Latin America

“At the time that I did the mapping and paying Angela, there were only 30 unicorns in Latin America.”

“Unlike in the U.S., where you can get everything as a service, At every layer of the stack. In many other markets, including Latin America, you just can't do that. There's no sort of, ah, fraud as a stack, KYC as a stack. So you end up having to build everythi…”

“In many of the countries where they operated, like in Latin America, there would be some local cash pickup service that you could, like, kind of like a Western Union, but it was different ones in different countries. And they typically had very high fees, like…”

“And the co-founders gave him a shot to be the CEO of the largest railroad company in all of Latin America at age 30.”

“And so SMS in Mexico Mexico, Latin America is not very strong. WhatsApp is definitely the go-to.”

“And Latin America is obviously important to this administration, so I think there will be a lot of strategic capital looking at Latin America right now, for which I think we are well positioned.”

“The reason we do well in Latin America is we don't have a Latin America fund. Because if we had a Latin America fund. We're going to buy at the top and sell at the bottom.”

“Because what that led to was me building my very first billion dollar in assets under management business in Latin America.”

“The way that I would characterize China's foreign policy is that it's very engineer-driven. They, the way that they conduct a lot of diplomacy in Africa and Southeast Asia, as well as Latin America, is just to go up to these countries. Build some roads. Build …”

“So we are not going to make it just with one country in Latin America. That's impossible. We're not going to make it. That's what I saw in the past.”

“When you build a SaaS company in Latin America, Numbers are not easy to build a one billion company, but when you create a transactional model on your product, that changes.”

“I feel like a bank could buy him, you know, the SAP of LATAM can buy him. So it seems like there are some exit opportunities”

“One of the challenges is this like tax and excite, like everything you do there is then effectively costs you 20 or 30% more when you get your money out. So whatever your like goal is, like a billion dollar company is really a seven hundred million dollar comp…”

“Venezuela has gone from the richest country in Latin America to poorer than Haiti.”

“Here in Latin America, Puerto de Sao Paulo and other left-wing groups had managed to exchange technology, information, resources, even to promote fraud, fraudulent elections all over the region.”

“I built a billion dollar business in Latin America.”

“And then in March, 2000, as you were saying, Nasdaq started to go down, down, down, down, and the market disappeared in the world for a few years in Latin America for almost a decade.”

“The second one was Amazon, but at the time it required significant capital because you needed inventory and warehouses and all that. So in Latin America, given what we were just discussing about the ups and downs in the market, it was hard to assume that you c…”

“And the third one was eBay. That was at the time a very light model in terms of just connecting with a software platform, buyers and sellers, and somehow we realized that the trading thing was something quite natural for Latin Americans, and that that would wo…”

“The main challenge we had was that internet penetration at the time in Latin America was really, really tiny. Two percent, three percent,”

“I would even say it's even more important in Latin America in some Asian countries. Where you have a culture, and I'm Latin American, so I can talk a little bit about stereotypes without it becoming offensive especially ones that are true, where there's a lot …”

“It's actually very useful in in Latin America and countries where access to US dollars are It is not as easy as in, in other places.”

“We're the largest wealth manager in Asia. We're the largest wealth manager now in Latin America after our Credit Suisse acquisition. And we're the fourth largest wealth manager in the United States based on assets under management from wealth clients. Also the…”

“So the impact, if you look around the world, which are the regions who are going to be more impacted, Latin America falls under the category of minimal impact.”

“In most of the economies in Latin America where you go, these are like trophy assets that whomever the owner is, normally families, they don't want to trade it. Having the ability to go into a market which is a little bit overlooked or an empty room, as you sa…”

“Still, they're very profitable, 30 to 35% margins, little capex, so they generally, they generate a lot of cash flow, which is also very relevant to us.”

“When you look at the latest transactions in the past five, six years in Latin America, all these regional guys have gone from like 10 to 14 times EBITDA. And the going in price for these assets is like seven to eight times EBITDA.”

“And I think, again, like we said at the beginning, this multipolar world, Latin America will certainly be together with the U.S., and that will mean further growth, integration, opportunities.”

“That leaves me, actually, super bullish to Latin America. It was very interesting that in these tariffs, Latin America was completely spared. Not only did they get a blanket 10%, but pretty much everything they export, whether copper, silver, lithium, et ceter…”

“That venture piece is probably split Evenly, roughly, between the U.S. And non-U.S. Most of the non-U.S. In venture is in emerging Asia and Latin America. Little bit in Europe.”

“I think Spaniards entrepreneurs, it's a small secret we have there, but it's actually pretty natural for us to expand into LATAM, which is a massive market, right? There's a cultural and language thing there, right?”

“And what came out of that, and some great research by R&D people, is A new product that took the suds away after you did your wash. Now that sounds like it's maybe silly, but these people are carrying water sometimes a mile, two miles, three miles to do their …”

“It is expected that five trillion dollars from manufacturing trade will shift into Latin America in the next five years.”

“We're not going to invest in China. We're not going to invest in the Far East. Not going to go to Latin America. Certainly not Russia. We will only invest in places where the rule of law is recognized.”

“I've been hearing that in Latin America and other areas, there's starting to be payment providers that are doing their cross border, you know, settling, clearing, like payments related stuff. They'll do it on chain with a stable coin and then just convert it b…”

“There's actually, you know, six hundred sixty million people living across Latin America, and it's an economy of six trillion dollars. And Brazil is a huge market just in terms of sheer size. Over two hundred million people.”

“In terms of percentage of GDP that tech occupies compared to other markets, it's very promising. We're at like one third of India, one 10th of China, one 30th of the United States, meaning that, like, Tech companies can grow a lot so that they occupy that spac…”

“More specifically, you can double or triple your income potential by learning English in a developing market like Latin America, and there are lots of those around the world.”

“Because there's so many opportunities that are left Latin America specific or that are emerging market specific, which means that if they work in an emerging market in Latin America, they could work in other emerging markets. And you know what? Most of the wor…”

“Latin America as a region is the third largest GDP in the world. It's a region that has six hundred fifty million people, very large GDP, a GDP per capita that is three to five x India,”

“Financial services is the single biggest market cap in the region.”

“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.”

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

“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…”

“You don't have the attitude of French people of like, oh, you want me to work more? I'm gonna go on a strike, you know? Like these are people who happily work 16 hours and are just happy to work.”

“The problem with Latin America and why people immigrate to Europe or the US is that you have a lot of overqualified people. Like there are a lot of people who are super knowledgeable, who are self-made, who make master degrees, PhD degrees in really cool stuff…”

“And nowadays Skype has real-time audio translation, so then you can talk to a VC phone in California in Spanish, and the other person will hear it in English because of Generative AI, and you don't even need to know English to pitch, and this will open a lot o…”

“And in places like Latin America, where the opportunity is the middle of the pyramid, the bottom of the pyramid, nothing represents that better than a bicycle.”

“And in 2021, notably, venture went from something like four and a half Billion a year to sixteen billion a year. Now it's back to less than a billion a quarter. So we're back to the four and a half.”

“And Latin America, if you add the GDP of Latin America, we happen to be two X India with one quarter of these people or one third of the people.”

“When we were investors in Uber, you know, we had to keep it a secret that after New York, three of the top five cities were Latin American cities.”

“Latin America is, to me, the land of opportunity, and I think Latin America is the only place where, which is great, because there are more opportunities than capital available. Everywhere else, There's more capital than opportunities available, which drives c…”

“I am a huge believer in the macro story of Latin America, and I think the next 10 years are going to be the best 10 years of Latin America for two very, very simple reasons.”

“If you look at the returns of GA, people often don't know, but if you truly study GA, the great returns have come from Latin America.”

“There's a lot of adverse selection. There's some founders who Might or might not be great who play really well in New York and in San Francisco. And so if you wait for them to come to you, that's all you'll think Latin America is.”

“Latin America has something like 25% of the world's fintechs. 25%, a quarter of the world's fintechs are in Latin America.”

“Latin America had the lowest percentage of venture investing as the percentage of GDP of whatever than any other region in the world, I think as close to Africa.”

“That means that Europe, the Middle East, big parts of Latin America, big parts of Asia, it will be at a minimum legal to buy, sell, send, and receive Bitcoin.”

“In Latin America, consumers tend to consolidate their financial lives with one primary institution.”

“And Latin America as a region exports twice as many calories as the U.S.”