Juan Pablo Ortega, Co-founder of Rappi & Yuno

Welcome aboard Venture Passport, a podcast delivering an inside view of early stage global markets. Me, Jack Richardson, along with my co host Richard Armstrong explore insights from the world's most innovative entrepreneurs and investors. This episode is brought to you by TAV. TAV is a global early stage VC with over 240 investments, 56 successful exits, six IPOs, 15 unicorns, including globally recognized names like SumUp, DeepL, and many others.

They write checks ranging from a hundred k to 1 mil and are sector agnostic. With a dedicated global team, TAV is focusing efforts on The US and Europe while also targeting emerging markets such as Indonesia, Thailand, Brazil. If you're an ambitious founder of a great idea, don't hesitate to reach. This week's episode is of Juan Pablo Ortega, the cofounder of Rappi and Uno.

Rappi started as an on demand delivery service and quickly evolved into one of LATAM's most viable tech companies, pioneering the region's rapid commerce and super app model. The company scaled to millions of users across multiple countries raising over $2,000,000,000 in the process from investors like SoftBank and Sequoia. After Rappi, one co founded Uno, a next generation payments orchestration platform that helps businesses optimize transactions, reduce fraud and and streamline global payment integrations.

UNO has raised from a 16 zed and Tiger Global and is rapidly becoming a key player in modernizing payments across LatAm and beyond. All indications, coming in, to the control center at this time indicate we are go. Go. Go.

Lift off. We have a lift off. So, JP, thank you so much for coming on today. Obviously, you know, we heard many things from many great mutuals, and, you know, I think your story is pretty incredible.

So, you know, as I say, before we get started, we'd love to hear a bit about your journey, right, you know, growing up in Latin America. I mean, obviously, you built one of the largest tech companies in Latin America. But did you always know you wanted to go into tech that early on, or what was sort of the path when, you know, growing up? Yeah.

So I had a a different path. So I I was a leader in Colombia. I knew I wanted to start something. I didn't know what it was.

I had, you know, a bunch of different businesses when I was little. I used to be that person that sold every kind of things. So I used to sell ice cream. I used to sell jollos.

Like, anything that was trendy in Colombia was basically selling it. But then when I was 14, I moved to The US, and I have always liked planes and I wanted to be a pilot, so I started flying. I started getting my pilot license when I was 15. At 16, I I flew by myself for the first time.

At 17, I got my private pilot license, and at 18, I became a commercial pilot. While going to to high school, started working, at an airline in as a baggage handler and loved the airline industry. I went I started college in in in South Florida and then transferred to Cornell and kept my job as a part time ground handler and basically used to fly down to Florida from Upstate New York every two or three weekends to maintain my minimum hours and to maintain my job at year two. And, yeah, I never thought about like, my whole career path was to become the CEO of an airline.

Never thought about a technology company. And even at Cornell, you know, like, there was a lot of startups going on. There were a lot of things going on, and I wasn't really that interested in becoming, you know, an airline CEO. After college, I worked for a for consulting company that only focus on airlines and did a bunch of projects in, you know, worked, for Airbus and did a bunch of things.

And one day, I I met Simone, my my cofounder. And we we met, like, on on a Friday. He told me, look. You you need to make a decision by Sunday if you wanna come with us.

And on Sunday, I said, you know, is this the right time? I was living in New York. I had to quit my job, move to Colombia. And I'm like, this is, I think, the right time for me.

Monday, I quit my job. On Friday, I was moving, and I had, like, seven bags that I packed, and I and I moved to Colombia. Wow. That's how everything changed.

So I have a, I think, a different career path than other founders. I you know, they're littles. I wanna start a company and all. Mine, I knew I wanted to start a company, didn't know when, but the right time hit seven years after that, it has been now ten years since that happened, but, yeah, we build the first Colombian unicorn and change the region as a whole.

And now on my second company with Uno. Yeah. That I mean, that that's exceptional. But I think there were early signs that you were gonna build something big.

So as I say, growing up, having started all those businesses and then just being super determined and motivated, I think those are some really good signs. Anyways, maybe we could talk a bit about Rappy. You're one of the cofounders. How did the idea come about?

There were many players in the region as well that were going after the delivery space and also in Latin America. What was the original story? Look. At the moment, there wasn't any anyone doing that.

You had companies like Domicilios Ponto Com, which was then acquired by the Lyrics Hero. And Yeah. The business model was really simple. It was just basically a technology layer on top of the restaurant infrastructure to Lyrics.

We wanted to change, and we saw there was an opportunity to use technology to basically connect people that wanted to deliveries with people that wanted something delivered. And at the beginning, the idea was to have, you know, everything that you can have in a corner store. So, like, whatever you find at seven eleven, we had, you know, a thousand SKUs, and people used to just order it. We used to basically match that order to the closest delivery guy.

The closest delivery guy will accept the order. They will go to a store, buy, and they will deliver. It was super easy. We saw with time that, you know, restaurants was something that people also wanted.

So we pick kind of the 10 top items in restaurants, and we put it in the store. And and RAPIA at the beginning had this really cool technology that came from Simmon's previous company called Rability. That was that you walk through a store and you basically throw like, you threw things down to the basket. So the the UI was actually pretty pretty cool and pretty naughty.

So on top of that, we built all of this, you know, technology to to mash and and to find the closest delivery guy and and do a bunch of different things. And then we added whatever you want. We call it Spanish a toho, and it's basically like a whim that you were able to add basically whatever you wanted. So you put what you wanted from where do we get it.

And then we started seeing, you know, people go crazy, and they will copy paste their grocery list and with groceries. And, yeah, we ended up buying a a lot of things. And today, WIM is is still available. People are still pretty creative on on how they use it.

We even have, rapid favors. You can use a courier to things, and people have even used it to to play soccer. So this is really cool story when there there was a a a group of of of of guys playing soccer. They were missing one player.

The player was sick, and they just ordered a a a rapid courier to to be a eleventh player, and at the end, they ended up winning. So it started from this idea on how do we use technology to bring people that wanna work with people that need something done together, and it just broke into this everything up that is doing available in many different countries. The before we kind of get on to the success, I I guess, like, it's a very complex business case. Right?

Like, balancing capital efficiency versus growth. Like, how do you know when to kind of, like, pour customer acquisition on so far and go for growth? But, like, I guess, what what kind of determines the success of a business like Raffy? Like, maybe in your day, and, like, do you kind of foresee that of being changed over the years?

Like, what was kind of, like, the North Star metric back then, and what was it kind of when you transitioned out into uni? It's two completely different businesses. So I think b two c and b two b are completely completely placed. How you plan, how you strategize.

There are kind of two factors that have changed a lot. One is just market conditions. When we started Rappi, we were in this phase where it was growth at all costs. And we raised money to basically grow, grow, grow, and and the north star metric was a regardless of anything else.

As you become more mature, then unit economics become important. And and rapid transitioning to this mindset of, like, unit economics and making sure the area that we live here was profitable, and that happened right before the pandemic. So when the pandemic hit, we were lucky to be positive unit economics. And then in the past couple of years, the whole change have been a mindset of profitability.

And I think you see that across the world. It's not only right. It's just across the world, startups are are moving to a mindset of, profitability. In Unio was there because right when we started, it was at the peak of of this funding bonanza.

So month one, we're, like, growth at all costs. Like, we need to get us all the logos. Like, we don't create the repairs. And we're lucky that things change really quickly.

So it was funny how, like, we started a company, like, in December, January. We started to investors. We raised our first round, and an investor was like, you need to grow. You need to grow.

And then by April, things changed and things like, okay. How much are you sharing how much revenue are you entering? I'm like, you wanted us to grow our own cost. And it was great because we completely changed the mindset.

We were able to focus on pricing. We were able to focus on making sure that each customer that we were on board was, bringing a lot of revenue. And it had been a a a key differentiator of what we do. Orchestrator, there have been orchestrators for a while.

But I think we have been kind of the only orchestrator that have been growing not only in the number of transactions, but in we have hit revenue targets and no other orchestrator have reached. This is kind of feedback that we get from investors. And it was takes to a kind of change in mindset and making sure we were building for the long term. And, look, many times we we lost some deals, but we lost deals because, you know, they were given out almost for free and, like, we're in the business of making money.

We're in the business of closing logos and deals. And this has helped us to grow the the company in a really healthy way and focusing on revenue. Our north star metric to ASR, a bunch of different things around it. But yeah.

No. That makes a lot of sense. I I guess back to the Rappi days. Did you always know that that was going to succeed as a business model?

You were solving such a big problem, right, as a as a kind of growing market such as LatAm. Was it always kind of up into the right, or was there obviously an inevitably parts of a journey which were, should you say, like a basketball? Well, it was really hard. Most of the time were were were things not working.

Like, I remember when we first launched the app, we print out, like, 2,000 coupons for, like, a free soda and chips. And we went out to a park, and we just give it out to everyone. And people are like, wow. This is amazing.

I wanna order right now. We got back to the office and, like, no one order. Like, what happened? And we just gave out, like, 2,000 coupons.

Like, people are gonna order, and many things didn't work. But then we found the right product that people wanted, and it completely changed. And and that was kind of like the that moment growing. And the moment worked for another month, you know, and months started going down.

So, like, there were, I think, more times of things that didn't work, and and you have to just, you know, keep that perseverance and seeing it. So if I think back, there were more doubts in my mind that, okay, this is not going to work, and we need to keep finding the the way to make it work more than the times that we say, oh, yeah. This is great. Like, we're gonna become a unique.

Right? Well, obviously, there were times we said, okay. We're doing it right. Like, this is going to work.

But, yeah, it wasn't that way of the time. Yeah. That's actually very interesting. But, you know, today, obviously, it must have something must have went right.

Right? Because, I mean, rep is valued at close to $5,000,000,000. They've raised 2,200,000,000.0.

In the early days, was fundraising hard? I mean, because peep a lot of people say, especially the large companies, they say, oh, yeah. Their first round was hard or their second round was hard. Right?

Because emerging markets has always been tough to raise capital. What was it like for Rappi? Look. I think that was that that is kind of the main point.

Investors, like US Investors, European Investors, were not investing in the region. We were the first Colombian investment at South America, outside of Brazil, for Sequoia, Brandtrees in Horowitz, for many of the VCs. So if I compare kind of my fundraising journey in Rappi and in Uno, we had the advantage in Uno that there were already success stories in the startup ecosystem. There was our first investor was Andreessen Horowitz, and it was kind of the first year.

And they were looking for investments in Latin America. This wasn't the case in Colombia or or, well, in RAPI. And I think the hardest part was to change kind of their mindset and and to convince them that, you know what? Like, investing in Colombia and South America is is a great place.

There was at least belief that we were able to build companies that will scale as fast as US companies. So let me know, but, you know, the market is too small or how are you gonna grow with the same as companies are growing in different parts? And we're completely, like, proving them that they were wrong. Not only with RAPI, but but even, like, with, you know, today, you know, we are a a SaaS competing worldwide against US and European companies with less funding with, you know, different kinds of engineers.

And but, yeah, we're building, you know, world class software, winning under RFPs, showing better results than companies that have been in the market longer and that have, you know, engineers since it's and they used to be kinda like the normal of the company that is gonna grow a hundred x. And I think that has been, a big change for racing compared to, like, the years ago. Yeah. Makes sense.

Yeah. Because, I mean, in Southeast Asia, obviously, we have Grapp. Right? And that's in America.

You have Grappi. Yeah. These are super apps used by millions of people. Right?

I mean, did you always think that, I guess, from not day one, but after you, I guess, gained some meaningful users that you realize that, hey. You know, this could really be a all in one app for everything. Right? From, like, as you mentioned, delivery to, you know, getting your own pharmacy stuff to even getting people to be a sort of eleventh man in the football team.

Right? Did you think that it could always be this super app from day one from, you know, financial services to delivery? Or yeah. What was the what was the vision there?

I think it was evolving. It was evolving with time. As I mentioned, we started with things in the seven Eleven, the United restaurants, the supermarket, electronics, and and it just basically with time as we're listening always to the customers. And as we listen to the customer request, we started standing.

I think at some point, we went a little bit too far. We had games. We have videos. We have a bunch of things, and, I think we got to a point of, like, okay, we need to focus on the core.

What is the core? Is this the main businesses, and we need to focus on that. And and we went from doing anything that we saw into focusing on the core products that made sense, but it evolved over over time. And because of just kind of, like, the fundraising, I guess, journey back to kind of Richard's original conversation, it'd be interesting to kind of delve into, like, a a bit kind of deeper there, I would say.

I I guess, like, what were the different sort of pressures from different VCs throughout the course of the company's lifetime? Was it very, very, should we say, capital constraints at the beginning? I meant it was grow at all costs. Like, when Sequoia came in to lead, like, one of the later rounds, what was that kind of story?

What was the messaging? Did you find it quite difficult to navigate, should we say, the two sort of aims? Yeah. I think all VCs have, like, a different mindset.

I think, overall, the USBCs have this kind of mindset of of of growth that you need to grow. I don't think it's growth at all cost, but you need to grow. You need to be you know, the company has to be doing three x, four x year over year as as you kind of are into year two and three. I think SoftBank had a a little bit more extreme way of looking at the world, and and as you have seen in the different examples of WeWork and everything, the mindset was, like, you need to go all in and and grow, grow, grow, and and that changed a little bit how how we execute it, how we how we used to do things.

But in general, more than the VCs, I think the expectations changes with with the still the company. So, like, how much are you generating, how many orders you have, and and the expectations change depending on on the stage of the company. And I guess, like, from a VC profile point of view, suit did wrap it. Like, what kind of VC were you looking for?

Were you looking for a partner brand, a local VC with local ties of ecosystem? What what what kind of made a good partner for you? It it was more we wanted kind of like US VCs, VCs that had experience and that had helped founders around the world or even in The US to grow their company. We you know, at the beginning, getting engineering talent wasn't easy.

It was really difficult. In Colombia, there were the many technology companies. Now we had to go to Argentina, different places where there was engineers with a little bit more experience. But having the VCs that could help us and could guide us on on what to do in the technology side, on the different sides, I think was extremely crucial to be able to look at what we're looking for.

And and often kind of leaders of big companies change in a variety of different moments in the company's lifetime. Like, how did you change as a leader throughout your time at Rappi? I guess, like, starting at the beginning and, I guess, from a character point of view, from maybe, like, a stress point of view, did you focus more time on your personal life as the company grew? Was it, like, just work but work at the beginning?

What's kind of the backdrop? It was very hard. I was 22 at the time when we started at the end. And, you know, I went from having, you know, five people to 50, to a hundred, to hundreds.

The hardest part I think is, is many times the company grows faster, then you can grow and, and, and you have to keep up. And it's really, no. I'm I'm thinking it's stressful, but it's just demanding. It it demands a lot of.

For many years, I I used to work seven days a week. Couldn't do many of the things that I wanted to do, and it was worth it. But you need to be not always learning, but always evolving. And people think that it's a matter of knowledge or of what you do, but I think the hardest part is is how you control that emotional intelligence.

Because as many things happen, good things, bad things, everyone is always looking up to you, and they're expecting for you to act a certain way. I mean, a moment of crisis, you need to account. In a moment of everything so right, you need to account. Like, that I think is the hardest part.

How do you measure rapidly until you're able to maintain that emotional intelligence in in situations that, like, supposed to freak out, like, but you cannot freak out. And and I think that is the hardest part. Yeah. It took time, many many years, many mistakes, but I think that was the hardest part.

That part of of growing that emotional intelligence and and growing and and maturing as a as a person to handle every different situations. And also many times, I was working with people that were, like, 40, 50 years old with a lot more experience, and and how do I learn from them? How do I absorb as much from their talents and their way of working to incorporate those behavior into the way that I was working? Yeah.

Absolutely. And I mean, he kind of mentioned the different thresholds of going from zero to ten, ten to twenty, twenty to a hundred, and beyond. I guess, like, how do you kind of, firstly, was culture, like, super important to Rappi and you, and and how do you implement culture in such a fast growing organization when everyone's in, out, different positions, being promoted, being to a different, should we say, vertical in the app, etcetera? Look.

People think that culture are these things that you cannot write and people believe, but culture are all the little things. Let me give you a couple of examples. When we first started rap, we used to chair an office, and then it was just, like, too crazy because we didn't even have a place to sit. Like, many people were sitting on a trash can because there weren't chairs.

And and, yeah, you could say, no. You have to go buy chairs. Like, no. We had to we'd have we were prioritizing the money for growing.

When I first opened the, office in Mexico, the tables that we used were basically doors that we got at Home Depot. And then we just basically put a couple of wood things, and and those were first tables. And the chairs were just regular plastic chairs. They didn't have, you know, all these fancy things.

And as we got the, you know, the first office in Bogota, it was completely, like, empty, gray, and it had plastic chairs, black seat tables. Yeah. After maybe, like, two or three years, we remodeled the office and we started printing, but it took a while. But I think when people say, like, why are you doing the book?

Because we need to, you know, that if you want to have this culture of focusing on the customer, focusing on the app, the rest doesn't really matter, then you're not really having that culture of being so focused on the things that matter. You know, having a chair and having a table were wasn't gonna change. So those are things that that I think define the culture. In general, we have a little bit different of a culture.

We focus on the customer, but we also you know, we're we're a smaller team. We need to build things a lot faster than everyone else, so we do invest on making sure that every employee has anything that they need. So it has been, I think, a a different way of building the culture. Now I think I I took all the great things from rugby, and I also learned what things not to do, and we build the, you know, culture being super mindful on the things that we didn't want in the culture compared for the rapid culture.

So it's like a not a second version of of a culture that we wanted to. Yeah. Absolutely. And I can imagine, like, you're super more, should we say, like, not less resourceful, but having a first round led by a 16 zed as opposed to, should we say, like a office in Bogota, which is super gray and with plastic chairs and tables and stuff, there's a bit of a a change in culture.

Yeah. And then also, you know, I I hated, you know, remote working, but the pandemic, you know, told me many things, and and he told me that a remote was great if you were new, if you know how to handle it. And the reality is that we started with a remote first mindset, and it has its challenges, but I think it has been extremely helpful. We have people around the world.

We have been focusing on bringing the best people regardless of where they are. They can work from wherever they want. We meet together every three months. We do this off-site where a % of the company meets and for a week, we spend time together.

We try to all the times that you don't you're able to to to go because we're in an office. So in the office, you want to get coffees and you have conversation with people and you want we do that, like, in a week period when we meet altogether. So it has been focusing on making sure people have whatever they need in their house to be, you know, productive, and and it has worked much. Yeah.

So that that's actually very interesting about the culture. Right? Maybe we could talk a bit about our mutual our mutual friend told me you're doing something quite interesting. I mean, could you maybe tell us a bit about how the opportunity came about?

I mean, part of the reason was, I think, due to what you learned from Rappi Bank and obviously starting that and then trying to implement sort of the new strategy? It actually started from, like, day five at Rapi. So when we launched in Mexico so we launched Colombia and and right after we launched in Mexico, and the number one issue was payments. We didn't have good acceptance rate.

We were having a bunch of issues, and this is why I kind of got so into payments. So at first, I created payments on the fraud team. I started to bunch of different things, being able to have wires, having multiple processors, optimizing payments, or optimizing the approval rate by going to a best vendor for each transaction, and, we just built a bunch of technology to to be able to do that. So the idea kind of started about after, like, seven years of struggling with an internal team, doing payment integrations, doing all of these development.

And I look back and I'm like, you know, I'm a delivery company. Like, why am I doing all these, you know, payments stuff? I should be focusing on how can I deliver a worker faster? How can I build a faster algorithm to do x, y, and per se?

And and we were focusing resources. We were focusing people. The things that we're adding zero value to a company. And the other issue is that even though we had, you know, this big team in payments doing all these different things, there was always a huge gap between what the business wanted and what we're able to achieve.

And this is kind of where the whole idea comes from. And companies have to focus on their core, and they have to put all the engineer resources in their core. And and we handle all the complexity fragmentation and everything around the payment. So today, companies that don't have an orchestrate like, you know, if they want to change provider, this is a super lengthy process.

They have to do RFPs because you need to find the best provider. You do a lengthy integration or your whole life, it it doesn't work as a We want companies to basically enable new provider within minutes. We don't have it to let integrations. They can AP test, and they can use five providers at a time.

And on top of that, we're going through this transformation in the payments around the world. We're going from only credit card, debit card payments in ecommerce and in apps to a bunch of different payment. You have a wallet in Indonesia. You have wallets in Thailand.

You have new payment methods in The US, Peru, Brazil. You have all this transformation as a business. As you grow international, you need to offer all these different payment method. This takes us a lot of time, and this is, actually, I think, our core where we help.

And and where do you kinda see the most differentiation happening within, like, payment orchestration? Like, is that in the tech? Is that in the customer experience? Market focus, because obviously, you have other comparables like Spreedly, for instance.

It's also kind of operating in their atmosphere. I guess, like, what's the standout feature of of what makes Uno unique? Perfect. There are a couple of things.

So number one, I think, is our deep knowledge of local expertise around the world. We have experts in APAC in Africa, in Europe, in The US, in Latin America. And it's not only a knowledge on on helping merchants or what they need to do, where they need to connect, but it's also the relationships that we have. So we have relationships with the main acquire with the main payment methods around the world.

And many times, I think if you ask our customers, that's what they like the most. On top of that, we have over 350 integrations. We have access to more than a thousand payment options around the world. And we have we understood the market so well because I was a merchant for so many years.

We have developed features that no one else have. We have things like monitors that automatically changes providers depending on the performance of the individual provider. We have, you know, orchestration of payouts. We have all different APMs integrated.

So think that the main difference are are are those, but, yeah, the main one is is these relationships and local knowledge that we have around the world. And and I guess that the relationships and local knowledge when you're expanding into a new market, like a a European market or an Asian or an African market? It's like regions are very difficult in different kind of infrastructures. What what, I guess, like, some of the biggest challenges that you foresee have already foreseen with encountering and and entering new markets, would you say?

Well, I think when entering the new markets, the most important thing is to bring the right people to lead that. In APAC, for example, we we brought she she has, you know, many years of experience, not only leading payments at at Uber, but also working at JPMorgan and and different companies. So she has been, you know, in the region for a while. I think this is our edge.

In The US, we brought Carl Bloomberg as our chief business officer. Carl, you know, was founding team of, Google Pay, then work at different banks and different providers. So I think that is the the main key on on how we view things different. And and, yeah, I think that that is a key, bringing the right people with the right knowledge to I think there's many opportunities still.

You especially know how fast the so the AI ecosystems is growing really quickly. How do you see this playing a part in terms of with payments and fintech, in terms of how you guys looking to use AI, leverage AI, things like this? Yeah. A couple of things.

So number one, AI has helped us a expedite how we do integrations. We used to do many things that took, you know, days to do, like, reading documentations, creating the mappings. This is something that today we do with AI AI models. Being able to develop faster, being able to develop, in a better way.

Today, we're able to do most of the QA automatically, and we use AI models to create these kind of use cases for the integrations that we do. You know, when when you send a payment for an authorization, it it sounds easy, but it's actually really complex. And and and we use AI to make decisions and do AB testing on how we send the message. Even though it seems kind of easy on how you send a message for an authorization, there are actually different variables that can change.

Issuers like certain parameters, other issuers like other parameters using AI, we're able to iterate faster and optimize that approval rate so that every transaction is approved. Another part that we're trying to use to improve our products is how do we use AI to make sure that our payment is approved. And we're testing different things. We're doing calls automatically that will guide the user on what they need to to solve an issue.

Many times, for example, in Colombia, payment is declined, and it's declined because the bank has, certain restriction in the current. You have to call your bank and say, hey. Like, I'm making a purchase. Many times in Thailand.

Right? I mean, every time you make an online transaction, it's like, they call you even though how small it is. Right? All the user, we guide them.

Like, you have to call your bank. Do you have the bank number? No. I don't have it.

Okay. Here is the bank number. You have to tell them a, q, and c, and we see increasing approval rates in a in a crazy rate, and it's using AI to able to do things that before wasn't scalable. Before AI, you were able to, you know, thousands of calls per per second, and and it's helping those users that used to churn to be able to to make and finish their purchase.

Yeah. And how do you kind of, like, stay ahead of, like, those compliance challenges while scaling globally except that's super difficult. Each bank has got different compliance processes, each country, each region, etcetera. Like, is that, like, heavily researched before you build and ship specific processes and products for each country?

How do you kind of go around that? Well, I think every new country that we open, we learn something new, and and most of the things repeat. The same thing that we had to do for an acquire in Mexico is super similar in Taiwan or in Japan. So we learn and we build all these, you know, repositories with all the information and and all the processes that we have to do for an RFP or for onboarding or doing a new integration into an acquirer.

So it has become a a repeatable system that evolves as we learn something new from a a different processor. I mean, yeah. So you've been in Southeast Asia as well as Latin America. Right?

And you see the ecosystem grow and develop. Do you see a lot of similarities between the two in terms of where the tech infrastructure landscape is today? But in what sense? Do you think one market's ahead of another?

Look. I think that in terms of fintech infrastructure, things have been evolving really quickly. For a while, you had these legacy players that were the only ones that enabled you to either payment process here or card issuing, and they were, like, really old technologies, really small. Like, it it had many restrictions how our our FinTech was able to offer their services, and these have completely changed.

You have companies like Marketa in The US that enable you through simple APIs to issue a car, and these have become kind of the norm. And you have Stripe doing the same and all these different companies doing the same. So reason wise, obviously, you know, The US and Europe is is a little bit ahead in terms of the fintech infrastructure for the legacy, let's say, payment methods, credit card, debit cards, etcetera. But you see in Southeast Asia and Latin America, most of the fintech growing out of, you know, Visa and Mastercard and going into creating their own wallet.

It's been a payment method. QR payments and all these different technologies are a little bit more, more popular in in, let's say, emerging markets. You Now you go to Saudi Arabia and everyone is paying with Apple Pay. And you go to The US and also most of the wallets are are these kind of wallets using NFC and different technologies.

You go to China and everything is Kubernetes. So different technologies, different ways of how fintech have been evolving, and we see that replicating in different parts of the world. What what's been easier and what's been harder about growing Rapi versus, you know, like we had, for instance, the founder of Delivery Hero on, where he essentially said that you can't underestimate the value of a network that he built up over his time at Delivery Hero in starting his new company and then founding a couple of things after as well.

What what's been kind of as I've said, what's been harder? What's been what's been easier this time around? Wait. It's way easier to for me, I think it's way easier to do b two b and b two c.

It's so hard. And you have so many factors that don't depend on you. Like, I remember in in rugby, like, it used to rain. I used to get stressed because the rain mean that, you know, we're gonna have to pay a a lot more for deliveries.

It was gonna become a mess more on a Sunday night. It's a different kind of stress. Like, we're just making sure we're always working, that we're never down. It's a lot of relationship building with these really large companies, and it takes a lot of time, and it takes a lot of spying and meeting with them and meeting with different stakeholders to make sure that we understand their problem.

The relationship that I was able to build during Rappi has made it, extremely easy to do many things. When we started, it was easy to call the right people, because it was people that I knew for a while that we had conversations about the issues that we're having in in in payments and how we were fixing some of that in in rapid. And fundraising has has been a a lot easier. This That's good.

Yeah. I can imagine so. Again, last question for me. If we kind of fast forward, say, five, six years down the line, like, what's fun one fundamental, or should we say, shift in payments that you believe most people aren't really paying enough attention to today, perhaps?

So like that, for instance, could be like a orchestration layer of an artist. Should we say, like, diversifying their PSPs, for instance, to optimize for localization? What will No. I think today, maybe, like, six months ago, that was the case.

Today, it's clear that everyone needs an orchestrator and they need to have a multi PST strategy. I think this has become kind of the norm. I don't think there is anyone still hiding under the rug saying that they only want one PST. That mindset have changed.

Enablement of local payment methods have become anor. Like, you need to have peaks in Brazil. You need to have, you know, in Colombia. You need to have Dana and Norway in Indonesia.

Like, you have all these different local APMs that you need to have to be able to grow, and that's has become the norm. Something that has been overlooked, I think, is going to change fairly quickly, Stablecoins. I think Stablecoins are gonna make these cross border payments easier, faster, cheaper. There's still a lot of work to do.

There's still a lot of adoption needs to happen, but I think that's gonna move faster. Just to just to be quickly on that. Do you think we'll see Stablecoin as a referred method of payments for a lot of retail goods in that time frame? I think so.

How long is it gonna take? Not sure. But we see, you know, the Trump administration is making many changes and then he's prioritizing crypto. This will help kind of expedite some regulation and a better framework to to manage.

Today, you know, crypto is already well regulated. There is a lot of uncertainty on what is, you know, allowed, what is not allowed. If that change is starting The US, I think that should have a a ripple effect around the world, and we could see a higher option of this. You know, people don't see, like, crypto has become the or stablecoins have become the backbone of of remittances between The US and Mexico.

You have companies like Skybox that is one of our customers to completely change how remittances are done, and now they're being, you know, implemented on the lack of stablecoins. Yeah. That's actually very interesting. I mean, maybe we can move on to a quick fire just before we finish.

Right? So, I mean, what is something you believe that others don't believe? It could be about tech, it could be about Latin America. People don't believe that Latin America is going to become the hope of technology companies in a couple of years.

I think that, you know, the hope others are are changing their mindset, and we're gonna keep building great technology companies in the region that not only serve the region, but that are competing worldwide against US and European companies. Next. Jack, you wanna ask one? I you go for it.

Okay. So in terms of the next one, I would ask, like, if you were to start a company tomorrow, right, what would it be in or, like, in terms of what area? Definitely AI. Something with AI.

Okay. But what area of AI? Because AI is a big area. Look.

There is so much to do with AI. I think there are just so many processes that today are being done manually and and by people that can be optimized with AI agents and AI models to increase the output of of humans in in different tasks. So one area not sure, but it will be basically using AI agents to make people more efficient and more productive. Interesting.

And without kind of getting too political, like, how optimistic are you about the next, like, five to ten years under the new political campaign to benefit, like, private markets in your region to benefit, you know? Do you think it's gonna turn out to be a positively good thing or not with a new administration? Look, it's too early. It is changes every day.

Apparently, we were, you know, worried on Monday afternoon. We were happy, like, things changed so quickly. We don't know not not sure what to expect, to be honest. I think things are changing quickly.

Not not not sure what to expect. We we keep building. We keep growing around the world, and then we don't pay attention to politics. Otherwise, you go crazy.

So, anyways, thank you so much, JP, for coming on today. You know, it was a great episode. I think, you know, obviously, it's exceptional what you built with Rappi. Let's let's have another episode a couple years and see where you know is at.

Amazing. Thanks. Thank you.