Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:40:14 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, David Vélez
[00:40:14] S0: What did you learn from Disney? That's an interesting one. [00:40:16] S1: I think it's the communication that you create with consumers and just simply the magic aspect of it. When you enter a Disney park, the setup of that entry path that you have, it's almost like you're entering into a kingdom. And the service that you get from everybody that works inside Disney and how they treat the young children, spectacles that they create and the fireworks that they create, they're really thinking about how do you create a product that is magical in nature. And that's something that we push our teams around is for something as boring as sending money. How do you create a magic experience out of that? The welcome kits that we're sending to our customers here in The US, when they receive that welcome kit of the first credit card, the first debit card, we're trying to create a magical experience in that moment. And we're very inspired by that. [00:40:59] S0: The customer obsession thing is something that sounds obvious now, maybe Amazon really pioneered this way of thinking. Nothing's for free, what are the trade offs associated with being so customer focused? It's become a popular thing to say and the temptation is like, yeah, everyone's customer focused to varying degrees. But what does that actually mean? What is the hard part about being so customer focused?
00:40:59 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, David Vélez
[00:40:59] S0: The customer obsession thing is something that sounds obvious now, maybe Amazon really pioneered this way of thinking. Nothing's for free, what are the trade offs associated with being so customer focused? It's become a popular thing to say and the temptation is like, yeah, everyone's customer focused to varying degrees. But what does that actually mean? What is the hard part about being so customer focused? [00:41:21] S1: I think the hard part is, as with any cultural value, to do what you say you do. Like you see it in any company that has very nice sounding values on the wall. Then the question is, are they actually executing that? Especially when it's inconvenient. Most companies will be consumer obsessed, but then when they are suddenly seeing themselves making more money because they invented a new fee, then, oh, well, maybe I'm less customer obsessed here and I want to make a little bit more money. You're prioritizing the short term versus the long term. And actually in the entire AI debate, you actually don't hear that much conversation about customers. Because there is so much energy and focus around how to use AI for efficiency and optimisation. There is much less conversation about consumer obsession here. And this is where humans still are beating the AI. So the biggest complexities is actually prioritising this value, even when it's inconvenient to do so, especially from a financial perspective. But also the AI bro, the tech bro is much more enamored today with the technology versus the consumer experience itself.
00:41:21 · David Vélez, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:41:21] S1: I think the hard part is, as with any cultural value, to do what you say you do. Like you see it in any company that has very nice sounding values on the wall. Then the question is, are they actually executing that? Especially when it's inconvenient. Most companies will be consumer obsessed, but then when they are suddenly seeing themselves making more money because they invented a new fee, then, oh, well, maybe I'm less customer obsessed here and I want to make a little bit more money. You're prioritizing the short term versus the long term. And actually in the entire AI debate, you actually don't hear that much conversation about customers. Because there is so much energy and focus around how to use AI for efficiency and optimisation. There is much less conversation about consumer obsession here. And this is where humans still are beating the AI. So the biggest complexities is actually prioritising this value, even when it's inconvenient to do so, especially from a financial perspective. But also the AI bro, the tech bro is much more enamored today with the technology versus the consumer experience itself. [00:42:27] S0: I'm really curious how you think about your own product, like literally the thing I see on my phone versus your own agent versus new agents being introduced in the marketplace. Do you think there's a world where it actually matters that your marketing is to agents more than it is to humans? Like how do you think about that world or whether to provide your own interactive agents versus a product that you're clicking around in on your phone?
00:42:48 · David Vélez
[00:42:48] S1: I think agents become a customer segment, important as consumers as a segment, and you have to provide a product for the agent, and you have to market to the agent, and you have to do SEO for the agent. It's the same way we have under 18 segment, and we have a small business segment. This is an entire segment and we're treating it as a segment. We have a team dedicated to understanding that segment and understanding the needs of that consumer, which is the agent. So that will be equally important, but I don't think it's going to be necessarily 100% of that decision. Because I think still specifically in banking, and this might be different in other segments, for example, but in banking, you go back to trust and branding, and the human will want to know where your life savings are deposited. There is the human aspect of that. And so you're still marketing to the human and you're still building the trust with the humans. You've got to do both. And also for some products, there'll be more delegation. And for some products, there'll be less delegation. Specifically for areas like in Brazil, where we have 65% of the entire country as a customer, we have the opportunity to be that agent to the consumer. And the customer is coming directly to our app and asking our agent for support specifically with financial products. And we can do it in a way where it's actually an open agent. It even provides product from third party banks and third party financial institutions. So there'll be a mix of this happening at the same time.
00:44:03 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:44:03] S0: If I think back to our original conversation five years ago, and you just think about yourself, how you've changed the most in five years, or what surprised you the most in the past five years, what comes to mind?
00:44:13 · David Vélez
[00:44:13] S1: One big change has been this view around five years ago, everybody was working remotely, including us. And over the five years, we've realized how important it is to at least spend some meaningful time in person in an office. And that's, I think a bit counterintuitive even from where you were five years ago. Also in a perhaps counterintuitive way, increases the argument to spend time in person more. Because increasingly the work that AI can do is more or less the work that people at home individually could do. And so the individual at home will be competing with AIs and will lose that battle. But the work around collaboration and coordination in presence physically, which is what humans needs to do, is what needs to be happening inside the office. We went from remote to hybrid and we're spending significant, much more time in the office. That has been one change. I think the second part is how the organisation changes through AI specifically. Start paying attention to the technology, but when we tested it, it just didn't really work. Just to give you an example, we use a lot of Clojure as a programming language. And through 2025, we kept using a lot of the models for Clojure for programming specifically, and it wouldn't work. It was really awful. As our most experienced engineer said, this is not going work. So we were testing and Opus 4.6 came in in December '25. And that was sort of the moment that a lot of people suddenly realized, no, this actually works. We didn't catch that moment, that switch moment in December. We only catched it sixty days after, as a couple of my partners and I were in California and we started meeting with a bunch of early stage entrepreneurs. And we said, well, something fundamentally happened. And we went to starting to test a lot of the new models, the new GPT models from Clojure and said, holy shit, this is actually working out. It can do Clojure very, very well. And we're sixty days where it made a huge amount of difference between us and best in class companies that were using AI. And so we went back to Brazil and we went kind of a cold read around the entire organisation. And we took a step back and we're almost in the process of reinventing the entire organisation. We mapped out 120 different workflows across the entire organization.