David Vélez - Building Nubank and the Future of Global Banking - [Invest Like the Best, EP.495]

So the last time we did this, I think you had 35 million customers. Now you have 140 million customers, so well done.

Busy five years.

Yeah, busy five years. One would be tempted to think that with that kind of growth, we've saturated the potential of fintech as a category to create a new platform that’s digital and mobile-first, and that we're maybe in the later innings of the fintech technology transformation. I know that you think it's the exact opposite, and I'd love you to detail exactly why and what you think we can expect in the next five years, not just for Nubank, but for digital financial services globally.

If you look at global consumer financial services, it's about a $10 trillion industry, and still something like 90% of that industry goes through banking branches and is owned by incumbent banks. While there are a lot of neobanks and fintechs across the world in a number of different areas, all of those fintechs and neobanks together are less than 10% of that entire market. In financial services, it's still almost as if 90% of the world were going to Blockbuster to get VHS tapes and DVDs, while Netflix-like services had only about 10% of the industry.

So that transformation, that migration that you've seen in other industries, in media with Netflix, in retail with Amazon, with the Barnes & Nobles, in transportation with companies like Uber, that migration from incumbents to digitally native companies is still very, very early in financial services.

I think Nubank is very unique, specifically in Brazil and Latin America, because we are really the only neobank in the world where we've fully surpassed the biggest incumbent bank. In terms of scale, we now have close to 120 million customers in Brazil, so approximately 65% of the Brazilian adult population are our customers. But even more than that, we've become the primary bank account for the entire country. About 60% of our customers use us as their primary bank account. We replaced the incumbent bank. We're not a secondary wallet. We're not just somewhere you leave some money. We are the primary institution where people are really banking day to day, and that is very unique to Nubank in Brazil. We're increasingly doing that in Mexico and Colombia, too.

We think this is a little bit of a look at what will happen around the world over the next 10 to 20 years, when you would expect a lot of market share to shift from incumbent banks to digitally native companies. That is not just a migration of market share; you'll also see a significant increase in market size as billions of people across the world enter the banking system. You still have 3 billion people who are completely outside the banking system and don't have access to credit.

I'd love to break this into 2 components. You could imagine freezing the product today and just working on getting it into more people's hands. That could be one dimension of expansion. But then, of course, I'm sure you're thinking carefully about all the wonderful things that AI and technology will allow you to do for customers that you don't yet do today. Can you talk through each of those levers to achieve this Blockbuster-to-Netflix transition?

The first phase of transformation that enabled a lot of the migration in other industries was the smartphone. This is the same thesis you see repeating: The smartphone is the moment we get to serve consumers without all that physical infrastructure. We have such a gigantic cost-structure advantage that we can pass that efficiency to the end customer through lower fees and a better product.

Just to give you a data point, we have 140 million customers with 10,000 employees. Our competitors have 100 million customers with 100,000 employees and 6,000 branches. You start thinking about why the cost of real estate for those branches is gigantic. Our cost to serve a customer is about 3% of what it is for a traditional incumbent bank. That means we have so much margin to give back to the customer through no fees, a better experience, better interest rates, and an overall better product.

That's pre-AI. We're still here in phase 1 of what the smartphone enabled. AI will be an additional multiplier of that efficiency, because then you get to choose whether you want much more efficiency. You could automate a lot of areas of the bank. You could imagine banks that have a billion customers with 5,000 employees. That's within sight. Or you can just decide to increase your level of ambition. For somebody like us, especially when we look at how early the transformation is, the question for us is: Why don't we go to 100 countries and try to accelerate this transformation, with Nubank becoming one of the leading digital financial services firms in the world?

What are the craziest things you can imagine a product or a bank like yours doing for the customer in 3 or 5 years because technology has made things possible that weren't possible before? Just like mobile made a lot of new things possible, we've got a much bigger wave now. If you really dreamed about what could be possible, what are some of those ideas?

We like to categorize the problems that we see in financial services into 3 buckets. One is access, the second is cost, and the third is intelligence.

On the access side, you still have 3 billion people in the world who don't have access to a credit product. It's crazy. Almost half of the world does not have access to credit. Even in a country like Mexico or Colombia, credit card penetration is 13%. Why hasn't that happened yet? Because you needed the creation of a lot of data, sophistication in credit underwriting, and the digitalization of the systems. This is happening. Cash goes away. It disappears. Real-time payment systems enter, as you've seen in Brazil with Pix or India with UPI. So there is a lot of transformation and a lot of catalysts accelerating the rails on which you increase access to consumer banking for the world, and this is going to be a massive opportunity.

10 or 20 years from now, 100% of the population will have access to banking services, 100% of the population will have access to credit, and 100% of small businesses will have access to credit. This is an insane boost to global GDP. I mean, I don't think it's really understood how big of a multiplier this could be for every single economy as you get half of your entire population in some areas access to banking. So that's the access side.

Cost is the one that tends to be more hidden, especially in developed economies. The U.S. is generally well served in banking services, especially if you're a high-income consumer. But when you look at the cost of that banking system, it's pretty significant in ways that are not readily apparent. For example, there's about $15 trillion of retail deposits in the U.S. banking system, but banks pay an average yield of about 40 basis points a year. In a world where interest rates are 4.5% or 5%, you look at the calculation on those $15 trillion: That's more or less $600 billion going to banks to pay for banking branches that, in a digital banking environment, would actually stay in consumers' pockets.

So this is a massive wealth tax: the fact that banks don't pay any yield. If you're high-income, you do. The lower your income, the less you get paid. That's a huge tax and a huge cost. Then you look at remittances, for example, in the U.S. A hundred billion dollars go out of the U.S., and people pay 5% to 10% per transaction. That will go to zero. Remittances—moving money, you're moving bits. That will trend towards zero in a more competitive environment. For a monthly account, people are paying $5, $10, or $15 per month in the U.S. banking system for a bank account.

And you look at Europe or other developed economies, Japan, the same thing. You see a huge amount of cost that consumers are paying that will eventually, with models such as ours coming to compete, also be competed away.

And then finally, intelligence. I think this is also the part that is less understood, and it’s beginning to be discussed with the advent of AI. If you’re in the top 1% of income, you have access to the best financial advice. You probably have a private banker. That private banker understands all the bank accounts you have, optimizes your deposits, and thinks about the right tax-efficient structure. If you need a loan, they’re going to get a bunch of different banks to compete with each other and get you the best yield.

But if you’re in the lower 99%, especially the further down you go, you have access to nothing. Historically, there’s been a lot of conversation about how education is the answer: you just have to educate people; people don’t have financial education. That never worked. People don’t sit down to take classes. You’re not going to solve this problem of intelligence through education. You’re going to solve it through AI, and that’s where I think AI is really transformative in financial services. It’s almost providing every single person around the world with superintelligence to optimize their financial life on their behalf and remove a lot of the profit pools that exist in banking today, which, in an environment with intelligence, will be competed away.

1. An AI Coach For Everyone

Flesh that last piece out a little bit more. Wealthfront used to have this idea of self-driving money, which comes to mind. I’ve got some money. Either I don’t have it in the banking system, which is the worst, or I come into the banking system and earn 40 basis points instead of 4%, so I’m in a lousy starting position. But I certainly don’t have investments or tax-loss harvesting or all this other fancy stuff. What do you think that ends up being for the average person in a couple of years because of this intelligence bucket?

The first obvious rearrangement is that the $600 billion banks are keeping on their balance sheets to pay for banking branches gets rearranged, gets forwarded to banking consumers, because suddenly they realize, “What am I doing leaving my money at zero?” Especially when you think about compounding and what that means for savings and compound interest, this is a lot of money ultimately being sent to pay for banking branches.

You look at really any country around the world, any structure. Look at Mexican banking balance sheets, for example, or Brazilian ones, where it’s exactly the same thing. The big incumbent banks pay zero on about 70% of their deposits, and pay some yield on 30%, generally to the highest-income population or corporates.

One of the things you see in banking is that, in a perfectly competitive environment, the best product should win. If you’re charging no fees and you have the best experience, banking is ultimately a commodity product, so you should be able to get 100% of the market share. That doesn’t happen because there’s a lot of inertia in the system.

With the combination of intelligence and open banking—for example, Plaid can connect 120 million accounts—and with intelligence on top of that, you’re effectively allowing each customer to know how to optimize their financial life and what fees are coming due. I’ll give you an example. We’re doing this in Brazil today. Every day, we’re telling about 50 million of our customers, “Your bank account or credit card at that other bank is due tomorrow. You don’t have any money there, and they’re going to charge you a 15% interest rate per day. Let us give you some money so you can pay that credit card.” Or, “You have this loan at 10% interest. Let us refinance that at 5% interest.” It’s ultimately a drive toward optimizing and removing a lot of those profit pools on behalf of the consumer.

In some products, like small-business banking, people do want to sit down with a banker, with a human, and have that conversation. If you have millions of dollars to invest, you still probably want to see a human on the other side of the table and have that conversation. For certain consumer segments and certain products, if you want to get a mortgage or use certain sophisticated products, there is value in having a physical space. But that might be 5% of cases today. If you have a savings account, a credit card, or a loan, you just don’t need that anymore. So I think the rationale is that, yes, we’re trying to serve these customers, but for the majority of people, especially the mass market, increasingly you just don’t need that physical infrastructure anymore.

2. Scale Becomes The AI Moat

Yeah. One of the questions that I think lots of investors and founders are wrestling with is: What will be the best competitive advantages or moats in this new AI era, when the cost to build new digital stuff is much, much lower? If you had to imagine it like you’re some new founder, I strip everything away from you, and your only goal is to kill Nubank—to build a new company to attack Nubank, let’s say in Brazil or in Latin America—what do you think you would do? What would be the vector of attack on your own business?

Which, in a way, was what we did to the incumbent banks—

Right. Yeah, of course.

—13 years ago, right? We were the disruptor going after incumbent banks.

Yeah.

So I think the biggest advantage for an early-stage startup today that is AI-native and digital will be speed—the ability to move extremely quickly and launch a number of different products, especially if you’re born unregulated. Then you’re going to be able to move fast. By now, we’re fully regulated. We have banking licenses in a number of different countries, so we have to go at a certain pace. We have to check with regulators.

Now, I think specifically in financial services, particularly banking, that will only get you up to a certain point, because eventually you’re going to need to be regulated as well. In some areas, there’s been a lot of conversation about how AI disrupts software and how you can ask ChatGPT or Codex to rebuild an entire software strategy. But you still can’t really get ChatGPT to get you a banking license, and you still can’t really get regulators to give you a license in six months instead of two or three years.

Specifically in credit or in certain products that we operate in, the amount of data that we have is pretty significant. We have about 140 million customers. For each customer, we have something like 20,000 to 30,000 data points across 13 different years. So this is a huge amount of information that allowed us to build our own foundation model. We built our own foundation model for financial services, for credit, and this gives us a significant advantage in making credit decisions, for example, or collection decisions. An early-stage startup entrepreneur would have speed, but would have a much harder time getting to that level of data.

So data becomes a significant moat for incumbents. Companies like us are in the sweet spot of benefiting the most from AI, because we already have the scale, the data, the brand, and the trust, and the licenses that will be hard for an early-stage, AI-native startup to get. But we also still have the technology angle and technology infrastructure to allow us to benefit from AI and what AI is creating, and to move even faster than we were moving before.

Can you build a pretty detailed timeline of when you first had the thought, like, “Wow, AI is a thing that we need to take really seriously,” and then, as the leader of the business, how you’ve thought about rolling it out and being more aggressive with it over time? I’m interested in the details. You said you have your own foundation model. How is that built? Is it open source that you’ve tuned based on your own data? Who do you work with? How did you think about it? I’m really interested in your personal timeline, how far back it goes, and what the major hash marks have been?

3. Nubank Builds Its Own Models

We’ve used machine learning since we started the organization in 2013. We looked at Brazilian interest rates for consumers paying 500% and 600% a year and saw an opportunity to use better data, analytics, and machine learning to price credit risk. Unlike a lot of fintechs, we decided to take balance-sheet risk and be capital-intensive by default. So we already had an organization that was very optimized for making decisions based on models and data.

When the ChatGPT moment came about 3 or 4 years ago, we started paying significant attention to how technology could facilitate some of those decisions. We acquired a company called Hyperplane in Palo Alto that was already working on foundation models for financial services. They were having a hard time selling to the big incumbent banks: sales cycles were 2 years. They weren’t really able to move, even though the technology itself was fairly forward-looking. So we bought the company and integrated the team.

We think we were the first financial services firm in the world to build our own foundation model with our own proprietary data, specifically for making credit decisions. We even published all of our research in this area. We developed an early advantage, and we’re now using our foundation model for fraud decisions in Mexico and Colombia. As we launch in the U.S. and our international markets, we can come in on day 1 with our own foundation model and understand how to use that data to make basic decisions. This should accelerate our ability to enter those markets.

The data thing is such a good example of the scale advantage. You were an investor before starting Nubank, so I’m sure you’ve thought about this endlessly. It sounds like scale may be the most important thing that will make Nubank competitively advantaged for the next 10 years or so. Is that right? Does that feel like the right one to pick?

I think scale is important, but you also need the right culture and the right systems. One thing we heard a lot in the early days was, “How are you going to compete with the banks? The banks have scale. They have a 100-year history and 100 million customers. How can you replicate that data?” Going back to the Blockbuster analogy, my answer was always, “Blockbuster had a huge amount of data.” Imagine how many people came into Blockbuster and looked at a VHS or a DVD without renting it. Did that data help them build a better search algorithm? No, because they weren’t capturing the data.

They didn’t have the right systems to capture data, or the right data culture for making decisions based on data or models. A company like Netflix was able to come in with no data, build a better algorithm, and ultimately use it. Scale and data are important, but your systems and culture are equally important. Ultimately, you need to be a culture that uses a lot of this data to make the right decisions.

I think that’s what differentiates neobanks, or more digitally native organizations like us, from traditional incumbent banks, which are still operating with 15 different systems as a result of a huge number of acquisitions over the years. They’re still dealing with this. If you look at a lot of the AI applications—how we use AI to transform COBOL, how we get away from the mainframe—you’re talking about 10- or 15-year histories of moving to the cloud. They’re still in the process of putting systems on the cloud.

How do you manage that tactically in the culture to make sure you don’t fall into the same trap as the big players before you, where you’re suboptimally using your advantages and don’t have a good algorithm? What are the tactics you use to make sure the team doesn’t mess that up and actually does the opposite?

I think the biggest difference is that historically, traditional banks saw their basis of competition as having a lot of banking branches. That’s literally how consumers used to pick a bank: “I’m going to pick a bank that has a branch very close by.” That’s why there was so much effort and energy put into real estate and physical infrastructure, and obviously a lot of focus on building brands and trust with consumers. In financial services especially, you need to protect that trust with the consumer. That’s very critical.

When we began the company, we didn’t have to spend energy or focus on an offline world. It was more of an online world, and we saw technology and data as a way to build a competitive advantage. From the beginning, we saw ourselves as a technology company, not a bank—a technology company that happens to be in financial services. So our culture has consistently used data and analytics for every single decision.

Our own foundation model has significantly lowered the cost of putting a feature into a model. Before AI, you had to spend 6 months adding a new feature. If you wanted to test a new feature in a model, you had to spend several weeks testing it, putting it into the model, and testing it out. With our foundation model, you can test a number of different approaches much faster.

The cost of creating a model to test, for example, whether an email has purple letters or yellow letters, has gone down significantly. The cost of doing a specific experiment has gone down significantly. Every decision in the organization can now be automated and made by a model rather than a human. That’s what AI is also enabling. It lets us do what we were already doing at a much greater scale, but the culture itself existed from the beginning, because we saw this as a way to differentiate ourselves.

How do you think the global financial system will change the most, or needs to change the most, in the next 5 years—totally apart from your business? What exogenous changes are you watching most carefully that you think matter?

One of the most transformational changes in financial services will be the end of cash, and this is happening everywhere. There are a lot of big, cash-heavy economies, like Mexico, Indonesia, and many African countries. Brazil used to be like that. Cash will go away, and payments will be digitized mostly through real-time payment systems.

Some implications are obvious: you don’t need as many banking branches. Some are less obvious: what happens to the economy, for example? Think about the efficiency of banks when they don’t need branches, the speed at which money moves in the economy, and the amount of data created in an economy that can then be used, for example, to provide access to credit. So that’s a big catalyst.

The second is open finance and open banking across the world. This is the concept that you, as a consumer, own all the data you have across institutions and are able to grab that data and share it with anybody else. One of the biggest sources of inertia in financial services, and also in telecommunications or utilities, is that you have a history with a specific company and can’t transfer that history to somebody new. Incumbents have benefited a lot from that inertia of data.

The moment you can connect all your history from all your services and pass it to somebody else, you’re reducing that inertia and enabling more competition for your data. You can monetize that data as a consumer. You can take your historical information with a bank and offer it to somebody else who’s willing to pay for it, if you decide to do so. Right now, social media does that without you deciding to do it. Increasingly, you’ll be able to do it by choice.

Open banking is important because it will decrease that inertia globally and significantly increase competition in banking. Banking globally is still very much an oligopoly structure. You have 5 or 6 banks in the U.S. that own 60% to 70% of all the assets. It’s the same in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. That will mean a less concentrated banking industry: much more fragmented, with much more competition. Obviously, that translates into lower fees and costs.

Another big trend over the next couple of decades is the role of crypto and stablecoins around the world. What will eventually happen, as people become increasingly mobile, is that they’ll operate in a combination of their country’s fiat system and a global offshore system. Their lives will move between the two without them even realizing it. For a lot of countries around the world, it’s really important. You’ve seen, with the use of and access to Bitcoin and stablecoins, that people increasingly want to bank in the offshore system. They don’t trust their banking system. They don’t trust their fiat currency.

Today, there are about 190 currencies around the world. My view is that 10 or 20 years from now, maybe there will be 10, because the fiscal situation in so many countries around the world is so dire that a lot of that fiat money isn’t real money. It’s basically crypto tokens. Increasingly, billions of people are going to be banking in the offshore world, using U.S. stablecoins, Bitcoin, and other types of assets. You’ll see these 2 parallel systems interacting with each other across the world.

If you think about the U.S. dollar and its importance, if it goes from 190 to 10 or something, do you think the U.S. dollar will be the reserve currency 10 years from now? Will it be one of a few? What do you think its role will be in the world?

There are 2 sides of that argument.

You can make the case that U.S. stablecoins ultimately will be one of the biggest saviors of the U.S. dollar because they democratize access to it. While the fiscal situation in the U.S. is not great and is deteriorating fast, it’s still better than the fiscal situation in the other 100-plus countries around the world. You look at the balance sheets of a lot of central banks or countries in emerging markets in Latin America, and it’s way scarier. They don’t have the sovereign capabilities.

At least there’s a lot of demand for U.S. stablecoins. There’s very little demand for the Brazilian stablecoin, unfortunately. So the fact that stablecoins exist for the U.S. dollar will ultimately mean that the U.S. dollar maintains its power as a reserve currency for a very long time, but it won’t be unique. I think you’ll have five or six other fiat currencies that people will be saving in, and a few crypto tokens that you’ll also be diversifying into. I’ve always been a Bitcoin fan, and it plays a role in a diversified investment portfolio.

What’s the most surprising thing, do you think, about the move away from cash? What would I not appreciate about the implications of that, or how long it would take? What’s surprising about going cashless?

The main thing is what this means for credit markets. For the majority of the world and the majority of the world’s economies, things are still very much offline. Just think about a taco stand on a corner in Mexico City that sells food for cash. That transaction isn’t recorded anywhere. It’s a transaction with somebody that goes away, and that taco stand can’t get credit today.

That person has a history: every day, they go and sell tacos, and they get cash flow that’s being recorded, but nobody can underwrite on top of that. The moment that transaction goes into a digital ledger and happens digitally, suddenly that taco seller can take that information to a bank and say, “Hey, look at my cash flow. Give me access to credit. If you give me access to credit, I can now have 2 taco stands, or I can have 5 taco stands.”

The digitalization of the economy, and what that enables for credit for a significant percentage of the world’s population, is not very well understood today. It’s a huge accelerant. Again, you look at economies like Brazil, for example, where something like 70% of all employment in the country is still in small businesses. It’s not the big corporations; it’s small businesses. The same thing happens in India, for example, or Southeast Asia. A lot of these small businesses historically also dealt with cash. Now they’re digitalizing.

So this is trillions of dollars of credit being enabled for billions of people around the world. This could be a significant economic shift for economic mobility across the world. In my eyes, this is a very exciting opportunity.

Do you think you can create creditworthiness, versus just predict or measure it once you have all this data? Is one of the goals to help people become more creditworthy somehow?

Yes, absolutely. The first thing you have to do is measure or record a lot of those transactions in a ledger, and that’s what the digitization of cash enables. With better algorithms—AI plays a role here—and better products, you can enable people to start building that credit history.

I’ll give you an example. We were the first credit card for 30 million people in Latin America. When we used to ask banks why so many people didn’t have access to credit, what we heard was, “People don’t want credit. People don’t want a credit card. They’re scared about paying taxes, so they’re never going to use the product.” But what we realized was that what they were really lacking was a product that matched their needs.

So we started a lot of people with a product where the first line was $20—a $20 credit line. When banks saw that product, they thought it was absurd. But in reality, people really appreciated that $20 was better than zero. Those $20 became $100, and the $100 became $1,000 over a period of time.

You enable them to create a credit history through the right product, and then you enable an AI copilot for that customer that tells them all the different moves they need to make in terms of spending, investing, and saving to gain points and become more creditworthy. That’s the concept of providing somebody with a coach to improve their ability to access credit and improve their financial picture. So absolutely, I think that’s going to be a big enabler.

How siloed are the individual countries in terms of how useful what you learn in one is in another? When you went to Mexico from Brazil, how much of what you learned in Brazil was portable, versus what was distinctive about Mexico? And how do you think about the countries you’ve learned in so far and exporting those learnings to other geographies?

4. Taking Nubank Global

It’s more exportable than we would have expected. The part that was less exportable—the biggest difference between a country like Brazil and Mexico—is that Brazil was actually much more banked than unbanked. When we went to Mexico, a lot of the conversations we heard were like, “Well, people in Mexico like cash. They don’t believe in digital payments or credit cards or debit cards.”

In the early years in Mexico, that was the biggest difference. When you go from a banked country to an unbanked country, it’s harder to compete. I always say that we’re a shark in digital waters. When we’re forced to compete in the offline world with banking branches, we’re much less competitive. We don’t have banking branches. We don’t have ATMs.

For a couple of years, it was harder for us to compete, even though we’ve become the second-largest bank in Mexico by now, and the largest digital bank there. But as these countries digitalize, including Mexico, the worlds start to look closer to each other. That’s ultimately what you see across any other industry, right? You look at social media across the world: it’s the same product. You look at Netflix, the same product. You look at Spotify, the same product. You look at Uber, the same product. Amazon is generally the same product.

Historically, there were a lot of particularities, and the cash part was one specific difference. The future looks much more homogeneous than the past, even for financial services.

If I force you to put your investor hat on and think about fintech writ large, where might there be other opportunities beyond the ones you’re focused on addressing? To borrow the phrase of our great mutual friend Mickey Malka, who said a couple of years ago, “Fintech is dead”—maybe he’s the best fintech investor ever, and now he’s doing less of that and more things in AI, power, and data—how would you frame the global opportunity to invest in fintech businesses and new companies, in startups, versus companies like yours that have the scale to take advantage of a lot of this?

If I think about that battle—if I want to invest in fintech, should I do it in the incumbents, like you, a new incumbent, or in pure startups? What do you think the opportunity set looks like?

I actually asked Mickey this question last week because I saw him spending a lot of time on AI and investing in AI companies. I was like, “Are you done with fintech, really?” I liked his answer: “No, we’re not. We’re just doubling down on the larger neobanks or neofintechs that are now riding the sweet spot between maintaining the ability to transform themselves through AI and having access to these moats of scale, data, brand, and licenses.” He continues to be an investor in us. He continues to be an investor in a lot of other startups.

A lot of other fintechs, yeah.

For the early entrant, I think it’s going to be in areas that are potentially less obvious as an entry path. It becomes a little bit harder, and you probably have applications on top of AI models. There’ll be specific applications as an entry path, I think. But building a consumer brand with hundreds of millions of customers at this stage, unless you come up with something completely fundamentally different, is going to be harder.

Can you talk about this big announcement that you just made, why you’re so excited about it, and what it means for the business?

I think most people still identify Nubank as a Brazil or Latin America neobank, which is what we are. But when you go back in time and look at our seed deck in 2013 and the way we thought about the opportunity, there’s nothing specific about Brazil or Latin America in the thesis. The thesis is that global retail banking will be transformed by digitally native companies because digitally native companies can solve the problems of financial services better. Those problems are cost, access, and intelligence.

We’re excited about this announcement as we launch the US as a market. We also announced that we’re launching a stablecoin-backed account in upwards of 35 different countries, because this is the beginning of continuing to play out a thesis that is global in nature. We think about our past 13 years as proving this model in Latin America and the countries where we operate, and I think we did. We’re now the largest private financial institution on the entire continent. We have the highest Net Promoter Score.

From a profitability perspective, we have the highest return on equity in a country like Brazil. We did all the checks, and now is the moment to continue executing this multi-decade vision of taking this model global. So we’re very excited.

The U.S. is obviously a very competitive market. It is the biggest market in the world. There are a lot of very strong neobanks and fintechs in the U.S. that we’ll be competing with. But in reality, it’s a market that’s still dominated by big incumbent banks. While there are a lot of fintechs, when you look at where the market is, it’s still dominated by a few incumbent banks and some community banks.

Most of the banking in the U.S. is still happening through bank branches, as if most of video and media were happening through Blockbuster. They still need to charge a lot, and they need to pay effectively zero yield to be able to fund this physical infrastructure. There are a lot of comparative advantages that we bring to bear, like our ability to do credit for the mass market and our ability to do payments globally. There’s also a feature that we announced that gives us the ability to make customers fanatically loyal, bringing a consumer-obsessed culture to an environment and industry where customers just don’t really care about their banking relationships, especially in the U.S. mass market.

What do you think is going to be the hardest part about competing in the U.S.?

Building a very strong brand will be one of the hardest things. U.S. consumers mention brand as one of the key attributes when choosing banks, and it’s not cheap. We want to do it in a way where we obviously have a lot of financial resources, being a very profitable institution, but we want to do it more smartly and capital-efficiently than simply coming in and investing a ton in marketing all over the place.

Building an organic brand in an environment where there are so many strong banking brands might be one of the most difficult challenges we’ll face. That’s critical to building trust with consumers because we want to become their primary bank account. That’s what we aspire to do.

If I had every buy-side analyst that covers Nubank here, and you got to convince them how they should think about your business through financial metrics—you mentioned return on equity earlier—is that the metric you would point them to as the barometer of how well you’re doing? Are there other financial metrics that you would hope investors use to assess how good a job you’re doing? How do you think about that?

Growth in the number of customers, Net Promoter Score, and the cost to acquire each customer. When you’re figuring out whether you’ve hit a vein, whether you’re growing in a way that means you’ve found an underserved market, and whether you’re able to offer a product that nobody else was able to offer, those are key metrics: number of users and NPS.

But are you doing it at a sustainable pace? You can buy your way into growth by spending a lot of money on marketing, so what’s the equation there? What’s your LTV to CAC? And ultimately, what’s your return on equity? Return on equity exemplifies the advantages that the business model could have. When you compare us with the big incumbent banks in the countries where we operate, we don’t charge a lot of fees. We literally charge no fees, so we have less revenue, but we end up with a return on equity that’s 2 to 3 times theirs. That basically means you’ve found a cost-structure advantage. You’ve found a way to offer a higher-quality product at a much lower cost. If you find that, generally through technology, then you’ve found yourself a moat. You’ve found yourself a comparative advantage, especially in markets like banking that are in some ways commoditized.

I think you’d also look at that combination of return on equity. Talking about the U.S., one of the most interesting, least appreciated aspects is that by now, some U.S. incumbent banks have higher returns on equity and are more profitable than the emerging-market banks we compete with. That means your margin is my opportunity, right? The typical Amazon view, or investor view, of the incredible ROE that even incumbent banks have—even on top of the huge amount of cost they’re using to provide their product—is that there’s a significant opportunity to undercut.

Who are your biggest influences? I know you’ve learned from some of the great entrepreneurs and some of the great investors out there. When you think about your whole Nubank chapter of your life, who are the people that jump out as having most influenced how you think about something? Who are they, and why did they influence you the way they did?

We began the company as a reaction to consumer pain: I realized how bad and painful consumer banking in Brazil was, and then realized that this was a proxy for what the majority of the country was actually feeling. We’ll always admire companies that are very consumer-obsessed, that know that to win they need to offer the best product and best service in a way that creates almost fanatical loyalty.

From that perspective, we were very inspired by Amazon. From the very beginning, Amazon was the more traditional consumer-obsessed company, and we studied how they built this customer obsession and how they thought about it. We studied Disney very carefully because it’s a company that wants to create magical experiences. Maybe it’s not super obvious, but even with a boring banking product, we want to create a magical experience for customers.

What did you learn from Disney? That’s an interesting one.

I think it’s the communication you create with consumers, and simply the magic aspect of it. When you enter a Disney park, the setup of the entry path you take is almost like you’re entering a kingdom. The service you get from everybody who works inside Disney, how they treat the young children, the spectacles they create, and the fireworks they create—they’re really thinking about how to create a product that’s magical in nature.

That’s something we push our teams on: for something as boring as sending money, how do you create a magical experience out of that? The welcome kit we’re sending to our customers here in the U.S., when they receive that welcome kit with their first credit card or first debit card, is an attempt to create a magical experience in that moment. We’re very inspired by that.

The customer-obsession thing sounds obvious now. Maybe Amazon really pioneered this way of thinking. Nothing’s for free. What are the trade-offs associated with being so customer-focused? It’s become a popular thing to say, and the temptation is to say, “Yeah, everyone’s customer-focused to varying degrees.” But what does that actually mean? What’s the hard part about being so customer-focused?

I think the hard part, as with any cultural value, is to do what you say you do. You see it in any company that has very nice-sounding values on the wall. Then the question is: are they actually executing on those values, especially when it’s inconvenient? Most companies will be consumer-obsessed, but then when they suddenly see themselves making more money because they invented a new fee, it’s, “Oh, well, maybe I’m less consumer-obsessed here, and I want to make a little bit more money.” You start prioritizing the short term over the long term.

In the entire AI debate, you don’t hear that much conversation about customers. There’s so much energy and focus around how to use AI for efficiency and optimization, and much less conversation about consumer obsession. This is where humans are still beating AI. The biggest complexity is prioritizing this value even when it’s inconvenient to do so, especially from a financial perspective. But the AI bro, the tech bro, is much more enamored today with the technology—

Mm-hmm.

—versus the consumer experience itself.

I’m really curious how you think about your own product, literally the thing I see on my phone, versus your own agent, versus new agents being introduced in the marketplace. Do you think there’s a world where it actually matters that your marketing is to agents more than it is to humans? How do you think about that world, or whether to provide your own interactive agents versus a product that you’re clicking around in on your phone?

I think agents become a customer segment as important as consumers, and you have to provide a product for the agent, market to the agent, and do SEO for the agent, right?

Seems so weird, right?

It’s the same way we have an under-18 segment and a small-business segment. This is an entire segment, and we’re treating it as a segment. We have a team dedicated to understanding that segment and the needs of that consumer, which is the agent. So that will be equally important, but I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be 100% of that decision, because I think still, specifically in banking—and this might be different in other segments—in banking, you go back to trust and branding. The human will want to know where their life savings are deposited, and there’s the human aspect of that.

You’re still marketing to the human, and you’re still building trust with humans. You’ve got to do both. Also, for some products, there’ll be more delegation, and for some products there’ll be less delegation. Specifically in areas like Brazil, where we have 65% of the entire country as customers, we have the opportunity to be that agent to the consumer. The customer is coming directly to our app and asking our agent for support, specifically with financial products.

And we can do it in a way where it’s actually an open agent. It even provides products from third-party banks and financial institutions. So there’ll be a mix of this happening at the same time.

If I think back to our original conversation 5 years ago, and you think about yourself—how you’ve changed the most in 5 years, or what surprised you the most in the past 5 years—what comes to mind?

5. Reinventing The Company With AI

One big change has been this view. Around 5 years ago, everybody was working remotely, including us. Over the years, we’ve realized how important it is to spend meaningful time in person in an office. I think that’s a bit counterintuitive, even compared with where you were 5 years ago. In a perhaps counterintuitive way, AI increases the argument for spending more time in person, because increasingly, the work AI can do is more or less the work people could do individually at home. The individual at home will be competing with AIs, and we’ll lose that battle.

But the work around collaboration and coordination in person, which is what humans need to do, needs to happen inside the office. We went from remote to hybrid, and we’re spending significantly more time in the office. That has been one change.

I think the second part is how the organization changes through AI specifically. We started paying attention to the technology, but when we tested it, it just didn’t really work. For example, we use a lot of Clojure as a programming language, and through 2025, we kept using a lot of the models for programming in Clojure, and they wouldn’t work. They were really awful. As our most experienced engineer said, “This is not gonna work.”

We kept testing, and Opus 4.6 came in in December of ’25. That was the moment a lot of people suddenly realized, “No, this actually works.” We didn’t catch that moment—the switch in December. We only caught it 60 days later, when a couple of my partners and I were in California meeting with a bunch of early-stage entrepreneurs. We realized something fundamental had happened, and we started testing a lot of the new GPT models for Clojure. We said, “Holy shit, this is actually working out. It can do Clojure very, very well.”

Those 60 days made a huge difference between us and best-in-class companies that were using AI. We went back to Brazil and went into a kind of code red across the entire organization. We took a step back, and we’re almost in the process of reinventing the entire organization. We mapped out 120 different workflows across the organization. Coding is one of them, but we looked at everything from product design and know-your-customer flows to internal audit, compliance, and regulatory capital management. We reinvented 120 workflows natively using AI tools.

We had to create a lot of eval infrastructure to measure how these workflows were being reinvented at every step. I would say we’re more advanced in some areas and less advanced in others, but the entire organization is being reinvented. That’s what’s so exciting about this moment: we get to reinvent the way we do things with AI technology. Frankly, a lot of the time, you see huge productivity gains that aren’t even because of AI. There’s always an opportunity to actively reinvent the way you do things, and if we did it now without AI, we’d find productivity gains.

But AI augments the possibility of doing that, and creates opportunities for larger spans of control, fewer managers, and much more visibility. I personally went from having 1 direct report to 20 over that period because it just increases your ability to operate horizontally. There are fewer layers in the organization. We went from 10 layers to 5, so the organization became very horizontal. This is a bolt of adrenaline for the organization in terms of our ability to execute, too.

Can you say more about what made that possible? What was happening when you had 1 direct report and 10 layers, and what’s happening now with 20 direct reports and 5 layers? I’m interested in the day-to-day tactics. I’m sure most CEOs would rather have a flatter organization with a higher bandwidth of information. So how does it work? What changed?

I think this is partly AI-related and partly related to the way we managed our organization for a period of time. As we started scaling significantly, going from a million customers to 140 million, the organization developed some inertia and started adding layers. I think every fast-scaling organization goes through the same process because you see things breaking all over the place. You have all these growth pains, and the easy answer when things are on fire is to add managers to solve the fire immediately. Through a natural, organic process, we ended up very verticalized, with a structure that didn’t give a lot of visibility.

Part of what AI creates is the ability to take a step back and reinvent everything about your business. I think this was a catalyst for us to think about the way we were structured.

Tobi Lütke talked about this: he can now ask the company things because AI can tell him things, so the separation between him and ground truth based on data is gone. I like this idea of the dictator’s dilemma: as someone gets more powerful at the top of an organization, it’s harder for them to know what’s real and what’s true. How do you stay up to date on ground truth, or what’s happening inside the business, when it’s gotten so big?

At every part of that chain, there’s a possibility for a message to get distorted, and you get a distorted vision by the time it navigates 10 different layers. Simply by removing a lot of those layers, you’re much closer to the ground truth. You also reduce a lot of those layers by having information systems that have access to everything happening across the organization—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 in launching certain products, or about metrics or features. You get directly to the ground truth. There’s also a mentality of actively going directly to the people doing the work. It’s very comfortable, as the organization takes shape, to respect the channels. You’ll see this in bigger organizations: you can’t jump a manager and ask a question of somebody who’s actually doing the work. There’s a specific chain of command that needs to be respected.

That’s more related to traditional organizations. Your approach as a CEO is more like, “No, I want to go talk to anybody I have a question for,” and there’s no need to respect a chain of command. Literally, I’ll go to whoever has access to the best information if I have a question, or we’ll problem-solve together if I see something that isn’t moving. So I think it’s partly technology, and partly a culture and attitude of being willing to be deeply integrated into the organization.

How do you think all of this will affect your company’s—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, help them get better, or move people on who aren’t as good? Have you thought about the performance culture and management side of the data and technology yet?

I think it’s going to be transformational, and I’m surprised so few people have discussed how AI is going to reinvent HR in organizations. If you look at the way it is today in most organizations, your manager gives you feedback every 6 months and tells you what you’re doing well and what you’re not doing well. Generally, there’s a lot of recency bias, so it’s not really 6 months; it’s the last 30 days. It’s what you did in the last 30 days that was good or not. Generally, it’s not very actionable. It’s like, “You’re doing this well; you’re not doing this well. Maybe you should do better.” Imagine that’s the type of feedback you’d give an Olympic athlete.

Mm.

That would be crazy. You’d never be able to succeed. Olympic athletes have somebody who’s literally coaching them every day and providing feedback. That’s the opportunity AI is ultimately going to create for every single person in an organization: Olympic-athlete-type coaching.

What we’re building at Nubank in our HR operating system is that every day, depending on your role—whether you’re an engineer, designer, or product manager—you should be able to get feedback from AI. If your AI copilot, when you’re coding, is reviewing your pull requests, it can tell you not only how you’re using these tools but how you could use them better. It’s very actionable and specific to what you’re doing. If you’re a designer, it gives you feedback on how you’re doing your job and how you could do it better.

If you’re a manager, you have very little information right now, especially if you’re managing a lot of people. That’s the other thing about these large spans of control. There’s this sense that you have to have one-on-ones with every single person during the week. Those one-on-ones tend to be very low-information-density exchanges. A manager who has access to all this information and instrumentation can now see in real time how every person on the team is doing, and it allows them to improve what they’re doing.

How do you stay up to speed on AI capabilities? Who are the people you rely on? What do you like to read? I feel like you need to time-box it every day. You could get an hour to read the updates or something. It’s like SportsCenter for business. How do you do it?

I spend a lot of time on X. I think that’s where you’re seeing a lot of the development, too. I have an agent that collates and summarizes a lot of the developments and what’s going on in detail. I block specific time in my calendar to use these tools and build products.

This is something I hadn’t done for a very long time. I coded a non-custodial crypto app, for example. That’s something we’ve discussed at Nubank for a very long time, and I just went in and did a project. We ask all of our senior managers to build products every quarter, or actual software and products—

Mm.

—so that we’re integrated and very aware of what’s going on. I don’t think the answer is necessarily that I should be spending 70% of my time coding. There are better people who will be much more productive coding than I am, but I think it’s important for everybody in the organization not only to read, but also to actively use the tools to understand how fast the technology is moving.

If you think really carefully about it, how have your motivations to keep doing this, fighting, and building changed over the course of the Nubank journey? Thinking back to the start, you and I talked about your original motivations last time. I mean, not just the business opportunity, but your personal sources of drive. How has that evolved, and what’s it like today?

I’m motivated by impact, by making it count, by doing something that has meaning and has some kind of impact. I went through a phase, even with Nubank, where I started thinking, “Is there more I should be doing beyond Nubank?” I think all founders get started on a company, the company then grows significantly, and then you start asking yourself, “What else could I be doing?”

Ultimately, after about a year or two of that analysis, I came out the other side realizing that there’s nothing else I can imagine myself doing that could have more impact than taking Nubank from where it is today and making it much larger—going from 3 countries to 100 countries, or from 100 million customers to a billion customers. Think of what this means in terms of impacting financial services and giving billions of people around the world access to financial services. And with that impact out there, there’s impact internally, too. It’s about how I can understand myself through bigger and newer challenges, and how I can develop as a leader to motivate an organization with big ambitions that’s facing big technology shifts.

With AI, you can either decide to stay behind or stay in front. I think this technology shift forces every organization to ask, “Which side of this disruption do I want to be on?” I find that I’m more of a wartime general than a peacetime general, so when a disruption or a change in the world happens, it suddenly becomes a source of motivation. I get more energized to continue executing that mission.

What’s an example of understanding yourself better because of growth? In what ways has that happened?

One of the questions I had personally as I scaled the business was whether we would need to bring in more professional managers at some point. I hadn’t managed anybody before starting Nubank, and then suddenly found myself the CEO of one of the largest banks in Latin America, asking myself, “What does the organization need right now? Do we need to hire much more experienced managers?”

We did. We hired a lot of external talent because I concluded, or thought, that I was going to need that. But I quickly realized that actually wasn’t what the organization needed. What the organization needed was more of what I had already brought into it: clear leadership, motivation, a willingness to think really big and dream very big, and to get people excited about doing something that feels impossible at the beginning.

Once something clicks and you realize, “No, this is the right answer for me and for the organization,” then I can continue doing what I’m doing with much more confidence. Especially when there are changes and shifts, there was always a latent question: “Am I pushing too hard? Am I asking too much from the team? Is this the right pace?” After 13 years of doing this, and becoming a little more confident, the answer is, “Yes, I’m pushing enough.”

It’s my job to push very hard, dream very big, and shoot very high. Then the organization will react and push back if needed. But it’s helpful to have somebody actively pushing the boundaries of what perhaps the company is ready to do.

What’s the hardest part of doing that for a long period of time?

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, you think, “Am I the right person to lead this organization?” Through some thinking, experiences, and feedback, you have to answer that question for yourself at some point, and answer it definitively. Maybe for some reason you’re not, but probably you are.

That doesn’t mean the founder will necessarily have all the answers or all the skills. You’ll need to continue bringing in people who add a lot of complementary skills. But for me, it was about getting past that phase of having a voice in my head asking, “Are you the right CEO for the business?” It’s about making the shift between founder and CEO, because generally you’ll see founders with both titles. But they’re very different functions. The founder and the CEO are very different functions. They don’t necessarily fit together.

What’s the key energy of each?

The founder is impatient, with a huge sense of urgency. The founder wants to run very, very fast, and will move extremely fast. The CEO needs to be more patient and more systematic in how decisions are made, and will generally need to bring much more systems thinking into scaling the organization. Sometimes those things conflict. If you have to be impatient on one end and patient on the other, there might be conflicts.

Generally, you’d think CEOs are better managers. Founders don’t tend to be good managers. They don’t have a lot of patience or willingness to do one-on-ones and sit down and provide coaching to a team. They just want to run. A lot of the time, they tend to be much more ICs—individual contributors—than managers. CEOs tend to be better managers because you have to build systems and think more from a systems perspective.

I think the key for me, though, has been realizing that you can redesign the CEO and founder roles in different ways, too, and that it’s possible to do both. It’s about being a little more patient when you need to be. But generally, you want to maintain more of the founder than the CEO. I think that’s why founder-led companies continue to outperform for decades. If you have to choose, you choose more of the founder than the CEO mode, especially in environments where there are big technology shifts and the founder’s advantages and assets become more obvious than the advantages of the CEO.

What was your lowest-confidence moment personally in the entire history of the business? How did you get through it?

I think you go through a lot of different phases. Scaling a business is hard, especially because you’re consistently making decisions about situations you don’t really know. For example, I wanted to build a technology company, but I wasn’t an engineer myself, so I needed to hire great CTOs and build a great technology organization. How did I know how to pick a great CTO at that point if I didn’t have the experience or credibility?

There’s a lot of expertise specific to financial services and credit. I questioned a lot of the decisions I made about building the team, asking myself, “Do we need to bring in somebody with way more experience from a big bank or a big organization?” For a period of time, it’s this imposter syndrome asking you, “Are you the right driver of the car as it becomes more complex and goes faster and faster and faster and faster?”

Hmm.

What was the most emotional moment in the history of the business for you?

Passing a number of different incumbent banks in Brazil was very emotional because, for 10 years, all we heard again and again, especially from the local experts, was that it was impossible to compete with any bank, that we were going to get crushed, that we were going to die, that these were the most trusted brands in the ecosystem, and that we had no shot at being successful. Becoming the largest private bank in the entire country was incredible. That was emotional in terms of what we were able to achieve from a point of scale.

Personally, I was born in Colombia, and I had to leave when I was 8 because of the security situation as I was growing up. I had to move to Costa Rica, and Colombia was then our country number 3. The moment I was able to launch Nubank in Colombia, which we did at a big event with the president of the country, was very emotional as well. It was a bit of coming back home and delivering a product and a service that I thought was going to be very great for the country, in an environment where I was being received by my people. It was videocast, and there were 100,000 people connected to the launch of Nubank in Colombia. It was very emotional, too. It was very exciting.

With all this experience now running the business, how would you define great leadership? I'm especially interested in the subtle points of what defines a great leader, in your opinion.

I think first is vision. You have to be able to see something that few people see, a world that is not as obvious right now. With the massive information overload that we all live in, it's increasingly harder to have a differentiated point of view about something—about your industry, your company, or how things are going to move. You have to have some kind of differentiated vision about the future.

But then you have to be able to sell that vision, and selling is about inspiring people. A lot of the time, that vision will be very hard or will almost feel impossible. The natural reaction of most people when they are presented with an impossible vision is to push back and declare it unrealistic: “It's not realistic that this is going to happen.” What is not realistic? Look at every single meaningful development in the history of the world. At some point, somebody defined it as unrealistic. You have to be able to sell that vision in a way that motivates a lot of people. That drives followership and motivation, but then you have to be able to be a good listener and understand that sometimes you're actually going to be wrong.

The vision that you have might not be fully complete. There's a mode where you go against the consensus and completely declare it wrong, and you're the complete revolutionary: nothing about the consensus makes any sense, and you will reinvent absolutely everything. The other mode is that you're consumed by consensus. You think about progress as unrealistic, and things will be the way they are today.

What's hard about being a great leader, I think, is navigating in the middle. The consensus or status quo exists because, from an evolutionary perspective, that vision of the world competed with other visions of the world and won. The world we see today was superior to other possible worlds that could have happened. There are elements of that status quo that exist for a reason, and you have to understand what those elements are and that they will continue to be here. But you also have to fight conventional wisdom and see which elements need to be changed.

I think leadership is about knowing what doesn't have to change and pushing to change the things that do. That's a combination of conviction, active listening, and humility: knowing that you might not have all the answers and that you're going to need to actively change your mind. Combining all those different factors is pretty critical for good leadership.

If we think about the next 5 years for Nubank specifically, I'd love you to paint what you think is the bear case for the business—the case you worry about and are actively making sure doesn't happen. Then, with my rose-colored glasses on, I'd love to hear the best possible story for Nubank over the next 5 years, the two ends of the spectrum from your perspective.

The bear case is that we're in these 2 countries in Latin America, we've completely saturated them, and growth declines. We haven't really been able to find any other growth alternatives from a customer perspective. We've—I mean, we have 65% of Brazil. Very soon, we're going to run out of Brazilians. Ideally, we'd see the birth rate in Brazil increase, with people having more children, but that's not happening, so we're going to run out of Brazilians. We didn't succeed in internationalizing. We ended up being restricted to these 3 countries, and growth saturated. That's the bear case.

Part of that would also mean that we could not take advantage of a lot of the AI opportunities, which also enable growth, and so that's one reason why we're not able to internationalize. The bull case is the opposite. We truly took advantage of this thesis we have about how much market share is going to be transferred from incumbent banks to digital-native companies over the next 2 to 3 decades, and how that is going to be accelerated by technology shifts like real-time payment systems, open finance, and AI. We're able to ride those tailwinds from technology shifts, and we were able to execute through a multi-country platform. A global vision of Nubank takes us to 100-plus countries over the next few decades.

We were able to solve a lot of these big problems that we still think will be solved. Three billion people don't have access to credit. Cash is becoming digital. More people need access to banking. If we have this cost structure advantage versus our competitors, versus the industry players that still own 90% of the $10 trillion profit pool—if we have a cost structure that is 50x theirs, and this is pre-AI—then that means we're able to pass a lot of the efficiency back to the customer via higher yields, lower fees, a better experience, fully digitalized services, integrating advice into our products, and truly taking advantage of these internationalization opportunities. So that is the bull case.

When I had you on last time, 5 years ago, I already asked you my traditional closing question, so I have a different one for you today. Across Nubank and the incredible experience you've had building it so far, what is the most interesting lesson you've learned about entrepreneurship?

How to quickly ignore the imposter syndrome, and how the fact that you are the person who had the vision and the energy to build something out of nothing—to give birth to it—already gives you such a high level of care for that company that it will make you the right leader for a very long time. I don't think anybody in the world cares as much for this company as I do, to a level that's almost visceral. You're a father, right? You have children. Nobody will ever care as much about this company, about its success, as I will. That will make you put so much energy and focus into making it successful that it will ultimately make you the right leader for the organization for a very long time, independently of your expertise or your knowledge or whether you have the right experience. Just that insight, just that energy, will make you the right person.

It seems like you could decompose that into having more faith in yourself and being really persnickety about the vision you want to go work on. If it's not something that's coming deep from your heart, from your gut, you won't get the benefit of this thing you just laid out. Do you think those are the right 2 parts of that really interesting insight?

Yeah, especially the second part you mentioned around the mission. It's a luxury and a blessing to find a mission that you truly are excited about, because then that will really make you go the long way. Scaling a company won't be easy. It will be much more painful than anybody anticipates, and if you don't have the level of conviction for the mission, it will just be harder to go.

How would you encourage other people to do a good job on that search? If someone's searching for a mission that's perfect for them, any advice you'd give them, or any sign that they've got the right one?

There's a level of serendipity and luck there. There's a level of searching, listening carefully, and feeling that this is a project, that this is a problem you truly care about. If you really care about it, you're not sleeping because you're thinking about it. You cannot imagine your life continuing if you don't decide to tackle it.

I think AI makes it harder, not easier. Just because the bar to start a company is now so much lower, you're probably just going to pursue problems that are easier to solve. I think that's why some of the best founders we're seeing right now are going for the impossible, truly. There's this shift now into hardware and space and things that seem completely impossible, because you're actively looking for opportunities that will be harder and unique to you, that you'll come to believe only you can really solve.

Incredible place to close. What an awesome closing thought. Interesting lesson. Thank you, as always, so much for your time.

Thank you so much, Patrick. It was awesome.