dLocal CEO Sebastian Kanovich: The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | 20VC #926
Sebastián Kanovich (guest), Harry Stebbings (host)
In this episode of The Twenty Minute VC, featuring Sebastián Kanovich and Harry Stebbings, dLocal CEO Sebastian Kanovich: The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | 20VC #926 explores 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.
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.
Key Takeaways
Treat 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.
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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.
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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.
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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. ...
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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.
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Go local and go hard: pair HQ culture carriers with strong local talent.
In tough geographies like China, India, and Nigeria, dLocal learned that exporting culture alone fails; success requires a blend of relocated core-team members and deeply local hires who understand on-the-ground realities.
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Keep teams lean to preserve ownership and coherence as you scale.
With ~650 employees across 35+ markets, Kanovich prefers small, empowered, remote teams, believing larger groups dilute ownership, slow cooperation, and make cultural alignment harder—especially under public-market scrutiny.
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Notable Quotes
“You 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
Questions Answered in This Episode
How can a founder practically distinguish between fast, acceptable risks and decisions that are too costly to make quickly?
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. ...
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What specific mechanisms can leaders use to ensure they’re listening to representative customer needs rather than just the loudest voices?
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How do you preserve frugality and humility in a culture when large amounts of capital and public-market attention suddenly arrive?
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What are the signals that a market is ‘hard but worth it’ versus simply structurally unattractive or too risky?
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How should CEOs consciously evolve their leadership style as they move from bootstrapped startup to global public company without losing their original culture?
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Transcript Preview
Three, two, one, zero. (beeping) You have now arrived at your destination.
Seba, I'm so excited for this. I heard great, great things from Oren Ziv and from the team at, um, General Atlantic. So thank you so much for joining me today.
Hi. It's great being here. Thanks very much for having me.
Not at all. But I wanna start with a little bit on you. So tell me, Dlocal is one of the most fascinating stories. It is a machine of a company, and actually quite under the radar, respectfully. So tell me, how did you come to be CEO of Dlocal?
So, Har, it's, uh, it's, it's ... This year it's year number ten, and it's, it was absolutely by chance. So, uh, I was in Montevideo, where I was born, and I at my mother's-in-law birthday party, and I met one of my partners and he tells me, "We are starting a company." I was back then trading stocks and bonds at Santander Bank. I, I studied economics, so it was supposed to be wha- wha- what one, one was meant to do. And he told me, "Look, we are starting this company. Come join us. See how it looks." Uh, and that's how I'm here, uh, ten years later. Absolutely by chance. Obviously I have no idea about payments. Uh, the good things about payments is that it's like a, it's like an onion. You, you keep peeling it and you're thinking, "Now we understand it." And then you realize that there's more and more layers. So absolutely by chance. I would have had no idea that I would be here ten years, ten years later. By no chance.
Can I ask you a question? And I often think about this one (laughs) . And I sent you the schedule beforehand. I'm like, "Oh, can I ask you a random question that I just thought about?" Luck and skill. I think, you know, (laughs) pe- people often kind of conflate the two, but then also don't appreciate that actually a lot is skill as well. How do you think about the role of luck and skill in your progression to be CEO today?
I think anyone who ... N- n- no one would disregard luck. You know, it, it's, it's impossible to disregard. Obviously you need to work extremely hard and you do everything you can to, to go after it. Uh, we're gonna be discussing a little bit more, but I really suffer when we lose, and it's something that I think has also proven to be a, a way of being lucky, in the sense that I don't wanna lose. Uh, so the fact that we don't wanna lose means that I'm gonna put everything I have, uh, to hopefully being a chance to be successful. So I think you need to go to your mother-in-law's dinner party. That's one lesson. Uh, so that's the luck component. But then you have ten years of very hard work, so bo- both are really important.
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