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.
02:00:27 · John Coogan, Micky Malka
[02:00:27] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How how do you actually build that trust and build that brand in some of those markets? Is it different in Brazil than other countries? Are you talking about the the feel of the product or actually just the marketing and telling people what your brand stands for? Or does it infuse through the interactions with bank teller in the virtual environment probably? [02:00:50] S8: I think it's all of the above. It's the little things. [02:00:53] S1: Mhmm. [02:00:53] S8: It's really telling a story in a way that people believe and consistently see that you're doing that. Mhmm. And everyone every company does it in a different way. So there was a a story I remember from Nubank in Brazil when we backed them super early. You know, in Sao Paulo, they are 18,000,000 people, but there's I think there's, like, 4,000,000 dogs. It's almost like one dog for and so whenever they saw that you you had a transaction on your credit card for a a a vet, you you they will send you cookies to your home. [02:01:30] S1: Wow. [02:01:31] S8: Right? Because it meant that your dog was sick or something was happening. So imagine but those are little things that you do that with consistency. And if the message is we care about you and we're paying attention to what's going on in your life, that's how you build that trust. It's a bunch of little details. There's never a big thing, but it has to be genuine. And you can see when when CEOs or teams are not genuine, you can see it 10 miles away.
02:01:31 · Micky Malka, Jordi Hays
[02:01:31] S8: Right? Because it meant that your dog was sick or something was happening. So imagine but those are little things that you do that with consistency. And if the message is we care about you and we're paying attention to what's going on in your life, that's how you build that trust. It's a bunch of little details. There's never a big thing, but it has to be genuine. And you can see when when CEOs or teams are not genuine, you can see it 10 miles away. [02:02:00] S0: How do you feel about so so you did the first institutional round of Coinbase and Robinhood. Correct? [02:02:06] S8: Yes. [02:02:07] S0: And did did you did you think at the time that that those companies did you have a feeling that that if they were successful they would end up ultimately competing with each other because it's not exactly head to head yet but you can imagine ten years from today these companies will just be going at it. And maybe that's just because of the trends around bundling and Fintech, Right? If you can create one product, you can add a bunch of others. If you can earn someone's trust in one category, you can expand out. But I think we're at this really interesting moment where the last ten years were about you had like, you know, traditional Fintech and you had Crypto and they were these distinct categories. But it seems that it it seems very obvious now that they will be, you know, massively overlapped in a ultimately just one category, which is money.