Brazil

“When you go to Brazil and you see customers paying 450% APRs and paying a ton of different fees and waiting four months to open a bank account, or you go to Mexico and you see five banks owning 90% of all the assets of the system, the pain is 10 X where you mi…”

“By the time we had that conversation again, in 2019, we were profitable in Brazil. We were cashflow positive. We have great product market fit. We are banking licenses. We were fully funded on deposits.”

“After two years before Sequoia, where we all kind of came to a set conclusion that we didn't want to really start a business in Brazil, which meant I was, Doug wanted me to go back to California and helping them think, invest globally”

“Brazil was 70% cash.”

“Being number five for a business, like being the number five Robin Hood in Brazil, and then expanding to Mexico to be the number six in Mexico, Is not going to be a winning business model. You would much rather be the number one in your country and then expand…”

“So the, like, top five banks have 80% of the market in Brazil, and Serve maybe 10 to 20% of the socioeconomic pyramid.”

“And then there's a massive percentage of the population, like, 30 to 50% underbanked or unbanked across Mexico and Brazil that don't have anything.”

“Brazil's an extreme on that, where it tends to have the most profitable banking industry in the entire world.”

“When you look at that tech penetration index in a more developed country like the United States, that's around 52%. Even if you look at, you know, China, that number is 20%. You look at India, it's 15%. But when you look at what the tech penetration level is a…”

“Facebook had something around a million users at that time in Brazil, ah, and our biggest competitor, which was Google's social network, Orkut, had over thirty five million users.”

“If you look at e-commerce penetration in, in Brazil to take one specific case, we're right now about almost three years ahead of where we would have been in that historic growth curve.”

“The same theme in Brazil 12 years ago, a company you should meet, XP, Market cap went up from three hundred million to twenty billion, doing the exact same thing E-Trade did, except in a market where the banks were at 99% and now are at 82 and dropping.”

“I was co-founder of the number one e-commerce company in Brazil in the nineties, the late nineties, company called Submarino.com, which became the first Brazilian company, tech Brazilian company to go public. It's the first big home run IPO in, in, in, in post…”

“Our suite of products for the up market, for the high income segment in Brazil has not had, and I have not cracked myself the degree of clarity of what makes that offering fundamentally different for that target customer set.”

“This central bank sponsored mobile real-time payment system in Brazil called PIX, which has taken off perhaps other than India, arguably other than India is, is easily the most successful real-time mobile payment system in the world is in Brazil.”

“The working capital cycle for credit cards in Brazil is very favorable for a credit card company for what we're trying to do, which is Almost, almost compared to anywhere else in the world, Mexico and Colombia are much more typical.”

“Brazil will become the largest food exporter in the world, so all that means is this com, these countries are going to be, I would call them economically sound.”

“It is expected that both the Brazilian and the Mexican economy Will be among the top 10 economists of the world, so it's nice.”

“You don't want to be a sub-billion dollar company on the NASDAQ. You'll be a rounding error for people. But from, I don't know, five hundred million up to a few billion, you can list very comfortably in Brazil.”

“Brazil is probably the most sophisticated financial market I've ever come across.”

“The currencies of Brazil and Mexico have been some of the best performing currencies in the world because the central banks hiked early.”

“When we go to these three countries, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, we go after big markets where we see a path to be Probably the largest financial institution in each one of these countries eventually, because we are the primary bank account and we become the…”

“This is the single hardest thing I can possibly imagine myself doing. Building a bank from scratch in Brazil is the hardest thing I can do, and that's why I wanted to do it.”

“About 25, 30% of companies in the Nasdaq today didn't exist 23 or 30 years ago. If you look at Ivo Vest by Brazil and Mexico, there's still incumbents that existed a hundred years ago. So the opportunity for disruption, a lot of these markets exist today.”

“So if we have 50% of the population and 60% of primary bank account, we have already close to, we have the primary bank account for close to 30% of adult Brazilians. Which, by the way, is now the highest among any bank in Brazil. We are now the most often, mos…”

“I think you run a little bit into more of the liquidity constraints where you see the businesses just building for Chile or building just for Colombia. Those tend to have much much harder exit opportunity. But when you really get Brazil and Mexico, you'll find…”

“I just, I remember specifically one trip where we signed three term sheets.”

“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 markets, these technologies have leapfrog to a place today where, where Brazil, China, India are ahead of U.S.…”

“The fact that you have five banks in the hands of 85, 90, about 85, 90% of the entire market in the hands of banks was something to be solved.”

“Neymar posted a dub smash. We saw a million downloads on Brazil in a single day.”

“So it's funny because I grew up in Brazil and, you know, born and raised there. And I started coding as a kid when I was eight or nine, originally hacking iPhones back in the day where they were not sold in Brazil.”

“It was like a black hole, like probably we lost like 30, forty million euros.”

“Brazil has not shown pathways to liquidity at scale. They've shown new bank and everyone says new bank. It's one in 20 years.”

“Two of our large, three largest countries by volume are India and Brazil. You know, the average fare in Brazil is like, Three 54 bucks USD and India it's two 53 bucks or something like that. It's going to be decades until the cost of autonomy compresses to the…”