The MINDSET Shift That Made Me a Billionaire (Guilherme Benchimol) | Jota Jota Podcast #284

I almost went broke a few times, I started with R$10,000 in seed capital, and I never looked for any kind of shortcut.

If you have a business that depends on you, you don't have a business. In my opinion, you have a turbocharged job.

A leader who starts becoming more arrogant, people don't want to exchange ideas with him. So the more success, the more complex your company becomes. Slow is fast at the beginning. Slow is fast.

Being intense is not being aggressive, as long as you are intense about a thesis that stands on its own.

In my opinion, you invest in who you trust. You trust who you know.

It's hard to stop being who you were and what worked for you, because you succeeded that way. But at the size you're at, that's going to start going wrong. Then you have to learn to become someone else. That's why most entrepreneurs reach a point and stay stagnant, because they lacked the courage to transform themselves again.

Thank you very much, João, up to here.

Simple.

I'm like that with everything, man. I think, I think I can modestly say I go straight, straight to the point without beating around the bush.

Always been like that. Yeah, I think, I think I became like that. I think I learned to be super objective. I think when you're an entrepreneur who starts having some success, I think Darwin only lets you climb the chain if you, if you go straight to the point, right? So, consistent net profit, right? So, revenue growing faster than expenses over time, increasing margin, increasingly satisfied customers. That's what...

Discipline, man. I think that's the word of the game. And I think I learned that over the years. When I was younger, I was a, a messier kid. But when you understand how things work and you learn to plan and you learn to have focus, then in the end, having that ability to do what needs to be done is what, for me, is what changes the game. It's not talent. It's important to see it, it's important to build the plan, but the challenge is in the daily execution, and for that it's important that you be very organized and do every day what needs to be done, which I notice a good part of these people spend their time badly. So, so you knowing how to manage time, knowing what you, what you want and, therefore, what you're not going to do, and you being very resilient in that process with discipline, in my opinion, is what, is what turns impossible things into possible.

That energy is very good, right? I never imagined... I'm a person with a more shy essence, right? So I never imagined being a communicator, I was, I was a stutterer in childhood, right? So, right? It wasn't something I imagined myself mastering, the roles, leading and so on. But it's, but it's gratifying to see how much I maybe inspire entrepreneurs in Brazil. So, for maybe having started an unlikely story and gotten where I am and having the feeling that I'm just starting, right? I think that makes a lot of people believe in themselves and think that there's a path, right? So, I almost went broke a few times, I started with R$10,000 in seed capital. So, I think all of that, and I never looked for any kind of shortcut. So, I think, I think in Brazil there are many stories of entrepreneurs who got there, but the wrong way. And I'm very proud to say that I never did anything wrong. I've made plenty of mistakes, but mistakes within the four lines and not illicit ones, right? So I think that you believing that you can have success with honor and with pride, I think that's it. I think that maybe that reaches people and makes them believe in Brazil, in their future, in their companies, always believing there's a path. So I think, I think I end up being an inspiring story, right? And I think that's, that's something Brazil lacks. I think we often cultivate the wrong heroes.

Right, follow him. We see XP really putting energy, focus, assets into João. What's behind that, what are the values you recognize that he has and that you want to promote?

Yeah, I believe the big gap Brazil lacks is being a country with a strong culture. So when we, when we think about countries that succeeded more, we think of the United States, there's a clear culture of entrepreneurship. When we think of Japan, there's the culture of honor. When we think of Germany, the culture of precision, right? Here in Brazil it's the culture of the 'jeitinho' (the workaround), right? So I think there's a silver bullet for Brazil, which is for us to set a standard of behavior, of performance, of quality, not of doing things kind of, kind of halfway, right? So, in a way, when we start sponsoring an athlete like João, who I hope will be a champion, because he's very young, he's just starting out, competing against foreigners who have much more infrastructure, who have much more of that established sports culture and so on. So someone who with a lot of resilience keeps winning and raises the country's flag abroad, that makes us believe more in Brazil, that makes us believe in the country, right? And I think, I think that we try to change this wrong behavior a bit, because I think, I think Brazilians have this syndrome that we can't get there. I think the more people believe they can get there, the more we'll get there. Exactly. So, so, so telling my story, my entrepreneurship story, João Fonseca and so many other athletes we help, that keeps making us believe that it's possible to win, right, the right way, with a lot of grit, with a lot of resilience. So I think those are the heroes that help us believe more in Brazil. So I think we, we're associated with, with people who win the right way, right?

I was going to talk about that, you guys... Senna, because it's not, it's not just about victory, because there were many athletes who had Senna's or Guga's competence, but it was the way things happened, the messages that came out of their mouths, and there was always that something extra. And I'm sure that older people, right, you're a bit younger than me, you didn't catch Senna, right? You caught, you caught very, very young, 13 years old, 12 years old. 13. Yeah, when he passed away, I was 13. So then we felt super powerful when you got in the car, when there were those Sunday mornings, when it rained, when it rained he would go out on last and win the race. So that makes us believe more in ourselves, because Brazilians have this 'jeitinho' thing, this thing of thinking everyone from outside is better, that we can't do it. So it's important that we have outstanding athletes, entrepreneurs who are outstanding. That creates that inertia that if one made it, I can too. If an athlete made it, I can too. So I think we have to exalt these heroes.

'22. We sponsored in 2018, '22.

Yeah, actually you took the opposite path from me, right? You started as an athlete and became an entrepreneur.

I, I, until I was 15 years old, my life was practically playing tennis. I came, came home one day and said: 'Dad, I want to drop out of school, I want to focus on tennis.' He said: 'Son, I'm glad you want to do that, because today you're going to, you're going to drop tennis.' And my career was ended because I wasn't doing well in school, so I only cared about tennis. My father is a doctor, super studious, so he wanted me to follow a more academic career. But what I really liked was, was playing tennis. But I think a bit of my competitive instinct came, actually a lot of my competitive instinct came from having had a lot of competition stimulus when I was younger. I think that thing of, of stimulating your child to compete in youth, I think that's the best way to teach young people to understand how life works.

You have to have grit, you have to have competitive instinct, right? Life is a competition. I don't know any other school that taught more about emotion management, winning, losing, frustration, competition, coach, long term, discipline, repetition, monotony, routine than sports. It's humility. Humility. Humility is extremely important. Resilience, a lot of discipline and a lot of humility. For me those are the three things that... What are they? Resilience. Resilience. A lot of humility and discipline. Humility. Right. You, you have to stay firm in the long term. You have to be humble, you have to learn from mistakes. You have to get a little smarter every day, understand that a mistake is a gift that makes you smarter and, and maintaining that consistency over the years is what will make you get closer and closer to what you're seeking, right? So, never think you've arrived, always think you're just starting, always think you haven't done anything, and having a, having a team that can, can complement you and also buy into those values.

Well, 2025, right, we did practically R$20 billion in top-line revenue, we did approximately R$5.2 billion in net profit. There are approximately 5 million clients. So those are our big numbers, except that we operate in a segment, right, that's a highly concentrated segment in Brazil. So I think that always inspired me. So, so as an athlete you'll understand this, right? The total... Yeah, R$1.4 trillion in revenue. That's what the financial sector does in revenue. We do R$20 billion in revenue. So, so we're very small, right? From a revenue standpoint, we're, we're more relevant from an investment standpoint. We have almost 10% market share in investments, but in revenue we have 1.5%. I see. And increasingly we're a more complete company. And, but this investment territory is, is the territory where we're more focused, but increasingly we're expanding, expanding this, and increasingly this client who invests with us starts to have a checking account, they have a credit card, they buy insurance, we have our wholesale bank that starts serving entrepreneurs who start growing in credit. So...

No, because, because our strategy, we're a company focused on the public that has money, right? So in Brazil there are 30 million Brazilians who have some kind of savings. So that's our target investor audience. Then this client starts investing with us, we want this client to have an increasingly vertical relationship with XP. Therefore, it's important that we can offer other experiences that make this client concentrate their entire life with us. And that's why you have a checking account, you have a credit card, then the client concentrates their investments and you generate other correlated businesses that give the company scale. So that's, that's a bit of the vision.

But about the characteristics, look, I, that, that I think there's no way you can have success or keep having success if you're not humble, because it's normal, actually it should be normal, right, you have some success, you become more and more self-confident. And think you know more about things, right? And, and I, I think I and my team, right, we increasingly, the more success, the more we understand we have to work harder, the more important it is for us to be in touch with the teams down below, talking with clients, understanding the competition. So if you keep having more and more success and start locking yourself in your castle, which I think is normal, in the sense of, wow, I had success, I know what needs to be done, right? So, we think we know what needs to be done, we believe it's in that direction, but we're always very humble, we, we exchange opinions. So it's normal for us to think one thing today, think another thing tomorrow. And I think that's what keeps us very... a leader who starts becoming more arrogant, people don't want to exchange ideas with him. So the more success, the more complex your company becomes. There are 9,100 employees at the company. So if I'm not very humble, people won't want to talk to me. And in the end that's how you feed on the opportunities in the company. Not just me, but Thiago Malo, the directors, etc., etc. So if you want long-term success, you have to be increasingly humble and you have to believe that you haven't done anything yet, that you're just starting out, because it's common again, you lock yourself in your castle, think you know everything and think you've arrived, right? And that's the beginning of the end, right? So we know how fragile a company is, right? It's very fragile. The difference between being alive and being dead is sometimes one cycle, right?

No, I've always been attentive to that. No, I, I think I always had a humble characteristic of listening. I think my ability, my ability as a leader is actually to bring people together, right? I'm not the smartest, maybe I'm the most skilled at, at connecting people and telling a story and giving a mission, a, a big dream, right? I think that's my... bringing together and... bringing together and showing the direction and getting the best out of each person in the daily grind, right? I think that's, maybe that's been my great characteristic, but I realize when you start a company, you have to be a person, actually I realize that today, I didn't think I was. When you start an initial phase of a company, you have to be a great operator, you have to get your hands dirty, right? You're there executing, operating, etc. And without realizing it, you end up being a person who interferes in everything. And in a way that's a certain arrogance. You know everything, you meddle in everything, you have your direct reports there, but you're smaller and you're a, you're a, you're a doer. So that characteristic gets you from zero to two, three, but that characteristic doesn't get you from three to infinity. Good. Because from three to infinity you have to be more than what I told you about what I am. The person capable of building extraordinary teams, learning to delegate, learning to inspire, learning to get the best out of each human being, learning to demand. Because if you keep being an executor, and again, the executor is in a way arrogant because he meddles in everything, he knows everything, he just knows more than everyone without realizing it, right? I see that today, like, today, today I'm no longer an investment specialist. There are people who know much more about that than I do. Today I consider myself a people specialist.

And, and I think that's the hard part of being an entrepreneur, because you have to keep changing your character. The formula that worked... I agree. isn't the formula that will keep working. At some point the formula changes and you start to become the bottleneck. So, in 2010, in 2010 I became, I became the bottleneck because I had a lot of success being an executor. The company went from zero up to 2010, which was when we had a foreign fund come in as our partner. But I was that tractor, like every entrepreneur who starts from scratch, you're a tractor, otherwise you don't get there. Except, except then you mold yourself to be this, to be this, this character, so to speak, right? And it's hard to stop being who you were and what worked, because you succeeded that way. Except, except at the size you're at, that's going to start going wrong. Then you have to learn to be someone else. And it's super hard to abandon what you did well at the top. No, abandon at the top what you did well and throw yourself into what you don't know. Total discomfort zone. Total. But it's, it's because of that, it's because of that that most entrepreneurs reach a point and they, they stay stagnant because they lacked the courage to transform themselves again. At the peak. At the peak, at the peak. Because it's a, a thing... no, you don't. You start to reach a point where you say: 'Damn, if, if I, I'm getting very overloaded, I'm working Monday to Monday and I can't get everything done. And what's missing here?' That's a sign of overload. That's a sign of overload. It's a sign. It's the, it's the, for me, the sign that for me was, was, was the most striking was, I started losing the pleasure of being an entrepreneur. I think that's super common, right? Super common, because you're good at having quality time, learning, you have your company, you have your family, you have your health, but when you get very overloaded and everything depends on you, that starts to dim that pleasure of being an entrepreneur. And then you say: 'Man, I work Monday to Monday and I can't finish everything that needs to be done.' That's already a sign... Uh-huh. already almost a red light, right?' So in my case, that's what I, I said, I don't... if this is being an entrepreneur, because they told me being an entrepreneur meant having freedom, following my own dreams. Well, that's not, that's not what I'm seeing here, I'm seeing something else here. And then you say, I have to change, I need to change this. That's 2010.

No, XP billed about R$50 million a year... R$250. R$50 million more or less. We were, we were already a mid-sized company, right? I understand? In your head, at that time you were consolidated, you were in a consolidation phase, you already had your territory established. I was, I was a profitable company, a company that made about R$30 million in profit a year, right? Already had some money, and was carving out my space, but clearly the company was very dependent on me, right? That's what I want to imagine. The result was there, how did you see the territory, but then from three to infinity there you realized, right? What, what I saw was that, that without realizing it everything in the company depended on me. Without realizing it. Give me three examples. The commercial director wanted to implement something. 'Guilherme, I have an idea here, I want to do this.' So everything came back to me. Why? Because I was very much an executor, I was very centralized, without realizing it, right? You only realize you're centralized after a few years pass and you change who you were. I say: 'Man, I think back then the fact that I had a small office with the door open, that wasn't, wasn't a sign that I was an open person. I, I was open, but I was very convinced, I was arrogant, without realizing it, right? Because every entrepreneur who's in execution, they know a lot about what they do. So they meddle, they, they, they go over their direct reports, they undermine the team's morale without realizing it, they interfere, they go to the director's manager, they want to know details of things again. There are times when that's important, there are times when it starts to get in the way. So I, I didn't let the team have autonomy without realizing it, right? And, and then everything the team wanted to do, any little thing they had to talk to Guilherme about. Had to talk to Guilherme. And then you become a bottleneck, because you work from 8 to 10 at night. That was my life, Monday to Monday, and you can't keep up. And then you start to realize that you, that you're getting in the way and that it's draining you too much. You barely have a life. Why? Because you're super competitive, you want to succeed and, and you learned to succeed in a way that you won't have scale unless you completely change who you are. And then in my case, right, there was this, this, this British fund that came in as our shareholder, the manager of the fund, he said the following: 'Guilherme, I want to help you change who you are.' And the most important question is: of your eight, nine direct reports, knowing them as well as you know them, how many would you hire again today? Good. I said: 'Oh, I think not even one.' He said: 'Then you already understand the size of the problem. You work with a very committed team, very gritty, people very loyal to you, but that's not necessarily competence, and you'll only have scale and we'll only be able to build an investment firm that achieves the dreams you say you want if you learn to work with the right people.'

That my team was... again, it's when you start to zoom out of the operation and you start talking to more people in the market, you start raising your bar a bit for people, your bar for performance, for how... because it's very easy to confuse commitment and competence, man. The person arrives early, the person leaves late, the person, the person is very gritty, the person is at every meeting, the person loves the company, the person... but that's not necessarily the competence you need. And to have business success, you can't be the tractor your whole life. You have to be a team that plays together and everyone pulls together, and then everyone shares a bit of that burden of running a company. Hmm. And then I, I said: 'Wow, I need to start talking to different people.' And then I replaced the CFO. It was a chaotic area in the company, chaotic. And then suddenly everything started to work and the CFO knew much more than I did. And, and I said: 'Wow...'

No, it was already chaotic before the change, right? But when we made the change, everything started to work. We started to have long-term plans, super structured. We started cutting expenses where necessary. We started allocating capital correctly. There was everything, there was logic, there was coherence, there was, there was data, there were facts and figures. I said: 'Wow, hold on, man. If I changed one and it started working, what's going to happen if I change everyone?' Man, what if I start now worrying less about executing day to day and start worrying about building more and more of a unit, start having increasingly solid planning, guarantee what, what is priority, have an agenda of, of, of rituals better organized, if I start having a more structured partnership from the standpoint of internal meritocracy, of starting to balance performance with culture. And I started to understand that these people and talent topics are the topics that, that keep making the company more and more solid, because you keep bringing in good people, you keep putting them in the right position, and all this dynamic of goals, of meritocracy, of performance, of culture, that makes people understand the rules of the game. You keep getting the best out of each person and that keeps, keeps scaling. Over the years. And then I turned the key completely. So I separate, separate my management as CEO. Until 2010 I was a super executor. Was, was super operational. From 2010 to 2021 I became a CEO who basically understood people and all their derivatives. Hard, that change. Hard. And, and in these last 5 years I made another important change. I think in my business life the last five... Yeah, there were three changes. 10. Yeah, until '10 I was an operator CEO. 2010 to 2021 I was a manager CEO, OK? Of people. And in 2011 I stopped being CEO, I was CEO of the company for 20 years. I'm chairman of the board, I'm in the day, I'm in the day-to-day of the company, but today there's a CEO who I understand is better than me at executing tasks. And I learned to influence the CEO and the team, but without having execution power, which is the stage where you become replaceable. And then you, and then in this stage I think you really have a business. Uh-huh. Otherwise my opinion is that you have a turbocharged job. Because if you have a business that depends on you, you don't have a business, you have to be, you have to be there, you have succession, you have a board, but you have to build a business that can keep improving without you. Then you've built a real business.

Yeah. Look, I, I think that in the, in the era when I started my business, it wasn't that easy to access information 20, 25 years ago. No, it wasn't, it was very much reading Jim Collins, right? It was that, 'Built to Last', 'Good to Great'. That's it. So it was studying those books and such. So I studied and put it into practice. But I think that a company, what, what is a company like, a company is a... you have to have a long-term plan, you have to have a long-term vision, where you see addressable markets, look at who I compete with, how big is this market, how am I going to create, what can I offer that's different to clients that allows me to get to point A, then B, C, and what's my team of direct reports that will make that happen. So I, I think I took a while to understand that. So you can be a leader-executor, so a company of 20, 30, 40, one person makes a big difference, because you're one of 40, one of 30, even more so being the founder of the company. But when you start having a much bigger team, 100 people, 200, you're one of 200. So even if you work 10x, you're 10 out of 200. It doesn't make as much difference anymore. Uh-huh. So I think my logic is a bit like that, but if you're starting out in business, you have to have a minimum hierarchy. You have to start getting these direct-report layers right and start gaining scale through them. So, I, I would do that as soon as possible. I think you shouldn't wait for problems to start. I think you have to prepare from, from the start, worrying about the org chart, this long-term vision, what differentiator do I have and aim at point A, and once you reach point A, reach point B and then keep going.

Yeah. And, and, and so I always liked it, I think it's so much easier for you to copy businesses, right? I, I, I, I think it's incredible what, what Elon Musk does, what Steve Jobs did, creating an industry that doesn't exist, right? Man, that's, that's tough, right? Yeah, it's so much better for you to be inspired by companies that, that already succeeded elsewhere in the world and you adapt that to Brazil, what were the mistakes and successes, learnings, etc. Yeah. So like, I think Brazil is always 10, 20 years behind the United States, Europe, Asia. So you go looking for those benchmarks that help you connect the dots a bit, right? What, what was the sequence that company A, B or C did abroad? And then you adapt that to the country you live in and then you become less erratic, you make fewer mistakes or you get to know other people's mistakes, right? And then when you put it all together, you start to have a more probable plan.

Yeah, it's understanding the sequence, because what was the sequence they did, because everything, because everything has a sequence, right? Like, we say this a lot in the company, right? When I talk with entrepreneurs, I think you must have this impression too, right? I think every entrepreneur dreams of having an international operation, right? I don't know if you have this impression, right? My dream is to have an international operation, to be able to scale internationally, have an office in Miami, have something in Silicon Valley and so on. And, and so, is that a priority? What's the sequence you're doing? So having an international operation is maybe step 60. That only makes sense for you to start the international operation after you've done the 59 previous ones. So like, having a sequence that lets you optimize the efficient frontier of entrepreneurship, because being an entrepreneur is about picking the low-hanging fruit, right? You have to have the sequence. So I, I do today what generates the most result for me, generates the most impact and requires the least effort. And with that I keep connecting those efforts over time, right, those dots over time. Yeah. So you keep optimizing the efficient frontier of entrepreneurship, we know you have to deliver results and the entrepreneur's fuel is optimizing results. With more fuel he takes more risk, he's more resilient, he... and, and with that his business keeps getting more solid over time. So having a sequence over time, so studying the sequence that was done in the United States, where they got it right, where they got it wrong, what they did, etc. That makes a big difference, because you start understanding the logic a bit and you start creating your own sequence, but already seeing where others did their sequences, right? Man, should I start with fixed income? Should I start with investing? Should I get into credit? Should I do stocks? And then you keep seeing, you keep understanding the logic a bit and you keep understanding why, why that benchmark abroad made certain moves or why it didn't make certain moves, right? Why didn't it make certain moves? Learning from other people's mistakes is easy, right? It's free. It's just that they wrote and said: 'Look, I did this, don't do it, don't repeat it this way.' Yeah, no, no. Today, man, with ChatGPT you can ask which are the companies in the world that do what I do? What was their sequence? Where did they make the most mistakes? Where can I not make mistakes? There, you have it, you just have to be curious. You're curious. Just be curious. Just be curious, right? I'm curious. You've already asked me about four or five questions here. Starting... you did like this, you did like that. Ah, I'm curious. But your curiosity isn't a curiosity that's, let's say, shallow, it's a curiosity to connect dots, right? Yeah, so I'm very curious, but I, like, I, I, I admire you a lot because you're very curious about many subjects. Uh-huh. You know a lot about a lot of things. I think I know a lot about a few things. Cool. I think I'm very, I know maybe very, very, very modestly, but about very few things. So like, I'm very curious about my business. I'm very curious to understand where whoever succeeded succeeded, whoever went broke went broke, and to dig in and, and understand the balance sheets of Brazilian banks, American banks, talk to people who made mistakes, who got it right, anyway. And so, I, I, I think I master my business very well, right? And, and, and I'm maybe a bit less curious about other topics. That's very good.