David Velez
person on 1 show · 15 statements across 3 episodes
On the record as a speaker too: David Velez across every show, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
15 statements about David Velez, every show
Velez: Peak positive market sentiment is the optimal time to go public
“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.”
Velez: Public markets offer the best capital access for capital-intensive companies
“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.”
Velez: Nubank should have hired experienced industry veterans sooner
“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…”
Velez: Building a bank in Brazil was chosen for its extreme difficulty
“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.”
Velez: Codifying values in a culture deck allowed Nubank to scale
“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. …”
Velez: Banks do not need proprietary LLMs to build AI bankers
“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.”
Velez: Foundational LLMs like OpenAI are just basic infrastructure
“I see the existing LLMs, the open AI, the Entropic as sort of basic infrastructure.”
Velez: Emerging markets' fintech lead will accelerate over next 5-10 years
“And this is just the beginning. You'll see this trend just accelerating, I think, over the next five, 10 years when you start thinking about open banking, when you start thinking about the uses of crypto, when you start thinking about how, what AI could do in …”
Velez: Complacency allowed emerging markets to surpass US and Europe in fintech
“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.…”
Velez: Nubank requires every employee to contribute opinions like a partner
“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…”
Velez: Nubank interviews focus entirely on character traits over career experience
“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.”
Velez: Sequoia signed three term sheets on a single Brazil trip
“I just, I remember specifically one trip where we signed three term sheets.”
Kaszek Backed Nubank's Seed Round When It Was Just a Deck
“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 CEO David Velez personally replies to every customer email he receives
“I still reply every single customer email that gets into my inbox, but it gets to the point where I cannot do that anymore”
Velez: Founder and CEO roles require opposite, rarely overlapping skill sets
“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…”