David Vélez
Founder & CEO, Nubank. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestornubank.com.br ↗Wikipedia ↗
David Vélez co-founded Nubank in 2013, building it into one of the world's largest digital banking platforms across Latin America. Prior to founding Nubank, he was a partner at Sequoia Capital leading Latin American investments and worked at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
1shows
2appearances
63statements
20resolved
10supported
1contradicted
50%fully supported
78said about them ↓ Everything David Vélez said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Velez: Entering investments via acquisition was Nubank's worst strategic decision
“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…”
Velez: Nubank will favor organic growth over M&A for the next decade
“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.”
Velez: 2017 regulatory change almost forced Nubank to raise 1B reais overnight
“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.”
Velez: Full-time RTO would cost Nubank top global tech talent
“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 …”
Velez: Brazilian consumers face 450% APRs and massive banking concentration
“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…”
Nubank funded zero-fee products by reallocating marketing budgets from Google and Facebook
“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…”
Velez: Building tech in LATAM impacts 99% versus 1% in US
“US and Europe is too easy. You're going to work very, very, very hard to make the life of the one percent, five percent better. If you move to Latin America, you're going to work very, very hard to make the life of 99% of the people, 70% better. So, ultimately…”
Velez: Almost 50% of Brazilian adults are Nubank customers
“We're getting to a point where almost 50% of the Brazilian adult population is a customer of Nubank.”
Velez: Nubank's Brazilian market penetration exceeds JPMorgan's in the US
“I don't think JP Morgan can say that about customers of theirs in the US.”
Velez: Sequoia interviews job candidates top-down, starting with firm leadership
“The first thing that came to mind was the first interview was with the head of the firm, not with the youngest analyst. In most firms, you start from the bottom, and then you go up, and Sequoia is the opposite. You go from the top, and then you go down, and yo…”
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: 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 holds 15% credit card and 5% personal loan market share
“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.”
Velez: Under-celebrating success is a feature, not a bug, for urgency
“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.”
Velez: Nubank reaches 85 million customers in Latin America
“By now we have one of the largest digitally native consumer platform, consumer basis in Latin America with eighty five million customers.”
Velez: Nubank will not enter e-commerce logistics or direct retail
“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.”
Velez: Branchless digital banking lowers cost-to-serve by 20x to 50x
“The moment we don't need to put a banking branch in every quarter, the cost to serve a customer goes down by 20 to 50 X. The cost to serve somebody goes close to zero.”
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: 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: 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: 15,000 Nubank customers tweeted at Brazil's Central Bank during 2017 crisis
“Monday morning, there were 15,000 customers on Twitter of the Central Bank of Brazil saying, you cannot do this.”
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.”
Sequoia Capital spent two years evaluating Brazil before deciding against a fund
“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”
The other half of the tape: David Vélez's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 74 times in 21 episodes across the shows. 4 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 43Sebastian Siemiatkowski 9Jag Duggal 8Martin Escobari 4Doug Leone 3Jason Wilk 2Bill Cillufo 2Nigel Morris 1
Statements about David Vélez, by other people (4)
Escobari: General Atlantic passed on Nubank's Series A, B, and C rounds
“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…”
Siemiatkowski passed on early advisory and angel investment role in Nubank
“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…”
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…”
Duggal: David Vélez targeted underserved LatAm consumers, not credit cards
“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…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 74
2026 14 mentions in 2 episodes 7 per episode
2025 2 mentions in 1 episode
2024 5 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
- Keith Rabois on Rejoining Khosla Ventures | E1102 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jeff Wang: Sequoia Capital's $9BN Global Equities Fund on The Future for NVIDIA, Google & Meta|E1212 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Justin Ishbia: The Three Traits Required to Succeed in Private Equity | E1119 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Roger Ehrenberg: Why VC Returns Will Get Worse & Why LP Incentive Structures are so Broken | E1117 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 32 mentions in 6 episodes 5 per episode
- Jag Duggal: How We Scaled Nubank to 80M Users; Google's Brutal Hiring Practices | E995 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jackie Reses: The Most Powerful Woman in Finance; Making $50BN for Yahoo on Alibaba | E996 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Tooey Courtemanche: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO | E1090 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Marc Benioff: The Future of San Francisco and What He Would Do if in Charge | E1064 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Marcelo Claure & Shu Nyatta: LATAM's New $500M Growth Fund; Investing Billions at SoftBank | E1042 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 8 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
- Martin Escobari: How to Invest During a Recession; Negotiation Tips; Developing Markets | 20VC #948 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20VC: How Today's Market Changes How Companies Should Approach Burn and Runway, Are Financing Markets Closing? How To Know When To Pay Up vs Stay Price Disciplined & Why The Most Important Thing in Venture is Generating Positive Selection with Bill Cilluf
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 13 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Sequoia's Doug Leone on What Has Been Instrumental To Scaling Sequoia Over Generations, How Sequoia Think About International Expansion and What They Learned From China and India & Why When You Lose Pre-Seed You Become Private Equity
- 20VC LATAM: LATAM's Largest Fund, Kaszek Ventures on Scaling from $100M to $1BN, Why Capital is not a Source of Moat & Why LATAM is More Than Copycat Companies with Nicolas Szekasy, Co-Founder @ Kaszek Ventures
- 20VC: Why Bundling Does Not Work, How The Best Founders Analyse Unit Economics, Why The Way We Approach Mental Health in Venture and Startups is Wrong with Nigel Morris, Co-Founder & Managing Partner @ QED Investors
- 20VC LATAM Part 2: a16z's Angela Strange on When To Expand Beyond Your Core Market, Why Serving the Unbanked is Such Good Business & Whether the Startup Will Acquire the Distribution before The Incumbent Acquires the Innovation?
- 20VC: The Pinterest Memo: Bessemer's Jeremy Levine on The Secret To Success within User Generated Content Plays, Where Most Investors Make Mistakes When Analysing Consumer Social and How The Pinterest Deal Wouldn't Have Happened without a Diverse Partners
- 20VC: Basecamp CEO Jason Fried on His Relationship To Risk, Money, Vulnerability and Self-Doubt, Fantasising About Being Fired, How To Optimise Decision-Making and Minimising Regret
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens David's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Nubank | 2 | 63 | 50% 10/20 | full record on 20VC → |