Escobari: General Atlantic passed on Nubank's Series A, B, and C rounds
Martin Escobari · Martin Escobari: How to Invest During a Recession; Negotiation Tips; Developing Markets | 20VC #948 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Nov 11, 2022 · at 49:30
Martin Escobari is Co-President of General Atlantic. He outlines his biggest investment miss, passing repeatedly on David Vélez and Nubank due to rigid assumptions about deposit requirements in emerging markets.
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“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 saying no. And in the emerging markets, there isn't a single credit institution that has survived the credit crisis, meaning survived more than 10 years, without deposits. And Nubank in its original inception had no deposits. So I made a dogmatic Decision that this has never happened in the emerging markets ever, and I failed to anticipate that someone as smart as David would figure out a way to build deposits by disrupting the money market market, which wasn't in the original plan, was hard to do, required regulatory changes that were hard to anticipate. He did it. It's a twenty billion dollar company.”
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