The Friendly Assassin
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By Jeff Kauflin, Maria Abreu and Antoine Gara
David Vélez set out to kill off the fat fees and lousy service of Brazil’s big banks. The operation succeeded beyond his wildest dreams: Today, his no-fee Nubank is the most valuable digital bank in the world, with 35 million customers—and he’s gunning for more.
In the summer of 2012, David Vélez moved to São Paulo with a newly minted Stanford MBA and a plum job as a Sequoia Capital partner. Douglas Leone, the head of Sequoia, had recruited the then-30-year-old Colombian to stake the venture capital powerhouse’s claim in Brazil—a youthful, resource-rich country of 200 million that had grown 4% a year for a decade to become the world’s seventh-largest economy. But on October 1, Leone called Vélez with bad news: After considering the uninspired pitches from Brazilian entrepreneurs and hearing that top-ranked University of São Paulo had produced just 42 computer science graduates the prior year, he was pulling the plug. Sequoia’s Brazilian adventure was over.