YouSaid · the spoken record

Seba Kanovich

lines on the record: 42
first: 2022-09-16
most recent: 2022-09-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Sure, the local will be the financial services provider for emerging markets. We're only starting, we have 35 countries today. We're going to expand into more places, new products, phase. The whole world in the payments world to be built. For me personally, who knows, life is crazy. I would have had no idea that I would be here five more years. I don't know. I love what they do.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That they can dream bigger. It's sound super cliche, but from where I come from, you can build an amazing company from Uruguay and Killit Globally. There's no one that is smarter than you just because of where they were born. You need to show it. No one's going to give it for you, for free either. You need to go and get it. But there's no reason why not.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would have want to know that everyone is trying to make it and everyone is making it as they go and no one has the perfect answer. When I meet some of my idols in the business world, there are human beings, they make mistakes, they have lunch, dinner, they have wives and families. And understanding that we are all learning, that's something I would have wanted to know.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hari, I'll give you two. One is on the payments world. I don't want to be CEO of Adien, but I really admire the way they built it. They are payments company, Dutch, Humble, Global, serving every customer on Earth. I really, really admire them. But the second one is probably the most interesting one. I want to be an MBA GM. I really admire the guys that don't have the, in the NBA, you have a franchise, you have a clear budget, you cannot overspend and you need to be smart and thinking in the long term. That's an amazing job to have.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mentioned it before, but evolving our culture in the public eye and having to report quarterly is something I'm getting used to.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I typically ask them what else should I know? I like that because it allows people to open up. I'm not a big fan of traditional interviews. We need to know each other because you might be amazing, but you're not a good fit or you might don't think you're amazing and we might find you amazing. So tell me what else that's in many cases where we get the best insights.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'm good at identifying talent where others don't. When you look at the talent profile in the local, many of the best people we have weren't obvious. We've met them along the way and we spotted them and they're extremely good today. And the biggest weakness is that I really suffer when we lose. And I take it personal and I shouldn't, but I do.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to play close to professional basketball and I went to school and I wanted to travel and I wanted to live where I live and I was running a company and it's hard to do everything at the same time and I was saying you need to sacrifice something. No, you can beat many things at the same time and it's okay.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Steven Wolf by Hermann Hess. I read it a few times. The first time when I was 18, and it taught me that you can be many things at the same time. It's something that I was struggling with and you can be many things at the same”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feeling that you did everything there was to be done. You never win. You win for a few minutes and then you are again back in the grind. But when I feel like a winner, it's when we gather a group of people, they share a common set of values. They live by them and they deliver on something that they agree they would. You celebrate for two minutes. I'm very bad at celebrating. You celebrate for two minutes and then you go again. But those few seconds where things work the way you expected, that's winning for me.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I still don't to be honest. I'm going to lend you some of my confidence. Part of it is cultural. Your way is a very unique place in that sense where being humbled is something that is very much ingrained in our DNA. I want to be ambitious. I want us to win. I want to compete and I want us to be amazing. I don't think too highly of myself. I'm learning and like the guy next door.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm doing a good job. And if you're someone who is doing a better job than I, they should be the one taking order. And that's the DNA, and that's the way we should be thinking about this. Because we win together. We are a team. And if we win, we all look good. And if we lose, we all look bad.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I don't think people are not ready because of the experience. That part I leave aside. I don't believe you need a certain level of experience to be running a certain size of business. But sometimes people don't have the attitude or they just don't want to do it. Something that has worked for us, it's having a very low ego culture where you're not the owner of a given title or for a given project. You are taking care of it for a given period of time. You do the best you can for that given period and then you move to the next thing and it's perfectly okay and you're not less important to the company if you're not running it or if you're not the chief something today. You might be a VP or a head of whatever and that's also okay. And we have many cases like that in the company. Hako, who is our president, I mentioned him before, he was a software developer. Then he became our CTO. Then he moved to COO. Then I tells him, Haco, we need the title, you're now the president. And we have people moving around different places in the organization. You want to keep a low ego. I'm the first one hopefully to be transmitting that. I'm not the CEO of the local no matter what, whatever happens. I'm the CEO as long as...”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's to retain, I want to maintain a culture that I'm proud of and identify with in a context where we are growing extremely fast and we are doing so in the public markets. Keeping that balance, it's how much should we evolve versus how much should we build love with who we once were. What are the first things to break in scaling teams? The break in steps. Whenever at the local, in 2016, our sales team was broken. Then we say, okay, let's have account management and customer success. Then finance breaks because you hilt a new skill. Then HR breaks. Then as you're growing, things are thought for a given size and suddenly you are operating a 10 exercise. So it breaks. The question is what's currently breaking and what you should be focusing on fixing because you know once you fix it it's going to be good for one or two years but it's going to break again and you're going to need a new iteration and you're going to need to think of that system again when you think about hiring people and working with people in their current phase i think some people are great for a certain phase”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something is better to happen this month or the other because of the quotas. I always want it to happen as fast as possible. So that's new. I think the work you need to do to explain your company, something that is new and it's positive because it helps you think about it and really have a new stakeholder in mind when you're making decisions. I'm still surprised at how much weight it's being put into tones or not numbers. I look at our business through its numbers and through its metrics and sometimes the tone of the voice will say a lot and that's something I'm still learning. When you think about the changing style of leadership but just kind of style of the business, what gets easier over time and what gets harder over time in your mind? So easier you have access to more people, to more investors, to more talent. You have more tools and having more tools if you know how to use them, your life should be easier and you have a reputation and building a reputation is extremely hard. And the harder part is for us.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not like how did that shape out? First of all, I didn't know that banks had a role to play in an IPO. And in ours, they were important and they did help. You also understand the dynamics of that business. And it's a business that it has some sort of potential for disruption. Let's put it that way. I also didn't know the amount of advisors that go into an IPO in terms of legal advice, compliance advice, tax advice. So that's something I actually enjoyed because it's one of those times where you have to line up 50 different teams and say, guys, this is what's going to happen. This is what it's going to look. This is the Excel sheet. These are the deadlines. And if there's something hard and proud, we decided in October we would IPO. We were going to IPO on the 25th May. That's my birthday. We were delayed one week because the SCCD and answering time and we were delayed by one week. Building a project like this in nine months and say we're going to make it and we're going to make it on time. It's something that I'm extremely, extremely proud of. Can I ask, what's the biggest difference for you when you compare being private versus being public? The quarterly questions are new. I never thought of our business in quarters. I never thought.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I love to have the spotlight on the business, and during the IPO, you are presenting the local. I could speak about the local for 100 hours, where I don't enjoy speaking about myself and bankers and investors want to know how will you make money and how you will you expand and how what are the new products that I can speak of forever that's a passion of mine it wasn't very challenging in that sense so having the ability of explaining something that hopefully you understand really well i really enjoyed it that that part of the process was great can be exhausting but great was there any surprising parts of the process yes everything was surprising but i didn't understand before the role that banks play i do understand it now in what way”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so far in the public markets. First of all, you have to understand what an IPO meant. So the first thing we did is we jumped on a call and I asked how does it work? What are the things that need to happen? Public companies are the big leaks and you want to be playing in the bigger leagues. Whether you like it or not, you can delay, but over time, great, great, great companies are built in the public markets. We want to be a great company. And for that to happen, we have to go through that process. We were never very well known. We wanted to have the increased visibility. We are in a business that requires a lot of trust, having transparency around our financials would bring trust to our merchants, to our providers. So it was a no-brainer from a strategic standpoint. Then there's a question of how well you're going to do. And we are still answering that. Can you walk me through the process? And can you also just help me understand? You mentioned not like loving public speaking. You have to tell your story to countless bankers, to countless investment banks. Did you find that challenging having to constantly be the front man telling the story, inspiring bankers? I mean, not so much.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Direction or do something else in my life, spend some time in a different ecosystem with my friends, with my family, in a place where I'm not the CEO of the Loga, but I'm Seva forever. That typically unlocks a lot of things. Because when you are stuck with something, go do something else, come back, you'll find a new perspective. We mentioned marriage. In terms of other significant milestones in one's life, I can't believe I'm aligning marriage to this. But going public is pretty fucking cool. Like, that is a highlight of one's business career. Wouldn't you think about the going public in the IPO process? Why first did you decide 2021 was the right time to go public? To be honest, Sanskrit is that we didn't know before that IPO was a possibility for us. I was telling you up until 2019, we had Bootstrap. So it happened really fast. EGA, there played a very important role, calling us and said, guys, there's a window for you. Business like yours can do IPOs in this current environment. We are very proud today to be one of the very few IPOs that are ahead of its IPO prize. We've done very”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You said they're about kind of marriage and your wife. What are the secrets to a happy marriage, Sabbath? I'm always looking for love life secrets. What are the secrets to happy marriage? That's a hard one. I can tell you I've been with my wife for 15 years since we were 17. I was 18, she was 17. So I don't know. I admire her. I love her. We get along extremely well and she's a partner. That's all I can ask for. And I'm rooting for her. And hopefully she's rooting for me as well. That's all. And we are a team together. That's how I feel it. What do you tell yourself? Like, what's your mind talk when you don't know if you can do something? You said earlier, like, oh, I don't know if I can do that. What do you tell yourself when you're not sure if you can do something? If I'm speaking too much to myself, that's a problem. I try not to live in my mind. I really believe in efficiency of movements. I watch a lot of NBA and the best NBA players are typically the ones that don't think, they act. And you can see that everything is very natural. If I'm spending too much time in my own mind, there's something wrong. I'd rather execute some sort of.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were always a company that was much less known than the good business we were, and a lot of that is for me to blame. I don't feel comfortable on the spotlight. I like to live a life that is very simple. And I think a lot of that is insecurity. I don't want to be the big shot CEO. I don't feel comfortable with that. I want to be doing my job. And I think that has sometimes been a big benefit for the local. If I would have a higher profile, probably our life would be a little bit easier. But I don't feel secure enough to do it. I think the hard thing now is actually”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Started. Every time I felt we were comfortable, the reality below me changed. And suddenly I had to quickly adapt. I thought I knew now how to run a company that was invested by a private equity. And then we went public. And then you are constantly learning something new. So I'm very insecure. I always feel that I need to be better. When I speak to other CEOs, I say, well, they do know what they're doing. And I'm trying to learn as I go. So I think that keeps us very humble and that keeps us very hungry. I hope that day I feel I know everything doesn't come. I think there's a healthy level of insecurity that needs to come with a job like mine. It's very hard to know how good you are in any given day because our job is to make things happen. Not necessarily one particular, but enables it. So it's an easy thing.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bigger teams have harder times cooperating. So I always choose the smaller team that is able to deliver what we want to do. In our case, we are a very remote organization. I have personally lived in Israel for the last six years, so this has been home for me. I've been away from our headquarters forever. I think that has become a strength for us because we know that our business is distributed. We have customers in China, in India, in Europe, in the US, and we have operations across 35 emerging markets. So you know you're always going to be far away from someone. So what do you need to do? You need to have a team that is amazing, that it's empowered that really understands your culture. Smaller teams are easier to keep coherent. That's at least our experience. I have remote teams as well. And I have insecurities in my own leadership that I'm inspiring them enough, given that we're remote. I don't know how happy they are because I don't see them at the end of the day. Just when you think about your insecurities and your own leadership, what would you say your biggest insecurities are in your leadership today? Plenty of them. The local has made sure that I'm never comfortable from the day we...”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I went in 2019. The level of innovation, the level of hard work, the ambition I saw there was mind blowing. And I was blind to it up until one year before. And I think many of us are blind. So the level of ambition that Chinese companies have in emerging markets, it's undeniable. For us, it was great to have the ability of looking at it firsthand, not someone else telling me. It's absolutely impressive. You mentioned the team members moving around the world. I think another thing that's very striking to me when I look at delocal is actually 650 people, respectfully is not a large team given the size of the company. How do you think about the benefits of being a small and lean team despite the size of the company? I was just before this call, I was having a call and they were asking me how many more people you want for the next quarter. We don't want many more people. We like small teams. I'm a big believer in small teams. I think small teams can achieve huge things. I believe small teams drive ownership and ownership is extremely important because you have the feeling that you are doing something that has an impact.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two Chinese people out of Shenzhen. No chance. They were a complete satellite. Like no connection whatsoever with the company. Then I moved there and we brought two more people with me from Uruguay. I said, it's absolutely impossible that we're going to be able to do this unless we find great local people. The reality is somewhere in the middle. You need to bring your culture to the new place because if not, you don't have a way of cooperating with the rest of the company. But you need local people. Otherwise, it's absolutely impossible. We have today people in every country where we operate. And we have a lot of people inside the company moving. So we have people from Mexico living in South Africa. We have Argentinians living in India. We have Uruguayans living in China. And we really encourage that because in that mixture, we are building bridges. And in order for you to be able to build a bridge, you need to understand both sides of it. What did you learn from your time in China? Born in Uruguay, moved to China to fix two Shenzhen employees who aren't working. That's a big move. What did you learn? Well, I learned a lot. I wanted to stay with my now wife. We decided to come back, but it was extremely, extremely tempting.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We find it tempting. The first time I flew to India, I came back and I called Hakko, our president. I told him, Hako, this is a nightmare. We are never going to make it. And then we said, look, it's a nightmare. We need to make it because it's very hard if it was so hard on us, it would be hard on everyone. That's a huge barrier to entry. Let's solve this thing and we'll be generating value for our customers. And that has been it. How do you make geographic expansion work on the people side? Because there's two schools of thought. One that says you always need people from the core team to bring the first culture. And then there's the other school of thought that says you need local people who understand the local culture. So how do you make geographic expansion work in India, in Nigeria, in all of these new very different societies and cultures? I think the answer here is that you need both. If you only go with people that have been with you and working your headquarters, you have no chance because you don't go deep on the country. The best example for us is China. When we were starting to sell to Chinese merchants, so we said for every Facebook, there's going to be a Bidance, our TikTok. We need to be able to serve them both. We have no idea how to do it. The first thing we did is...”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In payments in the industry where we exist, merchants want simplicity, so we need to be able to solve multiple problems for them at the same time. You will become much more valuable. So having the ability of someone like Google, having the ability of doing Nigeria and then Mexico and then Brazil and then South Africa is really powerful. So that's why we decided to go a little bit deeper. But I don't foresee us going to 60 markets in the next quarter. That's never reality for us because we generally need to go local. We need to have people on the ground. We need to understand the regulatory frameworks, the payments behavior. So we cannot do 100 countries at a time. Respectfully, do you like the hard countries because no one else is there because they're hard? That's where we come from, Harry. And probably I think there's always a matter of fit from the leadership of the company and the problem they're tackling. I was born in Uruguay. We started browsing payments in Brazil. No one ever cared about Uruguay, obviously. And Brazil was, it's not the Brazil of today where it's sexy and no one cared about Brazil back in the day when we started. Now Nigeria looks like that and it's full of friction and people say it's impossible to build a beautiful.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deep in many respects, and I hope that's okay for me to say. But it's like you could have had 10 countries and just gone for deep, deep penetration within them all about usage. Instead, you went wide. What was the strategic thinking around the geographic expansion and that breadth versus depth? It's a very strategic decision for us. First of all, in payments, 35 countries, it's not very wide. There are many payment companies that say we do 190 countries. For us, after seven years of work, we still do 35. So we've gone generally deep. There are things that we've chosen very hard countries. We started out of Latin America, then we moved to India, then we launched in Africa. Now we do some other countries in APAC. So we've always looked for the places which had the higher friction. And there's always a trend between going a little bit wider. So Latam, we spent three years in Latam expanding into new geographies and then going really deep into countries where we were ready. We then went to India and it took us a few years to be ready in India and feel comfortable with what we have. And only then we go to next level. The reality is that”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Harry, Friday, the answer is that you fall somewhere in the middle between what you were before and what your average investor wants you to become. Most of my disagreements with our investors were more in the direction of we want to keep our culture. We want to be frugal. We want to be humble. We want to build it block by block. But then you learn if you have a new vantage point and you don't incorporate any of it, you're not someone smart enough. When we were going public, GA was very instrumental and other investors were very instrumental in saying this is how your financing will look. And these are the investments you need to put today in order to be able to scale. In those areas where you don't know, you generally need to listen because others have seen it. But then how do we serve our customers? We serve them the same way as we did back in 2016. Anyone can call me. I'll pick up the phone and jump on a plane because I think that's DNA and that you should never lose. In terms of investing for growth, one thing that I found quite striking was that your geographic expansion, we mentioned 35 countries earlier. What was striking to me? Your choice of going broad and not”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to ask it, you know, you mentioned the rays itself there. You boot up for four years and scale pretty globally without venture funding. Why? And in hindsight, what were the pros and what were the cons of not raising money early? Hurry, why? Because we don't have any other option. We never even thought of the option. We started out of Uruguay. There wasn't venture capital out there. It's not that we had a Y combinator and five other buses waiting to give us money. We said, okay, if we want to build a company, how's the way you build it? You have customers that pay for it. Those payments are higher than your expenses and therefore you're profitable. And that's how you start scaling. That's why it wasn't any master plan. It was the way it happened. And I think that has become really deeply ingrained in our DNA, really defined our culture of who we are. We are very frugal. We really care about the red dollar. We spoke a lot about customers. They were our investor and our customers at the same time because they were funding everything we did. So I think that became really deeply ingrained. I spoke about the mistake.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up attracting the relevant type of investors, many of the great investors won't participate in processes. I think you sometimes defer too much to the bankers and it's our role as management to explain what we do as a company and put our voice out there. Sometimes they don't allow you to trust your gut. So we weren't optimizing for evaluation. We wanted to optimize for the right partner. And the process says that you need to have five bits and then three bits and then one bit. For us, it wasn't the right way of doing it. It was a failure. We didn't get to what we wanted. We ended up closing around three months after the process independently on our own. I'm going to be on bankers for fundraising processes. I get in trouble saying this. I hate it. Not a fan. Not a fan. Now my inbox is going to be screwed.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But worrying too much about how far we could get, we weren't ambitious enough. We were afraid that we wouldn't be good enough. And that was a mistake. It was a very painful one. Probably we held the company back for a few years. What was the realization that you could do it? You could go further. You could go bigger. Then suddenly we did have an investor. We were profitable, but an outside investor, General Atlantic in this case, came in and told us, guys, you have an amazing company. You have the potential. And suddenly we unlocked it. We stopped thinking about the short term. We say, okay, this is how it's going to build it. This is how we're going to build it for the long run. We are building this thing to own for 100 years. That was a great unlock. GA played an extremely important role. We wanted a partner that was going to add value. We were profitable. So we didn't need the money. And it was our first ever outside investor. So we were kind of worried of how this is going to work. And the reality is that it was before and after. There's a before and after our history because we're lucky enough to choose the right partner. We're going to talk about the fundraise itself. I do just want to ask, you said like running a process not a good idea. Why is it not a good idea? I think you will.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Customer needs haven't guided us to a better place than from where we were before. We went public. We went public because we felt that we wanted to be better perceived by our customers. We wanted to give them an additional level of comfort. It all goes together. I think we learn a lot from mistakes. You mentioned hiring mistakes. Can you just tell me about a specific lesson that you've had in the delocal journey that was painful? But weirdly, you're actually quite pleased to have had it. Back in 2019, we ran a process to get our first investor. We had bootstrapped delocal from 2016 to 2019. First of all, you don't run processes. Very bad idea. That's something I learned. I'm glad we run the failed process because we wouldn't be here otherwise. But the real lesson behind that is that we weren't dreaming big enough. We came from Uruguay and we thought, okay, we brought the company to this level. This is a time where you find someone bigger to acquire you. You got this far away, but companies from Uruguay don't go to the next level. And that's a very painful mistake. And it was a big one by us. Luckily enough, we lived another day as an independent company and we can tell the story.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On something that is not going to have an impact on customers, then I probably do the suffering work. My question to you is one, often the most vocal customers don't speak for the majority of your customer base. They're just the most vocal and they're probably super users. And two, there's always a lot of input. You can't take it all. So how do you know when to listen to customers versus to say, no, we're going to double down and focus on this, this quarter? It's extremely weird target that we're going to say we're going to double down and not listen. I can't even recall one time when that has happened. Typically, when you have smart customers the way we do, they give the signals in the same direction. They all want you to go to Africa. Why? Because they face the same challenges there than they once faced in Latin America where we started. So you start to see the signal. Obviously, you don't run after the first chat. But if you start to see consistently that people are asking you for payouts or for Africa or for APAC or go to India, suddenly there's a voice out there that you need to start listening to. That has served us well so far. We haven't had cases where our”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prioritization framework mindset for determining what one or two things move the needle because when you're in 35 countries there's so many things you could be focused on. Harry, we probably have a cheat sheet for this, which is we listen to our customers. We build in enterprise payments so our customers are big, they have opinions, they know their stuff. It's very easy. You ask them, where should we go next? What's the next thing we should be doing? Where are we not performing? And then you take that as the guiding principle and everything else, which is not going to impact your customers, you try to not focus on. That has always been the hack. For instance, we don't do product roadmaps on our own. We ask our customers, what should we do next? We started doing pain, so customers buying from a company. Then at some point they say, guys, what else should we do? Airbnb came to us, Anuver came to us and said, we want to do the opposite flow. We want to do payouts. Great, that's our products strategy. We are now going to do payouts. We want to do fraud. We want to do issuing. So being able to have something that is a guiding principle and for us, it's our customers makes everything else much easier. If I spend too much time,”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fallen for logos. I hire people because of the logos and they're not as good as they thought, yes, every single time. It happens to all of us, particularly when you're growing up and you're young and you're a CEO that doesn't have many references from previous experiences. Yes, someone is a VP at a big corporation and you say, okay, that's going to fix all of my problems. First of all, I learned that no one fixes all of their problems. We are a team and we fix them together. I also learned that in many, many cases the solution is right in front of you inside the current team and you end up falling in love of someone who is a great presenter or someone who worked at great companies. They might have been greater. It means nothing. But it's always a person in the situation. And growing up, I would typically focus a little bit more on the CV and less on the situation. Now I try to match the person and the situation. Is this person really going to fit this thing we are asking them to do? That's the answer, hopefully. You said the word focus then. It was something that a lot of your investors spoke to me about was bluntly your ability to focus and hone in on what really matters. When you think about prioritization, do you have a”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time when speed has caught you up? When was it, and what was your takeaway? Yes, many times. Absolutely. I think the key there is to own it. And the issue, the way I say it, it's not typically the first mistake. It's when you fall in love with that decision and you want to keep doubling down on it because either ego or you get too emotionally embedded on that decision. So on hiring, I made mistakes on hiring. I've hired some great people that didn't work out. And that was my mistake. And I hired them. I always say, let's do it fast. Let's make sure we give people the opportunity. Sometimes you make mistakes. And that's perfectly okay. What I don't accept or what I try to avoid is falling in love with the mistake and say, okay, I made a mistake and that's a sunk cost and therefore I'm going to continue to invest on that forever and ever when the signals are telling me that it was the wrong decision. So hundreds of those. What would”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Harry, I think when you're starting, speed is everything. There's nothing but speed. We started processing payments in Brazil. One day we said we're going to go to Africa. What do you know about that? Nothing. What do you need to do? You need to make sure you iterate fast enough to be able to have enough feedback from the problem to tell you this is not the path to go or this is the path to go. So speed for assets of essence. And there's nothing more important than it. There are obviously as you grow there are barriers. You need to make sure you're making mistakes that you can walk back. You need to make sure you understand the regulatory framework. We are now a public company. So there's more things to take into account. But when in doubt, I always choose pit.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clearly, not my strength. I'm not anyone to give any lessons on this. I think feedback is important. And I try to be extremely transparent. People should know where they're standing the whole time. And there are different type of mistakes. We don't want to have mistakes of lack of action because I was paralyzed. Those mistakes I don't typically tolerate. If you made a decision and it's the wrong one and then you own it, that's perfectly okay because the reasoning behind that is that we are all learning. If you're learning, it's normal to make mistakes. And therefore, okay, I made decision A. It wasn't the right one. I'm going to fix it. This is how it's going to look next time. And those loops are extremely important to us. It's very ingrained in our culture. The way we operate it, we don't know. We need to learn. We need to make decisions. If decisions are not great, we're going to fix them.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's true Very hard to define it, Harry, but you feel it when you sit. It's typically people that bring energy. You see people that are constantly not taking energy away but bringing energy to the workspace. It's people that are focused on the solution and not so much on the problem. When you're fast growth, you have problems. Things are not working the way they should. You want people that go after it and say, okay, I'm going to solve it. Not only that design a PowerPoint or a presentation of how the solution should look, that's not high performance. I'm totally against that. It's people that say it's on me. I want to fix it. This is how it's going to look. This is the time it's going to take. I need they deliver it. To me, that's high performance. And the reality is that the easiest way to spotting high performance is when you have a team of high performance, when someone's not up to power, you can tell right away. You can ask anyone on the team and they can tell you right away someone is not carrying their burden. That's how I define it.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No one would disregard luck. It's impossible to disregard. Obviously, you need to work extremely hard and you do everything you can to go after it. We are going to be discussing a little bit more, but I really suffer when we lose. It's something that I think has also proven to be a way of being lucky in the sense that I don't want to lose. So the fact that we don't want to lose means that I'm going to put everything I have to hopefully being a chance to be successful. So I think you need to go to your mother-in-law dinner party. That's one lesson. So that's the luck component. But then you have 10 years of very hard work. So both are really important.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Year, it's year number 10. It was absolutely by chance. So I was in Montevideo where I was born, and at my mother's-in-law birthday party, and I met one of my partners, and he tells me we're starting a company. I was back then trading stocks and bonds at Thunderbank. I studied economics. So it was supposed to be what was meant to do. And he told me, look, we are starting this company. Come join and see how it looks. And that's how I'm here 10 years later. Absolutely by chance. Obviously, I have no idea about payments. The good things about payments is like an onion. You keep peeling it and you think, now I understand it. And then you realize that there's more and more layers. So absolutely by chance, I would have had no idea that I would be here 10 years later by no chance.”
2022-09-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source