Don't let your ambition fall prey of conventional wisdom. If you're a consensus play, there's just no alpha. We serve over 3 million consumers or
50,000 merchant partners. We have incredible cost to serve economics. Over 200 agents in production. We built a company on a mono repo as opposed to
microservices. Mono repos today are all the rage and Tropics built on a mono repo. Google obviously
famously is a mono repo company. When we started the company, microservices was where it was at. >> So, why did you make that decision? And what gave
you the forethought to make it? >> I hired the best CTO in the business. [music] >> How did you get your organization culturally moving as quickly as
you have? >> It's basically a combination of two things. We have a very clear view of where we are
and where we want to be. We have been extremely explicit with folks about standards and expectations. It's not going to be easy. It hasn't been easy.
It has been easier than I thought, but >> We're here today with Santiago Suarez, the founder and CEO of Addi. Addi is a buy now, pay later marketplace
and payments platform in Colombia, and now just recently a bank. And Addi has served over 25% of
the population. Welcome to the show. >> Thrilled to be here. >> Amazing. All right, so for those in our audience who may be less familiar with Addi,
can you give us a sense of what does the company do now and what scale are you at? >> Absolutely. So, we provide consumers and merchants with
financial solutions such as credit at the point of sale, instantaneous payments, logistics. Uh we just got
our banking license. So, you should think of it as the kind of elemental fabric of commerce and financial services in one of the fastest growing Latin
American economies. Uh size-wise, we serve over 3 million consumers or 50,000 merchant partners. That's a little bit about uh the scale of Addi and
what we do today. >> Okay, so we're going to talk a lot about Addi. We think it's interesting to talk
about your career pre-Addi. So, you're from Colombia, you came to the US to go to college. You joined a startup as a first employee and you're you're
pretty public about being fired from said startup, and then left very surgically, created a list of the 10 best operators in your mind, and you wanted
to go work for one of those, and you chose Jamie Dimon. So so maybe walk us through the lessons
from those experiences that relate to what you're doing now. >> Yeah, um So it really starts with coming here for college. Um you know, I I think we
I've been increasingly open about this most recent years, but for a while it was like no one needs to know this, um I I actually the first time I ever
left Colombia was to come to college. And and I came to I came to the US for college uh on a full
ride cuz my parents couldn't afford college uh in the US certainly and most places in Colombia. Um so that to me was probably the first time that I
could really see doing something that no one thought was possible. I mean, like to the degree that I wrote my college essays on a borrowed computer
cuz we didn't have a computer cuz in that particular case those years were pretty tough. We didn't have
one. That's why I had to borrow someone's computer to write the college essays and be able to go from doing that to just getting a scholarship to this
incredible place um and it remains incredible more so at the time, Yale, uh for an undergraduate education. Uh it was incredible. It was it was just
like it just really changes your definition of what's possible. I think that also led me to work at
Navia, um the first startup. Navia was doing probabilistic computing back in 2010. And we used to say this is by the way 16 years ago. We used to say
our programs were so special because every time you run them, you get a different output. This was back in 2010. And you know, we were
pre-transformers, pre-image net, pre-all these things, and we're out there talking to investors being like, "Oh,
our programs run and give you a different answer every time because they're probabilistic. This is how AI is going to happen." Um that was about the
one thing we had going for ourselves there. >> [laughter] >> And in the But I I was so excited about the potential of that technology. We were just,
you know, a couple decades early. And and then to your point, we had four co-founders. And in the 12
months I was there, we had four or five CEOs. And I was the CEO for 35 days at the end of that stint. >> [laughter] >> And then I decided that what we
needed was to fire a co-founder. Um cuz he wasn't doing a good job in my 23-year-old head. Um so I I talked to the right people, supposedly, to gather
support. Uh and then I fired him, and within 24 hours, the four co-founders were like, "Yeah,
that's cute, but you're out of here." Um And and I think the lessons there, one was going to I mean, there's a non-obvious one, which is an obvious
one, which is, well, the power of AI. Uh the second was the power of getting organized internally to pursue a goal. And, you know, I think one of the
things that we've been able to do at Adi well, in spite of some challenges through the years, has been
very good at organizing ourselves. Uh you know, I was just having breakfast with one of our board members, and we brought our new CFO. And the new CFO
has an 11-year career at Meli, and um and this board member asked him, "Hey, what is the thing that surprised you the most?" And he's like, "How
well-organized the company is." Uh so I think that was one of the core insights was like, there's got to
be a better way. And that speaks to the like, "Okay, how do I want to do this?" And there were two things I knew about starting a company. One, I
wanted to do it. Two, I never wanted to do it on a visa. Cuz one of the challenges at Navia was like, for a while, the government denied my H-1B, then
I had to re-get it. So it was like, "No, I need a green card if I'm ever going to do that in the US."
So I I That automatically means bigger company, lower upside, but lower downside, you can stay there. And then the third thing, to your point, I was
like, "Well, I want to go see how great CEOs operate." Because clearly, I have no idea what I was doing in my 35 days as a CEO of a five-person
company, but I had someone new someone else had that. So, I wrote a list, and we had Costco in it, I had
Amazon in it, I had Wynn Casinos in it. Um it wasn't even financial services related. It was just who are these incredible people and how do they
operate? And I basically leveraging McKinsey, Yale, everyone I knew, I just tried to get in a position to get a job somewhere close to these people.
And the first one I came up with this kind of legendary strategy group back at the day at the time, which
was 10 people at JP Morgan, because Jamie hated consultants. Yeah. So, he had banned all consultants, but he had like a strategy group of 10 people.
And I was like, "Okay, well, then that feels like a good place to go learn." And I was there for 6 years, and it was incredible. It was like a whole
university in how to run companies and how to think about financial services. >> Okay. Amazing. All
right, so I want to fast forward to starting Addi. And I think you've done a few things that are usual, but most founders, when they look at Latin
America or most investors when they look at Latin America, they expect founders to start in Brazil, which is the largest market, then Mexico. You, you
know, obviously you're from Colombia, but decided you were going to do Colombia. And I think the view
at the time was Colombia is just too hard. Like payments are mostly cash, like 65 70%. Less than 20% of people even have a credit card. And then a
small number of banks own everything. And so, what did you What did you see that gave you the confidence to enter this market? And what do you think
that outside observers get wrong? >> So, the answer is on why Colombia, um it's In hindsight is
wonderful, and there's so many reasons, but part of it was why I was in Colombia. And I had landed in Colombia because I had followed um my
girlfriend, now wife. And I refused to be employed in Colombia. And I actually think being in Colombia was instrumental for being an entrepreneur
because I knew too much about the US financial services. And every time someone would give me an idea in the US,
I'd be like, "The Bank Holding Company Act of 1960 actually makes this unworkable." Or you know, "Durbin will make sure this doesn't work." Or "Here's
how you don't understand Swift." And like I had just been so into the matrix here that all I could see was the 10 ways in which your startup's going
to fail. Uh had I been that into the matrix in Colombia, I would have been like, "Yeah, your
company's never going to work out." Knowing [laughter] what I know now. Uh but I didn't. So, I think a little bit of ignorance is always bliss. A
little bit of being the right place, right time, and refusing to be an employee. But, there were two things that I saw that were very important. The
first one is extreme amount of technological adoption. And you know, you're on our board, so you know,
see we have these metrics and we say, "Hey, there's more smartphone per capita than Brazil and Mexico." Um which is incredibly powerful, right? 75% of
Colombians have a smartphone. Um but more than that, I remember in a 3-year period from 2014 to 2016, smartphones went from being the thing that my
banking friends had locally, and always like 3 years behind the models we had in the US, to being
something everyone had. I was like, "Wait. In in And when you think about banking in particular, right? Distribution has always been the issue with
banking. Uh that's why branch networks are so valuable. Um and that's why neo-banking in the US has been so challenged. You have these very embedded
distribution networks. Particularly in consumer, I should say. But, I was like, "Wow, we now have a
distribution device in everyone's hands at zero marginal cost of distribution." So, I was like inside one, I was like, "This is incredible." And then
the second thing to your point, was this is a country that has this very strong pay over time tradition, but no real work around it. The only thing
was Visa and MasterCard had actually changed their switches and rails to enable installments. Uh
handful of countries, right? Brazil, Korea, Turkey, us, where that is the default. Uh so it was like those two things are just like, you know what?
There is a great opportunity here. And the last and most important one, the UX. At the end day, UX really matters. And And when I say UX, I mean UX
not in the you know, black turtleneck, beautifully designed thing, but UX in customer pain. And I give I
always give two examples. One is I went to buy a T-shirt on installments, and it took me 22 minutes. Cuz they had to fingerprint me, they had to take
two photos of me, they had to call two of my friends. And then they would only do this during working hours. So Sunday >> on that for a second. That's
I think is very unintuitive. Like why are they calling your friends? >> That's basically his way of
like, what's your personal reference, right? So the bankers are literally just making sure they exist. >> You're trying to buy a retail purchase and
the KYC is literally phone a friend. >> Two friends. >> Yeah. >> Not one, two. >> Mhm. >> And then fingerprinting you and taking photos of you and all
these things. And your decision to be like, okay, I got to There's got to be a >> [laughter] >> bar
is very low. And then the other thing that I found asinine was that banks would charge you to use their online banking. So you would you would go in
and not to use them to like wire money, to access it. So you my original bank account in Colombia, I was able to enter my online bank portal twice in
a month. But after the third time, they would charge me like 20 cents. And I was like, this makes
First of all, why? Secondly, now it means I have to go to the branch, where I am more expensive to serve than if I'm self-serving myself, or call you.
Like any other channel of service is more expensive. Why are you charging me to use the channel that for you this is expensive, but that just gives
you a little bit of something of that dynamics of the market. Now, I think that's what we saw
originally and I thought, "Wow, this is a great test bit." I will confess what I didn't see was how big the opportunity was. Like even like nowadays
I'm like it's huge, but even at the time I was like, "Okay, we'll be able to build a good base, but then we got to go abroad, which we did
eventually." But nowadays I'm like, "No, this is this is a massive market, yeah." >> And Santi, you know,
there's there's an example of a global company that reached success by just focusing on one company and in one country that's Kaspi. And, you know,
the story goes that you messaged the CEO four times on LinkedIn before he replied and then you flew to Kazakhstan to meet him to spend time with him.
Uh we'll be curious to if you can share a little bit more of those lessons on having spoke to him and
find somebody that found success only focusing on one country. >> Yeah, so I give a lot of credit to one of our investors who introduced me to Kaspi
well before they are now a little bit known in fintech circles. At the time they were not. And when we exited Brazil, I think everyone was very
supportive, but I think even those folks who were supportive were worried. Like now, how what's going to
happen? These guys were so excited. They were like, "This is great. We're very excited. By the way, we've been telling you to do this. The the right
comp is this country company in Kazakhstan." I'm like, "Okay, great." Uh but they were public in London, so we had a lot of info. So we started
reading about them. And then what Daniel, my co-founder, and I try to do every year is we try to take a
trip to see things. Um so we've done one to Belize. We obviously the first one we did was to Brazil. And this time around we said, "Well, let's go to
Central Asia." Because Central Asia everyone knows about Kazakhstan, but also Uzbekistan is incredible. And Uzbekistan has like three fintech
unicorns. Oliver Hughes, who was the long-term think of CEO, now runs uh what's her name? TBC Uzbekistan.
So, we're like, let's go. But, obviously, you know, the the big price is Kaspi. So, I started like trying to get in front of this guy. In many ways, I
pinged one of their investors. I got sent to their IR team. But, the way it worked was after like three or four cold LinkedIn emails, he was like,
"Okay, fine." I'm like, "Come." And then we go meet him. And he was talking to us, but he said there,
he's like, "What questions do you have?" I was like, "Okay, great. Well, I shall ask you some questions." And then Danny and I just spent 90 minutes
with him. And he was extremely He was like, he just, you know, obviously public company CEO, but it's just like just the way he thinks. And the There
were two important lessons for us. Number one, uh NPS. And when I say NPS, I I don't mean it He's
actually been public about this where he's like, "I think NPS for a company with less than 1,000 employees is a terrible metric. You should just
listen to customer service calls." So, in our weekly business reviews, we always start with what happened to the customer last week. And we have two
transcripts uh pulled at random in addition to a number of a battery of KPIs just on customer experience.
Uh he was like, "The first thing you need to think about is NPS." Um And in fact, they measure all their product managers on NPS alone these days.
They don't have a P&L. Um And then the second thing that he said that was very useful, particularly as we think about our own product road map, he was
like, "Everyone thinks you got to do everything at once." But, he literally got on a whiteboard and
he's like, "That's not quite the way it works. Here's how you Here's how we thought about structuring our road map. Potentially think about it." And
that informs a lot of our product road map decisions because it's very counterintuitive to the work we do. You know, we had an event last week and we
announced in the same event a bank account, next day logistics, next day shipping, and an integration
with a third of the country's entire POS device fleet. It was like in the same event to the same audience. That's just not very intuitive. And then
the third piece which he gave us which you know we always take to heart. He was like, "Look, this is a very unusual play. Equity investors will not
understand this. Just ignore them for 5 years or 10 years. And then one day you'll come out and they'll
be like, 'Why didn't you call me?'" And you'll say, "I tried many times." >> [laughter] >> Um and it was just this clarity of purpose, lighter focus,
high conviction in serving a market in a different way. Um and then on the marketplace in particular, Kaspi has done an incredible job at owning um
e-commerce without logistics. Mhm. And it's not because we're tourists, it's because you wouldn't
build a social network today like you built Facebook in 2004. You wouldn't build a marketplace like you built. So a lot And we even so that we were a
tiny company and smaller, but like you know, when we built the ID in the first iteration, we had to do all of our ID checks in-house. Um you remember
this? >> Yep. >> Nowadays, we modularize some of it. We keep like the real valuable part, the
algorithms, the software. But like for a commodity run-of-the-mill biometric check, there are great providers that'll do it. And zero equity value
that generated there. That's just a commodity. So thinking modularly is very important and that was another lesson there. >> Very productive trip. >>
Yeah, very productive. And that leads you to the next trip. You're here in New York. You're receiving
an award from the Fast Company most innovative fintech companies in the world. How do you achieve that from Colombia? Yeah, this was This is um This
is a big deal. And we were talking before the podcast that we travel very rarely these days. Um but this was this was worth the exception. So, yeah,
we've been named >> in the world finally woke up past 5 years to your earlier point. >> Exactly. So,
we've been named the third most innovative company in Fintech by Fast Company globally. Um Look, I think there's obviously a little bit of our being a
little more disciplined in telling our story, but the real story is in the last 24 months a lot of our long-term investments have really paid off and
have allowed ship extremely exciting product, right? So, you know, we built a mono repo based
unified data architecture company that once LLMs became workable made it I'm not going to say very easy, but made it feasible to like try them at
scale. So, you know, today we have a company that has some interest in the fastest growing marketplace, has one of the most viable and at scale closed
loop payment networks in the country. Uh we are in over 1,000 cities in a country with 1,100 cities
with our own payment rails. We do our own clearing, our own settlement, all in our own tech. And then I think obviously because we live in the year
2026, we've done extremely attractive and powerful things with AI. Um so, we built our own in-house agents that currently handle all 100% of all
customer service queries. They handle 100% and they resolve close to 80%. So, full resolution, no human in
the loop. So, there's not a lot of dispatching, oh the human no, full resolution. Um the same thing on a merchant onboarding. We have a merchant
onboarding agent that allows us to onboard over 2 to 3,000 merchants a month. Um same stuff, 100% handle rate, over 20% improvement in conversion. Uh
we're launching our own transformer later this year. So, there are a number of these things that I think
when you when you see it uh we've always, you know, we've always benchmarked ourselves against the best and there are a number of things we've done
that I think are now putting us in that direction. I mean, there's a reason we run the company in English, which is we always want the best talent,
even though we're now in Colombia. It's very counterintuitive that you run a company in Colombia in
English, but it is not once you think about, where the world-class market is. Uh, so I think we're very grateful and and it's pretty humbling to be in
such company, but it's also just I think the recognition of four, five years of incredible investment spending off. >> Maybe just to stick on AI, I
think one of the um, one of the things I learned when we first started working together is, unlike in
the US where you can build financial services and then every piece of the stack, there's some other company doing it as a service. Like, none of that
existed in Colombia, right? To your point, like KYC might be undefensible, but it's not like there was another service that you could just bolt in
there. And so I think Addi has got a real history. You had to build your own loan management system of
just having to build every layer of that stack. And so maybe talk about how did you approach, like I think you were very fast on we need to rethink
Addi to be very AI forward. How did you How did you decide where to start? >> So, I would say we actually started it seven years ago when we made two
foundational decisions that to this day um, help us. Um, the first one was we built a company on a
mono repo as opposed to microservices. A mono repo today are all the rage. Anthropic is built on a mono repo. Google obviously famously is a mono repo
company. Uh, but when we started the company, microservices was where it was at. >> So, why did you make that decision? Or what gave you the
forethought to make it? >> I hired the best CTO in the business. I mean, like, you know, now I can tell you
exactly why, but he was like, you're all kids. We're going to build a mono repo. And the mono repo gives you, obviously, you know, for folks who don't
know it what the Monorepo is basically is all your code is in a single repository. So, for agents to read it, it's a lot easier than if you have
multiple code bases on many parts of the org. They also have some extreme economic advantages because
there's very little duplication. Uh you reuse components almost automatically. Um you know, we have 60 product engineers supporting a gigantic product
surface. Uh so, Monorepo was kind of canonical decision one that allowed us to drive AI. And the second one is you know, we built the company using an
event sourcing architecture, which means that every single event that happens at this company gets
logged. And events are anything from we texted you to you add something to our shopping cart to your bureau score to your financial everything. You
know, we generate over 10 What is it? Uh over 10 million events per day. Um so, those two things were there. Critically, these event architectures um
we used Kafka for hours are brutal to query. >> Mhm. >> So, that's why most people end up moving away
from this. And again, 4 years ago, well, 5 years ago now, we partnered with Databricks. >> Mhm. >> So, what that means is you in real time are able to
ingest these events and showcase them in vector form for LLMs, uh SQL form for classical machine learning models. Obviously, tabular forms for still
the humans we've got cuz we do have some humans. >> Mhm. >> Um so, the whole the whole engine of
foundation was there. And you're able to build on a very solid foundation. And then, of course, once we went in, and I'm lucky enough to work with a
great team that is very anti-hype. They The question was, "Okay, where do we start?" And then, we decided to start counterintuitively with legal. And
legal has two reasons. One, and now there's a wonderful Brazilian company that has figured this out,
which is you get sued for everything in these countries, right? So, uh there are these things called in Colombia tutelas, which are emergency
constitutional actions, and you get 48 hours to respond. And if you don't respond, the legal representative of the company, usually the CEO, goes to
jail. Like, it is liable to go to jail. Like, it is that high stakes. Um and then like that, you have all
these consumer protection laws, there's all these things. So, with insane response times. And by choice, we never settle them. Um because it sets a
precedent. So, you know, and there's a cottage industry in Colombia of people who will be like, "Oh, we'll sue the bank to get them to remove your
credit report." And it takes the bank costs the bank 2 cents to remove the credit report, and it might
cost you a few thousand dollars to fight the lawsuit, maybe 10,000 dollars. We've taken a couple of the way up to like the level below the Supreme
Court, cuz we will just not settle. Um cuz [laughter] then people know. >> Yep, matter of principle. >> Um So, we started with legal. Because with
legal, you actually need to take this incredible foundation that I was talking about, but you now need to
make sure all of them work extremely well. So, you need to build the right rack pipelines, you need to build the right um kind of feedbacks and
effectively R L I chef in-house loops, because 48-hour clock starts. You need all the data from every customer service interaction this customer had,
all the data from your financial core, all the data from the transaction history log. They need to package
this in a way that's sensible, legally allowed, with the right precedents, and then you need to get it ready for a lawyer fairly junior lawyer to say,
"Yep, this looks good. I'll print." So, and I I remember when we were discussing this, I was like, "Well, let's start with customer service like
everyone else." And Carlos, my CTO, and then Mauro, they were like, "No, this is the harder problem, but
this is the one that scales." Because all the pipelines we need to build for the A, by the way, we're saving a few lawyers, if not more, on this,
because we're able to get incredible efficiencies. But B, think about what it Think about what it takes to resolve a lawsuit in 48 hours that
otherwise the CEO is liable to go to jail, where you have to pull all the right data, you have to pull all the
right information, and all the right pricing with great accuracy. So, it was a 6-month investment to build these pipelines. We built these pipelines.
And then, you know, within 90 days, we had V1 of our customer service agent, which, as I mentioned, but you know, off the gate, there was crazy off
the gate, 100% resolution, 100% um not resolution, 100% handling, and off the gate it was 60%
resolution. Wow. Because if you could resolve a lawsuit, you could resolve most customer service interactions. >> Santiago, I wanted to touch a little
bit on a point that you mentioned about talent and building a great company, because, you know, we invested in a couple of companies in Latin America,
and one differentiation that we've seen is people that attract global talent tend to have a larger
success case. And I wanted, you know, from your experience having worked in the US and also building Latin America, you know, curious how you think
about attracting the best talent and how you'd build an organization that can attract this talent from this area. >> Mhm. >> Yeah, it's So, it's been
a So, I think I would say it's been a selfish focus of mine, because I think one of the reasons I
didn't last as long as I did in some of my jobs is I just thought my teammates were not great. Um so, I think when I when I decided [laughter] to
start my own company, I was like, >> I get to control who I'm picking my teammates. I can only pick >> I did I I Yeah, exactly. I get to choose who I
work with, and as I, you know, we hosted them last week. Uh we meet like six times a year in person. Um
and we also have a lot that I said, "Guys, I just have a great time working with all of you." Which is true. I don't I took me a while to get to get
to that place. Um but how we thought about talent was multiple ways. One, I think I mentioned earlier, uh we run the company in English. And we run
the company in English. Uh the obvious reason is it allows us to attract non-Spanish speaking talent.
The non-obvious reason, which we figured out later, was Spanish-speaking talent wants to work for great companies, and being in English actually there
is a certain raising of the bar. >> Mhm. >> A premium. It's a premium. There is a And people want that. And I remember when we went back to Colombia,
um my co-founder and I were discussing he's like, "Oh, should we now migrate to Spanish?" Because
there's a huge tax about running the company in English. An easy one. All our copies in English, and they need to get translated because our customers
want to see it in Spanish. Um and we were discussing this. And then I was like, "No, we we had a we had not quite an exact offsite, but more like a
manager. Once a year we do this thing, and we brought the 400 of them. And most of them are local.
But the fact that they get to like it changes their mind. It's like we are here to do serious work cuz we're equivalent speaking in English. You know
what I mean? Um so I was like there's that was a piece. The So, we run the company in English, which actually counterintuitively attracts local
talent. Uh the other thing we've done is we have a very high bar. And we push the bar very high. And we're
very editorial. And we're very editorial on what we want to see from our colleagues and teammates. And my view has always been there may not that many
that many of them, but we only need, you know, a few hundred of them. And in whatever 300 400 million pool of people, we should be able to get this.
And that it speaks to the other one, which is we hire regionally. Uh I would also say uh we're also
remote-first company. Um as we think about our AI adoption, we actually think being a remote company is a huge competitive advantage. Because it in-
ensures all the context is explicit, and it allows agents to work on that context. Like if you want to get an extreme example, the three of us were
building a company right now, we wouldn't be sending memos to each other. We'd probably just be hashing
thing out on a board, and then if you want an agent to drop on like it's just hard for the agent to have a context. We have a lot of like formal APIs
at the company. >> Yeah. >> That allow agents to grab them and run with them. Um and then the other piece is we give people uh great development
opportunities. So, we have a model where we bring world-class leaders, and we become very good at hiring
them, even though each search takes like 9 months, true story. And then we train young up-and-coming uh talent. Um and that combo is extremely
powerful. >> And then related to that, we were talking about this before the podcast. It is impossible not to be AI-pilled if you're in the Valley.
Like just stand in a coffee shop, it's the only conversations you're going to hear. You walk down the street,
you bump into five people from labs. That is not the environment in Bogotá. >> No. >> How So, you obviously had a CTO that was leaning into it, you
were leaning into it, but how did you get your organization culturally moving as quickly as you have? >> I think the same way we've done a few of
these transformations, right? Like 4 years ago we're like, we're going to make money come hell or high
water. Summer of 2022. I was just like, one day, I remember. And I remember why. It's like It's like, well, this world has changed. And I think it was
it's it's probably the similar thing. It just becomes the top priority for the company. Um obviously for a company of our scale and our product
surface, as I am reminded often by my team, there are many priorities. I was like, that's fair. Um, but
this is this is the one I think it's basically a combination of two things. One, giving you the tools, and then two, it is not optional. And we have a
very clear view of where we are and where we want to be. We have been extremely explicit with folks about standards and expectations. Um, it's not
going to be easy. It hasn't been easy. It has been easier than I thought, but we're asking our
workforce the same way everyone is asking their workforce to undertake like three high jumps in sequence in a span of months. But, you know, I I I I
send a I send like most people do these days, I send a note to the company every Monday, and it's only it became monthmatic. It was like, and the
other thing I did was before I got conviction to push this, um, I built my own stack. So, I got I got on
my own cloud provisioned. Um, I started playing with and I went the whole way. So, I was doing my own devops. I was provisioning my instances. I was
getting my own API keys. I could just really playing with the core tooling. It was so fun because like my I I my CTO and I would text at 10:00 p.m. I
was like, "Hey, this thing on Amazon is breaking." [clears throat] He's like, "What are you doing?"
[laughter] >> Like, I was just literally asking for devops style support that had nothing to do with the actual AI, but I was like, "I want to
build the whole end-to-end stack. I don't want to just play cuz there's a lot of now A and B wrappers, right?" So, they'll be like, "Hook all these
MCBs and you're off to the races." I was like, "No, I want to build my own." So, I I started from a empty
EC2 instance. And from there we built everything. And once I figured, "Okay, if this is helpful for me at this scale, and if I'm able to do this kind
of in between meetings, basically, then the entire company should be able to do this. And then, working with the partners, I mean, now we've got a
very powerful kind of four pillars, right? So, we talk about A, our customer service, Audrey, we call
our agents, and we talked about them. Um you know, we're investing in transformers. Uh so, we're building our own transformers using own GPUs to train
our own kind of like GPT of sorts. We call it IDNA with incredible early results. Um obviously, we've got a kind of like our whole refactoring of the
engineering code base. So, we're moving away mostly from reactive Java to more declarative
language. Uh so, it's kind of code as hardness, and we've seen extremely powerful early results. Uh we just shipped a version of our web marketplace.
So, you know, our marketplace is in our app cuz we're very app-centric. But, having it on web, great customer acquisition tool. It also allows Tik Tok
doing it to Google to do it. It's just a lot of benefits. We've always been like, "Man, it takes 6
to 9 months, five engineers, 60 product engineers. I'm not quite sure it hits the bar. Two engineers to months. Um So, then that's that's the piece.
And then, the last piece, which is the one that I'm spending most of the time, even though it has the least economic impact in the short term, is
changing the operating model of the company to be kind of agent and AI first. And that's where we are
making great inroads, but we're we're further behind against the other ones. >> One thing that's very interesting about Addi is that, you know, it
started pre-AI, and we're obviously you described opportunity in financial services in Latin America. Curious if you can share some thoughts uh if you
were to go back to Santi when you were starting the company now back then, what would be some of those
lessons that things to watch out especially for entrepreneurs that listen to the podcast and starting companies not only in Latin America, but
globally. But, um yeah, it would be great to hear from you. >> Um the first one is remember you're a technology company. If there's one thing we did
extremely well, but only became obvious 5 years down the line, was our investments in technology. Like this
stuff that we're talking about having we have over 200 agents in production, we have incredible customer economics, all these things are only possible
cuz we're a technology company. Truly. Um you know, we would have some people in the management team because for about a year 3 years ago we would
spend every week talking about how long it would take to compile when an engineer pushed the code into
production. And it would it had gone from sub 10 minutes to 33 minutes. And we treated this as like as a major problem. And some people were like, why
do why are we even wasting time on this? But it's like, guess what? Like, you know, 100 engineers times 20 minutes twice a day, that's a lot of
minutes. But it just gives you a sense that you cannot just one day show up and be like, oh, I'm a
technology company. So, I think it's something we did extremely well in part because we made some early good founding decisions, uh but in part
because we actually knew that and I think particularly in Latin America, it's very easy to forget that. And people treat technology kind of as an
afterthought or as an enabler. We're like, no, no, this is like real technology company and that's actually
where a lot of your equity value eventually compounds. Um the second lesson I would say is go a bit slower at the beginning. That'd be great. Um if I
think about some of our early near-death experiences, um they could have all been avoided by going a little bit slower. Uh we had some awful fraud
experiences at the beginning and it was because we were just going too fast. But again, remember,
right? This was the go-go years. Uh so, in the go-go years you have to go very fast. And then the last piece is go be very big in your ambition, but
be very contrarian in how you get there. Um even this morning I was on a in a meeting and I was like I'm like this just feels very conventionally I
can very conventional path to getting to where you want to get. So it sounds obvious, but particularly
LatAm the conventional wisdom in that case was go to Brazil or Mexico or uh thin layer across many markets. And I'm not saying our playbook is right
one for everyone. You know, there might be cases where you should go thin layer many markets. But don't let your ambition fall prey of conventional
wisdom. Uh because then there's no there's no alpha, right? If if you're a consensus play, there's just
no alpha. Uh those would be the three the three and then maybe bonus have a great co-founder. >> I think it'd be interesting to talk a little bit more
about how you're running the company now. And you do you do a few unique things, but one of the ones that you've moved to recently is North Star
metric versus long list of quarterly OKRs. >> Right. So the North Star metric was the foundational
organizing principle of the company uh for a very long time. It it remains so, but we're we're playing with it. But it be it started when we always
hated OKRs because I found OKRs to be very heavy. Like just so heavy you're like okay, five OKRs, five OKRs per OKR. So now we're 25 things I'm going
to got to look at just at the company. And then if you're being purist, then you cascade them. So
suddenly you have like 150 things. And um I recently read this incredible post on Twitter by um by this uh Sequoia investor Shaun Maguire about why X
was going to win or not. And you know, I don't want to talk about that in particular, but it was an incredibly interesting on how Elon Musk runs his
companies. And what you then realize is he spends all his time on the most important thing. Um and
very little time on everything else. Uh so, I think the North Star became that because we ended up realizing again in the summer of 2022, equity
capital markets are done. Uh at least for a while, we need to make money. And it just becomes very It's a very useful word, guys, in principle. We're
making this amount of dollars, we're losing a lot more. What is the first thing we can move to not lose
money? Let's first start with the risk-adjusted margin. Then we went to gross margin. Then we went to gross margin minus sales and marketing, and
finally we're like, "Okay, EBITDA." And now these days we even optimize our taxes cuz we're trying to optimize net income. Um it just focuses the
discussion. By the way, it worked really well, but now that you have three very different business lines,
we're starting to play with it a little bit more and saying, "What are the But so, we're calling them the L1 metrics. One or two, maybe three KPIs
that we want to track." But it's it But even then, it's three. Not five, seven, because once you get to five and seven, no one no one knows them. Uh
so, that becomes hard. >> Yeah. If everybody at the company can't name them, then you've got too many.
Which was a great thing about profitability. >> Yeah. >> And by the way, for what it's worth, I actually think one of the biggest challenges we had
after we hit profitability, it's kind of like the dog that caught the bus. And then we're like, "Profitable. Now what?" Uh but no, it turns out we
knew we knew it, but it like it was such a core thing of every weekly business review for for 3 years,
that once we actually got there, we even had to do a lot of like company education because we start we stopped talking about it on a weekly basis. But
we said, "The same way that no one says you should show up to work wearing appropriate clothing. That's like that is profitability. It's just like an
expectation. Like we've gotten because we were like, well, if we don't talk about it, can we be
unprofitable again? And we're like, no, you cannot be. It just a necessary part of what we do. >> And I think the other um the other principle that
you instituted very early on and have been very systematic about enforcing it is that everything is written down. Like even obvious that feels like
maybe it shouldn't be written down you managed to get written down and so we talked through like that
turns out to be very prescient in the world of agents. All of your SOPs are by definition written down. But what drove that before there was that kind
of necessity? >> So the original insight was certainly not agents are coming. The real insight was A, I had read enough about the early Amazon culture
with the memos, but B, I had been a consultant and I had been enough places where PowerPoint was
used to just model thinking. Um that I was like, okay, we don't want to do that. And then C, which is I think where what you probably have seen is as
we build a company, you know, as you build a company you have some stated values that you're like, nah, we're actually not that's actually not a
value. Like we don't value that. But there are some even originally unstated values that become extremely
powerful. And one of them was can you articulate the why? And can you articulate the why even if it's the most obvious why? And that's when for us it
became extremely important for everyone to write things down. And even, you know, we were always remote first for engineering and product even
pre-COVID. And post-COVID when everyone left then it became very easy. But even when we were in in person
we would just print memos and just have people read the thing and mark it up and ask questions. Uh because it I I I think it's just all these
companies are very idiosyncratic and I'm very idiosyncratic and one of the things that drives me nuts is when people don't know why they're doing
things. So, then we basically said, well, we always got to be able to say why you're doing things. By the way,
myself included, right? Like I will tell you once a week someone on the management team will be like, "Well, can you just articulate why this is a
good idea?" And even when we became a bank, some of the folks on management were like, "I understand you think it's a great idea. I don't understand
it. So, would you mind just writing a note explaining why you think becoming a bank is a good idea?" So,
it just So, it works. And by the way, in the process we A, recommitted to becoming a bank, but B, found a few things that we otherwise would not have
found out. >> So, Santi, let's look ahead. Everything goes well the way that it's going. Five years from now, where is Addi? What's the great vision?
We've been doing this now for 7 and 1/2 years. So, had I predicted we would be here in 7 and 1/2
years, I don't think I would have gotten most things I would have gotten most things wrong. But, I think I would have gotten a few things right, which
I think will remain the same. So, the first one is we are a force for financial inclusion and economic development, not only in Colombia, but in many
countries. Like we figured out a way of packaging kind of retail and commerce technology with
financial services to just drive economic activity. And that you see that has massive impact. Like we we have cases upon cases of people who are able
to send their kids to school. Uh, you know, we just featured we featured this 80-year-old man uh, 2 weeks ago in our merchant event who was selling
1,000 bucks a month pre-Addi and now they sell $30,000 a month and we're 75% of those sales. And it's
insane. It's like, you know, 300K plus a year. Like this in the Amazon, by the way. Down in the Amazon forest. Like this is just like out in the
Amazon. So, in 5 years time, we need to be able to do that at even higher scale, two three orders of magnitude more, and in more countries. What's the
first thing that >> that in It's a very unique combination. We're not just a fintech or a retail
commerce. It's just that combo. >> Uh the other piece is we're not only a first, we're probably mostly AI, AI native. I you know, I was talking to my
head of human resource, and I said we should think about calling you the head of human and agentic resources. Like [laughter] Like is there a
different way where you're now in charge of the productivity of the people who produce? And the people who
produce are people and agents. So, one of the things that I get most excited about is I get to play at even within Addi in this tiny Colombian
company, we get to play on the forefront of some of these things. And can we So, in 5 years time, we should have agents running all around the place.
Um And that'll be that'll be And then the third piece is how In 5 years time, we need we also need to be
the place where people have a great time and do the best work of their lives because they're driving economic empowerment, inclusion, growth. They're
playing with great technology, and great technology is enabling them. And they keep going, right? You know, I'm a We were talking before the podcast
that I'm a rare traveler. That's cuz I have a young family. And these jobs in these companies are so
demanding that you just need to make sure you're doing them for the right reason, but you're having fun. So, in 5 years time, like are we Like I go to
work, I'm I'm so giddy. And every day there's Jose Angel knows, like there's always something, but I am so giddy. So, in 5 years time, we need to be
giddy. Like there are a few hundred people, cuz it'll be a few hundred people, by the way. I I don't
see how it'll will a thousand people. >> Mhm. You know, Angela doesn't know this because we we haven't yet had our summer board meeting but like we're
running 150 heads below our budget while exceeding the growth. Like 150 heads. >> And your cost to serve is already >> Our cost to serve is nuts and
we're running this because we're seeing and it doesn't mean by the way that we are cutting heads. It
just means that for the growth rate we had, right? We were we're growing this year again at that rate we even with AI we're like oh we got to make a
few hires here or there to support the thing. And we're running behind. So we cut that thing and we're going to keep cutting it again. So the velocity
and efficiencies we're seeing they're real but five years down the line like imagine what we can do.
And and you know, at that point we may be talking about, you know, taking this interplanetarily, right? Like like I always ask and this is something I
tell Daniel I'm like you part of the reason you build this company is cuz you always want to be pushing the envelope a little bit. I think the day I
can't push the envelope maybe the day that I'm like I may look for a different job. But you get to
put And by the way, you don't have to be in San Francisco to push the envelope. Like we're in Bogota and we're pushing the envelope in interesting
ways. Um different ways obviously than the foundation labs. Uh but yeah, five years we should still be pushing the envelope and in fact if the last
five years were an indication, I mean we be you know, we'll be doing crazy stuff with jet packs or
whatever it is that will be there. Um but maintaining that sense of joy and wonder I think it's going to be critical and I'd love to see that again in
five years. >> Awesome. Santi, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you guys. Thanks Santi. >> [music]
Mhm.