David Vélez: Building Nubank, Transforming Banking Across Latin America, and Serving Millions of Users

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:01)
Hi, everyone. I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund. And today, I'm joined by a true FinTech pioneer who has transformed banking in Latin America. David Vélez is the co-founder and CEO of Nubank, one of the world's largest digital banks, serving something like nearly 120 million customers in Brazil, Mexico and Colombia. And under David's leadership, Nubank has grown from a startup to one of the most valuable banks in the region. So David, a warm welcome.

**David Vélez** (0:32)
Thank you, Nicolai. It's a pleasure to be here with you.

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:44)
Now, take us back to the beginning. How did your upbringing shape what you're doing now?

**David Vélez** (0:52)
Sure, so I don't come from a family of bankers at all, but I do come from a family of entrepreneurs. I'm originally from Colombia. Grew up in a family where my dad had 11 siblings, my mom had five, and they were all micro-entrepreneurs, still had their own business, my dad as well.

**Nicolai Tangen** (1:11)
So what did you guys talk about around the dinner table?

**David Vélez** (1:13)
Yeah, so the understanding was that you had to go and build your own thing. If you were about to get a job or you were going to try to manage something that was look up front, what was cool in the family, the DNA in the family was starting your own thing and solving a bunch of problems.

**Nicolai Tangen** (1:33)
Is that a DNA you are passing on to your kids?

**David Vélez** (1:36)
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think it's, you know, under the entrepreneurship thing, it's all about fighting a problem and building the solution for that problem. And I think it has, they had this kind of mentality about being, having agency and solving problems and not just sitting down and complaining and victimizing and hope that somebody else is going to solve it for you.

**Nicolai Tangen** (1:58)
You went to school in the US.

**David Vélez** (2:01)
That's right. I, you know, I looked, I started reading a lot about computers and technology when I was growing up. I was growing up in Costa Rica. My parents moved to Colombia in the early 90s. And I got enamored about Silicon Valley and technology, what entrepreneurs were doing over there, and had the good fortune of being able to make it to Stanford.
And I wanted to start a business there, but nothing really showed up. And I ended up taking the finance route and doing some finance for a few years in New York.

**Nicolai Tangen** (2:33)
Yeah. Well, it wasn't particularly bad, the kind of stuff you were doing. I mean, you were working at Goldman, Morgan Stanley, General Atlantic and Sequoia. It doesn't get much better. So when did you decide to leave all these incredible places to start up Nubank? How did it come about?

**David Vélez** (2:53)
Yeah, I mean, they were phenomenal places, but I found myself that in every meeting I had with an entrepreneur, be it first as a banker or then as a private equity investor, I secretly envied the person on the other side of the table. I just found that what they were doing was so much cool, actually building the company and hiring and growing and expanding, and I found myself to be in a position where I was supposed to give them advice as a venture capital investor, but I have no idea what I was doing. I had no operating experience, I had no operating background, and it felt a little bit like a farce. It's like, what gave me the credit of telling this entrepreneur what they should do with their business if I've never had that experience? I kept connecting that back to the family environment of being the entrepreneur and putting the entrepreneur in the center of the action. Initially, when I left GA to go back to business school, I was expecting to use the business school vacation to figure out what business idea I was going to focus on. But that's when Sequoia called me and said, no, come back, help us figure out if we want to open an office in Brazil. I did that for two years, flying back and forth, and eventually they decided that they didn't want to open an office to invest. For me, that was the moment where I said, okay, fine, I have to stop delaying the building of business. That was the moment.
A number of different things aligned with each other to decide ultimately to let's go and pursue this idea.

**Nicolai Tangen** (4:27)
What's the first thing you do? You decide, okay, now I'm just going to go for it. I'm going to start a bank. What do you do? Who do you call? What do you think?