The goal with Jeeves is really to build a global business bank that can function in multiple countries. Stable coins is a lived experience. It's not
something that's a theory. Like in Argentina, 60% of the population use stable coins. Our revenue has grown 10x, our volume has grown 8x. This just
wouldn't be possible without AI. Money's going to become programmable, and hopefully we're at that, you
know, nexus of all of this happening. >> Often when companies start in financial services, just because there's so much product to build, the tendency
is to start with the smaller guys, grow with them, and then eventually earn the credibility to go with the bigger guys. You took the opposite
approach. How did you become relevant to relatively large companies fairly quickly in their journey? >> Our
underwriting team today is four people. That just wouldn't have been possible 2 and 1/2 years ago. You need 15 people just to get that off the ground.
That's what changed. If you are not AI pilled, you're not going to make it. >> Dileep, welcome to the podcast. >> Thanks for having me. I'm super
excited. >> Before we dive into Jeeves, I don't think a lot of listeners know your backstory, which is
pretty interesting. You grew up internationally, you've got a technical background, you started another company, and sold it for over $100 million
before this. >> yeah. >> Yeah, so maybe tell us tell us about you and how that led you to start Jeeves. >> so I'm I'm uh I was actually born in
Nigeria. Uh so I grew up in three or three or four different continents, actually. So we moved from Nigeria
to Doha, Qatar. So that's where I spent most of my childhood, and this was when Doha was like a one camel town. Like they didn't I mean, it's funny
looking at the airport now, which is massive, and it used to be an airport with like two stalls, and plane A or plane B. You get on one of them, and
that was the airport. So it's very small. Uh and then we moved to Florida um outside of Orlando,
probably about 25 years ago. And so um what I've kind of noticed is, you know, the company that I'm working on now, Jeeves, is also a global company.
So it's almost like a manifestation of my childhood, and like the fact that I, you know, grew up in all of these different places. Uh I then went to
school for engineering. So I have actually two engineering degrees, which now I feel a lot more
unleashed with all of this stuff with the AI because I can start building. But the funny story is my master's thesis was actually on using genetic
algorithms to mimic money markets. And that was basically LLMs, which is basically you'd have a end goal and it would come up with test cases, rank
them, and it's just wild. This was in 2006 and it's amazing seeing that full circle 20 years later with
everything that's happening with the AI. After that, I started a company that was in the marketing automation space. Um And right before that I was at
Stanford GSB. And that company was Payoneer Inbox, which we sold for about 106 million. And then I started Jeeves. So, you know, basically at this
point if I don't start a company, I'm unemployable. So, but yeah, it's been it's been a great
experience learning a lot of different things. I think what I love about Jeeves most is it's just such a steep learning curve. Like one day you're
doing banking in Brazil, next day you have to be an expert on stablecoin. And if you don't like the learning curve, it can be so exhausting. But if
you like it, it's very exciting. And I I that's the biggest thing that I find interesting about the
day-to-day. >> Amazing. And so we're going to maybe we're going to talk through the backstory. But just to ground us, we're you're 5 years into the
company. What is What is Jeeves today? >> So, Jeeves is a stablecoin native financial operating system for global enterprises. We have two core
products. The first one is expense management. So, we sell corporate cards that we offer to our companies
and we can do that in 25 countries. Our core markets are Brazil, Colombia, Mexico. And then our second product is on the payment side. So, we do full
local payments and international payments. Today our international payments more than 50-60% settles on directly on stablecoin. And that's been
powering a lot of the growth that we've seen in the last year. >> Amazing. Um all right, so I think one of
the one of the most interesting ways to understand Jeeves is through your moats. >> Yeah. >> And now their moats, I would say they were massive
challenges to building the company and getting scale. And and now we can classify them in the realm of defensibility. So, two big ones are
infrastructure and regulation. >> So start with infrastructure which is my personal favorite cuz it looks like unsexy
plumbing but then the decisions there are really what drive the products you're able to offer and specifically the differentiation. And I think where
you started in Latin America an added challenge is unlike the US there's no as a service for all of these different pieces. So maybe talk us through
like what did you splice together? What did you build? And then like how does that enable you to
drive from the start? >> So it's it's a really good point. So internally we have the saying which we say difficulty is very defensible. Because it's
difficult it's actually defensible and we've done a lot of difficult things from day one. And and so just to give you an example our core IP what we
consider our core you know product so to speak is not the front-facing product it's the layer in
between. We connect to 50-60 different partners different vendors and we abstract all of that information into the central layer we call it a CMS. And
so just to give you an idea of what it could do. So as an example we maintain our own ledger in 25 countries and that is really hard to do because you
have to do that across currencies across effects. We issue statements in 25 countries in less than
24 hours. That took us 18 months to figure out and today we can do it and that's a core skill set because then the ledger sits directly with us and we
sit directly on the card odd stream. I think a big difference where we play on the card side is we're full principal members for instance with
MasterCard. And so when we issue the card it says issued by Jeeves Mexico issued by Jeeves Brazil. There's
no bank in between. And so that obviously requires a certain level of sophistication to be able to run and we've kind of learned that over time of how
to build that but we try to go very close to the infrastructure stack in all of these countries that we that we play. And I'll give one more example
on the card side because I think this might open up how we think about it. When I think about card
issuing I see there's four components. So you have the top of the funnel, customer acquisition, you have the processor, you have the program manager
for regulation and compliance, and then you have the issuing bin from Visa or MasterCard that gives you that license to issue the 16 digits. What we
do the first three, that sits on our own stack. Even though we have different partners, if we were
going from Mexico to Brazil, we only have to change the bin. If you tomorrow wanted to launch Indonesia, we only have to change the bin. And now with
stable coin, even the bin doesn't have to change because you get one bin and you carve it up by different countries. So, it's a super exciting time to
be building and part of the reason we're seeing this acceleration on stable coin is because we did
the hard work of building our own infrastructure stack for 3 years. >> Yeah. And so, for people who are maybe less in the weeds of infrastructure,
like why would it matter to someone like Nubank that you have a Brazilian bin versus, you know, a US bin? >> Yeah, so I think the value is that the
customer experience is very seamless. So, one of the things that Beezer is, if you log in to Jeeves in
Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, it looks the same. And you're used to seeing the same cards in the same places, and you can't do that unless you sit
directly on the rail. And so, when we started, which I think I think you might remember, we actually were shipping US cards. >> Yes. >> US cards cuz
we didn't have the setup yet. It takes time. It takes time to get the licenses. It takes time to get the
processors, all of those things. Today in every country we operate in, we have local issuing and local licenses. And then what that gives us is the
experience for companies like a Hotmart, for a Burger King, it's seamless. It's seamless in the sense that you don't have to train the team three
times with three different logins with three different countries. It looks exactly the same. And you can't
do that unless you sit on the rail. >> Yeah. Well, and your acceptance is probably higher if you're able to onboard sort of Yeah. >> Yeah. Do you want
me to repeat that in the >> Um no, maybe just add on to your steps. >> Uh and then just kind of building on that as well, our acceptance is super high
because we are sitting directly with our own bin. In Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, we have our own bin
that's just for Jeeves. Uh and And the the second part of that is we can also build in much better card controls because again we do the actual
authentication. When you swipe it we say yes or no. We also do some of the fraud detection components obviously with partners like Sardine. But all of
that sits directly with us. >> Okay, so infrastructure. The next critical but often tedious topic is
regulation. >> Yeah. >> So maybe talk us through you know, we've been at this for sort of five years at this point. I think you've got a lot of your
licenses. You've got another road map. Like what have you built there? >> Yeah, so where we sit we sell directly to mid-market and enterprise
companies. So we do not really sell to the long tail. The reason that I bring that up is it's really hard for
us to get gain the trust of these companies without the right licenses. So we are a regulated entity in Mexico. We've filed for our money movement
license in Mexico as well. In Brazil we're actually filing to be a full deposit taking bank. So it's a very high bar for a license. But if you don't
have this license one again we don't have the full customer flow so we can provide some version of the
cards. We can provide some version of the payments. But to really be kind of the global you know business bank enterprise bank financial operating
system you need to own accounts as well. And to own accounts you need these licenses. So we have always looked as licenses as core defensible mode as
in the product we want to build cannot be built without licenses. And so the issue with licenses is it
takes it takes time. And and so part of the way I think about building is how do you get into market quickly >> Yeah. >> and get a lot of market share
and then you just have a team that just every day we're just building layers and layers of this license. And so that way the customer experience
hopefully is seamless. They see the same thing but on the back end the product is a lot better because
now the licenses sit directly with us. And then the second part that is really important with licenses and with infrastructure is it helps us to
expand the margin. Our margin is expanded from 40% 2 years ago to north of 80% right now. You cannot do that unless you own the infrastructure and
unless you have the regular regulatory coverage because then you get the whole lion share and then you pay
it out to partners. So, that's the positive side of having all these things, but it's really hard. It's really hard and you need a team that's what
they're doing and we go country by country and even now I would say we probably need to get four or four or five more licenses in the regions we're in
to get to the stage that we want to get to. >> So, I want to go to you mentioned you're a little bit
more enterprise versus smaller company where I think often when companies start in financial services just because there's so much product to build,
the tendency is to start with the smaller guys, grow with them, and then eventually earn the credibility to go with the bigger guys. You took the
opposite approach and so maybe how did you become relevant to relatively large companies fairly quickly
in the journey? >> So, so it's it's it's funny because we started with a little bit of doing everything for everybody and then, you know, 2023 was
kind of the year that forced focus and we were we were realizing that we were just not making that much money in terms of revenue from smaller
businesses and we needed the same support for them and we're a very lean company. We have we have less people
today than we did 2 years ago and our revenue is, you know, grown about 10x. And so, what I'm trying to get to is we're not built to sustain, you
know, 10,000 small businesses. That's just not our model. What we're built for is these real mid-market enterprise companies that we sell one product
to and then we cross-sell six others and we increase the retention, we increase the gross profit that we
have with these companies. And so, it was a little bit of we did everything and then we made this really hard decision in 23 to say, "Okay, which is
the audience that really resonates with the product and what's the product we're looking to build?" And at that point we did have to make the hard
call to debank some of the smaller businesses that we had, but I don't think we'd be here today if we
didn't make that hard call in 2023 and that started putting the focus on what are we offering? So before 23, we did not have a payments product. When
you go sell this to enterprise, payments is a huge part of their business. In fact, cards volume is actually much smaller than payments volume.
Because if you look at share of wallet, AP, accounts payable, is a much bigger box than corporate card
spend. And so we started with cards, we started with these versions of credit products. And so we turned all of that off. We were like, what's our
focus? It's enterprise, it's mid-market. What do they need? They need accounts, they need payments. And then how do we make sure that we only sell
into that subset? In the sense of we have requirements where if you're below a certain revenue size, and
that goes from somewhere between 10 million reais all the way up to 100 million reais. That those are the two segments we have. We just wouldn't
onboard you. We can't onboard you. And and so that was it's a hard decision because it also then focuses on companies like Y Combinator where we came
from and they've been incredibly supportive. And we've had to find ways of like, okay, can we like
squeeze that in because those are the companies we want to build in, but they tend to be smaller to start. >> Yeah. >> So maybe a special YC exception
here. There would be >> [laughter] >> Maybe I just a good way to understand Jeeves' product suite is to take company like Nubank, which is Brazil,
Mexico, Colombia. You landed with cards. >> Yeah. >> Do you want to just walk through you land with
this and then where does it go? >> Yeah. So so I I I think what's interesting about our product suite is we are global, but we are fully localized. So
what I mean is it took us two years to figure out how to sell in Brazil. And a big reason we were not selling in Brazil. And Brazil's actually going
to be our biggest market this quarter. And it really started turning in September of 24. And the
reason was we started localizing the product. And so we made it obviously in Portuguese, but it's more than that. It's tying it into the actual way
people use the product. Brazil has an incredibly sophisticated financial ecosystem. I would say in some sense even more sophisticated than the US.
There's no cash. Everything is digitized, is instant. In fact, like when they come to the US and ACH
takes two days, it's almost like what are you guys doing? >> Yeah, sure it's >> And and so it took us a while to figure out how to localize the
product. And the reason I think that's important to your question of like how do these companies use us? We usually start with a card and then we sell
second and third products. So second and third products could be different depending on the country that
we're in. So in Mexico and Colombia, usually that in that moves into Jeeves Pay, which is our payment product. In Brazil, we actually have a very
strong travel product. So if you think about Brazil, uh a big concern there is fraud. It has one of the highest fraud rates in the world. And so we
had customers that would come to us and say, "Hey, if you have cards that are automatically uh turning
themselves off, meaning they're single use, uh we would use that for all transactions." And so we started playing around with okay, let's build out a
cards API uh that now we provide to these different companies. And so when you think about Nubank, you have corporate spend and then you have travel.
So those are the two areas that we kind of work with them on. And that travel component is strong in
Brazil, but might not be as strong in other countries. So I'm kind of getting to the point where we have this strong primary product, which is usually
the card, and then the secondary product kind of changes depending on the region that we're in, and that tends to be localized. >> So we were
fortunate enough to get to lead your Series A. >> Yeah. >> And every investment has a why now. >> Yeah. >>
And the why now at Jeeves when you started, um which I felt pretty strongly is I had a a broad portfolio in Latin America. All of you had tens of
millions of dollars in their bank account and they could not get corporate cards. >> Yeah. >> And if they could, they'd be from incumbents that made
US incumbents look like the most tech-forward companies on the planet. >> Yeah. >> So so that was a good
why now then. I think now you've got two more which are even stronger. >> Yeah. >> AI and stable coins. >> Yeah. So before we maybe dive into
specifically for Jeeves, as you think about the region of LatAm and the countries that you're in, like those tailwinds I would argue are even stronger
there than in the US. >> Yeah. So stable coin and let's start with that one cuz I I I think in Latin
America, stable coins is a lived experience. It's not something that's a theory. In Argentina, 60% of the population use stable coins. Like that's not
something you have to train people how to use. And so, in the US, it's a little more like, okay, why would I use stable coins because I have a Yeah,
because I have a stable US currency. Amazing. That's fantastic. A lot of countries don't have that.
And so, the fact that you have this dollar denominated coin that you can almost instantly transfer your local currency to is a huge, huge selling
point. And so, what we started realizing and and again, a big part of this was the genius act passing, which started making it more kosher to talk
through stable coin, was that a lot of the infrastructure we had could now be adapted towards stable coin.
And going back to your question earlier, the reason we can do that is because again, we maintain our own ledger. So, we don't have to have two
separate ledgers, one for USDC, one for USD. It all feeds into the same thing. And so, as soon as the genius act passed, it was one of the things
where I would say it's a little bit founder led. I was just like, this is happening. Like we're going to not
debate it. We're going to go build this whole thing. And in fact, even today, I mean, you can ask our team. We have three stand-ups every day, not
every day, every week, and I run them directly. Because to me, it's that important that we move everything onto stable coin. Because I see that as
absolutely the future and specifically for LatAm, which is one of the highest corridors of stable coin
usage, it just becomes something that people know how to use and the product becomes a lot better. I think the second part on stable coin that I I I
think is very interesting is when we sell it to these enterprises, we actually don't pitch stable coin directly. We actually pitch it as Jeeves
Instant Pay. But the inside is stable coin. And the reason that's important is when you talk to a CFO at an
enterprise company, they don't care as much on the technology side. They care, can I trust you? Is the money going to show up? And then, is this
something where, you know, the cost is better than what I have right now? And if they don't think the money's going to show up, it doesn't matter what
the technology is because at the end of the day, they're going to get probably fired. And so, we have to
win that trust and we almost kind of guarantee it with the Jeeves brand of like, "Hey, you use this for all these other things, trust us on this and
we'll make sure it shows up." And that's how we kind of sell the product in region and that's been a huge driver of the volume that we're seeing and
our PPV has increased from about 400 million 2 years ago to north of 3 billion right now and we're
probably going to touch about 6 billion this year. So it's significantly increased and a big part of that is because we have the stablecoin as the
infrastructure in between. >> Um >> So maybe contrast the um and you've got some more innovative products coming out. But to start with the sort of
classic cross-border, contrast fiat rails versus stablecoin rails cuz you were serving both customers. >>
So if you think about just where we were maybe 18 months ago before we had stablecoin and you wanted to do a payment between Mexico and the US, you
would usually have to have two different correspondent banks in between. You'd send the payment in Mexico, we'd have to make sure that we had a bank
partner that could handle it in the US cuz in the US you need to know the source of the funds as well.
So you So we basically had two different bank partners that had to do a handoff to transfer, let's say 1,000 pesos and get it to show up for $50 in
the US. Now what happens is in the in Mexico you can send us 1,000 pesos, we collect it on the ground in Mexico. As soon as we collect it, we release
USDC and that settles instantly and then we pay out on the US side. The longest leg is actually the US
payout because in Mexico that settles instantly and the ACH again still takes 1 day, but it's much much faster. And now for the end user, we don't
sell the stablecoin, we sell accounts payable, we sell your invoices are reconciled, we sell, you know, put in your tax ID, we'll download your
invoices and send international payments. That's what we sell. It just so happens that the infrastructure
that it runs on is now a lot better because we can do that in 1 hour instead of 1 day or 2 days. And so that's the way we kind of look at it which is
we give the end user the choice. If they want to use our Swift rails and get the you know, MT103 kind of kind of confirmation, we can do that. We can
do that for you, just it'll take longer, but that's your choice. If you want to use a faster version
which we call Jeeves Instant Pay, you can do that in the product. You just have to click a drop down and select that. So, we give you that choice, but
a lot of the way we kind of sell it is it's part of the product. >> Yeah. Would you like your money in a day or 5 days? >> [laughter] >> You'd be
surprised how many people pick one day. >> I'm not surprised not surprised yeah exactly not surprised
at all. Um amazing and then coming back to Argentina which I think anyone who's been there lived there can get a sense of you know your money at the
end of the year is worth nothing close to what it was at the start of the year. Um you're about to launch a stablecoin card. Who who's that for and
how's that going to work? >> Yeah. And and I think um you know taking a step back and you probably
remember this when we first chatted, the goal with Jeeves is really to build a enterprise version of Revolut. So, a global business bank that can
function in multiple countries. So, to be able to do that you have to launch multiple countries. And so, previously launching a country is a big
undertaking because you have to first get local entities, you know, get like again this example local issuing
licenses, you need to be able to collect funds. So, it usually take about 8 months and that's very fast. We were probably the fastest to be able to do
that in 8 months. And that would cost maybe $500, $600, $700,000 to just get spun up. Now with stablecoin and Argentina is our first new country
launch in 3 years. We're super excited about this. You can do that whole thing much faster and much
cheaper. And so, in Argentina we have our own pay in rails. So, you can pay in on Argentinian peso. As soon as it gets as soon as it comes in it
converts to USDC. So, you instantly get currency volatility protection which in Argentina where currency devalues is a huge huge selling point. As
soon as it converts to USDC, we can issue corporate cards on it. And now if you think about our core
product, it's not necessarily just the stablecoin or the payments. We sell the layer on top. We sell the operating system. So, now we can sell
budgets, we can sell approval flows, we can sell teams, we can sell card controls, we can sell fraud controls. All of that can now work. And what's
really cool about the setup and very unique compared to a lot of other stablecoin cards in the market is if
you swipe that card in Argentina, it does not have an FX fee. And the reason that's important is the customers we go after are mid-market and
enterprise customers. They have 50 employees. You're not going to get a card for 50 employees if you're going to get charged 2% when they buy a Coke.
Like that's just not going to work. And so, it's a really cool version of a product that we've used a lot of
different technologies to piece together, but now allows us to sell the full product suite in Argentina. And tying this back to kind of the what
Argentina is what it what it's going to become is it's going to be become the blueprint for other countries. And so, take Peru for instance. Nobody's
going to launch an expense management suite for Peru. It's too small of a town. Now we can. Now I I I
basically have to staff two sales people in Peru. They'll sell this product out there. I can still I can onboard 10 companies and it can still be a
profitable market. >> Yeah. >> So, the cost has completely collapsed in a way that, you know, previously like no one's going to launch in Peru. Now we
can launch in Peru because my cost is three sales head counts. It's amazing. >> So, I'm going to
shift gears a little bit to AI, which I think has been the other like oh, thank god. Like for instance, I think one of the things we all
underestimated was just KYB in for instance, Mexico and just the volume of documents you need to collect, what you need to link to, languages,
exactly. Um so, that is an example. Um but maybe talk through where you're using it in Jeeves and then what is the
impact that it's had on the business. >> Yeah. >> Um so, we it's one of those things where, you know, just like a lot of companies we've tried to
figure out how to incorporate it across the board. Uh I would say some functions we're seeing a lot more adoption than in other functions. Um if you
think about anything tied to document in ingesting, uh we've seen a lot of success there. So, I'll just
give you an example. I was kind of mentioning again our product core product is like a like a 30-day charge card like a Ramp or Brex. Um that still
requires us to cover the customer spend for 30 days. So, again, it's not a credit card, you can't keep it open, you have to pay us on day 31, but for
30 days we are covering your spend. That requires underwriting. Uh our underwriting team today is four
people. And that team is doing two, three billion in TPV. That just wouldn't have been possible two and a half years ago. You need 15 people just to
get that off the ground. That's what's changed. The models are better, it's self-learning. One person that's really smart can make this work in
multiple different regions. So, that's one example, but we're seeing that across the board. So, the only
real head counts we're adding uh are some components of engineering and product and then go to market. And go to market is one area where we haven't
had as much success using AI and we're trying different components for like en- enriching data, etc. Uh and so we do hire humans there, but on almost
all the other functions, we're seeing a significant, significant uplift uh using AI. And I I think
the biggest number is that our head count today is 140 people and two years ago was 200 people. >> Yeah. >> revenue has significantly increased. And
that's why you see that margin expansion. Basically, revenue is going up and costs are the same or going down. >> Yeah. Well, customer service I think
is another notoriously challenging in multiple different languages, multiple different countries. >>
Cu- customer service is one where we do have our own internal kind of chatbot, we call it Lenora. Uh and yeah, it handles most of kind of what people
bring up. I think what's interesting is and it's taken us a little while to learn this is just the cultural nuances. So, um you know, everybody's got
OCR, but it took us a while to figure out that in Brazil they use um the commas and the dots
interchangeably. And so when you're doing underwriting and you see the commas, the commas are actually the dots and vice versa. And so like that
training is what needs like specialization. And that's again special specialized to just Jeeves and what we do. So, yeah, it is something where we've
seen it across the board. Customer service for sure, KYB, I think document ingestion is another area that
we've been using that as well. >> Yeah. Great. And so now I want to fast forward a little bit to the future. And you gave us a little bit of a preview
about this, right? Like it's getting easier to launch more countries, things are coming more global. As you think of, you know, global business bank 2
years from now, 5 years from now, like what does that look like? What might be a little less
intuitive to anyone >> Yeah, so I so I I actually think a lot more um is going to go on chain. And so there's there's two three things that we're
thinking about. So like if you think about a business like ours, we have to still maintain capital pools uh in different markets, right? So we have to
maintain pesos, VRL, uh Mexican pesos, Colombian pesos, etc. We maintain a lot. What would be very
interesting, which is what we're starting to dabble into, is actually just keeping a single source of USDC or USDT and minting when we need it. So
that way the cost of capital significantly drops and we don't have to maintain these pools. So when I think about where this goes from an
infrastructure perspective, I actually see a lot of the existing stack moving on chain. So the second part of this
is going back to kind of that whole 1 2 3 billion TPV that we do, uh is there a world where we can start collateralizing that on chain? So we
basically take the receivables, put it on chain, get 60 70% against that on USDC. It doesn't remove our existing capital sources, but it helps
supplement that with on chain USDC. So when I think about where the infrastructure is going, I see the entire
company stack moving onto stablecoin in the next 2 3 years. And I think it's actually going to make it a much more efficient company that we can
operate in. And then the last one, which we've been dabbling with right now, is basically thinking of programmable money, right? So you have obviously
the agents that are going to be doing purchasing from M MCP, CLIs, etc. But then how do you make that
something that's very usable for these different companies that we service? And so today we do have two agents that we sell We have a lot more, but
those are the ones that resonate the most. Uh one is a reconciliation agent, so it basically looks at the purchases you have and then helps you kind
of match them one-to-one. And then the other one is a GL coding agent. So, if you think about
enterprises, a big, big function is literally someone's job is to look at every transaction and put a code on it so your ERP can read it. And we
trained a uh uh a a an agent to be able to do that with 99% accuracy or better. One of the huge advantages we have is the companies that we sell to
look like Jeeps. We are operating in 12 countries. We have 60-plus bank accounts. We have a sophisticated
finance team. We operate in LatAm. So, if our finance team can use it and they find that it's valuable, I'm pretty confident I can sell that product,
right? So, that's a really huge advantage that we have. And I as I look at the next two to three, four, five years, I I see this convergence of
stablecoin, I see the convergence of agents. Money's going to become programmable, and hopefully we're at
that, you know, nexus of all of this happening. >> Amazing. All right, I want to I want to wrap maybe with a couple more personal questions about you
that could be helpful. I think there's there's going to be more global businesses built. Uh I think huge opportunity there are very challenging.
You've talked pretty publicly about how you need to almost reinvent your superpower every six to eight
months. Like, what do you think your superpower was when you started? >> Yeah. >> And how does that evolving? >> Yeah, I I think what a lot of
founders try to do try to do a lot of different things when they start. And when you start, the way I see it is your job is to focus on one or two
maximum metrics that matter. And then like you need to be like a monkey with a stick, which is like, how do
you move that metric? And everything else doesn't matter. And then once those metrics are moving, then you figure out other things to do. So, I'll
give you an example. When we started, our number one metric is spend. It's not revenue, it's not necessarily does it have margin, it's can I get
someone to use this card in Latin America? I don't know. I did not grow up in Latin America. Actually, when
I first flew to Mexico City, it was kind of daunting on me. I'm like, I'm going to launch this product in Mexico, and I've I mean, that was the second
time I was in Mexico. >> Spanish is a little rusty. >> Poquito. >> [laughter] >> Uh but that was the focus. It was just focused on can we get people
to use the card. We started there. We were clearly getting acceleration on the spend and then we
figure out all the other things, revenue, we figured out margin, etc. And I think a lot of times founders try to do everything in the beginning and in
the beginning you need to just focus on what matters to get you from point A to point B. And then the second part, which is where I think most
founders need to really focus on is you have to be 70% good at almost every function. >> Yeah. >> And you
just have to rotate. And like that's your job. Today your job is product. Today I spend a lot of time on product country. It's just so important to
stablecoin. Uh 2 years ago it was finance because we were navigating 23 and interest rates had shot up 600% and that like every day I was on these
calls and that was a job. And now we have a amazing CFO, amazing finance team. So now I'm like, I don't
need to spend that much time. But as a as a CEO, as a founder, your job is to do whatever job is needed for the company to get to the next stage. And
I think a lot of times founders are like, "Oh, I can't do sales." It's like nobody can do sales. You just like you learn what you need to do and then
you hire someone better than you. That like that's also a skill. But you have to be dangerous enough
to know what you're looking at, right? And and I think that's now even more easier with AI. And so people can't do that now, I don't know what to say.
[laughter] >> Yep. Even if you don't have an AI thesis, you should be able to believe it. >> Yeah, it's it's it's amazing. Yeah. >> Um [laughter]
and the media I think the other biggest challenge building a company anywhere is talent and how do
you think about talent? What is Chipper's philosophy, especially being in the number of countries that you're in? >> Yeah. So we need local talent to
succeed. Uh and that's like the first hire we do in any geo. We actually in Argentina we just hired this person is what we call kind of a local GM.
They have to be local, they have to know the market, they have to live there because I'm not the one
selling on the ground. So that's always the first hire. What we look for we have this internal, you know, kind of like bar which is like we call it
relentlessness. Like we there's no real playbook for what we're doing. Like there's different types of playbooks, but no one's launching this in 25
countries with multiple product stacks, and everyone's like, are you guys doing too much, and are you
guys doing too little? But, that's what we do. That's what we offer. And so, you need to have this just very, very high motor that is constantly just
going. The good thing with a company like Jeeves is you'll know within probably a week if this is the right fit because it's either going to be like,
holy I'm learning so much, or it's going to be like, I don't know what's happening. I feel like I'm
drowning every day. And a lot of people, you know, like cycle out fairly quickly, which I think is fine. Like, it might not be the right fit. So, we
really push that engine part of like, you have to just have this high, high bar and keep, keep going. And then, the second part here is one thing
we've been able to do is bring in good season leaders for like the second cycle of Jeeves, right? So, the
first cycle is a zero to one cycle. You know, this year we should be crossing hopefully 100 million in top line ARR. And we need the second set of
leaders. And I think we've done a very good job, at least so far, of getting those season leaders. We brought in a CRO from Brex. We brought in a risk
officer from Capital One that joined us last year. Our CFO took Payoneer public. Like, getting those
people to join has really up the talent bar in the company, as well. >> Very focused on stablecoins. You've also been chief AI officer of Jeeves. And
I I think it is it is a huge advantage if you started pre-AI. You have the distribution, and then you can use that to really drive it forward. I think
the challenge though is getting the company to be AI-native. >> Yeah. >> So, maybe talk to How do
you make that happen? >> And then, how do you get the AI native? >> a good question. So, today we are at 140 people. We were at 200 people 2 years
ago. And our revenue has grown 10x, our volume has grown 8x. So, clearly it's accelerating, and it's accelerating with less people. This just wouldn't
be possible without AI. So, I'll walk through some concrete examples where we use it. So, one, which I
think is really important, is we use it on the underwriting side. We do pretty serious underwriting for any company that comes to us because just like
a Ramp or Brex, we have to give them 30 days of spend and then at the end of 30 days they have to pay us back. So we need to know that they're good to
pay us back on day 31. And today we have a team of four people that does this underwriting across
all these regions and that just simply wouldn't have been possible even two years ago. You needed 15 people just to get the underwriting going. Better
models, self-learning models, self-training models. We have a lot of data and now the models are actually keeping up with the data. So that's a huge
unlock. Same thing when you think about customer service. We again have maybe three people on the
customer service team and we have to handle different languages. We have to handle people that are obviously talked about payments but then also cards
and also AP. We just are starting to test an AR product and it's a very small team. Would not be possible without training what we have on the
customer service side to be able to handle that. So I think that's another area and then if you think
about KYB and document ingestion, that's an area where that we had to build our own version of, you know, an OCR machine because again, even if you
can do Spanish and Portuguese, there are little nuances like in Brazil, the commas and the dots are intertwined. So if you look at something and it
says $2,000, it's actually $200,000 because the comma and the dot is switched. And it took us a while to
train our models to be to be able to do that. But just like your question on the infrastructure, we want to own this core infrastructure ourselves. I
think without that we will not be able to succeed and that to me falls on the founder and the and the CEO. Like if you are not AI built, you're not
going to make it. And and I think part of what I've been pushing internally is just look, we are
pre-AI and we're trying to make that jump. If you think you're fast at 3x, there are native AI companies that are moving at 10x. So you're still slow.
And like you need to be 20x just to keep up with the 10x. And so just making that pace, but if you don't have that pace yourself and you don't set
that like clock beat, it's not going to happen. You can't outsource this. You can't hire a chief AI
person. Like you can hire that and there are many very smart people, but that energy, that pace has to come from the CEO. Thankfully, I have a little
bit of a technical background, and so I'm one of those maybe annoyingly dangerous CEOs where I'm like, "Oh, I'm good enough to tell you what to do,
but then you can go figure out what to do." But, I feel so unblocked as a ex-engineer now with AI
because I feel like I can actually start building. I mean, I I like I another example, as soon as Open Claw came out, like I built the first Open Claw
for G's. Not because I'm like some genius, but if I don't do it, everyone's going to say, "Hey, what's the security?" etc. And there are real security
things you need to figure out. But, if you don't show that you can build an Open Claw and someone
can tag it in a WhatsApp channel and it's going to give you jokes or whatever you want to do, then people just don't feel like they can do themselves.
And so, I it's just so important and, you know, everybody says the same thing, you don't have enough time, etc. You have to make the time. Like, if
it's important for the company to succeed, you need AI. And if it's important to do AI, you need to
do it. I mean, you need to do it. You need to figure out the time. And so, that's how I've kind of thought about it. And, you know, candidly, it helps
that it's actually very exciting building an AI. It doesn't feel like a chore. Like, I I wish I had more time because there's just so much I can do it
every week, it feels like Anthropic is releasing something else and I'm like, "Give me one day so
I can catch up to this." So. >> [gasps] >> Amazing. Well, thank you very much for joining us. I'm sure the great enterprises of Peru will be very
happy [laughter] very happy to hear you can now economically launch there. And appreciate you coming on the >> Thanks. Thanks for having me. This is
fantastic. And yeah, if there are companies out there that, you know, are looking to build with stable
coin and AI, would love for them to try us and give us feedback. Send an email directly to me and, you know, I'll respond probably pretty quickly. >> [music]