Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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
[00:53:50] S0: Your finance team isn't losing money on big mistakes. It's leaking through a thousand tiny decisions nobody's watching. Ramp puts guardrails on spending before it happens. Real time limits, automatic rules, zero firefighting. Try it at ramp.com/invest. As your business grows, Vanta scales with you, automating compliance and giving you a single source of truth for security and risk. Learn more at vanta.com/invest. Ridgeline offers one unified platform that automates away the complexity across portfolio accounting, reconciliation, reporting, trading, compliance, and more, all at scale. Schedule a demo at ridgeline.ai. Every investment firm is unique, and generic AI chatbots don't understand your process. Rogo is built by finance professionals. It's connected to your data, learns your process, and quickly produces client ready outputs. Check them out at rogo.com/invest. The best AI and software companies from OpenAI to Cursor to Perplexity use WorkOS to become enterprise ready overnight, not in months. Visit workos.com to skip the unglamorous infrastructure work and focus on your product. If you think really carefully about it, how has what motivates you to keep doing this and keep fighting and keep building changed over the course of the New Bank journey? Like if you think back to the start, you and actually last time talked about this, like what the original motivations were. And I mean, just the business opportunity, but the personal sources of drive. How has that evolved and what's it like today?
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.
00:56:53 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:56:53] S0: What's an example of understanding yourself better because of growth? Like in what ways has that happened?
00:56:58 · David Vélez
[00:56:58] S1: One of the questions that I personally had as I scaled the business is, will we need to bring much more professional managers at some point? Because I didn't manage anybody before starting NewBank. And then suddenly I found myself being the CEO of one of the largest banks in Latin America and asking myself, well, what does the organization need right now? Do we need to go and hire a much more experienced manager? And we did. We went and hired a lot of external talent because I concluded or thought that I was going to need that. But also then quickly realized that actually that's not what the organization needed. What the organization needed was more of what I had already brought into the organization, which was this clear leadership, the motivation, the willingness to think really big and to dream very big and get people excited about doing something that feels impossible at the beginning. Once something clicks and says, No, this is the right answer for me and for the organization, then I can continue to do what I'm doing with much more confidence. Especially when there are changes and shifts. There was always a little bit of a Latin question, Am I pushing too hard? Am I asking too much from the team? Is this the right pace? And the answer after thirteen years of doing this and being a little bit more confident is yes, I'm pushing enough. It's my job to push very hard and to dream very big and to shoot very high. And then the organization will react and will push back if needed. But it's helpful to have somebody that is actively pushing the boundaries of what perhaps the company is ready to do.
00:58:27 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, David Vélez
[00:58:27] S0: What is the hardest part of doing that for a long period of time? [00:58:30] S1: The imposter syndrome. It's fine to be a founder at the beginning, but then suddenly when you see yourself running a very large organization, it's like, am I the right person leading this organisation? You have to, through some thinking and through some experiences and through some feedback, conclude, answer that question for you at some point. And answer it definitively on maybe for some reason you're not, but probably you are. That doesn't mean that necessarily the founder will have all the answers and will have all the skills. You will need to continue bringing people that add a lot of complementary skills to you. But I think at least for me was surpassing that phase of having a voice in the head thinking, are you the right CEO for the business? And in making the shape between founder and CEO, because generally you will see founders having both titles, but they're very different functions. The founder and the CEO are very different functions. They don't necessarily fit with each other. [00:59:24] S0: What's the key energy of each?