Coming to America: David Vélez and Nubank

Colossus Magazine

This episode traces David Vélez's journey from a war-torn childhood in Colombia to founding Nubank, the digital bank that dismantled Brazil's financial oligopoly. After navigating

Key takeaways

• Sequoia Capital partners Doug Leone and Michael Moritz initially passed on Brazil but reversed course after Vélez's relentless hustle during Stanford GSB, eventually investing $1 million for 10% equity in 2013.
• In December 2016, a Central Bank of Brazil rule change threatening to compress credit card settlement windows forced Nubank into a public fight; viral customer backlash on social media successfully blocked the regulation.

Main topics

• Latin American fintech disruption
• Nubank's US market entry strategy

Notable quotes

"I never really felt that I was fully local... I always described myself as a Colombian, and there was always a sense of being an outsider."

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates how relentless execution, radical transparency, and customer

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:07) Feature, Coming to America. After facing down regulators, oligopolies, and corruption in Latin America, new bank founder David Velez faces his biggest challenge yet, the United States. By Gabby Marquez. October, 2026. Issue 8, narrated by Scott Brick. Speaker 1 (0:31) David Velez materializes on the 8th floor of New Bank's headquarters in Sao Paulo at 9.53 a.m. and greets me in Portuguese with a thick Spanish accent. I'll be with you in seven minutes, he says. I set up in a conference room. At 10 a.m., he takes his seat across from me and asks, in Portuguese, which language we're doing this in. We settle on English. He is sporting a gift from his wife. A purple bracelet on his right wrist. I grew up only four miles from here, and first remember hearing about New Bank in 2015 from a friend who boasted about her new credit card. She told me she'd been sent a link, signed up, and a few days later, a purple card appeared at her house. To a teenage girl in Brazil hearing about it from older friends and cousins, the plastic purple no-fee card sounded cool. To my dad, it sounded like a scam. He worked at Itao, one of Brazil's largest banks and New Bank's biggest competitors. I was reminded that we already had perfectly good credit cards and that I already had an account at Itao. There was even money in it. In 2018, I moved to the U.S. Every time I came back to Brazil, I'd notice more purple cards being pulled from pockets when a check arrived for dinner. It sounds quaint, but purple was a shocking color for a credit card or any consumer product in Brazil. It sparked questions, which its owners were eager to answer. There really were no fees. The customer service was unusually good. You could do all your banking from your phone, etc. They'd drone on until at last they'd exhale, you should get one. I didn't. But before my move back to Brazil in 2025, I needed a new bank account, a business account, and a credit card. I asked friends where I should go. New bank, obviously. From an apartment in New York City, I downloaded the new app. By then... NewBank had become the largest digital bank in Latin America and one of Brazil's largest financial institutions. Today, it serves over 140 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, including 118 million in Brazil alone, where more than 60 % of the adult population uses the app. In the second quarter of 2026, NewBank crossed $1 billion in quarterly net income and nearly $6 billion in revenue. It has been publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange since December 2021 and is now worth more than $60 billion. Part of what makes NewBank's rise so compelling is how improbable it once seemed. From its first pitch deck, One analogy has been used again and again to tell NewBank's story. David versus Goliath. Velez, NewBank's Colombian founder and CEO, has gone head-to-head with Brazil's largest, most profitable, and most entrenched companies. He angered them by lowering fees and rates, by bringing more than 31 million previously unbanked people into the financial system. and giving more than $18 million their first credit card, and by forcing legacy institutions to adapt to the consumer expectations that NewBank abruptly reset. In New York, when I first used the app, I remember feeling oddly proud of my NewBank account, similar to the feeling you get when one of your compatriots wins gold at the Olympics. You may have had nothing to do with their achievement, and you may have known nothing about the person before that moment. But suddenly, you feel they represent the very best parts of you, or the things you aspire to. Brazil has produced its share of successful companies, but few have become global reference points, the kind people on other continents know and point to as world-class. NewBank? is on the precipice of becoming one. Whether it does depends largely on the success or failure of Velez's current challenge, taking New Bank to the United States, its first market outside Latin America. His task is no longer to prove that a Brazilian startup can beat the Goliaths at home or in its neighborhood, but that it can compete and win on a global stage. In the course of reporting this story between Sao Paulo and Miami, I spoke with Doug Leone, the longtime partner at Sequoia Capital, who backed NewBank in its earliest years. There are the Elon Musks and Steve Jobses of the world, and they're fantastic, he told me. But there are also these people who were still early enough in their careers that we don't fully see what they might become. Bill Gates wasn't Bill Gates for the first 20 years. I think David is one of those guys, Leone said. He has vision. He executes. He's tough as nails. He's lovable. He's nobody's fool. And look, I haven't sold a single share of the company's stock. That doesn't tell you everything, but it tells you something. Velez was born in Medellin, Colombia in 1981. His parents were both entrepreneurs, as were all 15 of his aunts and uncles. There was a lot of entrepreneurial DNA being served for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, he told me. By age five, he was working at his father's button factory. On weekends, the Velez family would drive to their finca, a small house in the Colombian countryside. He remembers riding horses, swimming in the pool, and spending time with his two younger sisters. Yet, outside the finca, Medellin was at war. The Colombian government was fighting the major drug cartels, and bombs exploded often in the streets. It was not uncommon for people you knew to be kidnapped in broad daylight. I remember needing to sleep on the floor, Velez said. Because Pablo Escobar said they were going to bomb the city, and I was worried about the windows of my bedroom shattering. One day I wore a bunch of sweaters because I thought that if I wore enough of them, the bullets wouldn't hit me. He was six years old. When he was eight, the Velez family moved to Costa Rica. His parents wanted their kids to sleep in their own beds and wander outside without fear of being shot. They left behind their home, friends, family, the kids' school, Saturday lunches with grandparents, and weekends at the finca. I wouldn't necessarily use traumatic as a word, he told me, but it was life-changing, obviously. My parents were able to create an environment where I felt safe. That gave me a sense of confidence that no matter what happens, no matter what the environment is like, We're going to figure it out. We'll be fine. We'll know how to move forward, persevere, and succeed. But I never really felt that I was fully local, he said. I never felt that I fit in. I always described myself as a Colombian, and there was always a sense of being an outsider. It's a feeling that's followed me and continues to be a part of my identity. His father opened a button factory in Costa Rica, rebuilding the same business in a new country. Velez spent summers there doing odd jobs, making leather patches for jeans, helping wherever he could, looking for ways to earn a little money. At 12, he talked his dad into selling him a cow. It seemed like the greatest investment ever. The cow had a calf, making teenage Velez the proud owner of two cows. By the time he was 18, he had a herd of six. He sold them and took the money to Stanford University, which had become an improbable drain he managed to pull off. Nobody from his school in Costa Rica had ever gone to Stanford, and few Stanford students could trace their pocket change to a sale of six cows. The day the acceptance email hit his inbox remains one of the happiest in his life. He was a foreign-born kid who found his way to Stanford, Leone said, when asked about the first time they met. By the time you do that, you self-select. Velez graduated from Stanford in 2005 with a degree in management science and engineering and the bug to start a business, but no particularly good idea for what it should be. Instead, he interned at Goldman Sachs for a summer, then joined Morgan Stanley for two years before moving into private equity at General Atlantic, GA. His first deal at GA was an investment in Brazil's Commodities and Futures Exchange, BM &F. It was one of the largest investments the firm had ever made. Velez, who was 26 and the closest thing GA had to a Brazilian, was asked if he'd like to open their first office in Sao Paulo, where he spent the next two years. Between the summers of 2008 and 2010, he spent more and more of his time and energy on financial services. By the fall of 2010, he decided to return to Stanford for business school, which he envisioned as a vacation during which he'd figure out what business to start. Then a classmate, David George, learned through Doug Leone that Sequoia was looking at Latin America and introduced him to Velez. A couple weeks into his first quarter of business school, Velez drove the two miles from Stanford to Sequoia's Sand Hill Road office to meet with Leone. In the two minutes it took to walk from Leone's office to his car in the parking lot after the meeting ended, Velez received an email from Michael Moritz, Sequoia's other major partner, telling him to come back inside. He wanted to meet Velez too. When we ran Sequoia, we were two different cats, but we saw a lot of business things the same way, Leone said. With David, we quickly saw him exactly the same way. When we interview people at Sequoia, there's an expression we sometimes use. Someone is a half-pager. A half-pager is someone you meet, ask all the questions you want to ask, and 35 minutes later, you only have half a page of notes. Then, once or twice a year, you meet someone and the whole hour flies by, and you have two or three pages of notes, because they're so interesting you don't want to forget anything. David was one of those. At the time, the concept of BRIC, Brazil, Russia, India, and China, was still new. Sequoia had already expanded into India and China, and Brazil seemed like it might be next. Leone and Moritz needed someone to help them figure out whether it should be, and to potentially lead their