Nubank

“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.”

“And product number two for us Which is savings is way bigger than product number one for us. And product number three is going, is growing faster than product number two.”

“I still reply every single customer email that gets into my inbox, but it gets to the point where I cannot do that anymore”

“I honestly think there is no limit. It can be one of the largest companies in the world. I'm very confident with that.”

“The founder and CEO titles are generally so linked to each other, because if the founder is a horse and the CEO is a rhino, I think the Good founder and CEO is the unicorn. Is this horse that has been able to grow a horn and is this mythical creature? And I fi…”

“Some of the things that Sequoia had are non-scalable. You can do that when you have 30 people, you cannot do it when you have 3000”

“We always, since the beginning said, we'll focus on building the absolutely best product that we can have the best experience and trying to, instead of investing money in marketing and giving that money to Google and Facebook, we'll leave those money in the po…”

“When I decided to start Nubank, one of the first things to do is obviously I did the pitch deck of Nubank to raise capital, but the second thing I did was the culture deck of Nubank”

“I would say one of the big, cause I looked at new bank early. That's a good example. And I think I was, while I was loved the founder and so impressed with the business traction, the risk around a new market and a model I didn't totally understand just made me…”

“In Nubank, we invested in the seed investment together with Sequoia, so it was a PowerPoint really early on, David Velez by himself, and that's when we joined, and then we participated out of the fund one in several rounds in the series A and the B and the C a…”

“Nubank is not only the largest challenger bank in the world. We think one day it could become the largest bank without the challenger. They will become an incumbent bank, the number one in the world”

“Like, new bank, At a billion dollars, looked pretty damn expensive. What's it worth now? Like, thirty-five billion dollars? Not so expensive.”

“Oh, so many, but just the Latin American most painful one is NewBank. And this was early in my career in venture when I hadn't spent that much time in Latin America. And it seemed like a relatively high check at a relatively high valuation. And I didn't know t…”

“Like you've got NewBank, Rappi, Dlocal, right? And so like the kind of mafias from those companies are going to spin out and join the next generation of companies or grow the next generation of companies.”

“I passed on Nubank because of the price at the beginning when we started the fund, and it was the wrong decision because the opportunity was huge.”

“We turned down both NewBank and Loft at their seed stage, right? So in both cases, we knew the CEO long before they had the idea for the company... And in both cases, they had what at the time looked like offer sheets with really high valuations. We looked at …”

“I passed on Nubank because of the price at the beginning when we started the fund, and it was the wrong decision because the opportunity was huge. Now I made that mistake. I said, oh my God, it's too expensive. But I didn't realize that the size of the pie was…”

“I should have backed David Vélez at Nubank. David had worked at GA. I had tried to, and he left for Sequoia, and I tried to bring him back when I got hired into GA. He called us in our Series A, Series B, Series C, then he stopped calling because he kept sayin…”

“If we cannot get a Sean Ellis survey score, that's actually above what would Sean himself recommends well above. We're not focused on scaling it. We're focused on iterating it.”

“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.”

“And frankly, I don't think we're succeeding at balancing those two things anywhere near optimally if I'm honest.”

“We've got 70,000,075 million customers at Newbank.”

“David, David, you know, just to take that new bank example was in love with the potential of unleashing the Latin American consumer who was being really badly served. He wasn't in love with, I need to build a credit card for Because of X, Y, Z reason or busine…”

“When I'm recruiting someone, my default answer is they're not good enough to join the company.”

“So our insurance or investments or lending team when they started was a dozen people.”

“We are well north of 40% of all customers, not of actives, but of all customers. And again, that's part of us holding ourselves to a high bar. So when at, when three years ago, that metric was about 10%. And so we've grown at four X, even as we've grown the cu…”

“And so, I don't see a broad market for super apps. I think there are a few players out there who have shown that they could build multiple use cases around their product. Again, I got to go back to Square because I know it so well. Cash App is, to me, the most…”

“You look at Nubank. Great example. To me, the world's best digital bank.”

“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…”

“We're in the early days of using these eighty-five million digitally only consumer base to build a marketplace to go beyond financial services and enable our customers to access non-financial services products. So this is almost a redefine of what Nubank is. M…”

“We allocate today about 80% of all resources and energy to financial services, so that core continues to have most of the allocation of resources.”

“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.”

“We started the business in a very small house in Sao Paulo. We paid, I remember the partner of Sequoia, Michael Abramson was there. His mind was blown when I told him we paid 500 dollars per month in rent, and we had 20 people working out of the house.”

“By now we have one of the largest digitally native consumer platform, consumer basis in Latin America with eighty five million customers.”

“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 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…”

“And so, 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 will lose a lot of the incredible valuable talent that we …”

“They were gonna do it to two. That meant we were gonna need to raise a billion reais. Overnight. And that was going to be quickly the end.”

“Today we can serve customers that need a 50 dollar loan profitably. We can serve customers that have 200 dollars to invest Profitably.”

“And on top of that, AI, the AI private banker, the self-driving banker is the leading platform, the leading way where consumers are interacting with us, probably even beyond the smartphone. So I think those are would be, those would be the key pieces of that.”

“I do think now that the kind of the setup for more new banks in the region exists. And you'll see them over the next five to 10 years.”

“That was an insight that I took to Novak, and that was a foundational insight around the culture that we have today, where we want to treat everybody as a partner. Everybody needs to feel that they have a seat at the table, the youngest, The oldest, the person…”

“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 experienced persons that have been doing it for 30 years, And therefore I know the answer. …”

“Ah, 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 with full of Questions. It is also important to have head with full, with some answers. So I would h…”

“We're getting to a point where almost 50% of the Brazilian adult population is a customer of Nubank.”

“I think the, perhaps the word decision from a product and kind of strategy perspective has been entering investments. When we enter investments via a big acquisitions, we enter via an acquisition versus organically, and I think we underestimated or I underesti…”

“In credit cards, we have about 15% market share, but in personal loans, we have five percent market share. In investments, we have about two percent. In insurance, we have one percent.”

“Monday morning, there were 15,000 customers on Twitter of the Central Bank of Brazil saying, you cannot do this.”

“We were very deliberate around the type of people that we attracted, my co-founders, and how we picked them, and how we spent a lot of time trying to find them, the values that we set up, the way we organize ourselves, we put all our values in a culture deck. …”

“We would have Become the leading financial institution in Latin America, especially in these three markets. Clearly, we made that, we kind of checked that box. We've gone beyond Latin America. Not sure exactly where, but we've gone beyond in terms of internati…”

“So I don't think you need to own the model, but I do think you need to own And be very thoughtful around how do you, what are the incentives and what is the objective function of that algorithm when you start actually programming it.”

“We under-celebrate. Some people complain that we don't celebrate enough. And they're probably right, but you know what, that's probably a feature at the end of the day, not a bug.”

“My interviews today are not interviews about career experience. They, all the interviews, when I interview somebody that's a newbie, it's all about character traits.”

“I think this means a bias, even a bigger bias to build organically versus an M&A driven strategy as we think about the next five to 10 years of growth in the business.”

“We have several million daily active users today on, on our marketplace where our customers are Consuming or buying goods or services from over 180 different partners”

“We're not the e-commerce. We don't want to be the e-commerce. We don't want to get into logistics, but we are a platform that cross sells all our products to these consumers.”

“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.”

“The highest-rated-NPS consumer product in the world in any category is our purple, is Nubank's purple credit card in Mexico. It's a 94 NPS.”

“I passed on Nubank because of the price at the beginning, when we started the fund and it was the wrong decision because the opportunity was huge.”

“I think they have like a hundred million active users nowadays.”

“I think they made nearly a billion profit last year or something.”

“Revolut is growing fast, but Nubank is growing even faster.”

“They have like a 90% retention rate, like over 24 months.”

“So we got a banking license in Mexico, a head of new bank.”

“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.”

“In LATAM, they were old, they were stodgy, they weren't serving their consumers, and they were, these guys came in over the top, and they didn't just build a deposit base like Chimebill, they've done the whole, the full monte, they do deposits, they do lending…”

“If they can continue to do what they're doing and avoid doing dumb bank stuff, yeah, you could see a two x from here, which would be wow, which would be, you know, just a wow outcome.”

“He sends me an email, which was like, hey, Sebastian, would you like to, like, advise me a little bit? I'm starting this new company. And I was like, I'm sorry, I don't have the time. So I lost out on a lot of, a lot, I would have been a great angel investor t…”

“I think I have to go with David. Because I think, ah, Nick's challenge right now might be that he is so distributed. I mean, he's trying to go for the whole world, right? I mean, he's launching in Dubai. He's launching in India. He's launching everywhere. You …”

“They're going to enter the U S it's a good bet. They've still got David at the helm. They're growing 28% year on year. I think we, I think new banker incredibly solid.”