How contrarian hires and a pitch deck started Nubank’s $30 billion fintech empire

Welcome to Extra Crunch Tuesday

Founded in 2013 and based in São Paulo, Brazil, Nubank serves more than 34 million customers, making it Latin America’s largest neobank.

Reporter Marcella McCarthy spoke to CEO David Velez to learn about his efforts to connect with consumers and overcome entrenched opposition from established players who were friendly with regulators.

In the first of a series of stories for Nubank’s EC-1, she interviewed Velez about his early fundraising efforts. For a balanced perspective, she also spoke to early Nubank investors at Sequoia and Kaszek Ventures, Latin America’s largest venture fund, to find out why they funded the startup while it was still pre-product.

“There are people you come across in life that within the first hour of meeting with them, you know you want to work with them,” said Doug Leone, a global managing partner at Sequoia who’d recruited Velez after he graduated from grad school at Stanford.

Marcella also interviewed members of Nubank’s founding team to better understand why they decided to take a chance on a startup that faced such long odds of success.

“I left banking to make a fifth of my salary, and back then, about $5,000 in equity,” said Vitor Olivier, Nubank’s VP of operations and platforms. “Financially, it didn’t really make sense, so I really had to believe that it was really going to work, and that it would be big.”

• Part 1: How contrarian hires and a pitch deck started Nubank’s $30 billion fintech empire
• Part 2: One woman’s drive to make a neobank as magical as Disney
• Part 3: How Nubank’s CX strategy made it one of the most loved digital banks
• Part 4: Which Nubank will own the financial revolution?

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

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