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.
01:58:12 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[01:58:12] S1: That's fantastic. Sorry. Now we're now I'm going backwards. Can you talk to me about some of the wedges that you used in the previous companies to actually drive adoption of a new banking product or a new bank online. Yeah. [01:58:28] S0: I I have to imagine I have to imagine starting in markets like, you know, Spain Yeah. Brazil, etcetera, help help you, you know, many It it's been the narrative violation over the last twenty years has been that developing countries adopted fintech faster. They adopted new methods of payments, new you know, much faster than developing countries in many ways because there just wasn't that legacy infrastructure. So I'm curious if you even think you would have been successful if you had had just tried to come and only crack, you know, the The US market.
01:59:05 · Micky Malka
[01:59:05] S8: No. I would have been a failure. I would not understand the world. I I'm I was never the best student at school, but I was a student of life. And walking through the streets of all these countries and seeing how people behave with money was the best class and the best master class I could have gotten. Because at the end, everything you do is building a brand. And and brand means trust. And it's very underrated to understand how long it takes to build trust and how fast can you make it shake or disappear or fracture, and then how long it takes to bring it back. Mhmm. So if you see a pattern in everything that we've done is working with teams that we believe can build a brand and working with them because that is the only moat that you can build that gives you the chance to succeed in financial services. Because every financial product at the end, it's a commodity. It can be copied. You can start with free commissions, It will be copied. You can start with free credit scores. It will be copied. You can start with free interest rate lendings or tipping. It will be copied. So it has to be the brand. And that's a special DNA that I got to understand from working in markets where people's level of trust was even lower than in developed markets.