David Velez: How AI Changes The Future of Finance | E1059

We're getting to a point where almost 50% of the Brazilian adult population is a customer of Nubank. I don't think JP Morgan can say that about customers of theirs in the US.

David, I am so excited for this. We did our first one a while ago, but thank you so much for joining me again today.

No, thank you, Harry. Great to be talking to you again. It's exciting.

Now, I would love to start, we were talking about Doug before the show. Doug told me that I had to start with the Sequoia interview process, which I haven't heard about before. He said you gotta ask him, like, "How did we run it? What was the process like?" And what was it like from your perspective? Can we start there?

It's a great question. I getting introduced to Doug via mutual friend. And so I go meet... I go to Sequoia and meet Doug. And from that moment on, everything was different about that interview process, and given the interview process was different, just made me realize how different Sequoia is as a firm ultimately. But I'll just give you a couple data points. So the first thing that came to mind was the first interview was with the head of the firm, not with the youngest analyst. In most firms, you start from the bottom and then you go up. At Sequoia, it's the opposite, you go, you go from the top and then you go down and you start meeting there. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense because that first impression of meeting the head of the firm from a candidate, it's a, it's a, it's, uh, like, "Hey, this is important." A lot of firms say that talent and people are important, but they n- they just spend a lot of time interviewing a lot of people that, that, that are just beginning to understand the firm. So speaking with the f- the head of the firm made a lot of difference. Then all the questions that I had with Doug were very, very different questions, questions that nobody had ever asked me in any interview before. There was very little questions around your CV or your experience, there, maybe there were about five minutes of that. Everything else was about me a- is trying to get, uh, to know me as a person, and so a lot of questions around personality, character, questions like, "Tell me about your dad. What does he do? Uh, how is your mom? How's your relationship with your mother? Is she pretty strict?" You know, you, you just get asked, you just got to answer it be- there's no way to game those questions, right? There's no way to game those answers. There's not a right answer.

(laughs) .

But somehow Doug has developed an entire philosophy around what different answers to those questions actually mean and how those questions will lead you into, uh, into the right kinda answer. I'll give you one final data point. I finish e- the interview with Doug and say, "Hey," and he tells me, "I would love for you to meet more people at Sequoia." I leave Sequoia, and from the time that I went from leaving the office to getting to my car, which was ab- about a minute, um, I turned on the car and I had already an inbox from Mike Moritz asking me to go back and meet with him. So it took Doug about a minute to go talk to Mike, Mike to want to interview me, to send me an email, and to be ready to talk to me again. That just tells you so much about the firm in so little details that I was, that was just kind of the beginning of understanding how different Sequoia was as a culture firm, but, but I thought, I thought I was... all, all of those elements made it a very interesting interviewing experience and, and, and in, in, in hindsight, makes a lot of sense to, to structure it that way.