors, I got sent to their IR team. But the way it worked was after like three or four cold LinkedIn emails, he was like, okay, fine. Like, come. And then we go meet him, and he was huddled, but he said there is like, what questions do you have?”
2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source