20VC: Lessons Building Nubank to the Largest Neobank in the World, How AI Changes The Future of Finance, Leadership Lessons from Sequoia's Doug Leone & What European and US Fintech Can Learn From LATAM with David Velez, Founder @ Nubank

25:56Not a bug. It's uncomfortable at times because we celebrate very quickly a victory, but then 30 seconds after we are asking what's next? What is the next challenge? What is the next milestone that we need to do? And there are a number of our cultural kind of attributes and way we do things that at least try to maintain the level of sense of urgency that at least we had in the very beginning regardless of how many newspapers or positive mentions we get in the news in social media. You mentioned the different products that you haven't really touched on or haven't penetrated as much as you'd like to.

26:30You mentioned the different geographies where you haven't. What do you think is the most non -obvious but biggest opportunity that new bank has? I think this expansion beyond financial services is probably the most non -obvious. I think you've We've seen a lot of examples globally of large commerce businesses going into financial services or large social media businesses going into financial services. So Alibaba is a great example. Tencent is a very strong example. Southeast Asia, you see right -hailing apps or some of the commerce business going into financial services. You haven't seen that much the opposite direction.

27:04Financial services going into broader commerce businesses. But if you think about it from first principles, there is no reason why that reverse migration cannot happen. In fact, I would claim there is a bigger case to be made that is better or easier for financial services to go beyond financial services for a number of different reasons. The first one is trust and brand. In financial services, when you're the primary back of a customer, you have to work 24 -7 every single time. You're not simply just delivering somebody's shoes faster. If you fail on a transaction, it's not simply you delayed a transaction.

27:40You are handling people's life savings. So the importance of the need to be operationally effective 24 -7 is very very high. We cannot get this wrong and that means a higher necessity to build a stronger brand and trust with consumers. So financial firms that have become primary bank accounts have generally higher net promoter scores and had generally high trust with their consumers. And we see today especially in especially net promoter score. guess what is the highest net promoter score of any consumer product in the world today? This is gonna be surprising to you. It's not the Tesla, it's not the iPhone.

28:17The best highest rated NPS consumer product in the world in any category is new bank's purple credit card in Mexico. It's a 94 NPS. It's strange that that's the case, but that just tells you to think that tells you something about the marketing, the problem, and tell you something about the solution and the strategy that we've chasing to build this consumer brand. So very quickly go back to your question. In fact, just every you need to build brand, you need to build trust, you need to build very strong technology and platforms. By now we have one of the largest detail in native consumer basis in Latin America with 85 million customers.

28:51And we have a lot of data that we need to use to give people trust, which is credit. Once you add a lot of these assets and you put them under one roof, a very large base, a very strong brand, a higher end PS, There is no reason why this consumer platform cannot offer other products beyond financial services to consumers. That's kind of the most interesting kind of non -obvious opportunity we're trying to chase today. What are some examples of those services? And also the financial services that you think are most available? We're in the early days, but our market place is up and running today.

29:22We have several million daily active users today on our marketplace, where our customers are consuming our buying goods or services from over 180 different partners could be e -commerce businesses could be right hailing apps and your gift goods could be a number of different products they go into a marketplace they buy there because not only we use our scale to give them better products to give them discounts but also we use our data capabilities to give them access to credit so they can purchase more and if you You know anything about retail in Latin America, one of the key issues around selling is providing credit.

30:00And this is an area where we build probably the best infrastructure in Latin America. Where the best at pricing credit and providing credit for a number of different capabilities. So, this medium of consumers would decide to shop in our marketplace. We're not the commerce, we don't want to be the commerce, we don't want to get into logistics, but we are a platform that cross -sales all our products to these consumers. we give them better products and services, better discounts, and then for the merchants, we tell them stop spending money with Google or Facebook, stop spending a lot of marketing investments, we bring you 85 million consumers to your doorstep, and by the way, we help you sell faster and better within this marketplace.

30:41So this is the very beginning of building that business. My question to you is prioritization and resource allocation. Someone said on the that number one role of a CEO is to be the best resource allocated in the business. There are so many different things that you could do from insurance to mortgages to student loans, to financial products which have very high margins and are very accessible to you. Why do this? Yeah. The first point is we're not doing all of these different verticals, right? We're not doing ride hailing, we're not doing e -commerce. We're a platform that connects with the ride architecture through providers of these services.

31:14That's one point I think to leave. We've prepared because if we were to actually go on the other end and actually start trying to build all of this, then I completely agree with your conservator on priority session. But then to your main question, why do this? We think this is the next 10 years of growth for us. And this is the opportunity to really solve complexity for our consumers as the mission of the company since the very beginning has been to fight complexity to empower people. We found initially a lot of complexity in financial services and financial services continues used to dedicate, we're allocated today about 80 % of all resources and energy to financial services.

31:46So that core continues to have most of the allocation of resources. But when we think about the next five years and we think about the opportunity, what we can do to find that complexity and pursue that mission, we think there is a bigger opportunity to increase the concentric circles and provide more products and services to our consumers by fighting that complexity. So it's thinking about the big opportunities that we have ahead and also diversifying away from credit, they were so wet, they were so fine away from financial services, providing another type of revenue sources to the business and ultimately making it a much more resilient model beyond the ups and downs of financial services in Latin America which is historically very cyclical.

32:24I do have to ask you, when we look at the success of New Bank, the thing that I find striking is actually something that you said to me beforehand when we were going back and forth, which is actually that the US and Europe can learn a lot from India, from China, from Brazil, when it comes to financial services and particular. What do you think Europe and the US can learn in particular when you reflect on your own journey? So I think what I perceive a bit in, especially financial services in the US and Europe is a bit what we were discussing about what is the biggest line mine or the biggest challenge for new bank is there is a sense that they have one.

32:57It's a problem that is solved. The US seems to think that Europe seems to think that that there is no need to really try more. And as a result, you end up with a regulatory environment that seems pretty adverse to innovation. Crypto, beat, fintech, when I talk to colleagues or founders of fintechs in the US and Europe, it just feels like they're always going against, and the regulatory is always this headwind that they're trying to consistently fight against and somehow they got to figure out how to break it. When you look at India, China, Brazil is the exact opposite. All these countries, there was no sense that they had won, right?

33:35It was clearly that they had it. The lack of access was significant. In Latin America, you had it 250 million people, completely unbanked. 60 million people in Brazil. Brazil is charging one of the highest interest rates in the world. For regulators, it was clear that they needed to do something and that concentration of the system, the fact that you have about 80, 500 % of the entire market in the hands of banks, was something to be solved. And so that created an environment for fintics like cost to actually go and compete. And ultimately, the consumer one, because you're hiding comments, you have fintechs, everybody actively fighting for better products, the consumers, and consumers, having a lot of alternatives.

34:11So the first thing I think is, and because of that, you've done a lot of leapfrog. Today, how Brazil payments operate, that's the future, right? You go to some apparel today, you see how people are transacting. It feels a bit like when I first went to China in 2017, and people were transacting, it's like, that felt like the future. You don't seek cash anymore. That's not why you see in Europe or US today. So I think that level of complacency in these industries, in these big countries, has stopped innovation and have permitted that a lot of these emerging market, a lot of these technologies have leapfrog to a place today where Brazil, China, India are ahead of US and Europe.

34:48And this is just the beginning. You'll see this trend just accelerating, I think, over the next five to the year when you start thinking about open banking, when you start thinking about the uses of crypto, when you start thinking about how AI could do in financial services. What would you advise then? What would you advise founders who are in these more regulated markets who agree with you, but are going, what the fuck can I do? And then what would you advise regulators who are going, ha ha, we have our stronghold? Yeah, it's a hard problem. Maybe two small insights. The first one is in the early days of FinTech, 2012, 2013, 2014, when now I've seen a lot of people who are starting globally around this idea of the future of financial services is of technology companies.

35:27We made a very different decision that a lot of businesses in some developed economies. As I said to you earlier, we embraced the bankings space with all the pros and the cons. We went and wanted that banking license. The sense is that in a lot of our geographies, entrepreneurs try to almost do everything except embracing the space, except becoming a bank. Because of some arguments that if you became a bank, then your valuation multiple was going to be lower and you're going to be valued less. I remember discussing that argument and saying, cool cares. First we have to build this business and then we will care about valuation.

36:00It doesn't, doesn't really matter. That has partly won't be in one of the reasons why a lot of these businesses have become in backlash because regulators have seen businesses doing financial services that really look like banks. And in reality, they should have just embraced the space since the very beginning. That's one specific decision I think that we made that a lot of people didn't made. But from their latest perspective, it's not visible today, even for the big regulators, how much empty space and opportunities there is to improve efficiency in financial services, even in markets as sophisticated as the US.

36:31US is 50 % of the world's financial services space, but when you look at the subsegment, you find a lot of lack of access to good financial services. There's a lot of niches, a lot of subsegment that are not getting good access to products, They don't have good access to credit. They're not simple products. And so I wish regulators realized that Fintech could provide a lot of solutions and that they were ready to embrace new interest as a way to close some of those gaps. Versus the existing status quo which almost seems as if they were protecting and benefiting the traditional incumbents. I'm sorry, grenade in here.

37:09Will new bank or will any startup bank be able to disrupt the truly high net worth banking segment? When we look at the goldmins, the picktays, the true ultra high net worth, will they ever be displaced? One of those developments of technology where it's first very slowly and then very fast. First, it will begin by the high income population, not necessarily a top 1%, but the top 5%. It will begin in products that are very simple to manage where you need less access to your private bankers. So credit cards, personal loans, investments, access. Today, you don't really need a very sophisticated personal bank to tell you where to invest.

37:51If you realize that almost all returns comes from having a very well diversified investment portfolio and fixing common equities, you should just do that yourself and stop paying commissions to a lot of brokers or middlemen. So it has begun, I think that that kind of evolution has begun in very simple products. The door required middlemen. I think then AI and this vision around AI really private banker could become the catalyst for accelerating the immigration towards a fully digitalized private banker. And at that point, then you really start attacking the 1%. You really start offering products to the wealthiest of the wealthiest because you have an algorithm that is 24 -7 available that give you actually better advice than the human, that gives you access to products that the human is not giving you.

38:37And finally, it doesn't take a toll. It's not taking a lot of commissions in the middle and has no conflicts of interest, which a lot of the times of the bankers that you mentioned do have conflicts of interest and better in the business model. So I wouldn't discolor that we will see this happening not in the next two years, but maybe in the next five to 10 years. When you think for your heart with new bank, how do you think AI changes financial services fee both short and long time. I think that the shift towards digital banking that we saw happening in 2012, 2013, got us very excited because in that platform shift towards their smartphone, we saw the opportunity as we used to call it putting a bank in everybody's pocket.

39:16And that meant that we were really able to increase financial inclusion because the moment we don't need to put a bank in branch in every quarter, the cost to serve a customer goes down by 20 to 50X. The cost to serve somebody goes close to zero. So we created a model that is much more efficient than the incumbent, which means much more access and lower prices for everybody. However, this view around the fully democratization of financial access, it has a limit through the smartphone as a platform. What we realize is that you still have a mass of, let's say, 50, 60 % of the population that fundamentally doesn't really understand how to invest.

39:52That in an environment that is very complex where you have very complex concepts like compound interest, where have very complex issues around what is the most tax -efficient investment fund? How do I invest much money? They don't really know how to do it today. The response has always been out of financial education, financial education, but guess what? There is a limit to financial education. This is very complex stuff. People don't necessarily want to learn it, don't necessarily have the energy to learn it. And so there's been a limit in how much these democratization of financial access have happened.

40:25We think that AI is now the second platform shift that might actually be able to take it to its final conclusion. And so if the smartphone was the bank in every pocket, AI is the bank and the banker in every pocket. And that really is the catalyst to enable 100 % of the population to invest, to get credit and do the right financial decisions. And in a way, allow the bottom half of the pyramid to bank, the same way that the PICTAR customer is today back. It's really democratizing the axis and the service of the 1 % to the other 99%. Does AI change how you think about structuring your org? In terms of functions, in terms of your product teams, do you want to have a specific science and research team?

41:10How do you think about AI impacting your org design? We are asking ourselves, actually, this question. We are structured in a way to follow our strategy, which is we want customer to love us phonetically. We win when customers love us phonetically. Our entire strategy is get customer to like us. It's as simple as that. And we are organized in a way that we can build products and services to get customers to like us. And so we think AI will be one more platform to help customer like us, either because we give them better products or services or because we charge them less. So don't think we need a corporate organization.

41:48We just need to figure out how AI is embedded in everything we do and then Some cultural decisions this actually have been a very interesting debate We've had or the past few months with our teams is when did the purpose is AI? You say I is purpose today to get to cross -sell so you're gonna see I a private banker of new bank actively telling you Harry get this loan Harry get this insurance product and then become almost like this sales person selling on behalf of New Bank. We want to create an entity that will maintain almost a neutrality because we think that then neutrality will be the way to optimize loyalty for the consumer.

42:24I, I, they will tell you, hey Harry, guess what? New Banks actually doesn't have the best product for you today. You should go get it from it all because they have a better product. And having New Bank recommends somebody else's product because they have a better product than we do. How does AI deal with intense ambiguity of financial services? And what I mean by that is if you have an AI banker, it could legitimately say to me, hey, you should place more trades because you're taking a clip, you're taking a transaction fee. Even though it may be better for you, but worse for the customer. How does AI know who the boss is and where the incentives are?

42:57That's exactly the key debate. And is actually the same answer than your banker. Today, your human banker or your broker? Why is the incentives of that broker? Is the incentive of the broker that is calling you to say, hey, you should buy this stock and then sell it at the end of the day because it's incentivized to make a lot to get it to do a lot of the trades because it's getting a bonus at the end of the month based on the trades or is that broker really neutral and has a line incentives with you in that if you make good investment decisions the broker will make a big bonus. The same right of incentive need to be programmed inside the AI.

43:30That is I think where we're spending a lot of time and for us it's very clear we want to optimize consumer satisfaction in the long run and for us any conflict of interest will be a detractor from building that loyalty with the consumer that we want to do over the long term. Do you know I have to own the models yourself then? Because if you think about relying on any existing either closed or open models whether it's your open AI or your alarms or your anthropics of the world, you won't be able to have that control. The only way you'll be able to have that control really is if you actually own the models yourself.

44:00How do you think about that debate? I think the existing LLMs, the open AI, the entropic, as sort of the basic infrastructure that gives you the data, that gives you the model, but where you really create that type of incentive, where you actually define the behavior of that AI is when you start programming the behavior of your AI private banker, right? If you're telling him your objective function is to get consumers to get a lot of loans, that banker is going to go and push a bunch of notifications around, get that loan, get that loan at that very high interest rate or get that trade. Or if you tell that AI I probably back here, your objective function is to get the net promoters core of every single customer to be a hundred, 10 years from now, then that's going to be a complete different behavior.

44:42So I don't think you need to own the model, but I do think you need to own and be very thoughtful around what are the incentives and what is the objective function of that algorithm when you start actually programming it. I have to ask you, we speak about kind of how you're integrating AI into new bind today. Nigel Morris told me that you're the single bass listener. Well, one of the best listeners that he's ever encountered. What does great listening mean to you? And how do you think about your approach to it? Yeah, listen, I try to start a bank in Brazil without being Brazilian, without being a banker, without ever having ever worked for a credit card business, without having any network in Brazil, without knowing anything about regulatory in Brazil.

45:19I remember a conversation that had with the North Barnett Sequoia said, like, these are really interesting business, but you're not an engineer, you're not Brazilian, you don't speak Portuguese, you don't know these, you don't know that. like you have all these like, like apps. And it was one of those stuff of feedback that it felt a bit like a punch in the stomach at first, but maybe realized that he was right. And that my job number one was to go find people that feel all the gaps in knowledge and experience that I had. That forces you to listen, to learn to be able to listen because by default, you just do, you know that you don't know.

45:50And even part of a foundational aspect of Newback's culture, if this comes to the beginner's mind, that we like to hire people that have this ability that has more questions than answers that are able to look at a problem with a bunch of questions versus the traditional experience person that's that I've been doing for 30 years and therefore I know the answer. For those people, there are no real alternatives. You know everything, so how can you even innovate? So Nubank has this view around having a lot of questions. You have to be a good listener. Me personally, given my background, I have to listen a lot.

46:22I had to ask a lot of questions because there was a lot that I didn't know. That has almost shaped the culture of how we think about building products where we have this level of epistemic humility We know that we don't know about your stuff and so we're actively seeking to Find why we might be wrong or why we might be right when you listen to this deep -pays you do you seek out the truth to get to the Best outcome final two questions we do a quick fire I just want a review of decisions when you review the decisions that you've made What has been the single best decision you think you made in the new band journey and how has that impacted your mindset first?

46:58The early setup one of the things I got I remember getting from Sequoia was how important the first 90 days of a business are there's unlike the initial set conditions the first team the first culture the same value We were very deliberate around the type of people that we attracted Micophounders and how we picked them in high spent a lot of time trying to find in the values that we set up the way we organize ourselves, we put all our values in a culture deck. That has allowed us to scale this culture again and again and again, because we have a lot of clarity around why we stand for it and how we make decisions.

47:31And having focused a lot on that consumer obsession since the beginning, having created values around bringing diverse people, diverse from a mental perspective, diverse experiences, creating an idea meritocracy where the best idea wins, building that concept of partnership, of flatness in the organization. All of those elements, I think, have been the key core elements that had a lot of stool to really make a lot of right decisions from a product perspective, from a strategy perspective, from a hiring perspective, and sort of have decisions that kind of keep paying even as we scale. Everyone makes bad decisions.

48:05What has been the single worst decision you've made in the new band journey, and how did that impact your mindset? Perhaps the word decision from a product and kind of strategy perspective has been when we enter investment via a big acquisitions. We enter via an acquisition versus organically. And I think we're underestimating. I underestimated how hard was going to be the integration. We did everything we could to do diligence that. And I remember we've been comfortable enough, but ended up being harder than we expected. The other thing that the mistake that we did was, it was a decision that was made in a rushed environment that was very much momentum -driven.

48:41Interest rates in Brazil in the 2010 we're coming down very fast and so there was this massive movement towards equities. We saw a lot of people buying into equities and we remember saying we have to be daring the market now with an equities product. Everybody's doing it. We cannot be late. We have to do it now and that's what we have to do to be an acquisition. In hindsight, there was a bit of the departure of the way we generally like to make decisions which is we're building a company for decades. We're running a marathon on notice print. We'd rather be a little bit slow to a market, but do it well versus a company that tries to do too many things too fast and not a bunch of stuff.

49:16Since it was a big momentum driven, I think it was a little rushed. In hindsight, it probably would have decided to be a little slow, build it organically. From now on, I think this means a bias, even a bigger bias to build organically, versus an M &A driven strategy, I think about the next five to ten years of growth in the business. Did you always know you'd be successful? I speak to some of the biggest founders in the world. Some have an innate feeling that they would be successful when they're younger, some don't. Did you always feel that you would be successful or not? I think it's a tricky question because I think it depends a lot on your definition of success.

49:51To me, success was going to be having the journey and adventure of my life time. We were about to go against the biggest companies in Latin America. That was a great adventure. I'd recently read the Odyssey and the Iliad from Homer. That was a great adventure. There's a lot of poetry around why it was all about the journey, not the destination, right? For me, a new bag was always about the journey, not the destination. And so success for me was having the journey of my lifetime. Doing something hard, challenge myself, doing it with great people. If we failed, that was still success because we did a great journey.

50:26The journey was fun. I learned a lot of challenge myself. So from that perspective when we chose this idea of banking which by the way at that point was I remember thinking This is the single hardest thing I can possibly imagine myself doing building a bank from scratching Brazil is the hardest thing I can do and that's why I wanted to do it from that perspective I defy success that way I thought I was gonna be successful because he was gonna be a great adventure no matter if we made it or if we didn't Final one I promise a promise but one of my great friends is a very successful at the manager in billionaire and he said to me the other day, how are you the thing with giving?

50:58It's harder to give money away efficiently than it is to make it. And the important word there is efficiently. It's harder to give money away efficiently than this to make it. On the philanthropy side, you're doing a lot. Why you're doing it and how you think about efficient giving versus giving? It's a phenomenal question. My mind is split on this debate right now. It's something that I'm actively thinking about. I understand the concept of efficient giving. I think a lot of what we've been doing on the philanthropy side is figuring out how do you maximize impact per dollar spent? Where's the maximum point of leverage?

51:32You can give out a money, you can write a lot of checks, but are you really creating impact? And with creating a strategy within our foundation, very focused on areas where we think there is a lot of leverage, specifically areas like education and building leadership, public and private leaders. If you educate somebody, you create a lot of impact, they're going to go and build companies, you give them an opportunity to create more wealth for them and for their society and you create systemic impact. Now, I think that sometimes feels almost contradictory to the reality that you see in Latin America where you actually see millions of people that are hungry today.

52:04Millions of people that are waiting to get a surgery in a hospital. And so in a way it's like, yeah, fine, you want to create all these very sophisticated models or an impact and leverage in society. and because of that you're not given enough, but at the same time people need the money now. Like if you wanna create impact, go buy somebody's food, go make it easy for them to get the surgery that they need for their friends and stop overthinking this. You're overthinking this. The problem is now their sense of urgency, just go do it. And if you make one person today directly better off, that might have actually more impact than coming up with like this systemic model, style, ultimately, as a philanthropist, you're not even touching people's life.

52:44So it's a bit of a contradiction that we are in the middle right now and honestly I think both are probably true, but I haven't really figured out how to solve that contradiction Final final one and you're going to cringe at this, but you are a billionaire now on paper at least with new bank And you also have four children. It's very hard to bring children up in any situation It's also hard to bring them up with the same humility hunger work ethic when life is different financially How do you bring children up with hunger and ambition when brought up in a very affluent environment? It's a challenge and it's a question that I think a lot about.

53:18I've talked about it with Dawe, we talked about Zaggy, he has some very strong views. I think the most important thing is make sure that they don't realize they have one. If the children think they have one, which basically means they are complacent, they don't really have to try hard to anything. They raise their hand and everything appears next to them. Then you are stealing from them probably the single most valuable asset that anybody can have, which is this need to become a better person. This need to prove themselves and to everybody that they have something to prove. It's almost like a bit of inferiority complex.

53:52It's almost a bit of lack of self confidence where you have to go try. There has to be some struggle because they have to prove themselves that they can struggle, they can fight and they can win. If there's nothing to struggle with, then there is no victory. There is no opportunity to build self -confidence at the end of the day. And so when my wife and I think actively is like, how do we create a bit of a struggle for them? They cannot be too easy. They have to have responsibility. They have to have chores. They're still young, but they need to know that they need to make their bed every morning and they need to clean up after themselves and they need to wash the car every weekend and they need to do a bunch of different stuff so that they can be a good participant of the family, a good participant of the community.

54:35And so we are still trying to figure out the right answer for that, but I think the core insight I think is this gotta be a little struggle. We cannot remove it everything from them It cannot be too comfortable because otherwise they lose the need to Suprate themselves and to prove themselves even more. I mean if you want to give them struggle You could just give them an incumbent Brazilian bank account But the great idea they're not you're not open at account there But maybe maybe the issue star there was they get their first account Listen, I want to do a quick fire on I say short statement you give me your immediate thoughts.

55:08Does that sound okay? Okay, let's do it. Okay, so what single things you know now that you wish you'd known when you started new? The importance of bringing people with more experience sooner. I was a bit dogmatic in trying to get people that did not have Experience that had the head full of questions. It is also important to have headed with some answers So I would have balanced it better. What's the most vivid near death experience you have with new bank? Then in 2017 Friday morning I wake up I read the news that the government is about to change the liquidating timeline for credit cards in Bravery Brazil You have about 27 days to pay merchants a credit card issue.

55:45They were gonna do it to two that man We were gonna need to raise a billion reais overnight and that was gonna be quickly the end So it was a tough weekend. We rallied hard We went to regulators Monday morning There were 15 ,000 customers on Twitter of the Central Bank of Brazil saying you cannot do this. No bank is finally bringing competition that to the end we met with as president of the Central Bank of Brazil and he Tell us to be a micro founder. Don't worry. You're good. This is not gonna happen But that was very close. What was the biggest lesson from taking new bank public right before a big market crash?

56:19We could not see that market crash We were a bit lucky and a bit good in terms of the timeline I remember debating with my partner saying, this is a capital intensive business, no matter how well we do it, we're gonna need capital and the best way to get access to capital is in the public market. So we're gonna have to be a public company soon. Number one, and number two, around 2020, 2021, I remember having the conversation saying, everything is looking so good. The entire environment is so positive, there is only downside from here, which means this is the perfect time to go public. And so we went public, end of 2021 and then beginning of 2022 everything changed.

56:57So time was good preparation was good, where the insider, what lesson we got from that was very quickly realizing that there were a lot of things that we could control from that reaction or stock took ahead very fast. That created a lot of internal stress, but we spent some time figuring out what could we control, which was our execution, what cannot we control, which was US interest rates, US inflation, things that were affecting us, that were at cellular control, and then quickly now I've realized let's just focus on where we can control. You have four children as we mentioned. You can cool David Valazza the night before your wife gave birth to your first child and you can give one piece of advice.

57:34What would you cool David up and say, you should know this before your first? I would say how unbelievably rewarding it's going to be being a father and investing time and also how unbelievably tiring it is going to be also being a father and also how valuable a good night of sleep becomes. Sleep just becomes this an amazing amazing valuable asset. So, in draw while you can. Are you back in the office and do you believe in remote more and more of the people I interview? Don't. I'm still making my mind about it. I think our reality is very different than the reality of the typical Silicon Valley business.

58:10We, being in Brazil and being in Latin America, means we have to have a global footprint to get some of the best access and talent in the world. There is a lot of talent that we need to get access to that is simply not in São Paulo. It's not in Mexico City. It is in Berlin. It is in San Francisco. If we were to say everybody has to be in the office, we would gain a bit in terms of faster decision making, faster ability to innovate. I believe in all the pros of being in the office. but we lose a lot of the incredible valuable talent that we have. So for now, we are operating hybrid. We have to be in the office, all teams at Nubank have to be in the office for a week.

58:48Every six to eight weeks, as a minimum, some teams decide to be more in the office, but as a minimum, you have to spend some time in the office. And you know, go, well, we're looking at a lot of metrics from efficiency to productivity, to engagement. And so far, I think we are navigating this kind of economy statistically, but that's what this is, effectively. David, you can have dinner with anyone that are alive. Who do you have dinner with, and why? Steve Jobs, Karl Marx, and Nietzsche, to dinner. Steve Jobs, because I think he's the most incredible entrepreneur in history. And I want to get into his head.

59:22And I want to ask him a lot of questions. I want to ask him, look at Apple today, is this what you would have built? I'm very curious about that question. I would bring Karl Marx because I really want to get into his head and said, look at what, But your Marxism has done or did in the 20th century, is this what you expected it to happen and would this change your mind about what you wrote? I mean, I think clearly I think a lot about kind of political philosophy and it was a very pernicious philosophy. But when you read, I don't think you necessarily expected a lot of what actually happened, especially in the 20th century, I would have that debate with Marx.

59:58And I would want to talk to Nietzsche because where he read Nietzsche is fundamentally the most intellectually stimulating conversation I could imagine having. There is so much genius in that brain and when I read Nici and I rereaded five times to try to understand it, every single time I reread it I just get surprised and so that would probably be the most exxilarating dinner I could imagine having. I mean I just choose Doug Lee, I need some formal. And this appbook was brought to you by Sequoia Capital. Penoltima 1, what activity are you bad at but still continue to do? I like to sing opera.

1:00:35You do? I do and I'm a very bad opera singer. But when I feel good when I've excited I sing and my kids just immediately jump or be a stage just that please shut up and I have to shut up. I love that. I had no idea about that by the way that's a fun fact for all pub quizzes. Yeah, nice five years for you and for you when we do this again in 2028. Where's new then? I think we would have become the leading financial institution in Latin America, especially in these three markets. Clearly, we kind of checked that box. We've gone beyond Latin America. Not sure exactly where, but we've gone beyond in terms of international expansion.

1:01:11And we've gone beyond financial services into this vision around consumer platform and consumer services. And on top of that, AI, the AI, private bank, or the self -driving banker is the leading platform, the leading way, or consumers are interacting us with us. Probably even beyond the smartphone. Does it really be the key pieces of that? David, I absolutely love this. Thank you so much for putting up with my prime questions and you've been an incredible guest. Thank you, Harry, and I like the grenade, so keep sending them, keep shooting them. That was such a special show with David. If you want to see more from us behind the scenes, of course you can by searching for us on YouTube.

1:01:48that's 20VC, but before we leave you today, this episode is brought to you by Tegas, the GoToResearch destination for bold investing. Tegas curates expert insights analysis and financial data to give you powerful perspective for your investment decisions. With lining fast access to over 60 ,000 transcripts across 20 ,000 companies, you'll discover a wealth of unique insights to fuel your fundamental research, gain perspectives, synthesize information, and even model outcomes all on Tegas. As a 20 minute VC listener, try for free at tegas .com forward slash growth and spare you tools we can't live without like Tegas there.

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