YouSaid · the spoken record

Santiago Rojas

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66

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2026-06-17

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2026-06-17

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1. “I think everyone was very supportive, but I think even those folks who were supportive were worried. Like, you know, what's going to happen? These guys were so excited. They were like, this is great. We're very excited. By the way, we've been telling you to do this. The right comp is this country company in Kazakhstan. I'm like, okay, great. But they were public in London, so we had a lot of info. So we started reading about them”

   2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “No, I think that's what we saw originally. And I thought, wow, this is a great test bit. I will confess what I didn't see was how big the opportunity was. Like, even nowadays, I'm like, it's huge, but even at the time, it's like, okay, we'll be able to build a good base. But then we got to go abroad, which we did eventually.”

   2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Two friends That one And then fingerprinting you and taking photos of you and all these things, and you're just sitting there and be like, there's got to be low. And the other thing that I found asinine was that banks would charge you to use your own banking and not to use them to like wiremen, to access it. So my original bank account in Columbia, I was able to enter my online bank portal twice in a month. But after the third time, they would charge me like 20 cents. This makes, first of all, why? Secondly, now it means I have to go to the branch where I am more expensive to serve than if I'm self-serving myself or call you like any other channel of service is more expensive. Why are you charging me to use the channel that for use is expensive? But that just gives you a little bit of the dynamics of the market.”

   2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “A country that has this very strong payover time tradition, but no real work around it. The only thing was V-Shan Mastercard had actually changed their switches and rails to enable installments. A handful of countries, right, Brazil, Korea, Turkey, us, where that is the default. So it was like those two things. It was just like, you know what, there is a great opportunity here. And the last and most important one, the UX. At the end, they X really matters. And when I say UX, I mean UX not in the Black turtleneck beautifully designed thing, but you're actually in customer pain. And I always give two examples. One is I went to buy a t-shirt on installments and it took me 22 minutes because they had to fingerprint me, they had to take two photos of me. They had to call two of my friends. And then they would only do this during working hours.”

   2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “There were two things that I saw that were very important. The first one is Extreme amount of technological adoption. And you're on our board, so you know see we have these metrics and we say, hey, there's more smartphone per capita than Brazil and Mexico, which is incredibly powerful, right? 75% of Colombians have a smartphone. But more than that, I remember in a three-year period from 2014 to 2016, smartphones went from being the thing that my banking friends had locally and always three years behind the models we had in the US to being something everyone had. I was like, okay, and when you think about banking in particular, right, distribution has always been the issue with banking. That's why branch networks are so valuable. And that's why neobanking in the US has been so challenged. So you have these very embedded distribution networks, particularly in consumer, I should say. But I was like, wow, we now have a distribution device in everyone's hands at zero marginal cost of distribution. So I was like, inside, wow, I was like, this is incredible. And then the second thing to your point was, this”

   2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “So, the answer is in White Columbia, hindsight is wonderful, and there are so many reasons, but part of it was I was in Colombia and I had landed in Colombia because I had followed my girlfriend, a wife, and I refused to be employed in Colombia. And I actually think being Colombia was instrumental for being an entrepreneur because I knew too much about U.S. financial services. And every time someone would give me an idea in the US, I'd be like, the bank holding company act of 1960 actually makes this unworkable. Or, you know, Durbin will make sure this doesn't work. Or here's how you don't understand Swift. And I had just been so into the matrix here that all I could see was the 10 ways in which your startups are going to fail. Had I been that into the matrix in Columbia, I would have been like, yeah, your company is never going to work out. What I know now, but I didn't. So I think a little bit of ignorance is always bliss. A little bit of being the right place, right time, and refusing to be an employee.”

   2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Amazing. All right. So I want to fast forward to starting Adi. And I think you've done a few things that are usual, but most founders, when they look at Latin America, or most investors when they look at Latin America, they expect founders to start in Brazil, which is the largest market, then Mexico. Obviously, you're from Colombia, but decided you were going to do Colombia. And I think the view at the time was Colombia is just too hard, like payments are mostly cash, $65, 70%. Less than 20% of people even have a credit card. And then a small number of banks own everything. And so what did you see that gave you the confidence to enter this market? And what do you think the outside observers get wrong?”

   2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “And the first one I came up with this kind of legendary strategy group back at the time, which was 10 people at JPMoria, because Jamie hated consultants. So he had bandal consultants, but he had a strategy group of 10 people. And I was like, okay, well, then that feels like a good place to go learn. And I was there for six years. And it was incredible. It was like a whole university in how to run companies and how to think about financial services”

   2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Like, there's got to be a better way. And that speaks to them okay, how do I want to do this? And there were two things I knew about starting a company. One, I wanted to do it. Two, I never wanted to do it on a visa. Because one of the challenges in Navia was like, for a while, the government denied my H1B, then I had to re-get it. So it's like, I need a green card if I'm ever going to do that in the US. That automatically means bigger company, lower upside, but lower downside. You can stay there. And then the third thing to your point, I was like, well, I went out, go see how great CEOs operate. Because clearly I have no idea what I was doing in my 35 days as a CEO of a five-person company, but as someone else of that. So I wrote a list and we had Costco in it, I had Amazon in it. I had wind casinos in it. It wasn't even financial services related. It was just who are these incredible people? How do they operate? And I basically leveraging”

   2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Because he wasn't doing a good job in my 23 year old head. So I talked to the right people supposedly to gather support and then I fired him and within 24 hours the fork of unders were like, yeah, that's cute, but you're out of here. And I think the lessons there, one was, I mean, there's a non-obvious one, which is obvious, which is, well, the power of AI. The second was the power of getting organized internally to pursue a goal. And I think one of the things that we've been able to do at AD well in spite of some challenges through the years is being very good at organizing ourselves. I was just having breakfast with one of our board members and we brought our new CFO. And the new CFO has had 11-year career at MELI. And this boy member asked him, hey, what is the thing that surprised you the most? And he's like, how well organized the company is? So I think that was one of the core insights.”

    2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “And then to your point, we had four co founders. And in the 12 months I was there, we had four or five CEOs. And I was the CEO for 35 days. At the end of that stint, and then I decided that what we needed was to fire a co-founder.”

    2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “I think that also led me to work at Navia, the first startup. Navia was doing probabilistic computing back in 2010. And we used to say, this is, by the way, 16 years ago. We used to say our programs are so special because every time you run them, you get a different output. This is back in 2010. And we were pre-transformers, pre-image net, pre-all these things, and we were out there talking to investors being like, oh, our programs run and give you a different answer every time because they're probabilistic. This is how AI is going to happen. That was about the one thing we had going for ourselves there. But I was so excited about the potential of that technology. It was just early. We were just a couple decades early.”

    2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Yeah. So it really starts with coming here for college. I think I've been increasingly open about this most recent years, but for a while it was like no one needs to know this. But the first time I ever left Columbia was to come to college. And I came to the years for college on a full ride because my parents couldn't afford college in the US certainly and most places in Colombia. So that to me was probably the first time that I could really see doing something that no one thought was possible. I mean, to the degree that I wrote my college essays on a borrowed computer because we didn't have a computer because in that particular case those years were pretty tough. We didn't have one. So I had to borrow someone's computer to write the college essays and being able to go from doing that to just getting a scholarship to this incredible place. And it remains incredible more so at the time Yale for an undergraduate education. It just really changes your definition of what's possible.”

    2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Absolutely. So we provide consumers and merchants with financial solutions such as credit at the point of sale, instantaneous payments, logistics. We just got our banking license. So you should think of it as the kind of elemental fabric of commerce and financial services in one of the fastest growing Latin American economies. Size-wise, we serve over 3 million consumers or 50,000 merchant partners. That's a little bit about the scale of ADEN, what we do today.”

    2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “It's basically a combination of two things. 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.”

    2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Don't let your ambition fall prey of commercial wisdom. If you're a consensus play, there's just no alpha. We serve over 3 million consumers, over 50,000 merchant partners. We have incredible cost to serve economics. Over 200 agents in production. We build a company on a mono repo as opposed to microservices. Monorepos today are all the rage, anthropics built on a monorepo. Google obviously famously is a mono repo company. But when we started the company, Microservices was at.”

    2026-06-17 · a16z Podcast · The Fintech Playbook for Latin America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source