David Senra - Micky Malka, Founder of Ribbit Capital

Episode Date: August 2, 2026

Micky Malka is the founder of Ribbit Capital and the co-founder of Node, the first gallery built for digital artists. He calls himself an entrepreneur at heart and an investor by design — a line vague enough to defy labeling, which is the point. The only label he wants is the one on his tombstone: He was a rebel. At 25, Malka put every dollar from his first exit into a branchless bank in Brazil, moved there with his wife, and twice came close to killing the company and losing everything. At its peak, Lemon Bank ran 7,000 locations serving 50 million customers, most of them unbanked. He sold it in 2008. Twelve years later, the same insight persuaded Walmart to do a first — a jointly owned company. It became OnePay, the biggest financial brand you have never heard of. He founded Ribbit Capital in 2012 and has spent the 14 years since backing Revolut, Robinhood, Nubank, Coinbase, and Credit Karma — usually early, and usually before anyone else would. He met Vlad at Robinhood before there was an app or a single customer. Ribbit does not run like a fund: no partner is assigned to a company, decisions are made as a group, and the whole team can read his inbox. Malka does not call it an investment firm. He calls it his sixth startup, and the first one he will never have to sell — because, by his own standard, the best entrepreneurs never do. Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/micky-malka Made possible by Ramp: https://ramp.com Deel: https://deel.com/senra AppLovin: https://applovin.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) Why Micky Malka Refuses to Be Labeled (00:03:00) Writing Your Way to Conviction (00:05:41) Buying Berkshire at 13 and Learning Buffett's Operating System (00:11:48) Token Factories, AI Bankers, and the Future of Money (00:18:38) The Infinite Game: Why It's Better to Be Behind (00:22:09) Gen Z Founders and the Chaordic Company (00:29:00) Why Young Founders Want to Build Atoms, Not Just Bits (00:34:29) Bringing Beauty and Taste Back to Technology (00:36:56) Revolut, Founder DNA, and Earning Deep Trust (00:45:54) Building OnePay With Walmart (00:50:53) From Lemon Bank to OnePay: A 20-Year Idea (00:56:00) Compounding Trust and Protecting Your Reputation (01:00:30) Node and the Rebel Case for Digital Art (01:07:34) What It Means to Live as a Rebel (01:10:50) Why Ribbit Is Built Like a Startup (01:14:41) Charlie Munger and the Power of Time Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thanks for doing this, Mickey. David, it's a pleasure to be here with you. There's so many times on our previous conversations where I'm listening to you speak, and I'm like, shit, Mickey really does think and act a lot, very similar to a lot of history-scrainerers that I read all these biographies about for Founders 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?

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 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 playing good at basketball? And my first answer is, no, I suck a basketball.

Just try to get myself out of any particular label all the way to are you an investor, are you an entrepreneur, and I said, 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 calls to never accept labels.

Yeah, I think if you're labeled, it means you're kind of conforming to like an existing mold. And I think the great founders, they're inherently nonconformists. Yes, and you have to be nonconformist because the world can always be better. So why accept whatever is there today? 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 view yourself?

So I describe myself as an entrepreneur at heart, an investor by design. Such a general line that allows me to do anything, right? Some days I can wake up and be an 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. So there's really no, like you are completely fluid. You don't really, I put it like a label on yourself. Correct. I don't. I try and I avoid it. The only label I want to 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.

the other ones, I don't care. Yeah, I'm always interested in how people think about, like, their own perception of their work, because I just had this great conversation with Rick Rubin. And I had to, like, interrupt him one time because he's like, yeah, I kind of think of myself as a researcher. And I'm like, what? Because, you know, people are like music producer, and now he's a podcaster,

and, you know, he's a conceduliary to some of the top artists in the world. Yeah. And he's just like, all day, I'm just, like, finding what I'm intensely curious about and just researching that as far as I can. And I think that's what it takes. And that's what entrepreneurs do every day. And that's what I great investors does every day. But you don't get labeled like that.

But yes, I will agree with you. Question. I went to your website. I've read a bunch of these, like, what do you call them? They're not manifestos. Are they essays? They're essays. Okay, so I'm very curious.

You've only done a handful. Yes. I'm very curious, like, how your writing shapes not only your thinking, but also what you want to build through Ribbitt. Writing is everything. Because we can sit here and talk about ideas for hours. hours, but if you're not willing to put them in writing, you will never learn what truly they are, how deep they are.

And what I find is, typically those essays that you read, 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 with 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 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 10 years, 15 years. Just imagine.

And let it flow. Let it go. Let that energy get out there. Let that energy be taking from our brains and our Q&As and our diligence and our calls. just put it out there and see what happens. Why do you think that's beneficial? Because it gives you conviction. If you cannot have conviction,

then you're going in mood swings with the markets, up and down. If something changes, you've got to 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 unique conviction in whatever you do. You've got to 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. How long did they take to write? Some of them can take us a year. Some of them can take us four or five months. But the whole process to get a thesis that we like, sit down, think about it, articulate it, tested, share it, come back, work it, probably like a year, a year and a half. I know you were a fan of Buffett.

You've been a shareholder for... All my life. Yeah, like... Since I was 13. That's crazy. You know? I saw one of your tweets. I think it was from like 2015.

And you were like, I think you were holding for like 25 years or something like that at that point. So even more now. And I know you write all his shareholder letters, which I'm a huge fan of. Did that influence your decision to start writing these essays? Completely. So I bought my first share of Berkshire when I was 13 years old in Venezuela. It was November of 1987. How?

Why would a 13-year-old be interested in Bursher? I don't know. I had read a few articles in Fortune magazine about him, about American Express, about Coca-Cola, about a certain brand. And I love the brands he had in his portfolio. I didn't know anything about float or insurance. I was not very familiar with the line of the business. I would hope not at 13. And back then, what he used to say was buy it and get it share.

ship mail 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 my bar mitzvah in November of 87. The crash had happened a month before, the October 87 crash. Stock went down a lot. And I didn't collect enough money to buy one share, so I asked to have my grandfather for a loan, asked for a loan, which he charged my interest as a way to teach me, and bought one share.

And I had it in the mail, it showed up in Venezuela. Luckily, I don't know how I didn't lose it. And so since then, every year I got the annual letters by mail. Yeah. 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 there were terms I didn't understand in the letter. And myself learning came from doing all of that since I was 13. 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 the letters.

then now is just this like thought partner and companion compared to you having to buy a book and and look at the definition of base. It's insane. Like 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, like, it will be 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'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 read it. I don't know if AI can leave you. Say more about that. So it doesn't matter if you were in the 1970s when there was a little bit of inflation or high inflation in America compared to standards.

and he talked there about how he treated float and how flood of insurance worked or in the era of zero interest rates and then how he talked about float and the cost of flowed. 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. Why do you think that's so special that he used the same pattern? Because I think it's the discipline that he built. he just did find 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. I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately.

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This is really special to me right now because have you spent any time with Daniel Eck in person? No. Okay. He's one of like the wisest people I know. And I just did that right, like a couple days after I filmed that episode of Rick Rubin, who again, like I've been making episodes on Rigubin forever. Like I grew up loving hip hop. So he found a deaf jam in his dorm room, which is one of the most iconic hip-hop 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 then I had like probably, I don't know, a couple days, maybe a week later I was having a drink with Daniel. And he goes, how was the, you know, how was it hanging out with Rick? And I was just like, what was fascinating to me is just like, the aura is still there. But if you actually analyze Rick and his career, Rick Rubin in his career, it's just like, he had like basically when he was 19 when he started Def Jam and now I think he's 63, he had like four ideas. And these ideas. And these ideas, are not fucking complicated. It's like the adherence to the love of simplicity, reduction instead

of production, always working with the very best people you possibly can, building the product for yourself first. He's just making, literally, he is patient zero. I'm just building stuff that I want to see. And I was like, yeah, and that's it. And I was like, it's remarkable that those are like the components of that. And I was like, it doesn't even seem that special because they're just so simple ideas. He's like, yeah, but who adheres to the same four ideas for 40 years? I was like, shit, that is what's special. It varies so much what you just said about Buffett. That's what's special.

Yeah. And that's why they're writing special for us. You have to adhere to that. So do you want to talk about the one that you wrote recently on tokens? Yeah. So I love what you just said. Like, I can, you read it 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 napkin version of the token essay. And then you can expand on it from there. The concept is very simple. The word token means something different to everybody. If we sat with Ryan from Visa, the world he defines token is different than the world that Sunder has for token at Google, or the different world that Open AI has for token or Anthropic. They're all different, but they all mean the same.

It's machine-readable information. So if you think about the companies, we call on 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 going to need to understand identity. You're going to need to understand value, and you need to understand the intelligence that

goes into it. And right now, we're in the early unions, what we're starting to see first is the frontier labs being the token factories. They're taking all 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 going to see that evolution go deeper and deeper and deeper. And it will be much more personalized, and it will be much more complete to verticles 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 should be one of the first most fungible things that should be playing the game, and it's not. Why do you think it should be one of the first things that are playing the game? Because it's one of the things

that flows the most in the world. Everything flows to money. Like my whole life, the thing about what keeps my learning going is I follow flows. I believe that nothing static, right? money is never static. Money, it's like gravity.

It always falls, it always moves. It's always going somewhere. It's like water. It's never stuck. Energy is flowing everywhere. From the lights that we're in here, but also our own energies. Right now we're creating all energies and we're sharing that energy. And so I find that for something that is as dynamic as money,

it is not attached to AI yet on anything. on anything. So how does it get attached? I think it's going to 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. We can talk about Patrick at Stripe and how they're building all this.

Literally when you were saying that, 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 payments for agents. Yeah. that's a future or you can talk to anybody in that space or Vlad and Robin Hood doing the same for equities and you can see how they're tokenizing assets. And we're in the early innings,

but we're behind compared to knowledge. Knowledge went much faster. Money is behind, which is fine. So explain, because I don't know anything about this, and you study this night and day. So explain what you think is gonna happen with this in like the next year or two. I don't know the next year or two.

It's hard to know because with the speed of AI, what happens in the next 12 months. Yeah, next few months, whatever. But 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 taking care of. And some of the best founders have articulated this really well. David from New Bank, David LESL. You know, mobile was the way to put a bank in your pocket. Now AI is going to 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. He can go do all kinds of commerce decisions and recommendations, and he can start to do any kind of payment decisions and recommendations on your behalf. And you are going to start to see how that's kind of 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 an interesting market. People call it, some people call it a gambling. Some people call it a place where you can bet on anything 24-7. But here's the thing, it's 24-7. And what agents need are 24-7 rails. So all of this is building the rails to allow all of this to happen. And what we expect is that we're going to see a bunch of new companies or incumbents

that are going to be shipping these features in ways that we have not experienced That was going to be my next question to you. Who do you think actually wins this? Because you just named three pretty big, well-established companies, Stripe, Robin Hood, New Bank. You think it comes from them, or do you think it comes from a startup? I think it comes from them. Because first, they're still founder-led, or revolution also.

They're still funder-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. They're just going faster than the incumbents. For a while, I thought the incumbents were going to catch up. In 2021, 22, 23, I thought they were pair enough.

There was not much difference between a financial product offer from an incumbent than from one of these neo-brands. That's different to it. Again, AI has just become a rocket, nitro rocket for this breed of technology companies to just accelerate even faster and separate themselves again. which is the beauty of the infinite game. In the beauty of the infinite game, you never get to win or you never get to lose.

You're simply ahead or behind. And they were ahead for a long, long time, and then the other ones were catching up, but the rules change. What happens? You're ahead again, and the other ones fall behind. But 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 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.

So I know you play the infinite game. You want to play forever, but do you consider yourself a competitive person, though? Define competitor. I guess the way I think about this internally, it's just like, I'm in a very positive some 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. Yes. So if that's a competitor, yes. I try to do the best job. But it's not relative to other people. No. I don't look at other people.

I don't, 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 am alive. It doesn't matter if I win or lose because you will, that's not the game. 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 and when I'm ahead. When I'm ahead, it means, oh, you guys are doing well.

going right direction, you were right, this happened, this played out. And immediately, immediately, my spider senses get all activated and say, okay, that means that whatever, I got to change the rules, because it's not good to be ahead. You want to be ahead for a while, but you want the rules to change to fall behind so you can innovate again. Yeah, this is why I said that you, there's so many times when we're talking like, God damn it, Mickey sounds just like the people I read books about. I just met James Dyson, it was like a personal hero of mine.

And he said the exact same thing on this podcast. He's just like losing is so much more interesting. He's like, you just learn so much. He likes being behind. Yeah, he just has that chip on his shoulder. Well, really just the desire to constantly improve. He just feels you're going to improve a lot more when you're like losing or you're behind. 100%.

I'm much better when I'm behind. I'd learn more. Everything about it just gives you much more energy. I want to go back because I interrupted you. I want to go back to your idea of like every company is becoming a token factory. Yeah. The only token factories that you see right now are the, the labs?

No, so you're starting to see application layers that are starting to show up, that are building token factories. Think about on the voice AI. Think about 11 labs or Decagon or Sierra. They're all companies that are understanding how 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 is to be riddled by a machine. And that's how the world will go to the next generation.

So you finish writing the letter. What do you do next? We share it with our founders, people that we work with closely, and we allow them to, in our ops, our investors. Why? Because we want them to hold us accountable. This is the thinking. You have a chance.

You can walk out or you can keep believing in our, in our thesis. So we put it out there. And then we go out and we start talking about it with the founders that we met while we wrote it. And what happens- These are founders that you've not yet invested in? Most of them are founders that we have not yet invested in. Because as we write a thesis, we have not invested into them yet. We're learning from them.

Maybe along 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.

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 thinking about building companies? Good question. I think some of them are. I think some others are not, like any other generation. What I believe the people in their 20s have right now

is that they are the smartest. fastest learner generation we've ever had in history. They learned the fastest. And it's because they get used to listen to podcasts at one and a half, two X. They don't have to wait for the mail to arrive with an annual letter a month later. They can read it in real time, right? So they're 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 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 not trained to be great communicators on the other side. So the few that are great communicators, I think they haven't embedded in them. How do you think they view company building differently than somebody that's, say, 10 years older than them? I think they look at orchards very differently.

I think they look at functions very differently. They don't think the orchard 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 our lifetime. But orchards and the way they organize people, completely different. And you can see it. They are self-organizing. And I love studying this because one of my mentors is DeHawk.

the founder of Issa, and I spent with him almost 10 or 12 years visiting him and talking to him. And he's a creator of the chaotic organization. He is the believer that you should never organize. 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 chaotic is the right place to be. They're actually doing, these kids are doing an agreement.

great job by pure nature of how they were trained and wire with this era of technology to be in the epicenter of Chaotic. So that's how they're working, and that's what's different about them. What else did you learn from Deep? The fascinating thing, a couple people have asked me before, because I've done like two or three episodes on DeHawk, he wrote this great autobiography, which 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.

Again, somebody can compress the language and give you a lot of ideas in like, you know, a sentence or two. A lot of people have asked me, it's 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. And yet not a lot of people talk about it. And somebody asked me one time, or a few people have actually asked me this. Like, why do you think that is? It's like, because it's still very confusing on how he actually built it. I've read his book two times that I still don't really understand.

So, like, what else do you think you learn from D. Hawk? Did he influence the way you built Ribbet at all? Yes. Okay, I don't know about this. And not only Ribib, but my previous startups too, because he taught me so much about how to get people to be the best version of themselves in the kind of organizations that you have to have. Even my go-to question on interviews, it's a question he taught me on how to ask. So I've learned so much from him. What is that question?

I give people six words and I tell them to organize them in a certain order. And then the way they walk through that order says a lot 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 learned that from him. So spending time with Dee, 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 tend to be risk adverse and people that care too much about their reputation, he found a way through this model of association. This biggest success was the legal model he used. No one had ever done a company in that structure.

And the association model allowed everybody to safe 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. It didn't care because each one can compete by themselves at the same time, when is the brand won? That was the beauty of the when you spend time with him, he would say, it was the model. And people don't get it. So I find that his restless mind was alive even in his early 90s. because I would have swear that he could have been Satoshi Nakamoto

if he had been 40 years younger. He had explained to me blockchain and what, for him, Visa was a failure 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 smart contracts are today. But he was probably 60 years ahead of his. time. Deal is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying

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Learn how they can help your business today by going to deal.com forward slash Senra. That is deal.com forward slash Senra. Let's go back to the young kids that you spend time with and the way they think about company building compared to some of your older founders. From what sense?

I think the founders are moving forward. Obviously they're going to be way more capital efficient. I think they're going to own larger percentages of their companies because they're going to need to raise less money. I think you use the analogy of one time if you go back and look at some of the robber barons who owned like Henry Ford on 100% of his company. Some of them would go public and they don't have 70 or 80% of the company. Yeah, I'm just very curious like how you think they're going to be building companies,

again, a 21 or 22 year old compared to even like a 35 year old. So the first thing about these generations, they understand that if they play by the rules 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 bunch of problems that they've been watching this through YouTube. They've been reading about it on social media. They've been seeing that we have a spouten era of of Elon's, of innovation of Edison people,

mindset that 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 risk in ways 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 want to build physical objects. They want to touch materials. They want to get their hands. dirty in building 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 15, 20 years. Everybody was trying to go comfortable to light. Everybody was trying to build software only and try to go to 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 the 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. But the more time I spend with them, the biggest thing and the biggest question that I find asking them is, because the oldest of this generation are probably 25, 26, the younger are 18. You ask them, what were you doing during COVID? And that is the most fascinating question.

The most successful ones right now were the ones that during COVID were learning. and we're on YouTube sucking information about anything and learning about everything in life. So when they go and build companies, they find that first they're naive, so anything's possible. Second, technology is there, so anything's possible.

Third, if you're older, you get knowledge and you get wisdom, but you may not have the motivation. So they need to find out how to bring that from people. And so 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. So the younger people are recruiting the older ones?

Yes. And they're making them work in little hubs of two or three with two young ones. They're pairing them. Two 22-year-old kids with somebody much later working in teams together. And that's where they're jetting between their knowledge of the new ways of operations. of operating systems with the knowledge that you need from 20 years of experience. If you play this out over next like five, 10 years, aren't they going to have like a massive technical advantage too?

Because like me and you use AI a lot, but we have other stuff going on in our lives where they can live and breathe at 24-7. Yes, and they will. And we just got what this year high school class, 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 college, it's the first class ever that probably used ChachyPT to write an essay to get to college.

I keep asking questions about the young people that you hang out with because I've had founders literally in their mid-30s and they're the technical leaders of these really successful companies. You're like, I don't know if I can do this anymore. I'm too old. I'm like, what do you think you're too old? You're 35 years old. You're like, yeah, I think I'm going to get smoked by a 24-year-old.

I don't think they're too old, to be honest. And I don't feel old, and I feel I can still play the game. But you've got to understand that you've got to play a different game. You cannot keep playing the same game that you were playing in your 20s or in your 30s. You've got to understand that the way this 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 have to refact. and they have to refine its taste. They got to be able to articulate how to build something beautiful. That's not easy. And it's something that we've lost in society is able 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. Say more about Silicon Valley losing the ability to build beautiful things.

So if you think about the last 15 years, the incentive systems and every metric of success was wire on scale, grow, grow bigger, have more nuance, more. But it was kind of a building beautiful products. We have, when was the last time you bought something? It's a technology product that you loved. And you were like, wow, this is beautiful. I don't even want to tell you it's embarrassing the answer. It was a Dyson vacuum cleaner. That's great.

And by the way, Dyson comes up a lot when I ask this question. Also, the... Air raft, yeah. If you have a daughter or any women in the house, like they're obsessed with Dyson's products. And somebody in your team here was showing us, they still carry the iPhone. The S.E.

Yeah. Right, the small iPhone. Why? Because it's beautiful. It was one of the first ones. It's designing a different way. So we have lost that ability. And because we have...

We have given a price and a reward for efficiency, algorithm, 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 our lives in the way we're going, more than any time in history, we're going to 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. It's the perfect time that you're bringing this up because right now, literally, a few hours this morning, and the last few days I've been rereading this biography of Johnny Ive. I think it's called Johnny Ive, the genius behind Apple's greatest products or something like that. All he talks about was 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 you even working at Apple. And he's just like, oh, there's a human behind this. You can tell there's an actual human that cares behind this. And all he talks about, he's talking about redesigning hairbrushes and about how it makes them feel, to your point. 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, we don't have a chance. Right before you came over, I was on the phone with our mutual friend, Neil Mata. And he keeps telling me about Nick from Revolut, right? And we were talking about some unrelated stuff. And I go, oh, I'm about to see Mickey Malka.

He's like, you've got to ask him the conversation we had if he remembers because 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 Nick. Can you tell, like, why do I keep hearing about Nick and like what do you think makes him so special? You got to understand Nick for how he grew up and who he is, understand who he was. 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 Nick was there with Vlad the co-founder. And I was looking at my phone and I was remembering what was the first time that we had handshake our series A.

And it was literally that same day, 10 years before. Oh, wow. And so I went to them and I showed on the phone and said, listen, 10 years ago, we were drinking vodka shots to do our A round. And what was it about them from day one? First, the name Revolut stand for who he was. He wanted to truly create a revolution 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 got to change this. So that core DNA was there from day one. And then it went, he lifted every single day. He will wake up every day and go swimming. He will work in the office.

We will 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 I have a level, that execution,

that it was just a machine. There was no stop. I just have this mission and I have to do it in my lifetime. I'm glad you said, because I think that's what Neil described me. He's like a fucking Terminator. But that was Nick in his late 20s.

That was who he was there in the late 20s. Now, the Nick of today, 10 years later, he's gotten better. He's getting 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 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, they're two weeks off. Like, you can see his behavior of work. He's fine-tuned to who he is now compared to who he was before. So consistency, what I like to do is when we back these things, 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 want to see if that DNA reflects in the offices. in the team, the people, in the way they talk, in the way they move. And you still go to the revolution offices, which is like in now in, I don't know, 15, 20 countries. And I've been to the one in the Middle East,

in Barcelona, in London in the last year and a half, you still breathe that DNA still there. So that's what keeps it going. It's a very special way that you got to understand the founder really well to know, because each org is very different. So when you say you want to understand the founders DNA, how do you go about understanding that?

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, 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 spend most of more time in the team at Rivets 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 people behave, then everything's fine,

because you will see consistency or they will break it. Explain why it's important to you to be the person that they call when they have problems. Like, you just use an example of like when they can't sleep at night. Because all of us have something that wakes us up at night from time to time. And that particular mind problem that you're trying to solve, it's the biggest thing that you have to get on life.

to keep being the best version of yourself. And when you're there, sometimes it's really hard to trust if it's a vulnerable question. Sometimes it's really deep and has a lot of strategic consequences, and you're going to your mind a lot. And if we get that phone call, it means that we did 100 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 going to get to really help this person answer the question. So you have, 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 the traits that you think they share among the people that you spend the most time with? Well, they all want to win in their own way of being. 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 faked it to 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.

Is it reflected in the performance of their company too? Sometimes you don't. And you have people that fake it and then they build massively successful companies? Yes. They are, for sure. But sometimes, 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'll be

So if we go back to that idea that Rick Rubin has like these four, a handful of ideas, could be four, could be five, could be six ideas that he just used for over multiple decades. What would, like, be the list of traits that you would, if I said, hey, list out the four or five things that you want the founders that you want to build long-term relationships with and partner with over long-term have. What would those, what would your answer that be? We have this thing called the Isle of the Tiger. It's our way of thinking about the people that we want to back and how we want to partner with them. And as everything, as I told you before, it needs to fit in a napkin. So if we wrote it in an app, it means that we thought about it

long enough that we haven't, right? And it's basically the energy 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 want to make sure those things are present. And if they are, that's the kind of people that we want to partner with.

How long did it take you to develop? Like, how many, it's over several years, were you guys figured out these recurring traits? This is several years. This is probably a decade. To, I'm sorry, we probably put it into a napkin five years ago. So, yeah, it took us almost 10 years. Do you consider yourself a patient person?

Yes. Several of the questions I've asked you today is like, oh, yeah, that took a couple years. And that took a couple years. You started your first company when you were, what, like, 17? 17. And you didn't found, you found, you founded multiple companies, but you found it a ribet 20 years later? I founded Rivet much later.

I found the Rivet almost 20 years later. Yeah, 21 years later. 21 years later. You've been doing it for almost 14 years now. 14 years. Yes. And I heard you say before, it's like, well, everybody's like, well, you guys had this fantastic record. You've done all this.

You're like, yeah, it's like super early. We got a long way to go. Yeah. We found amazing people to partner. We got great ideas. We're still building. I mean, we build a company with Walmart. I mean, think about it.

It's just, it's the first time ever that that has happened. Okay, I just heard about this. We have a mutual friend, Sebastian, founder, former founder of Rappi. And he's like, ask him about the deal he did with Walmart. It just speaks to a little bit of this value system of ours. David, we had a chance to meet. I've been a fan of Sam Walton all my life. Same.

And I had read every book. I had never been to Bentonville until a few years ago. But I had read everything about him and I had a 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 in 2019 through Sarah Fryer, who's now open AI, but she was, she was in the board. She's on the board of Walmart. She organized a dinner where I had a chance to meet Doug McMillan, 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 going to do in Ventonville. So I left the dinner. I was so impressed by Doug, his way of speaking, his understanding about macro, the world, the values of Walmart. Everything was so present in him at that dinner. It was a small dinner, so it could have been something different, but it was authentic to him. that we went as a team to cover Walmart stores. We tried every financial product we can buy.

We could. We did remittances, prepaid car. And we found bugs, and we found all these things that looked like 1990s. Fintech. Were they selling them themselves? So there's like vendors inside a market. They had vendors and they had partners and they had their own Walmart car. It was a whatever card.

So I wrote them in January before COVID and said, listen, if you're inventomey, I'd love to go see you. And lo and behold, he said, yes. showed up, sit down with dog, and he introduced me to John Ferner, who's now the CEO of Walmart, who's alongside with dog. They were there for almost 30 years at Walmart, both of them since they were 17. And John is my age, so we started at the same time

in two different continents, and we were still 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 go on, and we went together and built a rock star team with a new brand.

We bought two companies and to build the infrastructure run by Omery's Mile today. And it's called One Pay. And it's one of the biggest financial brands that you've never heard of. Operating out of all the Wal-Mart? You will see it online on every shopping card experience on Walmart. You will see the retail's everywhere. If you want to pay with your phone today, the only way to pay a Walmart is with one pay. If you want to have a debit card, it's the only way you want a loan from Klarna.

It goes through one pay. If you want an installment loan, you want a credit card. It goes through one pay. 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. He had learned how WePay worked and how Ali paid the business. They were investors in India and Flipcard and phone pay.

So they saw what could happen with mobile money. They have been the greatest partners to have. And so together, between the founder team, Revit and Walmart, we have built this amazing journey together that is quite unique for a big corporate. like that. 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 App Loven has done with their advertising platform. App Loven connects you with over a billion potential new customers inside mobile games.

App Loven allows you to capture undivided attention. App Loven ads are a lot of 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 App Loven in minutes. You set the goal, and App Loven achieves it. There's no complex setup, no expertise needed, and App Loven 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, increase their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all of your competitors are on Apploven. And you can do that by going to apploven.com. That's apploven.com. Tell me if 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 branchless bank in convenience stores or some shit like that in South America in Brazil.

Okay. What was the name of that? It was called Lemon Bank. Okay, Lemon Bank. Yes. It sounds like you almost took like an idea that worked in Lemon. Because you guys, you were the founder of that? Yes.

Okay. And then we'll explain what Lemon Bank is, but then you sell it to the biggest bank in Brazil, right? Is this not the same idea, but kind of with Walmart? Yes. This speaks to why I ask you if you're patient, I ask you what the trade set, like, that you notice them greatest founders because I noticed them in you. So like patients, long-term thinking, reputation, which I want to get to in a minute, which is how me and you actually met.

because you helped me, like, I had a big decision to make in my career and, like, your reputation proceeded you and was like, I actually need to meet this guy because I have some questions for him. So this is what I mean. It's like, you talked about the infinite game earlier. It's like, I'm going to do this to like die, which you just said, which I fucking love, by the way. And 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. Yes. Okay, explain the connection between the two. That's an infinite game right there. You just said it yourself really well. When you're playing this life game and it's infinite,

being ahead or behind in 2003 when we started a 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 almost lost all the money I have ever made. Wait, we've got to pause there. We're going to get to what it does.

How did you almost lose all the money you ever made? Because when we had sold our first dot-com company and then used all the proceeds to start this bank in Brazil. I moved with my wife to Brazil. We were living there. So you had no investors? No, we had no investors. It was just my business partner, Wences Casares, and myself and my goal. So you put all your chips back on the table.

All the chips back in the table. We were 25, 26. So, and almost lost everything because the economy didn't take off. No matter what we did, we just couldn't, which is how you learned that macro-mars. And I learned that growing up in Venezuela with hyperinflation and evaluation. But then another thing is to leave it also when all your money is on the table. So, wait a way, you're a 25-year-old kid wanting to build essentially like a branchless bank. Is that how you describe it?

Yes. And your idea at the time is to set these little like kiosk, whatever we didn't call. Yes, there were three models. We had inside existing stores at checkout. We had kiosk inside stores, which was a hybrid model. And we had franchisee little stores that only did our payment systems. Because this is before the smartphone, right? But it was mobile or a lot of – so we had to – it was a hybrid of 2003-2007 era.

So we had to build all of this and run all of this. We had at peak we had 7,000 of these physical spaces all over Brazil. We were serving 15 million customers. Half of Brazil back then was unbanked. Unbanked. So that was the opportunity. That was the opportunity to bank. We were the first to buying them to 15 million people.

So essentially you did like the legwork for the largest bank. Correct. Now we've attacked this customer segment that you haven't like succeeded with. We succeeded. You're essentially, you know, rounded up a bunch of now customers for them. They want to buy you. That's a good way. So you sell in what year?

2008. So 2008, that insight then comes into play 12, what is that, 12 years later? You're starting to talk to Walmart in 2020. Yes. And that's the long game. That's the infinite game. And by the way, you can tie every single one of our decisions that we've made, like we're big decisions like that in the Rivet Life,

to something that happened to me 20 years before. This is really important, especially for younger entrepreneurs, because you said earlier, like, there's just something wrong about, you know, like we're optimizing for just like start, scale, sell, right? Correct. Or it's like, you know, some of your partners you've been partners with for 20 years. Yes. Some of the people you've backed.

You met Vlad at Robin Hood when people. I don't even think they had a product yet. There was not an app, right? No, there was, it was not public-facing app. It was no customers. No, no customers. So your relationship with them was for like 15 years. Yes.

I always say it's like when I've read, you know, all these biographies for the other podcasts I have, it's like just stay in the game long enough to get lucky. It's like so much of stuff is not predictable. And I think that maximum is so it just like stay in the game long enough to get lucky. So you built a massive business 12 years after you built, you know, a very successful business in South America. Now, think about the scale of Walmart. This is not comparable to anything else. And that's the power of compounding.

Yes. And it's compounding relationships and ethics and work and principles and love and passion and time. And just don't care about the winning or losing. Just let it be because the power of compounding is the most important equation in society. And everything on friendships, on family. Just be consistent, work every day. Yeah, this is like a very Buffett, Munger kind of thing. Like, Munger has 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 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 to what you want to do. And so that leads, if you're going to play the infinite game, then you want to do things over a long term, you have to protect your reputation, which is another thing that Buffett would repeat and 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 want to know how you think about reputation,

and then I want to know, and then I'll talk about why it's so important, how it led me to you. I started to go to the Berksia annual meetings when I was 18. And back then, they were much smaller. They were a Friday afternoon and a holiday in, a couple hundred people.

And as soon as they moved to the bigger convention center, a few years later, they had this movie clip playing in the beginning of the annual meeting with a bunch of TV commercials, or Buffett interviews over the years. And every time, since I was a young age, they were playing the Buffett getting deposed when he was the chairman of Solomon Brothers

saying that line that you just said. He got stick in my head in my brain. So they replayed it at every annual meeting? Every annual meeting. It was there that deposition, that was, he said that line on a deposition at Congress for something that Solomon Brothers was doing with the treasuries,

arbitrage in the service. or taking advantage of the Treasury issuing market. Yeah. And they played it every single year. And I remember it every single year. And part of the reasons why I wanted to live that life is because it was natural to me. It was the way you wanted to live life.

So, yes, reputation matters more than anything. There's a handful of people that I really trust and admire. And then the people I trust admire, I want to know who they trust in admire. and I had a decision I had to make, and I wasn't sure how to make it. There was a lot of uncertainty and I didn't have the information I needed

and realized that you were actually in possession of this information. We won't talk about the details of this. And I actually never, almost ever, asked me 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 went up talking for, like, several hours. And then we, like, became, like, fast friends. Yeah. But I made a big decision in my career, based on how fantastic your reputation was. And so therefore, almost like, Charlie Munger has that great line where trust is one of the greatest economic forces

in the world. And it's like the level of trust that you have built up an 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 I did this episode on Jensen. There's this book called The Nvidia Way, which is kind of like half biography of Jensen, half company history. And it talks about he pitched Don Valentine.

Don Valentine's still alive, still making an investment decision of Sequoia. And Don's like, that was the shittiest pitch I've ever heard. I'm still going to give you money because your reputation precede you and it's so excellent. It's so valuable. It is the most valuable asset.

It's the only asset we have. It's a 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 there. You know who always? also shape my thinking on this.

It's like, you've ever heard of Paul Merlucky talk about reputation, have you? No, I haven't heard of them. So he says the exact same thing. He's like,

any time he thinks this idea where like if people tried to destroy reputation, like you should just, you know, rise above the phrase. Like, no, this is bullshit. He was just a fight back because the problem is

it forecloses opportunities. If this person is damaging reputation and it's not true, it's going to foreclose future opportunities and it's not like if somebody, and he's so a point, he's like, this is invisible. And I thought it was really

interesting insight. He's like, if somebody, I let somebody just short my reputation and unfairly, and two years later, I asked for a meeting with a guy who took that story and believes it, he's not going to tell me I'm not taking the meeting because your reputation sucks. He's going to 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. Because Franklin would nurture and then also protect and fight back against his reputation 250 years ago. It's very fascinating. I love it. I didn't know that about a Red Franklin. I want to read more about that.

So I told you right before we started recording that I got the art piece that I ordered at Node. 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 you're doing it? Yes. So I think it's in the spirit of being a rebel. 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. 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 they're all here, and they're all studying 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 the world, the same way we were describing some of the rebels in companies. Like think about right now we're running a show on people. That's the one I saw.

That's the one you show. So think about people. Think about an entrepreneur who decided for 5,000 days to do an art piece every single day, posted 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 an image online that no one bought, people paid attention and just made fun of it or congratulated him or jump against it until in 21, he sells the first 5,000 days. What is it? 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 real rebel do? He said, fuck it, we're going to double down. I'm going to build a studio. I'm going to 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 is 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 evolved the portrait. So the story is we went to the museums and we said, this art should be seen. Because at home, we put it around our house, and all my kids when they were teenagers and brother friends, guess where their attention went? Not all you have it hanging on the walls. It went to this. Yeah. 15, 20 minutes in front of it, talking to it, interacting, asking questions, no one didn't understand. We go to the museums and they said, yes, we can do this, 2020. five years from now, four years from now, and we'll have to find a curator who's going to 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 artist. It is a space where the artist is his own curator, because that's what rebels do.

You design how you want to show your art. You don't let somebody else tell you how you want to 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 things, kids are bringing their parents. So you told me that last time you went to a museum where the kids are telling, Dad, let's go in.

Yeah. Exactly. So that is a 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. But this is what I meant about, like, you're way more entrepreneur than you are investor.

Because you just like when you start a bank for the unbanked in Brazil, you're like, well, I'm not going to open up branches. I'm going to 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 didn't even have the infrastructure. to display digital art. And like me, I went to Node with you. Like the walls are like customizable. The next, how the people's in there for what? Like two months, something like that?

Yes. Yeah, and then the next one comes in. The infrastructure's still there, but now the artist gets to essentially use the infrastructure as a canvas for his or her art. We think the world will have a lot of these places. Museums will change. They will evolve.

It will take a while. The location that you picked speaks to again. Like you're kind of just identifying, what's the way they did? and like, look, what's the way I should do it now? We're like, you can walk into it. It's like in a very, like, small downtown area. Yes.

It's not like a destination in and of itself. It's something you could just, it's like part of the neighborhood, if that makes any sense. 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 that what happened in Paris and with the rebels 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 100 years. We're living through that same moment. Funny enough, it's not in Paris. Maybe it's starting in Palo Alto. And so you look at the first node in Palo Alto almost like a prototype.

Yes, because the name node is meant to be a node in the network. So we will be learning here for the next year to perfection our technology, improve our UIs. There's a bunch of engineers working This is I'm from foundation with engineers. I think of how different it is to traditional art and then expanded and open in many other places. Another thing that I want to 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. Well, first, I'm a Star Wars generation, right? And I grew up with Star Wars. I'm a big fan of Star Wars. And to me, growing up in Venezuela, the only way to survive in that environment is you have to be a rebel. The system, the dark side was all over, the chaos was present.

You had to raise 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. So me being a rebel is just a way of being. It's a way of looking at the world. And 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's missing?

Like, just the mindset of always being willing to know that better means it can still be better. I mean, just 17-year-old sort of company. Yes. That would lead me to believe that you had this, like, rebel. You were essentially a born rebel. Yes. How did you apply that? Because people reference you as like one of the greatest, like, venture capitalists.

I'm like, that's not how I think of Mickey. I don't think of him as like a venture capitalist. 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 going to do it? How did you think about it when you started? If I end up being labeled as I grew up, first I hate labels, and second I will be very depressed 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 was everything about me. The way I raise my kids, the way my relationship with my wife, the way I treat my friends, the way I make business decisions, the way I change 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 of what I do. And I run away from any of those things. Actually, I find that the rebel mindset is one that you are always asking questions. You're a rebel. You are nonstop asking questions. You want to learn.

You want to 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 a 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

And like, I'm reveling now against the traditional art world. I'm trying, you know, to allow artists to show art in a different way. We rebel and rivet, the way we designed it. We were, people were asking, well, what are you? Are you a venture guy? You're an early stage guy? I'm like, yes. Are you a late state guy?

Yes. Are you a finti guy? Yes. But are you doing now defense or yes? Like, yes, what's wrong? Like, I'm not going to let anyone allow that. That is the rebel mindset. 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? I don't think of it as an investment firm. Okay. You have to say more about this. 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 our rebels and our meetings are called Tattoo-in, and we have Jedi.

And we have Jedi. I didn't know this. Yeah, yeah. Oh, so you're really into Star Wars? Oh, yes, completely. And... Are you backing Jedi's or you have Jedi? We back Jedi's.

And we have wookies and we have the whole thematic truly alive in the way we think because it has to be authentic. And people that work with us at Rivet, the whole team feels that ownership, that teamwork. Investment firms are very silo in many ways, and I don't love that. We want to overcommunicate even internally. Like right now the entire team knows that we're sitting together. Everybody can see my calendar in 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 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 as a founder, I said, I don't know. I call Mickey for something.

I called Nick for something. I call Justin for something. I mean, we are just a team that works together in very different ways. So that is the joy of going to the office every day. I love being there and spending time with the team because we just have fun together. What was the insight, though, that caused you to do this instead of, because you started how many companies before this? This is your six company?

Yes. Something like that. So like, but your six company looks vastly different from your first five, correct? Yes. So, like, what was the insight between five and six, though? I had to, in the infinite game, I 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 life around the world, I consider myself a failed entrepreneur. That's absurd. What you got to say? Why? Because the best entrepreneurs never have to sell their company. Okay, not a fist bump on that.

There you go. And so I had to learn for 20 years how to get to the point to design the structure. the structure, the culture, the team, the knowledge, the aperture, the brand, compound all those values to a place where we can do something for forever. This is the infinite game. This is the infinite game.

Nick Sleep has one of my favorite lines ever. And he goes, the best investors aren't investors. They're entrepreneurs who never sold. 100% agree. So that's fascinating. Okay. The fact is I'm a failed entrepreneur because I had to exit. You had crazy successful exits too for my first five

because I didn't find the vehicle in which I can do forever. Which is again, when, again, I'm like new to being relatively known in like this community in last like five years for a podcast. And I didn't understand because I sat in a room by myself for a decade and just talked into a microphone and read books. And I didn't think about the outside world at all. And then everything kind of came to me. And so now I have to like constantly vet everybody around me.

And I get a lot of advice from like, especially like older or more successful. because of entrepreneurs are like, man, you have to be so fucking careful with like, because it goes back to Charlie Munger. It's like most people are rat poison. Yeah. Right? And it's like, and he's just like, you have to like vet them in all different directions. But when I, and even people I want to have dinner with or talk to like you, you ask a bunch of people.

And they're just like he's obsessed with this infinite game. This infinite game. He's like, he doesn't need more money and he doesn't need to do another deal in his life. But he just can't stop. But it's, it's this joy. It's this thing that everything. you get better and you just are improving and you know I sat with Charlie Munger once and one after another meeting at the Hopi Hall of Golf Club where Warren had this

thing afterwards and I saw myself and I only had one stock of Persia I was probably 24 years old and 25 and I sit next to him or he sees next to me I'm sitting he says he says he says take him 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 older than 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 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 going to eat and just sit down and eat. I love that. Time is the only true currency we have. It's the only true currency we have.

I appreciate you spending your time giving it to us today. That's awesome. Thank you for having me. 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.