Prosus CEO: From Startup to Global Scale, Innovation and AI Transformation

0:01Hi everyone, I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Soren Wealth Fund, and today, hey, I'm in really good company with Fabricio Bloisi, the CEO of ProSus. Now, you may not know what ProSus is, but they basically have incredible companies, iFood, which is the equivalent of DoorDash in Brazil, Just Eat, which feeds millions and millions of people across Europe, Swiggy in India, and PayU, one of the biggest fintech platforms in emerging markets. So, all in all, they reached like a billion and a half people across the world. And he is pretty pleased about it himself. I can see his smiling hair on the screen.

0:36So, Farisio, we look forward to hearing all about it.

0:48Before we talk about you, what is Prozuz? Hello, Nikolai. Pleasure to be here in good company. Prozos is a tech company, and we offer amazing products for one and a half billion customers on delivery, food delivery, on top of that payment, on top of that lifestyle services like events and travel. And we are just getting started. We do all of that in three big regions, Latin America, India, and Europe. And I think we are reinventing everything we are doing. We are in a moment of amazing change through AI. My whole story is about reinventing everything. So I'm very excited to build the next chapters of Proz.

1:29What do these companies have in common? I think our focus is to build an ecosystem. And this ecosystem means we are not investors, just to start. What we build are operational tech companies that are very good in execution, technology, services. So when we build an ecosystem, we make sure that one company helps each other through cultural management model, cross-sell, innovation, AI. and I'm investing the same kind, I'm building the same kind of ecosystems in Latin America, India, and Europe. So if you look to Latin America, I already had it work in Latin America. In Latin America, people talk about iFood, but it's 10 times bigger than iFood.

2:08We have beverage and pet shops and payments and meal voucher and grocery and travel. The same ecosystem that is very sophisticated that I have in Latin America, I'm building today in India, where I have very similar companies. and the same ecosystems I'm going to build in Europe. Start with just Eat and OLX, but I'm going to expand that to the same kind of ecosystem. What region are you the most excited about just now? The more mature for sure is Latin America. As I told you, people talk about Thai food, but what we have in Latin America is very similar to the ecosystem that existed in China. In China, we have Tencent, but also Alibaba, ByteDance.

2:49And we really can cross-sell lots of our services. For example, we bought a travel company, Despegar, just nine months ago. Despegar is growing twice as fast today because we acquired it. So it's not only Despegar and travel, but we also have, as I told you, grocery and payment and lots of business there. So Latin America is very advanced. And my objective is to replicate the same thing I did in Latin America, in India and Europe. But an interesting thing, I'm very excited about India because India is a really big market with a lot of potential. We invested in China. Oh, we didn't talk about that, but we own 25 % of sense.

3:25We invested in China 25 years ago. It was more or less like India today, but I can see many of the potential to grow in India in terms of market size and grit and focus in creating big tech companies. So it's very exciting to be in India right now. And I think the next 10 years is very exciting. And I'm a Brazilian, but I'm a big believer in Europe. I think Europe deserves and has the opportunity to have big tech in Europe. It's our challenge to make it happen. But Fabricio, before we go into the businesses, we have to start with your life story, right? So you are 21 years old, you live in Brazil, you're straight out of school.

4:05What do you do? I was finishing school and I said I love the Bill Gates story, the Microsoft story. I want to build a$100 billion global company. And I started a startup with two people in a small room. and we started what was Movili and became iFood over the next 15 years, 20 years actually. What was the first thing you did? So you had two people sitting in a room and it's just like, hey, let's do$100 billion. What was the first thing you did? What was the first company? I think we did mobile content, so like ringtones and messaging, etc., like in 2000, many, many years ago. But the first thing I did was failing.

4:45I really failed a lot. The company didn't succeed for the first one, two, three, four, five, seven years. And I learned not only about failing, but I learned about the importance about culture and moving faster and innovating and managing people to have an amazing result. And even if we were like a 20, 30, 40 people company, we were always dreaming big to create a global leader. And that very small company learned about management model and cultural innovation, and we grew to become a 10 ,000 people company. If you fail for five years, a lot of people give up, right? Yeah. Why did you give up?

5:20I think that's what I learned. First, I choose something that I love. I love my job since day one. I love the opportunity to learn, to meet good people, to do better, to become better. And I also learned that failing is part of the process to learn. So although we failed a lot, the company became better year after year for many years. We didn't raise a lot of money in the beginning. We were like a very poor, small company. But we became very good in having the best people and innovating very fast. But tell me, 1998, you start from scratch. And then 2024, you are CEO of 40 ,000 people. Just what's in between?

6:08What did you do in between? Failing, learning, finding very good partners, amazing people that are better than me. So my job is to find people better than me, tell them a vision about what we can do better and how we can challenge how the world is today. And those people together for me, they keep improving and improving. Our company innovated a lot. iFood is one of the best operators in the world in food delivery. We started very small. It was a$5 million investment in food I made like 2013. It became a 10 ,000 people company that has the best products in the world. And it's not because I'm smart, not because I have an idea.

6:47I don't believe in being smart or having an idea. I believe in working a lot with very good people, being open to learn a little every day. And the result was, even in Brazil, not like a core country of the world, we have one of the best operations in the world. How did you build iFood? I had a reasonable company, Movili. and Moldly was, I don't know, a$100 million company, something like that. But I really wanted to build a$100 million company. So I started to invest in other business to understand how I could use my culture and innovation capability to build something a hundred times or a thousand times bigger.

7:21Then I acquired iFood. It was a$5 million company. I acquired for, I think,$5 million, something like that. And I put there, culture, management, model, and innovation. And we started to dream big to create one of the biggest food businesses in the world. When we acquired that, it was a company doing 20 ,000 orders per month. This month, we are doing 200 million orders per month. So we grow a lot. I don't know how to say this, the growth in percent. Okay, so how do you do that? How do you go from a dream to actually achieving this? What are the important steps if you want to build a business like that?

8:01The important steps. People think big is very important. Believe you can do it and really think big. Having the best people, and I invest a lot in people, not people that I can hire, people that can execute and deliver and dream and do better every week. How do you find these people? I find people that deals well with uncertainty and with big challenges. I hire people that I tell them, And look, my goal is unbelievably big. And most people get uncomfortable about that. And I say, you are going to be in charge of that. Many people, they don't feel empowered enough to build amazing things. So I hire entrepreneurs.

8:45That's the question, the point. My first value is entrepreneurship. I hire people that want to have big impact. And then I empower them a lot. Let me tell you one thing. I also fire people. So many times it doesn't work. And I know in Europe, people don't like to talk about that. People in Europe say, oh my God, doesn't find anyone ever. I don't know. I have to find the best, the right people to the right places. Sometimes they're not the right people and they leave the company. And it's good for the company. It's good for them. I need to have people that say, I'm going to be empowered to have an amazing impact.

9:18And that's my job. Put the people there and they do amazing things. And innovate. Innovate every week. What's the key to innovation? Innovation to me is, look, we have a successful business. We have$10 to$50 billion in revenue. And every day, and we have profitable now, like$1 to$1.5 billion in profitability. But every day I start the company saying, it's not good enough. We are not the best in the world. And even if we are, we have to do better. So the level of pressure in the company to disrupt everything and do better is daily. Every day, we have to do it better. So you have to have people with the open mind to think, I'm going to find a new way.

9:59I'm going to find a hack to do things better. We are in a technology business and we are in an AI moment. I see the people in the financial world talking about AI and doing spreadsheets. I hire people that understand how AI transforms everything. And this is so amazing. Before we get to AI, tell us about some of the innovations you did in the food company in Brazil. What were some of the clever things you did? Today, for example, iFood is a company run by AI. The personalization of the first page, what we offer to the customers, the push we give to them, the anti-fraud, the customer relationship management, all of that is through AI.

10:41And there is no guideline how to do that. You have to experiment, to try, to do it better. Today, we spend less money in marketing to our customers. We have better NPS, customer satisfaction because of AI. We internally, we have a system called Token, where we give AI, we give the capability to everyone in the business to use AI to do their own jobs better through agents. None of that was done like it was an idea of Fabricio. We go there and do it. All of that starts with, and power entrepreneurs move fast, test 20, 30 versions until you have results that makes your company better. Then put that on a scale because we never invest 10 million, 100 million, a billion because of idea.

11:22What I do is to have entrepreneurs moving fast, we call it jet skis. Tell me about the jet skis. Jet skis means empower a small team with 5, 10 people to experiment as if they were the owner of that business. So they have to experiment, take risks, try 10, 20, 30 things, fail a lot until they find a way that has amazing impact. So all the innovations I told you started as jet skis. A small group trying very fast until we have the best operations of our category or of the world. And why is it important to tell this story? Because that's not how big companies work. Big companies usually, they say, let's make a budget.

12:03The budget is a billion dollars to the CEO like this project. Then we have one year to deliver a big thing. And then one year after, you lost a billion dollars and you lost one year. So what we have to find first, without money, without team, without one year, timeline, is to find how we make this really work. That was a jet ski. A small company, a startup inside a big company with the right people to innovate and deliver. I don't know, there's an expression I love that's called ambidextrous organizations. I think we heard that in, I think Harvard talks a lot about that. That means a company that is very good in operating with scale, so it's very good in discipline, in budgeting, in financing, planning.

12:49But being ambidextrous means the company is very good also in disruptive innovation, just like a startup. I think what I do as a manager, and that's, I think, what people could learn from process today and modeling, is to be always ambidextrous. I operate startups as a real startup. Crazy, fast with entrepreneurs. At the same time, I can have the discipline to make a plan and execute that over one year after I find a way to succeed on a jet ski. Tell me about the... Yeah, it makes sense. I'm not so sure I would be a very good jet skier, but hey, what about some of the things you've done outside Brazil?

13:31So in India, for instance, how did you come up with the business models in India? I think India is an amazing opportunity. We have there the biggest payment company, PayU, and we have the second biggest food delivery company, Swiggy. And what we are doing right now is building the ecosystem around that. That's what we are doing today. So over the last six months, for example, we invested in Hapidu. It's the number one ride-hailing company. We invested in a few fintechs so we can now give credit to our users. And we started to integrate with Ixigo. It's a travel business. And now I'm putting all of them to work together, just like Brazil.

14:08So in Brazil, I have companies growing faster because they are working together. In India now, I'm offering credits and payment services to all our companies. We have 20 companies there in India. So they can transact with smaller friction. Better than that, right now, we are creating what we call large commerce model. An AI model that uses the data from all our companies to make all of them operate better. So we understand better than any other company about what the customers want, what they buy, when, how I serve them better. So you see, we are using, again, technology innovation to make all our companies work together.

14:51That's what we are doing in India right now. And I think we have half a billion customers more than that in India. And I think it's going to be an amazing ride, not only the next quarter, but over the next 15 years. We'll zoom in a bit more on AI. But before that, tell me about the Just Eat deal you did in Europe. We had a big business in Europe that is OLX and EMAG, but my vision is build the same ecosystem. So it starts with high-frequency business. That's why food delivery is so important. People buy food delivery many times per week. We know their payment method. We know their address. So on top of a high-frequency business, I can create many other businesses.

15:30That's what I did in Brazil and India. Then we acquired Just Eat. Just Eat was a good, Just Eat was a food company. And I had a very different view for Just Eat. I don't think the thing is being a food company. You have to be a tech AI first company. So the reason I acquired Just Eat, not because it's an investment, it's because I think I can operate Just Eat much better, sharing the knowledge we have on innovation from India, on AI from Brazil, on management and culture from Prozos. We acquired that, I think we took the company less than six months ago, five months ago. And we transformed the company completely from a food business to a technology business.

16:09So now we talk about innovation, AI, large commerce model. We are moving much faster. We built an entrepreneurship to make the company really dream to be the best in the world. And I think Europe needs, deserves, requires big tech in Europe. So after acquiring Just Eat, we have now a big AI lab in Amsterdam. Yeah, but I'm sorry, before we get to that, you had to sell your stake in Delivery Hero, right? Whilst at the same time, competition could make acquisitions. Just how do you look at the European regulatory environment? Yeah, I am an optimistic CEO founder, but it's frustrating to operate in Europe.

16:56because at the same time, I have everyone in Europe saying, I need big tech, I need innovation, I need AI. I said, I'm ready to invest$10 billion to build debt in Europe. And then the regulator said, no, you have to divest. And I even told the regulators, I'm going to divest and sell to an American or Chinese company. They said, we don't care. So Europe, so a funny thing, I see the American companies having the government trying to say, I need big tech here. Let's make my big tech global leaders. I see the same thing in India, the same thing in China. In Europe, I have to fight Europe. I have to spend a lot of energy saying Europe.

17:32It is good, it's necessary to have big tech here. And what's happening right now in Europe is that Europe is succeeding in avoiding big tech in Europe and succeeding in making the Americans and the Asian big tech to win in Europe because the European companies can't win in Europe. So I have an obligation to sell my participation in Deliver Hero. I absolutely disagree with this direction. An interesting thing, two weeks ago, Europe said, we are going to change our guidelines on the M &A. And then we said, okay, so like why are we selling? We are an European company, have two European players, why are we selling one of them?

18:15And they said, we are changing next year. You have to sell this year. So I think Europe didn't understand that AI, things happen every month. I know we'll talk about AI later, but the rate of change in the last two months, it's crazy.

18:33Let's talk about AI. Do you think AI is underhyped? I think AI is underhyped. This is a crazy phrase to say. And the reason is I do that operationally. I am a CEO of a big company, but I understand the details about what's happening. Many people last year were talking, maybe there's overhype and next year things are going to cool down. It's the opposite. What's happened the last three months? It's much more than everyone expected for this year. In robotics, obviously robotics is moving at crazy speeds. But what's happened with OpenClaw or with cloud code in the last 60 days? It's substantially more than what happened before.

19:16And it's going to change completely how companies work. How is your group going to work going forward by implementing everything you can do in AI? We have every time more autonomous organizations where AI do much more than making the job of one person 20 times faster. What AI is going to do is to make the whole company 100%, 200 % more efficient. Until now, people are trying to make their job faster. They have to do a document. I say, AI helped me with this document. What is possible today is much more than that, and it was not possible in December. So that's the thing that many people didn't understand.

19:54From December to May, now it's possible to teach an AI, to teach the intelligence of the company to an AI. So the company can really operate not for 10 minutes by itself, but can operate for one to three days by itself. Internally, we have 20 ,000 people creating agents that makes their substantially more productive. The last month, I gave a course to all our executives, starting with the CEOs, so they can program by themselves. You can think, are you crazy? We're talking about CEOs of$5,$10 billion company making software? Yes, because when they learn what they can do in four hours work, they understand that all their goals can be substantially bigger.

20:39They can deliver software substantially faster. They can automate things substantially faster. I myself, I did a software that we call auto research software that enables parts of the company to auto to work by themselves. And me, myself and the CEOs are doing that. Not because I'm going to run the software we do, but because after we do that, I can start to operate in weekly cycles and not in monthly or bimonthly cycles. I think that's going to, all the comps are going to change completely because of what's possible to do today. Many people ask, ah, when AGI arrives? That's not the right question.

21:16AGI will arrive in one, two, three, four years. The point is that with the technology we have today, for example, OpenClaw, and how you can ask an assistant that has memory to build a whole system for you, and you're not even a programmer. So, because of this kind of technology, the companies are going to be different. And the companies that are fast enough to do it first, they are going to have a disproportional benefits over the next, I'm not talking about three years, I'm talking this year. How do you spread knowledge across the group? So let's say now you come up with something great in Amsterdam where you have your AI lab.

21:50How do you make sure that Brazil, India, that they benefit from it? I think that's my job. That's why I'm an operational CEO. I have to know what is exceptional in our companies all around. And I have to make sure that this spreads together with the culture to everyone else. Every two weeks, we have the senior management together. Every four weeks, we put all the CEOs together, like 30, 40 people to discuss what is exceptional in the company. So people know what's happening and they copy. That's what I build. I build an ecosystem where when I have a disruption in AI in Amsterdam, I have to have that running in Brazil and India in two weeks.

22:26Then I fly a hundred people to Brazil. Right now I have like 50 to a hundred people in Brazil discussing how to make agent AI better in Brazil, but people for an hour around the world. So I spend a lot of time making sure what is exceptional is spread hour round. And second, leadership. So I am a leader that can talk about technology and product innovation with everyone, and my CEOs can do that too. So the leaders should be focusing how I make products that people love, how I create innovation that can make us one year ahead of our competitors. And I think we are doing that quite well. I'm very happy.

23:01I think process changed a lot last one year. And I think that the next one year is going to be even more exciting. Before we continue on culture, just what's going to happen with payment systems? When you have all your agents transacting, how are the payment systems going to work? I think payment is going to keep changing. There is a lot of changes happening today. For example, with distributed payment systems and crypto, et cetera. And this is going to keep happening. The big thing we are talking agents and e-commerce now is we need to enable agents to complete transactions. And this will happen.

23:35Some people say maybe, there's no doubt, question, that we will have agents purchasing for their customers, for the people that they represent. And today some companies are blocking that. It doesn't make sense. It is going to happen. So we, as a tech company, we have to enable that, to enable our software, our platform to sell to agents and enable agents. A big priority for us is what we call life assistance. So it's not an assistant like ChatGPT that just answers a question, but an assistant that can order you food or buy an air ticket or a hotel or a ride hailing. That's the biggest thing we are investing now.

24:14I think we have 20 life assistants in the world today. And in the foundation of that, it is agents that complete transactions.

24:26Pramish, how would you characterize the corporate culture in the company? The first thing I do is to kill the corporate world. Culture means empowering people to move faster, to be innovative. We call our culture a process way. Entrepreneurs that feel that they are in charge to have results. Innovation. Innovation is core to everything. We have to question what we are doing all the time. Obsession about results. We need results. I don't need smart people giving nice excels. I need results and impact. I really believe big companies should have impacts and have a positive contribution to the regions they are.

25:03So we talk about culture all the time. I think my job is to set the culture and the vision. And some people love this culture and they work two, three times more. Some people don't fit. And we have to politely suggest them keep looking to the company where they fit their culture. To me, the most important thing, Prozbo had a good year. We had good results. We grow. We are more profitable. The financial people like to talk about results and numbers to me. I like to talk about culture because every result we have is because the company is more focused about giving more power to the right people, moving faster, delivering results and being more innovative.

25:41Do you have the same culture in all areas, like in Latin America, India and Europe? Yes. How do you do that? Do you have townholds? How do you communicate with everybody, with your 40 ,000 people? we start with a very clear set of goals and we summarize all of that like in one page, we call our strategic map, and we reinforce that with all 40 ,000 people every month. Also, we put people together, everyone usually is less like 5 ,000 people, like the more sooner than 5 ,000, and then they replicate it to the other 40 ,000. But quite often, we do big events, we call strategy share, usually it's four, five hours events where I show direction, I show what we are doing.

26:27I show what's doing well. And I show what is doing bad. I'm very direct to say, to face the brutal facts. This is doing very bad. And we have to fix it this month. So the company has a level of transparency that is unusual to a big company. And that's what creates entrepreneurial culture. It's not talking about that or putting that in the walls. It's believing in people enough to share what is good, what is bad, what were my mistakes, and who will deliver. and say, look, you, if you deliver more, you also are going to benefit from all of that. Last week, as a curiosity, we did the last strategy share.

27:04It was around 5 ,000, 6 ,000 people all around the world. And we only talked, the big thing was disruption, not only results, but disruption. So now I have the whole company thinking about, okay, OpenClaw was a big disruption. How process is going to be as disrupted as OpenClaw? And we are launching TokenClaw, our version of OpenClaw. and now I have 14 ,000 people focusing on that. What is this new innovation going to do? You're talking about empowering first people inside the company, but then our partners, we have 5 million partners and then our customers with the latest AI capabilities where you have agents that behave as smarter agents.

27:43It can develop software, it can do transactions. That's what OpenClaw did like three months ago. And now, but OpenClaw is for nerds, it's for computer scientists. We already have it running inside the company. We're going to push it to our partners now. An open claw for everyone. An open claw that everyone can use. So you see, Proz is connected to what is really happening in the world of technology now. But we have the scale, the investment capacity, the reach to push that in Latin America, India and Europe. And I think this is an amazing opportunity because the innovation today starts in Silicon Valley.

28:17No, I want that to start in Bangalore, not in Silicon Valley. How can you be innovative and structured at the same time? That word I told you, ambidextrous, is in the core of that. My answer is the opposite of what you asked me. You have to be innovative and disciplined at the same time. If you are only disciplined, after two, three or four years, some startups take your lunch and you stop being a big company. If you are just creative, when you find something well, some big company invests, and again, you lose the chance of really growing. So being ambidextrous is the concept of you need to respect both of them.

28:57And I think this is the biggest mistake big companies do. They think I'm very good in discipline and managing a billion dollars, so I don't respect the innovators. No, we need the innovators. Otherwise, this company is not going to succeed in one, two, three years. At the same time, the innovators, they don't respect the managers because they say the managers, they are too boring and slow. I spend time teaching the innovators, you need managers. That's how we are going to grow. And teaching the financial and marketing people of the company, you need the disruptors. That's how we are going to keep being a young company for many years.

29:38Where could the process be in 10 years' time? My goal for the short term is to have$100 billion more. In 10 years' time, we will be a half trillion dollar company or bigger and a clear global leader. Today, people talk about global leaders in Silicon Valley and China. 10 years, to me, we have to see clearly Prozos as a company that creates the future of the world to technology with innovation done in Latin America and India and Europe. And I think this will be a big contribution to those regions. And global leader in what kind of industries?

30:17agentic lifestyles ecosystems. So agents that can deliver much more than, it's not pure e-commerce, it delivers, as I told you, travel, deliver payments, deliver other services for the user. this is a very big market. It's a very big market because people usually think then as individual companies. If you can integrate them, as people do in China, there is a space to be a real global leader. Who will you compete away? We have lots of companies, the usual suspects in the Valley and in China. In the Valley, you have some big companies doing assistance, including Google and Facebook and OpenAI. In China, you have Alibaba, for example, or Meituan, global players.

31:09You have Uber, that's a similar company to us too. But I'm very confident we can push our innovation to the world. Let me give you one example. In India, the lab of innovation we have, usually the world doesn't believe what we are doing in India. We have profitable e-commerce companies that sell things for$3 and deliver that in the whole country. American companies cannot think the innovation required to do that in 50 local languages using voice as the main interface. the cost of operation that we have in India is disruptive to how an American or European company operates. The innovation we have in Brazil, it is in food delivery.

31:55We have one of the most efficient food delivery businesses in the world because Brazil is a difficult market. The cost of capital is very high. Operating there is very chaotic. So you need to use innovation and technology to really deliver good results. If I can use this kind of innovation to have a global leader. Most of my AI R &D is in Europe. So you see, I can take some things from Brazil, some things from India, some things from Europe, and I just need to make it$400 billion more valuable. I think we can do it. How much do you work? A lot. Much more than my wife and my kids think I should work.

32:36But what I tell them is that I love what I do. I have the opportunity to travel all around the world to meet the smartest people in the world, to learn with them and to have an impact that is amazing. Because I really think if Europe can have big tech, it's going to be really good. I think Europe needs that. Europe needs sovereignty on tech, on AI. I think if you can create a half trillion dollar company in India, it's amazing good for India. If you can do a hundred billion dollars company in Brazil, it's amazing good for Brazil. And also I invest a lot in social impact and social return. I think I have the responsibility to do that.

33:12So I work a lot, but no one asked me to do that. I just have fun. What is your advice to young people who listen to you? Dream big. It's possible to change everything. Young people usually look to the world and think that's how the world is. It's a lie. That it's how it is today. Everything is going to change so much in the next one, two, three, four years. and the young people that can learn and build the future can do much more than they think. So study a lot, do something that you are patient about because the opportunities are much better ahead than before us, than behind us. Well, this has been tremendous.

33:59I'm not sure I've met anybody who's been dreaming bigger than you. So it's been a real pleasure. Oh, my God. Great friend, you know, good luck and go get them.