Micky Malka, Founder of Ribbit Capital

1. 0:00 – 3:00

   Why Micky Malka Refuses to Be Labeled

   1. DSDavid Senra0:00

      [intro music] Thanks for doing this, Micky.

   2. MMMicky Malka0:03

      David, it's a pleasure to be here with you.

   3. DSDavid Senra0:05

      There's so many times in our previous conversations where I'm listening to you speak, and I'm like, "Shit, Micky really does think and act a lot, uh, very similar to, like, a lot of history's greatest entrepreneurs that I read all these biographies about for Founder's Podcast." And one thing that I think you have in common with them, and that you said before to me, is that you hate being labeled. Can you say more about that?

   4. MMMicky Malka0:25

      I think it's a way of always growing up in Venezuela and all my life. You never had people being labeled. I never learned what, what, what that was about. And every time somebody tried to put me on a label, I fought really hard to get out of it, from, "Hey, are you tall? So you must be play good at basketball." And my first answer is, "No, I suck at basketball."

   5. DSDavid Senra0:46

      [laughs]

   6. MMMicky Malka0:46

      Just trying to get out, myself out of any particular label, all the way to, "Are you an investor? Are you an entrepreneur?" And say, "What about if I'm both? What about if I'm not any? Why do I need a label?" And the more you walk through life allowing things to have label, the more difficult life is, because then you cannot see through it. You just see what you've been told to see. So I think it's part of my rebel cause to never accept labels.

   7. DSDavid Senra1:15

      Yeah, I think w- if you're labeled, it means that you're kinda conforming to, like, an existing mold. And I think the great founders, they're inherently non-conformists.

   8. MMMicky Malka1:23

      Yes. And you have to be non-conformist, because the world can always be better. So why accept whatever is there today?

   9. DSDavid Senra1:29

      So when you just said, "Hey, are you an entrepreneur? Are you an investor?" Maybe I'm both, maybe I'm neither. Like, today, how do you, how do you view yourself?

   10. MMMicky Malka1:36

       So I describe myself as an entrepreneur at heart and investor by design. Such a general line that allows me to do anything, right?

   11. DSDavid Senra1:43

       [laughs]

   12. MMMicky Malka1:44

       Some days I can wake up and be entrepreneur, some days I can be an investor, some day I can be both, some day I can be something completely different. But at heart means that it comes from a place from inside, that if I change my heart, I can just change it. And by design means that if I learn and I keep learning how to do something, I can only get better at it. So I just allow myself to keep learning.

   13. DSDavid Senra2:04

       So there's really no... Like, you are completely fluid. You don't really put, like, a label on yourself.

   14. MMMicky Malka2:09

       Correct, I don't. I try and I avoid it. Uh, the only label I, I wanna, I wanna get in life is that people say I'm a great friend, I'm a great partner, and I'm a good father. And if I can get that label, that label I would love to have. Other, the other ones, I don't care.

   15. DSDavid Senra2:27

       Yeah, I'm always interested in how people think about, like, the, their own perception of their work, because I just had this conver- great conversation with Rick Rubin. And I had to, like, interrupt him one time 'cause he's like, "Yeah, I kinda think of myself as a researcher." And I'm like, "What?" 'Cause, you know, people think music producer, and now he's a podcaster and, you know, he's a consigliere to, like, some of the top artists in the world.

   16. MMMicky Malka2:45

       Yeah.

   17. DSDavid Senra2:45

       And he's just like, "I'm... All day I'm just, like, finding what I'm intensely curious about and just researching that as far as I can."

   18. MMMicky Malka2:52

       And I think that's what it takes, and that's what entrepreneurs do every day, and that's what a great investor does every day. But you don't get labeled like that. But yes, I

2. 3:00 – 5:41

   Writing Your Way to Conviction

   1. MMMicky Malka3:00

      would agree with you.

   2. DSDavid Senra3:00

      Question: I went to your, um, website. I've read a bunch of these, like, what do you call them? They're not manifestos. What do you... Are they essays?

   3. MMMicky Malka3:07

      They're essays.

   4. DSDavid Senra3:08

      Okay. So I'm very curious. You've only done a handful.

   5. MMMicky Malka3:11

      Yes.

   6. DSDavid Senra3:12

      Uh, I'm very curious, like, how your writing shapes your, not only your thinking, but also what you wanna build through Ribbit.

   7. MMMicky Malka3:20

      Writing is everything, because we can sit here and talk about ideas for hours, but if you're not willing to put them in writing, you will never learn what truly they, they are, how deep they are. And what I find is typically those essays that you wr- that, that, that you read, uh, they start by being probably 20 pages long, but I can actually get a napkin and explain to you each one in a napkin. And if I can do that, if anybody can explain anything complex to you in a napkin, it means that they have studied enough that they know how to articulate it. So what we do there is we start by writing our, our essays. And our essays, what they are allowing us to do is to not conform to what the world thinks today. It's to allow us to conform to what the world looks like in ten years, 15 years. Just imagine and let it, let it flow. Let it go. Let, let that energy get out there. Let that energy be taken from, uh, our brains and our Q&As and our diligence and our calls. Just put it out there and see what happens.

   8. DSDavid Senra4:24

      Why do you think that's, that's beneficial?

   9. MMMicky Malka4:26

      Because it g- gives you conviction. If you cannot have conviction, then you're gonna be going in mood swings with the markets, up and down. If something changes, you gotta be able... The only way to really have a joyful investment life or life in general, is to try to play this very long, infinite game, and the only way to do that well is you have to, you need conviction in whatever you do. You gotta be willing to be wrong for a long time. But if I write it, and we put it in writing, and we share it with the world, and we get feedback, it allows us to make sure that the compass is in the right direction.

   10. DSDavid Senra5:02

       How long do they take to write?

   11. MMMicky Malka5:04

       Some of them can take us a year. Some of them can take us four, five months. But the whole process to get a thesis that we like, sit down, think about it, uh, articulate it, test it, share it, come back, work it, probably like a year, year and a half.

   12. DSDavid Senra5:20

       I know you're a fan of Buffett. You've been a, a shareholder for-

   13. MMMicky Malka5:23

       All my life.

   14. DSDavid Senra5:23

       Yeah, like-

   15. MMMicky Malka5:24

       Since I was 13.

   16. DSDavid Senra5:25

       That's crazy. [laughs]

   17. MMMicky Malka5:26

       Yeah.

   18. DSDavid Senra5:27

       I saw one of your tweets, I think it was from like 2015, and it was like, I think you were holding for like 25 years or something like that at that point.

   19. MMMicky Malka5:33

       Yeah.

   20. DSDavid Senra5:33

       So even more now. And I know you read all his shareholder letters-

   21. MMMicky Malka5:36

       Yes

   22. DSDavid Senra5:36

       ... which I'm a huge fan of. Did that influence your decision to start writing these essays?

3. 5:41 – 11:48

   Buying Berkshire at 13 and Learning Buffett's Operating System

   1. MMMicky Malka5:41

      Completely. So I, I bought my first share of Berkshire when I was 13 years old in Venezuela. It was November of 1987.

   2. DSDavid Senra5:50

      How?

   3. MMMicky Malka5:51

      It was my-

   4. DSDavid Senra5:52

      Why, why would, would a 13-year-old be interested in, in Berkshire?

   5. MMMicky Malka5:55

      I don't know. I had read a few articles, uh, in Fortune Magazine about him, about, about American Express, about Coca-Cola, about certain brands, and I love the brands he, he had in his portfolio. I didn't know anything about float or insurance. I, I was not very familiar with that line of the business. [laughs]

   6. DSDavid Senra6:11

      [laughs] I would hope not at 13.

   7. MMMicky Malka6:13

      And, and, and back then, what you u- what, what, uh, he used to say was buy it and get it shipped, mailed to you in physical form. Don't leave it in a broker house so people can add margin against it. And there I was, I was 13. I had had my bar mitzvah in November of '87. Uh-

   8. DSDavid Senra6:29

      Yeah

   9. MMMicky Malka6:29

      ... the crash had happened a month before, the M- October '87 crash.

   10. DSDavid Senra6:33

       Yeah.

   11. MMMicky Malka6:34

       Stock went down a lot, and I didn't collect enough money to buy one share, so I asked to ask my grandfather for a loan. Asked for a loan, which he charged me interest as a way to teach me.

   12. DSDavid Senra6:44

       [laughs]

   13. MMMicky Malka6:45

       And bought one share, and had it mailed, in the mail, it showed up in Venezuela. Uh, luckily, I don't know how I didn't lose it. And, and so since then, every year I get the annual letters by, by, by mail.

   14. DSDavid Senra6:57

       Yeah.

   15. MMMicky Malka6:58

       And I will read them, and I will highlight them, and then I will go and learn. That made me have to buy the little book from The Wall Street Journal called Understanding Money and Markets because y- there were terms I didn't understand in the letter. And my self-learning came from doing all of that since I was 13.

   16. DSDavid Senra7:12

       Imagine what a 13-year-old kid could do now with AI. Like, if he wanted to, he or she wanted to go through Buffett's letters and then has this, this, like, thought partner and companion, compared to you having to buy a book and, [laughs] and look it up-

   17. MMMicky Malka7:24

       It's, it's insane

   18. DSDavid Senra7:24

       ... this definition of base.

   19. MMMicky Malka7:25

       Like I, I, I was thinking about it and I was saying, If I were to do it again at 13 now, with all of this, I will go to AI and tell them, "Write, do me, take those letters, find me the Buffett partnership letters from before, which are very hard to find, but you can find them. Read them, analyze them, come back to me, give me the n-..." Like, it will be ins- insane what you can do. Now, I think you will lose a little bit of the nuance because part of it, if you read them carefully enough, and you, you've done it, you know that there's the pattern repeats, and what you learn from it is not the decisions he makes, it's how in any environment he repeats the same pattern of decision-making process. And that's the most important thing that you get from reading. I don't know if AI can give you that.

   20. DSDavid Senra8:07

       Wait, say, say, say more about that.

   21. MMMicky Malka8:09

       So it doesn't matter if you were in the 1970s when there was a, a little bit of inflation or high inflation in America compared to standards, and he talked there about how he treated float and how float of insurance worked, or in the era of zero interest rates on, on, on, on... And then how he talked about float and the cost of float. It didn't matter what was the macroeconomic conditions of the world or the macroeconomic conditions of the interest rates. He used the same pattern every single time to define how to think about money.

   22. DSDavid Senra8:40

       Why do you think that's so special, that he used the same pattern?

   23. MMMicky Malka8:43

       Because I think it's the discipline that he built. He just did fine, was amazing at taking all the noise away, canceling noise, and focusing on the three things that matter the most, and that only you can do if you study enough. What I learned, and I went to the annual meetings for a number of years, and I got to meet him and hang out with him afterwards and all of that for a number of years. To me, going there was not learning anything new, it was just seeing how he applied those principles to the new economic conditions that every year were around.

   24. DSDavid Senra9:14

       I wanna tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world, and one of the main themes in the history of SpaceX is constantly attacking and questioning your cost. Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that. The median company running on Ramp cuts their expenses by 5%. And one thing SpaceX has demonstrated is that a religious dedication to controlling costs can help actually increase revenue because you can pursue opportunities you couldn't otherwise. And we see that in the Ramp data, too. The median company running on Ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. So when you're running your business on Ramp and your competitors are not, you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp, and you should too. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. This is really special to me right now because, um, have you spent any time with Daniel Ek in person?

   25. MMMicky Malka10:22

       No.

   26. DSDavid Senra10:23

       Okay. He's one of, like, the wisest people I know, and I, I just did the... Right at, like, a couple of days after, um, I filmed that episode with Rick Rubin, who again, like, I've been making episodes on Rick Rubin forever. Like, I, I grew up loving hip-hop, so he, he founded Def Jam-

   27. MMMicky Malka10:36

       Yeah

   28. DSDavid Senra10:36

       ... in his dorm room, which is one of the most iconic, uh, hip hop r-record labels. And so, like, you know, for probably a decade and a half, I was a fan of Rick Rubin from afar before I got to meet him. And, uh, then I had, like, probably, I don't know, a couple of days, maybe a week later, I was having, uh, a drink with Daniel, and he goes, "Well, how was the, your, you know, how was it hanging out with Rick?" And I was just like, "What's, what's fascinating to me is just, like, the aura is still there, but if you actually analyze Rick and his career, Rick Rubin and his career, it's just like he had, like, basically when he was nineteen when he started Def Jam, and now I think he's sixty-three, he had, like, four ideas, and these ideas are not fucking complicated. It's like the, the adherence to the love of simpl-simplicity, uh, reduction instead of pro-production-

   29. MMMicky Malka11:17

       Yeah

   30. DSDavid Senra11:17

       ... uh, always working with the very best people you possibly can, building the product for yourself first. He's just making, literally, he is the patient zero.
4. 11:48 – 18:38

   Token Factories, AI Bankers, and the Future of Money

   1. MMMicky Malka11:48

      to that.

   2. DSDavid Senra11:48

      So do you wanna talk about- I, uh, the one that you, you wr- you wrote, uh, you wrote recently on tokens.

   3. MMMicky Malka11:55

      Yeah.

   4. DSDavid Senra11:55

      So I love, I love what you just said, like, I can... You read it, it's very long, and there's charts and everything else, but you're like, "I can distill it down to a napkin." I think compression is understanding. Let's start with, like, the, the napkin version of the token essay, and then you can expand on it from there.

   5. MMMicky Malka12:10

      The concept is very simple. The word token means something different to everybody. If we start with, with Ryan from Visa, the word he defines token is different than the word that Sundar has for token at, at Google or the different word that OpenAI has for token-

   6. DSDavid Senra12:24

      Mm-hmm

   7. MMMicky Malka12:24

      ... or Anthropic. They're all different, but they all mean the same. It's machine-readable information. So if you think about companies, we call them token factories because just think about the Industrial Revolution example in this token revolution era, where every company needs a supply of tokens, of information, money and knowledge, and then they do something, and they deliver something new. And you need basically three components to deliver any service, any promise, or any product. You're gonna need to understand identity. You're gonna need to understand value, and you need to understand the intelligence that goes into it. And right now, we're in the early innings. What we're starting to see first is the frontier labs being the token factories. They're taking all the information from the web, from videos, from the world, and they're finding a way to ingest it and create a different set of tokens that somebody else can consume. So they are the raw materials providers to these factories. Now, in the next few years, we're gonna see that evolution go deeper and deeper and deeper, and it will be much more personalized, and it will be much more complete to verticals that we haven't even touched. Like today, token factories don't touch money that much. Money's been outside of AI, and we're on year four or five. It's funny because money is supposed to be one of the first, most fungible things that should be playing the game, and it's not.

   8. DSDavid Senra13:45

      Why do you think it should be one of the, the first things to playing the game?

   9. MMMicky Malka13:48

      Because it, it's, it's one of the things that flows the most in the world. Everything flows through money. Like my m- my whole life, the thing about what keeps my, uh, learning going is I follow flows. I believe that nothing's static, right? Money is never static. Money, it's like gravity. It always falls, it always moves. It alway- it's always going somewhere.

   10. DSDavid Senra14:12

       Mm-hmm.

   11. MMMicky Malka14:12

       It's like water. It's, it's never stuck. Energy is flowing everywhere, from the lights that we have here, but also our own energies. Right now, we're creating both energies, and we're, we're sharing that energy. And, and so I find that, um, for something that is as, as dynamic as money, it is not attached to AI yet on anything.

   12. DSDavid Senra14:36

       So how does it get attached?

   13. MMMicky Malka14:37

       I think it's gonna be that intersection between probably what blockchains will do and AI will do because you will need to have intelligent, smart contracts that will do stuff on your behalf, and you can start to see great entrepreneurs and great founders working on it. You can-- we can talk about Patrick at Stripe and, and how they're building all this.

   14. DSDavid Senra14:55

       Literally, when you were saying that, um, I just heard John Collison talk about this, and basically, he said that that's the only thing he's working on. It's like agentic payments for agents.

   15. MMMicky Malka15:03

       Yeah. And, and that's the future. You can talk to anybody in that space or Vlad at Robinhood doing the same for, for equities, and you can see how they're tokenizing assets. And we're in the st- early innings, but we're behind compared to knowledge. Knowledge went much faster. Money's, it's behind, which is fine.

   16. DSDavid Senra15:20

       So explain, because I don't know anything about this, and you, you study this night and day. So explain what you think is gonna happen with this in, like, the next, like, year or two.

   17. MMMicky Malka15:28

       I don't know, the next year or two. Uh, it's hard to know because with the speed of AI, what happens in the next 12 months-

   18. DSDavid Senra15:34

       Or n- yeah, next two months, whatever

   19. MMMicky Malka15:35

       ... but what I, what I will say is that what we should start seeing very soon is agents that are designed for specific functions that will take care of your financial life in ways that you have never been taken care of. And some of the best founders have articulated this really well. David from Nubank, David Vélez said, you know, mobile was the way to put a bank in your pocket. Uh, now, AI is gonna be the way to get you the banker in your pocket. So what I expect to see very, very soon is an AI agent that can go and do all kinds of investment decisions, recommendations. It can go do all kinds of commerce decisions and recommendations, and it can start to do any kind of, uh, payment decisions and recommendations on your behalf. And you are gonna s- start to see how that's gonna free time and ideas that you don't have today. We're just starting. The signals that this is going the right way, signals, prediction markets. Prediction markets, it's, it's an interesting market. People are call it-- Some people call it gambling. Some people call it a place where you can bet on anything twenty-four seven, but here's the thing, it's twenty-four seven, and what agents need are twenty-four seven rails. So all of this is building the rails to allow all of this to happen, and what we expect is that we're gonna see a bunch of new companies or incumbents that are gonna be shipping these features in ways that we have not experienced before.

   20. DSDavid Senra17:04

       That was gonna be my next question to you. Who do you think actually wins this? 'Cause you just named, you know, three pretty big, well-established companies, Stripe, Robinhood, Nubank. You think it comes from them, or you think it comes from a startup?

   21. MMMicky Malka17:14

       I think it comes from them, uh, because first, they're still founder-led or Revolut also. They're still founder-led. Those founders are pushing the boundaries of all of this. They are at an age, and they are at a place, and if you talk to them, they're still as hungry as they were on day one. They're still in that day-one mentality, and they're just going faster than the incumbents. For a while, I thought the incumbents were gonna catch up. In 2021, '22, '23, I thought they were pairing up. There was not much difference between a financial product offer from an incumbent and from, uh, one of these n- neo brands. That's different today. Uh, again, AI has just become a rocket- A nitro rocket for the, for this breed of technology companies to just accelerate even faster and separate themselves again, which is the beauty of the infinite game. And the beauty of the infinite game, you never get to win, and you never get to lose. You're simply ahead or behind, and they were ahead for a long, long time, and then they were... the other ones were catching up, but the rules change. What happens? You're ahead again, or you f- and the other ones fall behind. But the, the game never ends. That's the way I live my life. That's the way I think about everything I do. That's the way I make decisions. I don't think about winning or losing, ever, uh, on anything I do. I just think about, "Will this put me ahead or put me behind in the game?" And then just keep playing the game.

5. 18:38 – 22:09

   The Infinite Game: Why It's Better to Be Behind

   1. DSDavid Senra18:38

      So I know you, you play the infinite game. You wanna play forever, but are you c- do you consider yourself a competitive person, though?

   2. MMMicky Malka18:42

      Define com- competitor.

   3. DSDavid Senra18:44

      I guess the way I think about this, uh, internally is just like I'm in a very positive-sum industry. If you listen to my podcast today and another podcast tomorrow, I don't lose on that, but I still wake up every day trying to, like, do the best job I possibly can.

   4. MMMicky Malka18:56

      Yes. So if that's a competitor, yes. I try to do the best I-

   5. DSDavid Senra18:59

      But it's not relative to other people.

   6. MMMicky Malka19:01

      No. I don't look at other people. I don't... I-- each one is playing their own game. I have-- I try really hard to not have fear of missing out. I try really hard to just make sure that I'm playing the best game I can to play this game until the last day I, I am alive. It doesn't matter if I win or lose, because you will... Th- that's not the game. You w- you fall behind. Actually, I will tell you that I've learned about myself, I'd rather be behind. I'm a much better person being behind than when I ahead. When I'm ahead, it means, "Oh, you guys are doing well. This is going right direction. You were right. This happened, this, this played out." And i- immediately, immediately, my spider senses get all activated and say, "Okay, that means that whatever the r- I gotta change the rules," because it's not good to be ahead. You wanna be ahead for a while, but you want the rules to change to fall behind, so you can innovate again.

   7. DSDavid Senra19:53

      Yeah, this is why I said that you, uh, there's so many times when we were talking like, "Goddammit, Micky sounds just like the people I read books about." Uh, I just met James Dyson, who's like a personal hero of mine.

   8. MMMicky Malka20:02

      Yep.

   9. DSDavid Senra20:02

      And he said the exact same thing on, on his podcast. He's just like, "Losing is so much more interesting."

   10. MMMicky Malka20:06

       Yeah.

   11. DSDavid Senra20:06

       He's like, "You just learn so much." He likes being behind.

   12. MMMicky Malka20:09

       Yeah.

   13. DSDavid Senra20:09

       Yeah, he just has that chip on his shoulder. Well, really just the desire to constantly improve. He just feels you're gonna improve a lot more when you're, like, losing or you're behind.

   14. MMMicky Malka20:16

       A hundred percent. I'm much better when I'm behind. I learn more. Um, I... Everything, everything about it is just gives you much more energy.

   15. DSDavid Senra20:24

       I wanna go back 'cause I interrupted you. I wanna go back to the id- your idea of, like, every company's becoming a token factory.

   16. MMMicky Malka20:28

       Yeah.

   17. DSDavid Senra20:29

       The only token factories that you see right now are the, the labs?

   18. MMMicky Malka20:33

       N- no. So you're starting to see, uh, application layers that are starting to show up, uh, that are building token factories. Think about, uh, on the voice AI, think about Eleven Labs or Decagon or Sierra. They're all companies that are, a- are understanding how to, how to... They're creating their token factories. They're creating a service that did not exist before in a way that was not possible. We're going to a world where every single piece of information needs to be readable by a, by a machine, and that's how the world will go to the next generation.

   19. DSDavid Senra21:04

       So you finish writing the letter. What do you do next?

   20. MMMicky Malka21:06

       We share it with our, um, founders, people that we work with closely, and we allow them to, uh, and, and our LPs, our investors. Why? Because we want them to hold us accountable. This is our thinking. You have, you have the chance. You can walk out [laughs] or you can keep believing in our, in our, in our thesis, so we, we, we put it out there. And then we, we go out, and we start talking about it with the founders that we met while we wrote it. And what happens-

   21. DSDavid Senra21:39

       These are founders you've not yet invested in?

   22. MMMicky Malka21:42

       Most of them are founders that we have not yet invested in, because as we write the thesis, we have not invested into them yet. We're learning from them. Maybe on the way we make an investment or two, maybe, but most of the time we don't, and then after that... And what happens is some of the best founders will read it and said, "Oh, wow, you guys really understand it. This is deep. Let's talk about it." And that's how we build those relationships that take a long time to build.

6. 22:09 – 29:00

   Gen Z Founders and the Chaordic Company

   1. DSDavid Senra22:09

      So I know you spend a lot of time with people in their early 20s. Do you feel that this is the way they're talk- they're thinking, uh, about building companies?

   2. MMMicky Malka22:15

      Good question. I think some of them are. I think some o- some others are not, like any other generation. What I, what I believe the people in their 20s have right now is that they are the f- smartest, fastest learner generation we've ever had in history. They learn the fastest, and it's because they get used to listening to podcasts at one and a half, 2X. They n- they don't have to wait for the mail to arrive with an annual letter a month later. They can read it, uh, in real time, right? So their ability to process information, it's so much faster than our brains ever had been trained for, so you can see it in the way they can process. What I think the best ones can do also is that they can articulate a vision and a story and f- and bring people to follow them, but not all of them have those skills yet. They haven't developed them, because that generation, as much as they're super smart learning, they're also were not trained to be great communicators on the other side. So the few that are great communicators, I think they have it in- embedded in them.

   3. DSDavid Senra23:20

      How do you think they view company building differently than somebody that's, say, 10 years older than them?

   4. MMMicky Malka23:25

      I think they look at org charts very differently. I think they look at functions very differently. They don't think the, the org chart structure that we inherited and that we grew up with, I don't think it applies anymore in the same way they did. Humans are key center, and they will be for as long as we're alive in, in, in our gener- in our lifetime. But org charts and the way they organize people, completely different, and you can see it. They are self-organizing, and I, I, I love studying this because one of my mentors is Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, and I spent with him almost 10 or 12 years visiting him and, and talking to him, and he's, he's a creator of the chaordic organization. He is the believer that you should never organiz- the best expression of humans are in the intersection between chaos and order. If you're too orderly, you don't innovate. If you're too chaotic, you don't communicate, and you break. So chaordic is the right place to be. They're actually doing... These kids are doing a great job by f- pure nature of how they were trained and wired with this era of technology to be in the epicenter of chaordic. So that's how they're working, and that's what's different about them.

   5. DSDavid Senra24:40

      What else did you learn from Dee? Um, the, the fascinating thing, a couple people have asked me before, 'cause I've done, like, two or three episodes on Dee Hock. He wrote this, this great autobiography, which is, you know, tells the story of Visa. But then when he was a much older man, he also has these two books of maxims called The Autobiography of a Restless Mind, Volume One and Volume Two.

   6. MMMicky Malka24:56

      Yeah.

   7. DSDavid Senra24:56

      Again, somebody that can compress the language and, and give you a lot of ideas in, like, you know, a sentence or two. A lot of people have asked me this, like, "Why do you think, you know, Visa is one of the most successful companies of all time, I think one of the most profitable per employee companies in history-

   8. MMMicky Malka25:07

      Yeah

   9. DSDavid Senra25:08

      ... and yet not a lot of people talk about it?" And somebody asked me one time, uh, or a few people have actually asked me this, like, "Why do you think that is?" It's like, 'cause it's still very confusing on how he actually built it. I've read his book two times, and I still don't really understand.

   10. MMMicky Malka25:20

       Yeah.

   11. DSDavid Senra25:20

       So, like, what else do you think you learned from Dee Hock? Did he influence the way you built Ribbit at all?

   12. MMMicky Malka25:23

       Yes.

   13. DSDavid Senra25:24

       Okay, I wanna hear more about this.

   14. MMMicky Malka25:25

       Um, and not only Ribbit, but my, my, my previous startups, too. Um, because he, he, he taught me so much about, uh, how to, how to get people to be the best version of themselves in, in the kind of or- organizations that you have to have. Even my go-to question on interviews is a question he taught me on, on how to ask. So I've learned so much from him.

   15. DSDavid Senra25:49

       What is that question?

   16. MMMicky Malka25:50

       I give people six words, and I tell them to organize them in a certain order, and, uh-

   17. DSDavid Senra25:55

       [laughs]

   18. MMMicky Malka25:55

       ... and then the way they walk through that order says a lot about, about the person. And it was a letter that Dee wrote to his team in 1972, I think, where he articulates all of this. So I, I learned that from him. So spending time with Dee, what, what you get is that he understood human psychology better than anybody in that era in that particular space. He understood that to get bankers, who by their sheer DNA are people that are, tend to be risk adverse and people that care too much about their reputation, he found a way through this model of association. His biggest success was the legal model he used. No one had ever done a company in that structure. An association model allow everybody to save face but at the same time take the credit, and that's how he won, because it doesn't matter who you were, which bank competed with the other one. He didn't, he didn't care, because each one can compete by themselves, but at the same time, win if the brand won. That was the beauty of Dee. He, when you spend time with him, he will say, "It was the model, and people don't get it." So I, I find that his rest, r- uh, restless mind was alive even in his early 90s, because I would have swear that he could have been Sa- Satoshi Nakamoto if he ha- if he had been 40 years younger.

   19. DSDavid Senra27:21

       [laughs]

   20. MMMicky Malka27:22

       He had explained to me blockchain and what... For him, Visa was a failure, if you, if you talk to him, because he only got to release the simple version of it, which was payments. He wanted to do a lot more, which looked a lot like blockchains and, and smart contracts are today. But he was probably 60 years ahead of his time.

   21. DSDavid Senra27:45

       Deel is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade, and one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, Eleven Labs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deel. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deel after using their product, and what they discovered is that Deel is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deel will help your business hire, pay, and manage any worker anywhere in the world so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. The founder of Eleven Labs has a great description of the value Deel can give your company. He said, "We built Eleven Labs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deel enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world." Deel is trusted by over 40,000 businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to deel.com/senra. That is deel.com/senra. Let's go back to, um, the young kids

7. 29:00 – 34:29

   Why Young Founders Want to Build Atoms, Not Just Bits

   1. DSDavid Senra29:00

      that you-

   2. MMMicky Malka29:00

      Yeah

   3. DSDavid Senra29:00

      ... spend time with and the way they think about company building compared to some of your older founders.

   4. MMMicky Malka29:05

      From what sense?

   5. DSDavid Senra29:06

      I think the founders moving forward, like, obviously they're gonna be way more capital efficient. Uh, I think they're gonna own lar- larger percentages of their companies because they're gonna need to, to, um, to raise less money. I think you used the analogy of one time if you go back and look at, like, some of the robber barons who owned-

   6. MMMicky Malka29:21

      Yes

   7. DSDavid Senra29:21

      ... like Henry Ford owned 100% of his company.

   8. MMMicky Malka29:23

      Yep.

   9. DSDavid Senra29:23

      Or some of them would go public, and they'd own 70% or 80% of the company. Yeah, I'm just very curious, like, how you think they're gonna be building companies, again, a 21 or 22-year-old compared to even, like, a 35-year-old.

   10. MMMicky Malka29:35

       So the, the first thing about this generation is, uh, it, they understand that if they play by the rules of, of the game, they will not win, the rules of society right now. They will be stuck in student debt. They will be stuck in a, in a bunch of problems that, uh... They've been watching this through YouTube. They've been reading about it on, on social media. They've been seeing that we have s- uh, span an era of Of Elons, of innovation, of Edison people mindsets that are-- it's allowing the mind to really flow. And surprisingly, capital is right now historically levels of almost unlimited capital access, especially if you're younger, there's even more capital than before. It's a perfect scenario for this generation to really create and take risks in ways that, that you cannot imagine. Funny enough, when you talk to them the most, you will find that a lot of them feel that working on software alone is boring. It's not fun. It's not challenging enough. They wanna build physical objects. They wanna, they wanna touch, um, materials. They wanna get their hands dirty in building, um, stuff that will actually matter and get to our hands one way or the other, which is super interesting because that was not the generation of the last fifteen, twenty years. Everybody was trying to go capital light.

   11. DSDavid Senra30:54

       Mm-hmm.

   12. MMMicky Malka30:55

       Everybody was trying to build software only and try to go through the cycles as fast as you can. This generation is not afraid of getting their hands dirty, so it's super interesting to see the behaviors. What's the difference? Why? I don't know. Like, maybe they just find that they grew up with a phone, they grew up with a tablet, they grew up with a computer, so it's not interesting enough to limit the world to just bits and bytes.

   13. DSDavid Senra31:18

       Mm-hmm.

   14. MMMicky Malka31:18

       But the more time I spend with them, the, the biggest thing and the biggest question that I find asking them is, because the oldest of this generation are probably twenty-five, twenty-six, the younger are eighteen, you ask them, "What were you doing during COVID?" And the-- that is the most fascinating question. The most successful ones right now were the ones that during COVID were learning and were on YouTube sucking information about anything and learning about everything in life. So when they go and, and build companies, they find that, first, they're naive, so they, anything's possible. Second, technology is there, so anything's possible. Third, if you're older, you got knowledge and you got wisdom, but you may not have the motivation. So he-- they need to find out how to bring that from people. And so what, what you're starting to see is that the best ones are attracting some of the best older people to come join them because they feel that magnet. And-

   15. DSDavid Senra32:20

       So the younger people are recruiting the older ones.

   16. MMMicky Malka32:22

       Yes. Um, and they're, and they're, and they're making them work in little, uh, hubs of two or three-

   17. DSDavid Senra32:29

       Mm-hmm

   18. MMMicky Malka32:30

       ...with two young ones. They're pairing them. Two twenty-two-year-old kids with somebody, uh, much later working in teams together, and they're-- and that's where they're jetting between their knowledge of the new ways of operating systems with the knowledge that you need from twenty years of experience.

   19. DSDavid Senra32:47

       If you play this out over the next, like, five, ten years, don't they-- aren't they gonna have, like, a massive technical advantage too? 'Cause, like, me and you u-use AI a lot, but not-- we have other stuff going on in our lives where, like, they can live and breathe it twenty-four seven.

   20. MMMicky Malka32:58

       Yes, and they will. And we just got, what? This year high school class-- Uh, sorry, college class is the first one that actually went to college and had AI the four years. We just started. The senior class, the rising senior of, of college, it's the first class ever that probably used ChatGPT to write an essay to get to college.

   21. DSDavid Senra33:21

       I keep asking questions about these, the, the young people that you hang out with because I've had founders, like, literally in their mid-thirties, and they're the technical leaders of their-- these really successful companies. They're like, "I don't know if I can do this anymore. I'm too old." I'm like, "What do you mean you're too old? You're thirty-five years old." [chuckles] They're like, "Yeah, but I think I'm gonna get smoked by a twenty-four-year-old."

   22. MMMicky Malka33:39

       I don't think you're too old, to be honest, and I don't feel old, and I, I feel I can, I can s- I can still play the game. But you gotta understand that you gotta play a different game. You cannot keep playing the same game that you were playing in your twenties or in your thirties. You gotta understand that the way these dynamics work and what you can bring to them is very different. What can you bring to them? Wisdom, knowledge. Give them experiences, stuff that they don't understand. By the way, the best ones, they still lack, and they w- they, they have to refine its taste. They gotta be able to articulate how to build something beautiful. That's not easy, and it's something that we've lost in society is ability to build beautiful stuff. Silicon Valley has lost that ability a long time ago, and we have to bring it back. I'm hoping this generation is the one that spends time thinking how to deliver beautiful experiences.

8. 34:29 – 36:56

   Bringing Beauty and Taste Back to Technology

   1. DSDavid Senra34:29

      Say more about Silicon Valley losing the ability to build beautiful things.

   2. MMMicky Malka34:32

      So if, if you, if you think about the last, um, fifteen years, the incentive systems and every metric of success was wired on scale, grow, go bigger, uh, have a more nuance, more what, but it was, it wasn't about building beautiful products. We, we have... When was the last time you bought something, some technology product that you loved, and you were like, "Wow, this is beautiful"?

   3. DSDavid Senra35:04

      I don't even wanna tell you. It's embarrassing, the answer. It was a Dyson vacuum cleaner. [chuckles]

   4. MMMicky Malka35:09

      That's great. But... And, and by the way, Dyson comes up a lot when I ask this question. Uh, also the, the, the, the-

   5. DSDavid Senra35:15

      Air wrap, yeah

   6. MMMicky Malka35:16

      Yes.

   7. DSDavid Senra35:17

      If you have a daughter [chuckles] or any women in the house, like-

   8. MMMicky Malka35:20

      Yes. And somebody-

   9. DSDavid Senra35:21

      They're obsessed with Dyson products

   10. MMMicky Malka35:22

       And somebody in your team here was showing us they, they still carry the iPhone SE.

   11. DSDavid Senra35:25

       The SE, yeah.

   12. MMMicky Malka35:26

       Right? The small iPhone. Why? Because it's beautiful. It was one of the first ones designed in a different way. So we have lost that ability, and because we have given a prize and a reward for, um, efficiency, algorithm, uh, compounding of those things, and we have put aside how it makes you feel. In this world where technology is taking over a lot of, of our lives in the way we're going, more than any time in history, we're gonna need that feeling back again, how it makes you feel. And it's not just the brand with a TV commercial. That's the- Point I'm less worried about. It's more about what's authentic, what's beautifully designed, and what does it make you feel when you are around it.

   13. DSDavid Senra36:14

       It's the perfect time that you're bringing this up because right now, literally a few hours this morning, uh, and the last few days I've been rereading this biography of Jony Ive. I think it's called, like, Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products or something like that. All he talks about is feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling. He didn't think computers were for him. He thought they were ugly and tacky. He starts using a Mac. This is years before he's even working at Apple, and he's just like, "Oh, there's a human behind this."

   14. MMMicky Malka36:36

       Yeah.

   15. DSDavid Senra36:37

       You can tell there's a actual human that cares behind this, and he... all he talks about, he's talking about this redesigning hairbrushes and about how it makes him feel, to your point.

   16. MMMicky Malka36:47

       And I think that if we don't bring that back, the founders that will do that will win, and the founders that don't have that ability, they don't have

9. 36:56 – 45:54

   Revolut, Founder DNA, and Earning Deep Trust

   1. MMMicky Malka36:56

      a chance.

   2. DSDavid Senra36:56

      Right before you came over, I was on the phone with my... our mutual friend, Neil Mehta, and he keeps telling me about Nik from Revolut, right? And we were talking about some unrelated stuff, and I go, "Oh, I'm about to see Micky Malka." He's like, "You gotta ask him the conversation we had if, if he remembers," because he, he said you invested way before he did. I think he's done now the last, like, two or three rounds, but I think he remembers calling you and passing on Nik. Can you tell, like, why do I keep hearing about Nik, and, like, what do you think makes him so special?

   3. MMMicky Malka37:27

      You gotta understand Nik, um, for how he grew up and who he is to understand who he was. Uh, funny enough, I was in London a few weeks ago because they finally got their bank license approved, and there was a chancellor there and some public officials speaking, and Nik was there with Vlad, the co-founder, and I, I was looking at my phone, and I was remembering when was the first time that we had, we had to handshake our series A.

   4. DSDavid Senra37:57

      Mm-hmm.

   5. MMMicky Malka37:57

      And it was literally that same day 10 years before.

   6. DSDavid Senra38:00

      Oh, wow.

   7. MMMicky Malka38:01

      And so I, I went to them and I showed on the phone and said, "Listen, 10 years ago we were drinking vodka shots because-

   8. DSDavid Senra38:06

      [laughs]

   9. MMMicky Malka38:07

      ... uh, to do our, our A round." And what was it about him from day one, first, the name Revolut stand for who he was. He wanted to truly create a revolution in, in money. Like, there was nothing in the middle about it. He had come to London. He had left Moscow. He was a trader. He was frustrated with how complex it was to move money, how difficult and how expensive and how unfair it was for everybody in the system, and he says, "Fuck it. I gotta change this." So that core DNA was there from day one. Uh, and then it went, he lived it every single day. He, he will wake up every day and go swimming. He will g- work in the office. He was the first one to arrive, the last one to leave, and the first one to arrive the next day again, and he will swim and stay fit and just relentlessly focus on getting this mission moving forward. And people just either competed with him at that level because it was a performance that had a level, that execution, that it was just a machine. It was nonstop, "I just have this mission and I have to do it in my lifetime."

   10. DSDavid Senra39:24

       I'm glad you said the machine 'cause I think that's what Neil described. He's like, "He's like a fucking terminator." [laughs]

   11. MMMicky Malka39:29

       But, uh, that was, that was Nik in his late twenties. That was who he was there in his late twenties. Now, the N- Nik of today, uh, 10 years later, uh, he's, he's gotten better. He's gotten better because now he can lead. He can lead by example. He can lead by mission. He's a missionary also now. He can lead by taste. He has very strong opinions on how s- things need to go. He still has 20 people direct report to him, and he will work seven days a week, and then every number of weeks take two weeks off. Like, you can see that his behavior of work is fine-tuned to who he is now compared to who he was before. So consistency, what, what, what I like to do is when we back these teams, we try to understand the DNA of the founder, and we try to understand what drives them and how do they work. But more importantly, we wanna see if that DNA reflects in the offices, in the team, in the people, in the way they talk, in the way they, they, they move. And you still go to the Revolut offices, which is, like, in now in, I don't know, 15, 20 countries, and I've been to the, the one in the Middle East, in Barcelona, in London in the last year and a half. You still breathe the, that DNA still there. So that's what keeps it going. Uh, it's, it's a very special way that you gotta understand the founder really well to know because each org is very different.

   12. DSDavid Senra40:53

       So when you say you wanna understand the founder's DNA, how do you go about understanding that?

   13. MMMicky Malka40:57

       You gotta spend time with them, and you gotta ask them all the questions, and you gotta build a level of trust where honestly you don't have to talk about business that much. What kind of level of trust you gotta... You g- how do you build that trust to talk to them in a way where they feel that they can trust you back, that they can call you when they cannot sleep at night? Those are the things that you gotta, I, I spend most of my time and the team at Ribbit spend most of the time doing, which is building that level of understanding and relationship so we know how they behave. Once you know how, how people behave, then everything's fine because you will see consistency or they will break it.

   14. DSDavid Senra41:35

       Explain why it's important to you to be the person that they call and when they have problems. Like, you just used the example of, like, when they can't sleep at night.

   15. MMMicky Malka41:43

       Because all of us have something that wakes us up at night from time to time, and that, that particular mind problem that you're trying to solve, it's the biggest thing that you have to get unlocked to keep being the best version of, of, of yourself. And when you're there, sometimes it's really hard to trust if it's a vulnerable question. Sometimes it's really, uh, deep and has a lot of strategic consequences, and you wanna be really... You're, you're going to your mind a lot. And- If we get a phone call, it means that we did a hundred things right to deserve the right to be there to help this person think through it. Never answer the question, just help him or her answer the question. And that meant that you were able to talk about life and family, and you were able to talk about society and politics, and you were able to talk about everything because that's the only way you're gonna get to really help this person answer the question.

   16. DSDavid Senra42:43

       So you have a, in many cases, you know, decade-plus relationships with a lot of the founders that you back. How does... Like, can you compare, like, Nick to the other ones? Like, what are, what are the traits that you think they share among the people that you spend the most time with?

   17. MMMicky Malka42:56

       Well, they all want to win in their own wellbeing. They care about if they are true to themselves, they still... The mission that they wrote on the first day is still present today. And when you find that authenticity, they win. So the ones that are authentic are the ones that you can keep seeing. The ones that fake it till they make it and then they change and then they move and then they... Those are the ones that over time you just don't have the appetite to spend time with. It's not worth it.

   18. DSDavid Senra43:25

       Is it reflected in the performance of their company too?

   19. MMMicky Malka43:28

       Sometimes you don't-

   20. DSDavid Senra43:28

       And you have people that fake it, and then they-

   21. MMMicky Malka43:30

       Yeah

   22. DSDavid Senra43:30

       ... build massively successful companies? [chuckles]

   23. MMMicky Malka43:31

       Yes. They, they are, for sure. But sometime, somewhere, somehow down the line, authenticity matters. And as long as you're authentic to yourself and you keep your values authentic and you remember yourself, why you're doing what you're doing, and you can wake up every day with that energy, you're, you'll, you'll be fine.

   24. DSDavid Senra43:51

       So if we go back to that idea that Rick Rubin has, like, these four handful of ideas, could be four, could be five, could be six ideas that he just used for over multiple decades. W- what would, like, be the list of traits, uh, that you would... If I said, "Hey, list out the four or five things that you want the founders, that you wanna build long-term relationships with and partner with over long term have," what would those, what would your answer be?

   25. MMMicky Malka44:12

       We have this thing called the isle, isle of the tiger. It's our way of r- thinking about the people that we wanna back and how we wanna partner with them. And as everything, as I told you before, it needs to fit in a napkin. So if we wrote it in a napkin, means that we've thought about it-

   26. DSDavid Senra44:26

       [chuckles]

   27. MMMicky Malka44:26

       ... long enough that we have it, right? And it's basically the energy o- of a scientist, the conviction of a missionary, the heart of a partner, the dreams of an athlete, the obsession of an owner. When we meet them and we spend time with them, we wanna make sure those things are present. And if they are, that's the kind of people that we wanna partner with.

   28. DSDavid Senra44:48

       How long did it take you to develop? Like, how many... Is this over several years where you guys figured out these, like, these reoccurring traits?

   29. MMMicky Malka44:53

       This is several years. This is probably a decade to honestly... We probably put it into a napkin, uh, five years ago, so yeah, it took us almost ten years.

   30. DSDavid Senra45:02

       Do you consider yourself a patient person?
10. 45:54 – 50:53

    Building OnePay With Walmart

    1. MMMicky Malka45:54

       has happened.

    2. DSDavid Senra45:54

       Okay, I just heard about this. Our... We have a mutual friend, Sebastian, founder of, uh, former found- founder of Rappi, and he's like, "Tell... Ask him about the deal he did with Walmart."

    3. MMMicky Malka46:03

       It just speaks to a little bit of, of this value system of ours, David. Uh, we had a chance to meet, uh, I've been a fan of Sam Walton all my life, right?

    4. DSDavid Senra46:11

       Same.

    5. MMMicky Malka46:12

       And I, I had read every book. I had never been to Bentonville until a few, few years ago, but I had read everything about him and I, I'd follow, and I remember Buffett owned the stock for a particular period of time until he sold it, and that was when I first learned about Walmart back in the day. And, uh, in 2019, through Sarah Friar, who's now OpenAI, but she was, uh, she was on the board, she is on the board of Walmart. She organized a dinner where I had a chance to meet Doug McMillon, the CEO at the time. And we had a lovely dinner in San Francisco a few months before COVID, and Doug says, after dinner he says, "Listen, if you ever find yourself in Bentonville, come visit me." And I'm like, "I don't know what I'm gonna do in Bentonville," but-

    6. DSDavid Senra46:52

       [chuckles]

    7. MMMicky Malka46:53

       Uh, so I left the dinner. I was so impressed by, by Doug, his way of speaking, his understanding about macro, the world, the values of Walmart. E- everything was so present in, in him at that dinner. Uh, it was a small dinner, so it could have been something different, but it was authentic to him, that, uh, we went as a team to a couple of Walmart stores. We tried every financial product we can buy. We could... We did remittances, prepaid card, we... And we found bugs, and we found all these things that looked like 1990s fintech.

    8. DSDavid Senra47:28

       Were they selling them themselves or there was, like, vendors inside of Walmart?

    9. MMMicky Malka47:31

       They had vendors, and they had partners-

    10. DSDavid Senra47:33

        I see

    11. MMMicky Malka47:33

        ... and they had their own Walmart card. It was a whatever card. So I wrote them in January before COVID. I said, "Listen, if you're in Bentonville, I'd love to go see you." And lo and behold, he said, "Yes." Showed up, sit down with, with Doug, and he introduced me to John Furner, who's now the CEO of Walmart, who's a, alongside with Doug. They were there for almost 30 years at Walmart, both of them, since they, since they were 17. And John is my age, so we're, we started at the same time in two different continents, and we were sitting in the same room talking about this. And I said, "Listen, you guys can build something much better with financial services here. This is not your priority number one, two, or three. It is for us. Let's figure it out." And they did something that never, they had never done. They created a JV. A company that we both co-own, and we went together and build a rockstar team with a new brand. We bought two companies, and to build the infrastructure run by Omer Ismail today, and it's called OnePay, and it's one of the biggest financial brands that you've never heard of.

    12. DSDavid Senra48:36

        Operating out of all the Walmarts?

    13. MMMicky Malka48:38

        You will see it online on every shopping cart experience on Walmart. You will see it the retails everywhere. If you wanna pay with your phone today, the only way to pay at Walmart is with OnePay. If you wanna have a debit card, it's the only way. You want a loan from Klarna, it goes through OnePay. If you want an installment loan, you want a credit card, it goes through OnePay. Every single financial product to millions and millions and millions of American consumers. And the beauty of that is that with John being... And this is the beauty of the Walmart culture. John had been in China for a number of years. They, he had learned how, uh, WePay worked and how Alipay did business. They were investors in India, in Flipkart and PhonePe. So then they saw what, what could happen with mobile money. They have been the greatest partners to have. And so together, between the founder team, Ribbit, and Walmart, we have built this amazing journey together that is quite unique for a big corporation like that.

    14. DSDavid Senra49:42

        I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book Zero to One. The quote says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas." That is exactly what AppLovin has done with their advertising platform. AppLovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers inside mobile games. AppLovin allows you to capture undivided attention. AppLovin ads are full-screen video ads that are watched for an average of 35 seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch on AppLovin in minutes. You set the goal, and AppLovin achieves it. There's no complex setup, no expertise needed, and AppLovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, have scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increased their revenue by millions. So you wanna get started quickly before all of your competitors are on AppLovin, and you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com.

11. 50:53 – 56:00

    From Lemon Bank to OnePay: A 20-Year Idea

    1. DSDavid Senra50:53

       Tell me if I'm, I'm connecting things that are unrelated or not, but I don't think I am. What was the business that it was either you or your partner built? It was like this bank, this branchless bank in convenience stores or some shit like that in-

    2. MMMicky Malka51:07

       Brazil

    3. DSDavid Senra51:07

       ... South America, in Brazil.

    4. MMMicky Malka51:08

       Yes.

    5. DSDavid Senra51:08

       Okay. What was the name of that?

    6. MMMicky Malka51:09

       It was called Lemon Bank.

    7. DSDavid Senra51:10

       Okay. Lemon Bank.

    8. MMMicky Malka51:11

       Yes.

    9. DSDavid Senra51:12

       Is... Do... It sounds like you almost took, like, an idea that worked in Lemon, 'cause you guys... You were the founder of that or-

    10. MMMicky Malka51:17

        Yes.

    11. DSDavid Senra51:17

        Okay. And then you... We'll explain what Lemon Bank is, but then you sell it to the biggest bank in Brazil-

    12. MMMicky Malka51:22

        Yes

    13. DSDavid Senra51:22

        ... right? Is this not the same idea, but kind of with Walmart?

    14. MMMicky Malka51:25

        Yes.

    15. DSDavid Senra51:26

        This speaks to why I keep... I, I ask you if you're patient, ask you what are the traits that, like, that you, you notice in the greatest founders because I notice them in you. So, like, patience, long-term thinking, uh, reputation, which I wanna get to in a minute, which is how me and you actually met.

    16. MMMicky Malka51:40

        Yeah.

    17. DSDavid Senra51:40

        'Cause you helped me. Like, I had a big decision to make in my career, and, like, your reputation preceded you, and I was like, "I actually need to meet this guy 'cause I have some, some questions for him." So this is what I mean. It's like you, you, you talked about in the infinite game earlier. It's like, "I'm gonna do this till, like, die," which you just said, which I fucking love, by the way. And you... I'm hearing you talk, and I knew the rough shape of the Walmart thing. I didn't know what it was called. I'm like, "Wait a minute. This sounds like Lemon Bank."

    18. MMMicky Malka52:03

        Yeah. Yes.

    19. DSDavid Senra52:04

        Okay. So [chuckles] explain the connection between the two.

    20. MMMicky Malka52:06

        That's the infinite game right there. You just, you just said it y- yourself really well. When, when you're playing this life game, and it's infinite, being ahead or behind in 2003 when we started that business in Brazil, and I lived there for three years and grinded, a few times almost died trying this business, and we almost killed the business twice along the way. I almost lost all the money I have ever made.

    21. DSDavid Senra52:32

        How... Wait, we gotta pause there. [chuckles]

    22. MMMicky Malka52:33

        Well-

    23. DSDavid Senra52:33

        We're gonna get to what it does. How did you almost lose all the money you ever made?

    24. MMMicky Malka52:36

        Because when I, when we, we had sold our first, uh, dot-com company and then, uh, used all the proceeds to start this bank in Brazil. I moved with, with my wife to Brazil. We were living there.

    25. DSDavid Senra52:47

        So you had no investors, or you were just-

    26. MMMicky Malka52:49

        Uh, no, we had no investors. It was just w- my business partner, Wences Casares, and myself, and, uh, Michael.

    27. DSDavid Senra52:54

        So you put all your chips back on the table.

    28. MMMicky Malka52:55

        All the chips back on the table.

    29. DSDavid Senra52:56

        [laughs]

    30. MMMicky Malka52:57

        We were 25, 26.
12. 56:00 – 1:00:30

    Compounding Trust and Protecting Your Reputation

    1. MMMicky Malka56:00

       Work every day.

    2. DSDavid Senra56:00

       Yeah, this is like a very Buffett Munger kind of thing. Like, uh, Mu- Munger has that, that line where he's like, you know, "You need to learn the big, the few big ideas in each discipline, they carry most of the freight," I think is the way he describes that. And, uh, through all this reading, I was like, my version of it is like, oh, time carries most of the weight. Like, if you're in a good business, like just stay there and time will actually carry most of the weight, uh, to what you wanna do. And so that leads, if you're gonna play the infinite game then, and you're, you wanna do things over long term, you have to protect your reputation, which is another thing that Buffett would repeat in his shareholder letters. Like, "Hey, we can lose money. We can lose a lot of money, actually. We can't lose a shred of reputation." I wanna know how you think about reputation, and then I wanna know, and then I'll talk about why it's so important, how it led me to you.

    3. MMMicky Malka56:41

       I started to go to, uh, the Berkshire annual meetings when I was 18, and back then they were much smaller. They were on a Friday afternoon at a Holiday Inn, a couple hundred people. Uh, and as soon as they moved to the, to the bigger convention center a few years later, they had this movie clip playing in, in the beginning of the annual meeting with a bunch of TV commercials or, or Buffett interviews over the years. And every time since I was a ki- young that age, they were playing the Buffett getting deposed when he was the chairman of Salomon Brothers, saying that line that you just said. It got stuck in my, in my brain.

    4. DSDavid Senra57:17

       So wait, they replayed it at every annual meeting?

    5. MMMicky Malka57:18

       Every annual meeting. It was there that deposition... That was, that, he said that line on a deposition, um, at Congress for something that Salomon Brothers was doing with the Treasuries, uh, arbitraging the, or taking advantage of the Treasury issuing market.

    6. DSDavid Senra57:34

       Yeah.

    7. MMMicky Malka57:35

       And they played it every single year, and I remember it every single year. And part of the reasons why I, I wanted to, uh, live that life is because it, it was natural to me. It was the way you wanted to live life. So yes, reputation matters more than anything.

    8. DSDavid Senra57:54

       There's a handful of people that I really trust and admire, and then the people I trust and admire wanna know who they trust and admire, and I had a decision I had to make, and I wasn't sure how to make it. Um, it was, there was a lot of uncertainty. I didn't have the information I needed, and realized that you were actually in possession of this information. We won't talk about like w- the details of this. And I actually never, almost ever asked to meet people, and I asked two separate people, I was like, "Do you mind making this like introduction for me?" And then the first time we met, we actually winded up talking for like several hours.

    9. MMMicky Malka58:24

       Yeah.

    10. DSDavid Senra58:25

        And then we like became like fast friends.

    11. MMMicky Malka58:27

        Yeah.

    12. DSDavid Senra58:27

        But I made a big decision in my career based on how fantastic your reputation was, and so therefore almost like, uh, Charlie Munger has that great line where like, "Trust is one of the greatest economic forces in the world." And it's like the level of trust that you have built up over a ve- exce- excessive long time with people I trust made me be able to build a relationship and trust your judgment really fast that I could make a decision based on your reputation, and I think this is super important. It's also something that comes up over and over again. Like, um, I, I did this episode, um, on Jensen. There's this book called The NVIDIA Way, which is kinda like half biography of Jensen, half company history, and it talks about he pitched Don Valentine. Don Valentine's still alive.

    13. MMMicky Malka59:08

        Yeah.

    14. DSDavid Senra59:08

        Still making the investment decisions at Sequoia, and Don's like, "That was the shittiest pitch I've ever heard. I'm still gonna give you money because your reputation precedes you, and it's so excellent, so valuable."

    15. MMMicky Malka59:19

        It is the most valuable asset. It's the only asset we have. It's our reputation. Everything else can come and go, but that's the one thing that we have that it will always stick to us, even when we're dead.

    16. DSDavid Senra59:29

        You know who also shaped my thinking on this is like, have you ever heard Palmer Luckey talk about reputation? Have you?

    17. MMMicky Malka59:34

        No, I haven't heard him talk.

    18. DSDavid Senra59:35

        So he says the exact same thing. He's like, "Any time..." He, he thinks this idea where like if people try to destroy your reputation, uh, like you should just, you know, rise above the phrase. Like, no, this is bullshit, because you have to fight back, because the problem is it forecloses opportunities. If this person's damaging your reputation and it's not true, it's gonna foreclose future opportunities, and it's not like if somebody... And he, his whole point is like this is invisible, and I thought it was a really interesting insight. He's like, "If so- if somebody, I let somebody destroy my reputation and, and unfairly, and two years later I ask for a meeting with a guy who took that story and believes it, he's not gonna tell me, 'I'm not taking the meeting 'cause your reputation sucks.'"

    19. MMMicky Malka1:00:12

        Yep.

    20. DSDavid Senra1:00:13

        He's gonna make up some other story. So he's like, "You have to protect it and then fight against it." I thought it was interesting. It's very like a Ben Franklin kind of idea.

    21. MMMicky Malka1:00:19

        Yeah.

    22. DSDavid Senra1:00:19

        Because Franklin would nurture and then also protect and fight back against his reputation 250 years ago. It's very fascinating.

    23. MMMicky Malka1:00:27

        I love it. I didn't know that about Ben Franklin. I'm gonna read more about

13. 1:00:30 – 1:07:34

    Node and the Rebel Case for Digital Art

    1. MMMicky Malka1:00:30

       that.

    2. DSDavid Senra1:00:30

       So I told you right before we started recording that I got the art piece that I ordered at Node. I- I was, I don't even know how to describe the fact, like, I could spend about an hour there with you. Can you just describe what the hell Node is and why [laughs] you're doing it?

    3. MMMicky Malka1:00:44

       Yes. So I think it's in the spirit of being a rebel. Um, so my wife and I, we love art. We find that art is beautiful, and when you find stuff that speaks to you, it has an immense value. It's been around all of us since the caves, right? It's, it's always been there, and five years ago, we stumbled upon digital art for the first time. I was on Twitter scrolling, and I saw an art piece that looked something very similar to a physical art piece we have from the '70s, and then we got into it and started to find other artists in digital art that were doing beautiful stuff that matched something beautiful in history, so we started to pair them together, and that journey took us, like any journey, to get to know the artist. Because what's the difference of these artists? They're alive and, and they're all here, and they're all using... They all studied computer science one way or the other, and they just decided to be artists and tell a story in a different way. Once you start to meet them, they were rebels in the complete expression of, of the word, the same way we were describing some of the rebels in, in companies. Like, think about right now we're running a show on Beeple. Think about-

    4. DSDavid Senra1:01:58

       That's the one I saw.

    5. MMMicky Malka1:01:58

       That's the one you show. So think about Beeple. Think about an entrepreneur who decided for 5,000 days to do an art piece every single day, post it online, so he can only get better. His goal was, he read a book that said, "If you do something every day, you will only get better at it." And he started in 2007 sketching, 2011 started to use Photoshop, 2014 Cinema 4D, and so the software evolves, and every single day posted a image online that no one bought. People paid attention and just made fun of it or congratulate him or, or jump against it until in '21 he sells the first 5,000 days, what is that? 14 years, for $69 million. And suddenly it's like an IPO moment. No one pays attention for a long time. You sell it. What does a, a real rebel do? He said, "Fuck it. We're gonna double down. I'm gonna build a studio. I'm gonna start building a lot more stuff that I couldn't do before." And now he's one of the most prolific artists alive. All he does, his work is digital, and he's not the only one. People see CryptoPunks, and they see a JPEG. Actually, I see a movement. I see a cultural artifact, the first art on chain ever created, and it happens to be portraits. Guess what? Every single art movement in history starts with portraits. They always involve the portrait. So the story is, we went to the museums, and we said, "This art should be seen," because at home, we post-- we, we put it around our house, and all my kids when they were teenagers and brought their friends, guess where their, their attention went.

    6. DSDavid Senra1:03:45

       Not the art you have hanging on the walls.

    7. MMMicky Malka1:03:47

       It went to this.

    8. DSDavid Senra1:03:48

       Yeah.

    9. MMMicky Malka1:03:49

       15, 20 minutes in front of it, talking to it, interacting, asking questions no one didn't understand. We go to museums, and they said, "Yes, we can do this 2028, five years from now, four years from now, and we'll have to find a curator who's gonna curate what the artist wants to do." And my wife and I look at each other and said, "No fucking way. This needs to happen today." So Node, it's the first digital art studio designed for digital artists. It is a space where the artist is his own curator, because that's what rebels do. You-

    10. DSDavid Senra1:04:23

        Yeah

    11. MMMicky Malka1:04:24

        ... you design how you wanna show your art. You don't let somebody else tell you how you're gonna put your art. And it's a place where you come, and you get your hands-on with the art that speaks to the future. And we put this place in downtown Palo Alto for a particular reason, because Silicon Valley needs creativity. We need to bring it back. So our contribution to society is put it in a place where people can actually walk in and see it, and we've opened it five months ago. We had close to 60,000 people show up already. Every weekend we're breaking records. It's free. It's open, and people are interacting. And the most beautiful thing, kids are bringing their parents. So you tell me the last time you went to a museum where the kids are telling-

    12. DSDavid Senra1:05:08

        [laughs]

    13. MMMicky Malka1:05:08

        ... "Dad, let's go in."

    14. DSDavid Senra1:05:09

        Yeah.

    15. MMMicky Malka1:05:09

        Exactly, so that is the difference. So I think we need it, going back to beauty, to taste, to creating authentic stuff, and these artists are the most authentic people right now using digital tools. So let's show them. Let people interact with them, and let that be the driver for entrepreneurs to use it in their own practices.

    16. DSDavid Senra1:05:35

        But this is what I meant about, like, you're way more entrepreneur than you are investor, because you... Just like, th- like when you, when you start a bank for the unbanked in Brazil-

    17. MMMicky Malka1:05:44

        Yeah

    18. DSDavid Senra1:05:44

        ... and you're like, "Well, I'm not gonna open up branches." I mean, like, what opportunity, what's the white space that these incumbents are not... I'm a rebel. What is the white space that these incumbents are not attacking? Well, you just said, like, the museums are, like, they, they don't even have the infrastructure to-

    19. MMMicky Malka1:05:58

        No

    20. DSDavid Senra1:05:58

        ... to display digital art, and, like me, I went to Node with you. Like, the walls are, like, customizable. The next... How... The Beeple's in there for what? Like two months, something like that?

    21. MMMicky Malka1:06:06

        Yes.

    22. DSDavid Senra1:06:07

        Yeah, and then the next one comes in. The infrastructure's still there, but now the artist gets to e- essentially use the infrastructure as a canvas-

    23. MMMicky Malka1:06:13

        Oh, good

    24. DSDavid Senra1:06:14

        ... for his, for his, his or her art.

    25. MMMicky Malka1:06:15

        We think the world will have a lot of these places. Museums will change. They will evolve. It will take a while.

    26. DSDavid Senra1:06:21

        The location that you picked speaks to, again, the, the, like you're kind of just identifying what's the way they did it and, like, l- what's the way I should do it now, where, like, you can walk into it. It's, like, in a very, like, small downtown area.

    27. MMMicky Malka1:06:34

        Yes.

    28. DSDavid Senra1:06:35

        It's not a, it's not like a destination in and of itself. It's something you can just... Y- it's, like, part of the neighborhood, if that makes any sense.

    29. MMMicky Malka1:06:40

        If you read history, which is part of- The beauty of playing infinite games where you have to live in the future but also understand the past, this is not very different than what happened in Paris in, in, with the rebels in, in their art movement when they were not accepted in the museums, and this is how the impressionism came to be, and all the art that was a revolution that changed the way we look at art in the last hundred years. We're living through that same moment. Funny enough, it's not in Paris. Maybe it's starting in Palo Alto.

    30. DSDavid Senra1:07:10

        And so you look at the, the first Node in Palo Alto almost like a prototype.
14. 1:07:34 – 1:10:50

    What It Means to Live as a Rebel

    1. MMMicky Malka1:07:34

       places.

    2. DSDavid Senra1:07:34

       Another thing that I wanna talk to you about, what's with your fascination with rebels? It's all over your website. People that know you talk about this all the time.

    3. MMMicky Malka1:07:42

       Well, first, I'm a Star Wars generation, right? And, uh, I grew up with Star Wars. I'm a big fan of Star Wars. And to me, growing up in Venezuela, you... The only way to survive in that environment is you had to be a rebel. The system, the, the dark side was all over. The chaos was present. Uh, you had to raise above, above that. And the rebel mindset is one where you know authentically and genuinely that something can be better, and you're willing to give your life for it. To me, being a rebel is just a way of being. It's a way of looking at the world, and when you, when you see something, you can always look at it and accept how do you make it better? How do you make it more beautiful? How can... What, what's missing? Like, just the mindset of always being willing to know that better means it can still be better.

    4. DSDavid Senra1:08:35

       I mean, a 17-year-old-

    5. MMMicky Malka1:08:37

       Right

    6. DSDavid Senra1:08:37

       ... starts a company.

    7. MMMicky Malka1:08:38

       Yes.

    8. DSDavid Senra1:08:38

       That would lead me to believe that you had this, like, rebel... You, you were essentially a born rebel.

    9. MMMicky Malka1:08:43

       Yes.

    10. DSDavid Senra1:08:44

        How did you apply that? 'Cause, uh, people reference you as, like, one of the greatest, like, venture capitalists. I'm like, that's not how I think of Micky. I don't think of him as, like, a venture capitalist.

    11. MMMicky Malka1:08:52

        Mm.

    12. DSDavid Senra1:08:52

        So, like, when you're building Ribbit, how did you apply, like, your rebel, like, your inherent rebel nature to... You're essentially almost like, you're almost like an artist in the sense of, like, this is the canvas that I'm building. This is how you think I should do it, but this is how I'm gonna do it. How did you think about it when you started?

    13. MMMicky Malka1:09:08

        If I end up being labeled as a great venture capitalist, first, I hate labels, and second, I will be very depressed-

    14. DSDavid Senra1:09:13

        [laughs]

    15. MMMicky Malka1:09:14

        ... because that's not the label... I want no labels. All I want in my tombstone is to say, "He was a rebel." That's all I want to be said there, and that will say everything about me, the way I raise my kids, the way, my relationship with my wife, the way I, I treat my friends, the way I make business decisions, the way I change m- my mind. I'm willing to change my mind if I learn something that is different. That's a rebel mindset. Everything that is the opposite is a mindset that I know too well. My kids are perfect. I'm the best at what I do. And I run away from any of those things. Actually, I, I find that the rebel mindset is one that you are always asking questions. You're a rebel. You are nonstop asking questions. You wanna learn. You wanna keep... But you and I know a lot of people that get to a point in life when they stop to ask questions, and they start to preach. That's past the rebel time, and everybody has that breaking point somewhere in their lives. I want that to be the last day of my life, so I need to live by that principle on everything that I do, on every behavior, on, on... Like, I'm rebelling now against the traditional art world. I'm trying, you know, to sh- allow artists to show art in a different way. Uh, we rebel at Ribbit, the way we design it. We were... People were asking, "Well, what are you? Are you a venture guy? Are you an early-stage guy?" I'm like, "Yes." "Are you a late-stage guy?" "Yes." "Are you a fintech guy?" "Yes." "But are you doing now, uh, defense or..." "Yes." Like, yes. What's wrong? Like, I'm not gonna let anyone allow that. That is the rebel

15. 1:10:50 – 1:14:41

    Why Ribbit Is Built Like a Startup

    1. MMMicky Malka1:10:50

       mindset.

    2. DSDavid Senra1:10:50

       You are a founder, but you think so much like a founder. So, like, this decision in 2012 to start an investment firm, like, why?

    3. MMMicky Malka1:10:57

       I don't think of it as an investment firm.

    4. DSDavid Senra1:10:59

       Okay. You have to tell, you have to say more about this.

    5. MMMicky Malka1:11:00

       To me, it's a startup. It's a company, and we build our own technology stack, and we have a small team, and we consider ourselves are rebels, and our meetings are called Tatooine, and we have Jedis, and we behave-

    6. DSDavid Senra1:11:11

       Oh, [laughs] I didn't know this.

    7. MMMicky Malka1:11:13

       Yeah, yeah. [laughs]

    8. DSDavid Senra1:11:13

       Oh, so you're really into Star Wars.

    9. MMMicky Malka1:11:15

       Oh, yes, completely. And, uh-

    10. DSDavid Senra1:11:16

        [laughs]

    11. MMMicky Malka1:11:17

        And-

    12. DSDavid Senra1:11:17

        Are you backing Jedis or you have Jedis?

    13. MMMicky Malka1:11:19

        We, we back Jedis.

    14. DSDavid Senra1:11:20

        Okay.

    15. MMMicky Malka1:11:21

        And, and we have Wookies, and we have Jedis.

    16. DSDavid Senra1:11:23

        [laughs]

    17. MMMicky Malka1:11:23

        We have the whole thematic truly alive in the way we think because it has to be authentic, and people that work w- with us at Ribbit, the whole team feels that ownership, that teamwork. There's... Investment firms are very siloed in many ways, and I don't love that. We wanna over-communicate even internally. Like right now, the entire team knows that we're sitting together. Everybody can see my calendar and my inbox. They can see my emails, and I can see anybody's emails. We share all the information, so we can actually become better as a team. That mindset is very rebel in this environment. And, and, and how we make decisions, we don't make individual decisions. We make group decisions, and there's no, like... Somebody asks, "Who's the partner responsible for that company?" It's like, "What partner?" And you ask the founders, they say, "I don't know. I call Micky for something. I call Nick for something. I call Justin for something." We are just a team that works together in, in, in very different ways, so that is the joy of going to the office every day. I l- I love being there and spending time with the team because we just have fun together.

    18. DSDavid Senra1:12:28

        What was the insight, though, that caused you to do this instead of... Because you started how many companies before this? This is your sixth company?

    19. MMMicky Malka1:12:34

        Yes.

    20. DSDavid Senra1:12:34

        Some- something like that?

    21. MMMicky Malka1:12:35

        Yeah.

    22. DSDavid Senra1:12:35

        So, like, but your sixth company looks vastly different from your first five, correct?

    23. MMMicky Malka1:12:38

        Yes.

    24. DSDavid Senra1:12:39

        So, like, what was the insight between five and six, though?

    25. MMMicky Malka1:12:41

        I had to, in the infinite game, I had just had to learn how to do it right, and this time I do it right because I consider myself, even though- They were successful, and they created a lot of impact and changed a lot of people's lives around the world. I consider myself a failed entrepreneur.

    26. DSDavid Senra1:12:56

        That's absurd.

    27. MMMicky Malka1:12:58

        But I-

    28. DSDavid Senra1:12:58

        That's what you gotta say. Like, why?

    29. MMMicky Malka1:13:00

        Because the, the best entrepreneurs never have to sell their company.

    30. DSDavid Senra1:13:05

        Okay, another fist bump on that. There you go.
16. 1:14:41 – 1:16:24

    Charlie Munger and the Power of Time

    1. MMMicky Malka1:14:41

       But it's, it's this joy. It's this thing that every day you get better, and you just are improving. And, uh, you know, I sat with Charlie Munger once, uh, in one of... after another meeting, uh, uh, at the Happy Hollow Golf Club, where Warren had this thing afterwards, and I saw myself, and I only had one stock of Berkshire. I was probably 24 years old and 25, and I sit next to him. Well, he sits next to me. I'm sitting. He, he says, "Hey." He says, "Take it." I said, "No, come on. Sit here, Charlie." And we started to talk, and, and that room was everybody. Bill Gates was there, all these big CEOs of all these companies, and I was like the youngest guy by an order of magnitude. And he looks at me and says, "You must be very wealthy to be here." And I said, "Actually, no, I only own one share." He says, "You don't get it. You are the wealthiest guy in the room." And I said, "You're wrong, Charlie." "No, no, you are." "Why?" "You have the power of time. All of us here are in our last ep- chapter. You're just starting your time. You will compound for the next 70 years of your life. So never forget the rule I'm about to tell you. You only need to get rich once, and then that was it." He says, "And now I'm gonna eat," and just sat down and ate. [laughs]

    2. DSDavid Senra1:15:53

       I love that. Time is the only true currency we have.

    3. MMMicky Malka1:15:55

       It's the only true currency you have.

    4. DSDavid Senra1:15:56

       I appreciate you spending your time giving it to us today. This was awesome.

    5. MMMicky Malka1:15:59

       Thank you. Thank you for having me.

    6. DSDavid Senra1:16:02

       Yeah. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders. [upbeat music]

Episode duration: 1:16:24