How are we doing, guys? We are right now for the first time in my life here in Brazil. Before you start nagging at home that I'm here in Brazil, I've already accepted it. I came to see these lands in person. Since you guys keep pestering about Brazil, I came to see it for myself. The only difference...
Brother, did you see or not? Brother, very well, thank God I made it here, brother.
Look, look, welcome. I am here with David Vélez. I didn't expect you to arrive so suddenly. We are in one of your Nubank offices, which, well, I see that over there there are some...
Yes, on this street we have three buildings, but this is the main one.
Okay. Here we are, here we are. And it seems amazing to me because I've been here for about three hours more or less, and I've been walking around the office, and I feel there is something very welcoming, youthful colors, and I see many young people working here.
Of course. Yes, yes, yes.
There is something about Nubank that has to do with youth, with young people.
The average age inside is 27 years old. We have people from 17, 18 doing internships, up to, logically, all ages.
Of course. And these are offices where employees are; it has nothing to do with, like, customers don't come here.
It's employees, but the interesting thing is that since we don't have physical branches or anything crazy, it happens that we have 120 million customers in Brazil, so every day there are two or three customers who come here wanting to talk to someone, clearly. And the team had to create a protocol to see how to serve those customers, because we don't have... there's no, no, no physical cash, no ATMs, there's nothing. So...
That's what we have to talk about now because that is just too crazy. I mean, you're telling me that all customer service is virtual.
100% virtual. We are the largest private bank in Brazil now, and you won't find a single coin in this place or a single piece of paper money. It is all completely digital.
Let's go in. Come on, go ahead.
Come on. Well, we are with David Vélez, who I imagine many people know, a very well-known person in Colombia, very well-known in the world, who has achieved great things, and obviously, it's an incredible success story. Imagine how everyone is doing. I think this is one of the biggest streams I have ever done in my life.
Well, man, no, I've seen you a lot and... and congratulations and thanks for the visit. We came here to this building back in, like, 2016. We started the company in a little house here in São Paulo.
A house. The house was the size of this place here,
And we ended up with 30 people working in that house, and then we moved to a bigger building.
We kept scaling up. The idea was to be in that building for about 5 years, and in six months it was full. Whew! And I remember coming into this building thinking, man, how, how are we going to pay the rent? Ah, well, this was the first one. Uh, after those three we came here and we needed to make a bigger leap for all the people.
And I spent two weeks without sleeping, thinking, how are we going to pay the rent for this one? Will we be capable of making that leap and taking the risk? Because that is the hardest part. You just jump into the ring and look at this. And today, well, we have a bit of the history here on this wall. We started in 2013. 2013. Here it is. I started the company, raising capital, and then I went and looked for my co-founders, Cristina and Edward. Cris is Brazilian, Edward is American. I was the typical outsider. They asked me, "What is a Colombian doing in Brazil wanting to start a bank?" Never worked for a bank. Never even had a credit card.
It's just too much. Yes, it's a very strange story because, in the end, you didn't have that connection, right?
I was, I mean, I could see the opportunity because I was an outsider, I was outside the system. Sometimes it helps a lot to be a foreigner and look at the system with fresh eyes to question the way things are, right? Because if you're in that day-to-day routine, you don't see the opportunities, but once we started executing, I needed someone local who understood the system from the inside, and that's when Cris came in, and we always saw ourselves as a technology company, not a bank, and she brought that focus on the technology side and helped us build the technology.
And good allies, I imagine, because in the end, looked at...
Tremendous allies who are still with us in different areas. This is the little house where we basically worked. Ah, this is the little house. We were there for almost two years. Uh, Edward, my co-founder, lived on the second floor. One of the first programmers lived with him. He worked 20 hours. The same programmer was there, the same guy with his boss working, living on the second floor and working on the first floor, and they worked 20 hours a day. We would leave and Edward would be at the computer programming, and we'd come back the next day and Edward was still there at the computer programming.
