The Friendly Assassin

David Vélez set out to kill off the fat fees and lousy service of Brazil’s big banks. The operation succeeded beyond his wildest dreams: Today, his no-fee Nubank is the most valuable digital bank in the world, with 35 million customers—and he’s gunning for more

- JEFF KAUFLIN, MARIA ABREU & ANTOINE GARA

In the summer of 2012, David Vélez moved to São Paulo with a Stanford MBA and a plum job as a Sequoia Capital partner. Douglas Leone, the head of Sequoia, had recruited the then-30-year-old Colombian to stake the venture capital (VC) powerhouse’s claim in Brazil—a youthful, resource-rich country of 200 million that had grown 4 percent a year for a decade to become the world’s seventh-largest economy. But on October 1, Leone called Vélez with bad news: After considering the uninspired pitches from Brazilian entrepreneurs and hearing that top-ranked University of São Paulo had produced just 42 computer science graduates the prior year, he was pulling the plug. Sequoia’s Brazilian adventure was over.

“It was the day before my birthday and it was a bit of a shock,” Vélez admits. Still, he had always wanted to launch his own startup and saw an opportunity in the very dearth of Brazilian innovators that had turned his VC compatriots off. “You want to position yourself on the side of the market where there’s scarcity,” Vélez explains. “In the US, there’s an oversupply of good entrepreneurs. Somebody with my experience and background is a commodity. In Latin America, there was significant scarcity.”