Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:49:08 · David Vélez
[00:49:08] S1: Every part of that chain, there is a possibility for a message to get distorted and you get up the distorted vision by the time it navigates 10 different layers. So simply by removing a lot of those layers, you are much closer to the ground truth. And you reduce a lot of those layers by having information systems that have access to everything that's happening across the organisation, a company brain that is proactive and reactive. It's actually sending me information about what we're doing from changes in our AI transformation to how we're doing around launching certain products or metrics or features. You get directly to the ground truth. There is more about that mentality of how do you actually also actively go directly to the people doing the work. It's very comfortable as the organisation takes its own shape to respect the channels. You'll see this in bigger organisations. You cannot jump a manager and ask the question to somebody that is actually doing the work. There is a specific chain of command that needs to be respected. This is more related, I think of traditional organizations. And here is more your approach of being a CEO. It's like, no, I want to go talk to anybody that I have a question with. And there is no respecting of a chain of command. Literally, I'll go to whoever has access to best information if I have a question, or we're going to problem solve together if I see something that is not moving. So I think it's partly technology, partly is culture and attitude of you willing to be deep down integrated into the organization.
00:50:33 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:50:33] S0: How do you think all of this will affect your company or any company's ability to raise the overall average talent bar in the business? How can you use this to see how good each person is and help them get better or move people on that aren't as good? Like, have you thought about the performance culture management part of the data and the technology yet?
00:50:54 · David Vélez
[00:50:54] S1: I think it's gonna be transformational. And I think this is an area that I'm surprised so few people have discussed about how AI is going to reinvent HR in the organisations. Because if you look at it the way it is today, or for most organisations is your manager gives you feedback every six months, tells you why you're doing well, why you're not doing well. Generally, there's a lot of recency bias. So it's not really six months, it's like the last thirty days, what you did in the last thirty days that is good or not. Generally, it's not very actionable. It's like you're doing this well, you're doing not, maybe you should do better. Imagine that's the type of feedback you would be giving an Olympic athlete. That would be crazy. You would never be able to succeed. Olympic athletes are somebody that literally every day is coaching them and providing potential feedback. That is the opportunity that ultimately AI is going to create for every single person in an organization is you have Olympic athlete type of coaching. And so while we're building a new bank in our HR operational system is literally every day, depending on where you are, if you're an engineer or a designer or a product manager, daily, should be able to get feedback from the AI, your AI copilot. If you're coding, is reviewing your pull requests and is telling you not only how you're using these tools, but how could you use them better? And it's very actionable and it's very specific to what you're doing. If you're a designer, it's giving you feedback around how you're doing your job and how better you could do in your job. If you're a manager, managers right now have very little information, especially if you're managing a lot of people. That's the other thing about this large span of controls. There is the sense that you have to be having one on ones with every single person in your week. Like those one on ones tends to be very low information density type of interchange. A manager that has access to all this information, this instrumentation is now seeing real time how every person in the team is actually doing and is allowing them to improve what they're doing. How do you stay up
00:52:45 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, David Vélez
[00:52:45] S0: to speed on AI capabilities? Like who are the people you rely on? What are the things you like to read? I feel like you need to time box it every day. I get one hour to read the updates or something. It's like sports center for business. How do you do it? [00:52:57] S1: I'll spend a lot time on X. I think that's where you're seeing a lot of the development also. I have an agent that collates and summarizes a lot of the developments of what's going on on details. I block specific time in my agenda to use these tools and to build products. This is something that I hadn't done for a very long time. I coded a non custodial crypto app, for example. That's something that we've discussed at Nubank for a very long time to do. And I just went in and did a project. We asked all of our senior managers to build products every quarter, our actual software and products, so that we are integrated and very aware what's going on. I don't think necessarily the answer is that I should be spending 70% coding. There are better people that will be much more productive coding than I am. But I think it's important for everybody in the organization to be actually not only reading, but actually using the tools actively to understand how fast the technology is going.
00:53:50 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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00:55:21 · David Vélez
[00:55:21] S1: I'm motivated by impact, by making it count, by doing something we're investing time and energy in something that has a meaning and that has some kind of impact. I went through a phase even with NewBank where I started thinking, is there more stuff that I should be doing beyond NewBank? I think all founders get starting on the company, the company then has a significant growth. Then you start asking your questions, what else could I be doing? Ultimately, I went through the other side of that analysis for about a year or two years, realizing that there's nothing else that I can imagine myself doing that could have more impact than taking NewBank from where it is today to making it the next larger and going from three countries to a 100 countries or from a 100,000,000 customers to a billion customers. What this means in terms of impacting financial services, impact for people around the world, for billions of people access to financial services. And with that impact out there is impact internally too. It's like how I can also understand myself through bigger and newer challenges, and how I can develop better as a leader to motivate an organisation that has big ambitions. And with big technology shifts, like AI, can either decide to stay behind or stay in front. I think this technology shift forces every organisation to think, in which side of this disruption do I want to be? I find that I'm more of a wartime general than a peacetime general. And so when a disruption, a change in the world happens, it suddenly is a source of motivation. I get more energized to actually continue to execute that mission.