01:50:54 · Casey Neistat, John Coogan, Micky Malka, Jordi Hays
[01:50:54] S6: Thank you. [01:50:55] S1: Next we have Mickey Malka, the founder of Ribbit Capital. Really quickly I will tell you about AdQuick. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. And, we hopefully have Mickey Malka. How are doing Mickey? Good to meet you. [01:51:16] S8: Hi guys. Good to see you John and Jordi. How are you guys? [01:51:18] S1: Welcome to the stream. [01:51:19] S0: Great background. [01:51:20] S1: Yeah. What's going on background. Break it down for us. [01:51:23] S8: Those are some NFTs. Wonderful. From an artist called Bright Moments. They did a exhibition all over the world, and these are crypto citizens from the 10 cities around the world where they had their exhibitions. [01:51:35] S0: Amazing. Amazing. It's great to have you on the show. We've been excited for this. You guys have been on a absolutely crazy run and it's awesome that you're starting to talk about it a bit more. [01:51:46] S1: Yeah. I wanna start with like your background. I think that you might actually have a nontraditional path to venture or at least a very interesting entrepreneurial journey prior to launching a venture firm. So can you just give us a little bit of on your history and how you wound up running
01:51:46 · John Coogan, Micky Malka, Jordi Hays
[01:51:46] S1: Yeah. I wanna start with like your background. I think that you might actually have a nontraditional path to venture or at least a very interesting entrepreneurial journey prior to launching a venture firm. So can you just give us a little bit of on your history and how you wound up running [01:52:01] S8: Of course. Ribbit. So I'm an entrepreneur, and I'm still entrepreneur. It just happens that I started when I was 17 years old, and that's all I know how to do. And I started in financial services. Growing up in Venezuela in the early nineties, it was inflation, crises, bank failures, all the things that you need to learn in your life. I had them by the time I was 22 years old. [01:52:25] S0: Speedrun. [01:52:26] S8: Oh my god. Yes. Lightspeed through all of that. So I started four different companies around the world before the the word fintech or crypto even existed, always trying to do something in in around the Internet and making money better. Simply, that was the whole thing. [01:52:43] S0: And And what did and what did did some of those first companies look like? Were they specific to problems that you were having in in Venezuela, or were they global by nature? I I love some advice.
01:52:43 · Jordi Hays, Micky Malka
[01:52:43] S0: And And what did and what did did some of those first companies look like? Were they specific to problems that you were having in in Venezuela, or were they global by nature? I I love some advice. [01:52:54] S8: One was it was the first online trading platform for Latin America. A little bit what Robinhood is today. Yeah. But imagine that in 1998 in the beginning of the Internet, and you could trade online stocks of every local Latin American market. Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile. We had a Brazil. We had a we bought its stock exchange seats in all of them, we were able to allow people to trade. So Amazing. That that was the one of the first ones. And then I I And you were you were [01:53:23] S0: you were, like, 20 at this time? [01:53:26] S8: I was 23, 24 when I started. Yes. [01:53:29] S0: Wow. [01:53:29] S8: That company. And and there were no venture capitalists in Latin America. There was nobody. We had to convince some people in The US and New York to fund us and headquarter in Miami to avoid any kind of problem with choosing a place in Latin America. And and that company became the largest online broker dealer in South America. [01:53:51] S0: Wow. Insane. And then where do you go from there?
01:53:51 · Jordi Hays, Micky Malka, Alex Hawkinson, John Coogan
[01:53:51] S0: Wow. Insane. And then where do you go from there? [01:53:56] S8: I went to Spain because my first company was acquired by a big Spaniard bank, and the Internet had blown up. Little bit like when they think it was all hype. It will happen to AI eventually when they will all and people will think it was it was all wrong in, eventually, the future. But and I started the first online bank in Europe. There was no online banks. It was a bank called Openbank because it was supposed to be open twenty four twenty four seven, three sixty five. It still runs in Spain, and it was Were [01:54:26] S0: you were you the [01:54:27] S8: starting bank. [01:54:27] S0: Was was adding open to the start of a word? Were you the first person to do that? A trend. [01:54:32] S2: Open a high. Open store. [01:54:35] S8: We're taking over the open words these days. [01:54:38] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Pay [01:54:40] S1: me my fee. I I coined that. Yeah. That's wild. What what who is the first LP to kick you off? Like, what was the story [01:54:49] S0: Well well, first, have to ask. I'm I'm assuming there wasn't bank there wasn't like 20 banking as a service platforms back How did how did you get how did you how did you convince a bank to in In banking. In Europe to to bank? [01:55:00] S8: Well, I I I had to become regulated. By the time I was 25 or 26, I was regulated by eight central banks Wow. To go through the whole KYC bank approval process myself. [01:55:13] S2: Was the same thing [01:55:14] S8: I learned?
01:55:14 · Micky Malka, John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[01:55:14] S8: I learned? [01:55:15] S1: Is it more just like you filled out the forms perfectly? You sent the right messages, or were you, like, kind of knocking on doors trying to grease palms to make it happen? [01:55:25] S8: All of the above. [01:55:26] S1: All of above. [01:55:27] S8: Depending on the country, you had to do a lot more. Were a lot more technical than others. Yeah. But definitely, you had to see they had to see that I was not just this kid who didn't know anything about finance. And then I had to pretend I knew a lot about finance. [01:55:39] S1: Mhmm. So yeah. You wanna continue with that? [01:55:42] S0: Now from where where did that go? I I I don't wanna leave a cliffhanger. [01:55:45] S8: So so that business grew to the fastest bank in Europe. I sold it back to them to them to the bank that we were partnered with. Mhmm. And then I moved to Brazil, started on I got approval by the president of Brazil back then, Lula, which is again president now, to approve a new banking license granted so we could start a bank to serve the on bank with financial services. So I lived in Sao Paulo, did that for three years, became the largest retail bank in the country serving almost 15,000,000 customers. That was I'm [01:56:18] S0: seeing a trend. I'm seeing a trend. [01:56:21] S1: Trends on the Bad day to be unbanked. Well, no. [01:56:23] S0: No. It's gonna sound You seem to like being the fastest growing or the number one in the category.
01:56:28 · Micky Malka
[01:56:28] S8: You you know, what I like is making allowing people to when when people have access to better money, it makes their life better. Yeah. It's not about having more money or less money. It's just making money better. And better money means you should be able to invest the same way I can anywhere in the world. You should be able to get the best loan and not get your knees beaten up if you don't pay it back a credit. You should be able to get a good insurance product no matter where you are or what you're trying to do. That's what I call better money. So I think the journey of my life has been one of pursuing that better money makes life better. And moved to Silicon Valley eighteen years ago to start a company in payments before the iPhone came out. I I had a feeling people were gonna tap and pay with their phones. So we were one of the first companies tapping on NFC stickers, putting them on back of the phones. You could pay for in merchants. And and that when the App Store came out with the iPhone, we were the first wallet in the phone. Wow. So that moment was like an moment. When you saw mobile and you saw the App Store, this is like, this is what I had been waiting for twenty years as an entrepreneur. That moment in time when suddenly you can compete with incumbents in a playing field that they were not looking at. Mhmm. So that's where Ribbit Capital started. Instead of building one more company, because I always consider myself even though we always move the ball forward, I was a failed entrepreneur because the best entrepreneurs never sell their companies. So I decided to start Revit as a way to say, this is the one I'm gonna run until the last day I wanna run it.