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 over here in Brazil, I've already accepted it; I came to see these lands in person. Since you talk so much about Brazil, I came to see it myself. The only difference, brother, are you good or not?
Brother. Very well, thank God. It hit me right away, brother. Look, look, welcome.
Hey, I'm with David Velez; I didn't expect to run into him so suddenly. We are in one of your Nubank offices, which, well, I see there's a little bit over there too.
Yes, on this street, we have three buildings, but this is the main one.
Okay. No, we are here, we are here. And it seems really cool because I've been here for about three hours now, and I've been walking around the office, and I feel there's something very welcoming, youthful colors, and I see a lot of young people working here.
Is there something about Nubank that has to do with youth, with young people?
The average age is 27 years old within... There are people from 17, 18 doing internships, up to, logically, other ages.
Sure. And are these 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 like that, the thing is we already have 120 million customers in Brazil. So, every day there are two or three customers who come here, they want to talk to someone, and people had to create a protocol to see how to serve those customers because we don't have... well, there's no physical money, there are no ATMs, there's nothing. So,
we have to talk about that right now because that is just too crazy. I mean, you're telling me that all customer service is completely virtual?
100% virtual. We are the largest private bank in Brazil now, and you won't find a single coin in this place. Here, not a single paper bill. It is all completely digital.
Let's go in. Come on, right this way.
Come on. Well, we're with David Velez, who I imagine many people know, a very well-known person in Colombia, very well-known in the world. He has achieved such great things and obviously his story of overcoming obstacles. Imagine how everyone is feeling. I think this is one of the biggest streams I've ever done in my life.
Well, man, no. I've seen you a lot and congratulations and thank you for the visit. This, we came to this building here in like 2016. We started the company in a little house here in Sao Paulo, a little house, a house. The house was the size of this place here, tiny. And we had 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 like 5 years, and in 6 months it was full. Whoa! And I remember coming into this building saying, damn, how are we going to pay the rent? Oh, right, this was the first one. Eh, after those three, we came here and we needed to take a bigger leap for all the people. Oh. And no, and I spent two weeks without sleeping thinking, how are we going to pay the rent for this one? Are we capable of making that leap and taking the risk? That's the most, well, the hardest part. You have to jump into the ring and look at that, and today, well, no, here we have a bit of the history here on this, on this, on this wall. We started in 2013. 13. Here it is. Eh, I went, I started the company raising capital and that's where I went and looked for my co-founders, Cristina and Edward. Cris is Brazilian, Edward is American. I was the typical outsider. They told me, what is a Colombian doing in Brazil thinking about starting a bank? Never worked for a bank. Never had a credit card.
It's just too much. Yes, it's a very strange story because, well, in the end, you didn't have that connection, right?
I was, I mean, I could see the opportunity because I was from the outside, I was, I was outside the system. Sometimes it helps a lot to be a foreigner and look at the system with fresh eyes to, to question the way things are, right? Because if you're in that, in that day-to-day, you don't see the opportunities, but once we started executing, I needed someone who was local, who understood the system from the inside, and that's where 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 create the technology, and good allies, I can't imagine, because in the end they have determined... Tremendous, tremendous allies that still remain with us in different areas. This is the little house where we more or less worked. Ah, this is the little house. We were there for almost two years. Edward, my co-founder, lived on the second floor. One of the first programmers lived with him. He worked 20 hours.
