Nubank ft. David Vélez - An Outsider Upends the Brazilian Banking System

**Roelof Botha** (0:00)
Hi, listeners. Got a bold idea brewing this new year? Masters of Scale can help you turn it into reality. Hosted by Jeff Berman and LinkedIn co-founder, and my former PayPal colleague, Reid Hoffman. This podcast reveals scaling secrets from operators across industries. Hear from leaders at Microsoft, Reddit, Canva, and Airbnb, as they share the insights behind their success. Tune into Masters of Scale on your favorite podcast platform, and start scaling your vision today.

**David Vélez** (0:39)
It was our end of year celebration, and I had to speak to an entire company. Part of our culture was treating everybody like an owner and a partner, and that means being very transparent with our employees. The natural thing to do was to tell everybody, don't worry, everything is fine, we're all good, let's celebrate, let's have some drinks. We're going to figure it out. The reality is we had no idea how we were going to figure this out. What was consistent with our values was to say, this is real. We're going to work really hard for the weekend and figure out what to do, but right now, I don't know how we're going to solve it.

**Roelof Botha** (1:14)
Welcome to Crucible Moments, a podcast about the critical crossroads and inflection points that shaped some of the world's most remarkable companies. I'm your host and the managing partner of Sequoia Capital, Roelof Botha. In 2013, David Vélez set out to upend the Brazilian banking system, where big banks charged among the highest fees and interest rates in the world. His mission was to democratize financial services for those with no good options. Nubank is the story of an underdog team, determined to disrupt an oligopoly in a geography most would have bet against by delivering on a consumer experience unimaginable to most Brazilians. David and his co-founders faced Crucible Moments as they navigated a highly regulated industry, persevered as competitors conspired to shut them down, all while cultivating rabid customer love.

**David Vélez** (2:16)
My name is David Vélez and I'm the founder and CEO of Nubank.
I was born in Colombia and I lived in Colombia until I was eight. Colombia in the 80s and early 90s was going through a very tumultuous time, a lot of violence, drug cartels. And so my family decided to leave the country and was lucky enough to end up in Costa Rica. My dad has 11 siblings and they're all entrepreneurs. They all started their own business. So I grew up working with my dad in his factory at a button factory. I spent a couple of summers working there, saving a little bit of money. There was definitely an entrepreneurial ethos inside the family that supported being your own boss. There was this sense of freedom and autonomy that entrepreneurship and having your own business brought. I looked up to Stanford and Silicon Valley as the place where the big companies got started and where some of the best entrepreneurs operated. And so my own dream was to try to make it somehow to Stanford Nobody from my school in Costa Rica had ever go to Stanford, but that was a dream of mine. I was trying to figure out how to end up there and was lucky to be able to go to Stanford and study engineering there. I did my undergrad at Stanford, worked in finance in New York for a couple of years in financial services and private equity, and then went back to business school at Stanford. And I was ready to use my two years at business school to finally start a business. I felt a bit disappointed that during undergrad and even after undergrad, I hadn't decided to go on my own. And I wanted to use business school to do exactly that, have two years to focus on figuring out what I was going to do. But a couple of weeks into the first quarter of business school, a friend of mine from my class told me that Sequoia was starting to look at Latin America and Doug Leone wanted to meet me.

**Doug Leone** (4:04)
We were looking for someone to help lead our efforts in Latin America. We just expanded to India and China.
And as we looked around the globe and you think of the word brick, Brazil was a key part of that. My name is Doug Leone. I am a partner at Sequoia Capital. The natural place to look was at Harvard and Stanford. And so I interviewed the second year students at Harvard and at Stanford. They were terrific young men and women, but I just couldn't tell them apart. They looked like the same single type of person. And so I had given up on that channel. The following year, my now son-in-law, David George, said there is a lion, a tiger, who has just started a business school. And so I got to David, I cold called him. I invited him to Sequoia. There are people you interview where you look at your watch, it's 20 minutes, 30 minutes. And Mike Moritz, my partner, calls them half pagers, meaning you have a half pager of notes and that's all you can come up with. Well, the conversation with David ran way over. He was a great communicator. The experience he had, the investments he made and the investments he didn't make, the ability to articulate the issue, the drive. He was not only a half pager, he was a two pager or three pager.