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The Twenty Minute VCdLocal CEO Sebastian Kanovich: The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | 20VC #926
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
dLocal’s CEO on Luck, Frugality, Hard Markets and Relentless Execution
- dLocal CEO Sebastián Kanovich recounts how he became CEO by chance, bootstrapped a payments company from Uruguay, and grew it into a global public business focused on emerging markets. He emphasizes a culture of high performance built on speed, ownership, frugality, and a deep obsession with customer needs rather than internal roadmaps. The conversation covers tough lessons from hiring and fundraising, the strategic rationale for entering “hard” markets like Nigeria, India, and China, and the complexities of going public. Kanovich also reflects on his personal insecurities, leadership evolution, and the challenge of maintaining culture while scaling and operating as a public company.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasTreat luck as an entry ticket, but rely on relentless effort.
Kanovich attributes his role partly to luck (a chance conversation at a family party) but stresses that 10 years of intense work, obsession with not losing, and constant learning are what actually sustain success.
Define high performance as ownership plus energy, not presentations.
He looks for people who bring energy, focus on solutions, say “it’s on me,” and actually fix problems, rather than producing decks and delegating responsibility.
Optimize for fast, reversible decisions—but don’t fall in love with mistakes.
Speed is non‑negotiable for learning in new markets, yet the real danger is ego-driven doubling down on bad calls (especially hires), instead of owning the error and adjusting quickly.
Let customers write the roadmap and use converging signals to prioritize.
dLocal systematically asks large enterprise clients what to build and where to expand (e.g., payouts, Africa, India), acting only when multiple smart customers point in the same direction.
Bootstrapping builds powerful frugality, but the right investors expand your horizon.
Growing without VC forced discipline and customer-funded growth, but General Atlantic later unlocked ambition, access, and validation—showing them they’d been thinking too small about what was possible from Uruguay.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesYou need to go to your mother‑in‑law’s dinner party. That’s one lesson.
— Sebastián Kanovich
High performance is people that say, ‘It’s on me. I’m gonna fix it.’
— Sebastián Kanovich
The issue is not the first mistake; it’s when you fall in love with that decision and keep doubling down on it.
— Sebastián Kanovich
We weren’t dreaming big enough. We thought companies from Uruguay don’t go to the next level.
— Sebastián Kanovich
You never win. You win for a few minutes, and then you’re again back in the grind.
— Sebastián Kanovich
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
