Micky Malka, Founder of Ribbit Capital

Summary

Podcast Episode Summary

Podcast: David Senra (Scicomm Media)
Episode: Micky Malka, Founder of Ribbit Capital
Date: August 2, 2026
Theme: Conversations with the Greatest Living Founders—Deep Dive into the Mindset, Journey, and Philosophy of Micky Malka

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Episode Overview

This episode features a wide-ranging and deeply personal conversation between podcast host David Senra and Micky Malka, founder of Ribbit Capital. The dialogue explores the essence of building impactful companies, the philosophy behind long-term investing, and Malka’s experiences shaping and backing some of today’s leading fintechs. Malka reflects on what it means to be a rebel, the importance of authenticity, and the infinite game of entrepreneurship and venture capital. Throughout, core lessons from icons like Warren Buffett and Dee Hock (Visa) are richly discussed, illuminating the compounding power of time and reputation.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Rebelling Against Labels and Conventional Modes

• Micky’s Aversion to Labels ([00:25], [02:09]):
  • Malka describes his lifelong resistance to being labeled, viewing labels as limiting and conformist.
  • Prefers fluidity: “Entrepreneur at heart and investor by design.”
  • Sees being a rebel as central to his worldview—constantly challenging norms.
• Quote:

  "I just allow myself to keep learning... The only label I wanna get in Life is that people say, I'm a great friend, I'm a great partner, and I'm a good father. And if I can get that label, I would love to have the other ones. I don't care." — Micky Malka [02:09]

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2. Writing as a Tool for Clarity & Conviction

• Importance of Essays in Shaping Ribbit’s Thinking ([03:12]–[05:19]):
  • Writing clarifies ideas and forces deep understanding.
  • “Compression is understanding”—if you can explain it on a napkin, you understand it.
  • The essay process drives conviction, enabling playing the “infinite game.”
• Quote:

  "If anybody can explain anything complex to you in a napkin, it means that they have studied enough that they know how to articulate it." — Micky Malka [03:20]
  "The only way to really have a joyful investment life or life in general, is to try to play this very long infinite game." — Micky Malka [04:26]

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3. The Influence of Buffett and Compound Thinking

• Buffett’s Impact on Malka’s Philosophy ([05:19]–[08:43]):
  • Purchased first Berkshire share at 13.
  • The discipline to focus on a few enduring ideas and decision patterns is the greatest compounding lesson.
  • AI changes access, but repetition/consistency retains fundamental importance.
• Quote:

  "What you learn from it is not the decisions he makes, it's how in any environment he repeats the same pattern of decision making process. And that's the most important thing..." — Micky Malka [07:25]

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4. Token Factories, AI, and the Future of Finance

• ‘Token’ as a Foundational Concept ([11:48]–[17:14]):
  • Every company becomes a “token factory”—creating and manipulating machine-readable information.
  • Predicts the next wave: agents performing financial tasks (payments, investments, commerce) on behalf of users.
  • AI accelerating new winners; founder-led companies (Stripe, Robinhood, Nubank, Revolut) are more likely to adapt.
• Quotes:

  "Money is... like gravity. It always falls, it always moves... It's never stuck." — Micky Malka [13:48]
  "What I expect to see very soon is an AI agent that can go and do all kinds of investment decisions, recommendations. He can go do all kinds of commerce decisions and recommendations and he can start to do any kind of payment decisions and recommendations on your behalf." — Micky Malka [15:35]

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5. Infinite Game, Competition & Compounding

• Mindset of Playing Forever ([17:14]–[20:17]):
  • Malka avoids viewing business as finite win/loss; it’s about staying in the game and compounding expertise, relationships, reputation.
  • Prefers being “behind”—finds it energizing and catalytic for improvement.
• Quote:

  "The beauty of the infinite game. You never get to win or you never get to lose. You're simply ahead or behind." — Micky Malka [17:14]

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6. Gen Z Builders: New Approaches to Organizations & Learning

• The Next Generation of Founders ([22:09]–[34:29]):
  • Younger founders self-organize, value chaotic structures, and learn faster than previous generations (podcasts, AI, YouTube, etc.).
  • Attraction to building physical products—"not afraid of getting their hands dirty."
  • They often pair with older, experienced team members for wisdom and taste.
• Quoting Dee Hock (founder of Visa):

  "The best expression of humans are in the intersection between chaos and order. If you're too orderly, you don't innovate. If you're too chaotic, you don't communicate and you break. So chaotic is the right place to be." — Micky Malka, summarizing Dee Hock [23:25]

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7. The Lost Art of Building Beautiful Things

• On Beauty, Taste, and Product ([34:29]–[36:47]):
  • Silicon Valley’s last 15 years prioritized scale over beauty, losing ability to build products that feel beautiful.
  • Cites Jony Ive and Dyson as rare counterexamples.
• Quote:

  "We have lost that ability. And because we have given a prize and a reward for efficiency... we have put aside how it makes you feel." — Micky Malka [35:22]

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8. Founders’ DNA, Authenticity, And Long-Term Partnerships

• Traits Malka Looks For ([40:53]–[44:53]):
  • Core: energy of a scientist, conviction of a missionary, heart of a partner, dreams of an athlete, obsession of an owner (“Isle of the Tiger” framework).
  • Prioritizes authenticity: founders true to their original mission win long-term.
• Quote:

  "Authenticity matters. And as long as you're authentic to yourself and you keep your values authentic... you'll be fine." — Micky Malka [43:31]
  "Isle of the Tiger: energy of a scientist, conviction of a missionary, heart of a partner, dreams of an athlete, obsession of an owner." — Micky Malka [44:12]

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9. Patience, Time, and Compounding in Building Enduring Companies

• Lemon Bank, Walmart, and the Infinite Game ([51:09]–[56:00]):
  • Lemon Bank (branchless banking in Brazil) laid groundwork for later massive initiatives like Walmart’s OnePay.
  • Stories of resilience—almost losing everything—underscore importance of patience and learning from the past.
  • In both startups and venture, the “long game” is about compounding experiences and relationships.
• Quote:

  "Just stay in the game long enough to get lucky... So much of this stuff is not predictable." — David Senra [55:14]

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10. Reputation as the Only True Asset

• Buffett & Munger’s Influence ([56:41]–[59:19]):
  • Reputation exceeds all else; compounding trust is the greatest economic force.
  • Stories of high-trust networks and the invisible downside of lost reputation.
• Quote:

  "It is the most valuable asset. It's the only asset we have: reputation. Everything else can come and go, but that's the one thing... it will always stick to us." — Micky Malka [59:19]

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11. Node: Bringing Art, Creativity, and the Rebel Mindset to Silicon Valley

• Node as a Digital Art Space ([60:44]–[66:07]):
  • Node is both a physical space and a movement—giving digital artists a platform in the heart of Palo Alto (Silicon Valley).
  • Model: artist as curator, authentic engagement, learning from historic art movements.
  • An extension of Malka’s lifelong rebel philosophy—questioning, creating new canvases, and inspiring cross-generational connection.
• Quote:

  "Node, it's the first digital art studio designed for digital artists. It is a space where the artist is his own curator, because that's what rebels do." — Micky Malka [63:47]

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12. The Rebel Ethos—From Childhood to Venture Capital

• Applying the Rebel Mindset Everywhere ([67:34]–[73:08]):
  • Malka: I identify as a rebel first, investor/founder second.
  • Ribbit is structured as a startup, not a traditional investment firm—flat leadership, radical transparency, Star Wars/Jedi ethos.
  • Infinite game: true entrepreneurs never sell; you just keep building forever.
• Quote:

  "All I want in my tombstone is to say he was a rebel. That's all I want..." — Micky Malka [69:08]
  "The best entrepreneurs never have to sell their company." — Micky Malka [73:00]

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13. On Wealth, Time, and Lasting Impact

• Munger’s Lesson ([74:40]–[75:53]):
  • Most valuable currency is time and the power of compounding across a lifetime.
• Quote:

  "You must be very wealthy to be here... No, you are. Why? You have the power of time. All of us here are in our last chapter. You're just starting your time. You will compound for the next 70 years of your life." — Charlie Munger to a young Micky Malka [75:40]

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Notable Quotes and Timestamps

• "I just allow myself to keep learning... The only label I wanna get in Life is that people say, I'm a great friend, I'm a great partner, and I'm a good father." — Micky Malka [02:09]
• "If anybody can explain anything complex to you in a napkin, it means that they have studied enough that they know how to articulate it." — Micky Malka [03:20]
• "The only way to really have a joyful investment life or life in general, is to try to play this very long infinite game." — Micky Malka [04:26]
• "Money is... like gravity. It always falls, it always moves... It's never stuck." — Micky Malka [13:48]
• "The beauty of the infinite game. You never get to win or you never get to lose. You're simply ahead or behind." — Micky Malka [17:14]
• "We have lost that ability. And because we have given a prize and a reward for efficiency... we have put aside how it makes you feel." — Micky Malka [35:22]
• "Isle of the Tiger: energy of a scientist, conviction of a missionary, heart of a partner, dreams of an athlete, obsession of an owner." — Micky Malka [44:12]
• "It is the most valuable asset. It's the only asset we have: reputation." — Micky Malka [59:19]
• "All I want in my tombstone is to say he was a rebel. That's all I want..." — Micky Malka [69:08]
• "The best entrepreneurs never have to sell their company." — Micky Malka [73:00]
• "You must be very wealthy to be here... No, you are. Why? You have the power of time." — Charlie Munger commenting to Micky Malka [75:40]

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:25] – Malka on rejecting labels and embracing a rebel mindset
• [03:12] – The essay-writing process at Ribbit
• [05:41] – Malka’s first encounter with Buffett’s philosophies
• [08:09] – Pattern recognition in decision-making
• [11:48] – Token revolution: Every company as a token factory
• [15:35] – Vision for AI agents in financial life
• [17:14] – Infinite game, founder-led tech, and the new AI divide
• [22:09], [23:25] – Lessons from Dee Hock, Visa, and the chaotic organization
• [34:29] – On beauty and product-building in tech
• [40:53] – Assessing and partnering with founders, authenticity
• [44:12] – “Isle of the Tiger”—founder traits
• [51:09] – Lemon Bank, early failures, infinite game, compounding
• [56:41] – Reputation as capital
• [60:44] – Node: a new canvas for rebels in digital art
• [69:08] – The rebel label as a life ethos
• [72:56] – “Failed entrepreneur”—the importance of continuity versus exits
• [75:40] – Munger’s advice: time is the true currency

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Flow, Tone, and Final Reflections

The entire conversation is rich, personal, and filled with practical wisdom. Malka’s humility, conviction, and authenticity shine, as does his relentless curiosity and rebel worldview. The episode will resonate with anyone interested in the long-term game of entrepreneurship, the subtle art of compounding, and the core, unchanging traits of great founders. The tone is intimate, respectful, and energized—often humorous and never preachy, as Senra skillfully leads Malka through memories, lessons, and forward-looking philosophies.

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For listeners and founders alike, this episode is an invaluable window into the mindset of one of venture capital’s true iconoclasts—a rebel who prizes learning, relationships, and authentic, never-ending creation above all labels, titles, or short-term wins.

Transcript

[David Senra]

Thanks for doing this, Mickey.

[Mickey Malka]

David, it's a pleasure to be here with you.

[David Senra]

There's so many times in our previous conversations where I'm listening to you speak and I'm like, shit. Mickey really does think and act a lot. Very similar to, like a lot of history's greatest entrepreneurs that I read all these biographies about for Founders Podcast. And one thing that I think you have in common with them and that you said before to me is that you hate being labeled. Can you say more about that?

[Mickey Malka]

I think it's a way of always growing up in Venezuela and all my life you never had people being labeled. I never learned what that was about. And every time somebody tried to put me on a label, I fought really hard to get out of it. From, hey, are you tall? So you must be playing good at basketball. And my first answer is no, I suck at basketball. Just trying to get myself out of any particular label. All the way to. To, are you an investor? Are you an entrepreneur? And say, what about if I'm both? What about if I'm not any? Why do I need a label? And the more you walk through life allowing things to have label, the more difficult life is because then you cannot see through it. You just see what you've been told to see. So I think it's part of my rebel cause to never accept labels.

[David Senra]

Yeah, I think if you're labeled, it means you're kind of conforming to like an existing mold. And I think the great founders, they're inherently non conformist.

[Mickey Malka]

Yes. And you have to be non conformist because the world can always be better, so why accept whatever is there today?

[David Senra]

So when you just said, hey, are you an entrepreneur? Are you an investor? Maybe I'm both, maybe I'm neither. Like today, how do you view yourself?

[Mickey Malka]

So I describe myself as an entrepreneur at heart and investor by design. Such a general line that allows me to do anything. Right. Some days I can wake up and be an entrepreneur, some days I can be an investor, some days I can be both. Someday I can be something completely different. But at heart means. Means that it comes from a place, from inside, that if I change my heart, I can just change it. And by design means that if I learn, and I keep learning how to do something, I can only get better at it. So I just allow myself to keep learning.

[David Senra]

So there's really no, like, you are completely fluid. You don't really put like a label on yourself.

[Mickey Malka]

Correct. I don't. I try and I avoid it. The only label I wanna, I wanna get in Life is that people say, I'm a great friend, I'm a great partner, and I'm a good father. And if I can get that label, that label, I would love to have the other ones. I don't care.

[David Senra]

Yeah, I'm always interested in how people think about, like, their own perception of their work. Because I just had this great conversation with Rick Rubin, and I had to, like, interrupt him one time. Cause he's like, yeah, I kind of think of myself as a researcher. And I'm like, what? Because, you know, people think music producer, and now he's a podcaster, and, you know, he's a consigliere to, like, some of the top artists in the world. And he's just like, all day, I'm just, like, finding what I'm intensely curious about and just researching that as far as I can.

[Mickey Malka]

And I think that's what it takes, and that's what entrepreneurs do every day, and that's what a great investor does every day. But you don't get labeled like that. But, yes, I will agree with you.

[David Senra]

Question. I went to your website. I've read a bunch of these, like, what do you call them? They're not even manifestos. Are they essays?

[Mickey Malka]

They're essays.

[David Senra]

Okay, so I'm very curious. You've only done a handful.

[Mickey Malka]

Yes.

[David Senra]

I'm very curious how your writing shapes not only your thinking, but also what you want to build through. Ribbit.

[Mickey Malka]

Writing is everything. Because we can sit here and talk about ideas for hours, but if you're not willing to put them in writing, you will never learn what truly they are, how deep they are. What I find is typically those essays that you read, they start by being probably 20 pages long, but I can actually get a napkin and explain to you each one in a napkin. And if I can do that, if anybody can explain anything complex to you in a napkin, it means that they have studied enough that they know how to articulate it. So what we do there is we start by writing our essays. And our essays, what they are allowing us to do is to not conform to what the world thinks today. It's to allow us to conform to what the world looks like in 10 years, 15 years. Just imagine and let it. Let it flow, let it go. Let that energy get out there. Let that energy be taken from our brains and our Q&As and our diligence and our calls. Just put it out there and see what happens.

[David Senra]

Why do you think that's beneficial?

[Mickey Malka]

Because it gives you conviction. If you cannot have conviction, then you're going to be going in mood swings with the markets up and down. If something changes, you got to be able. The only way to really have a joyful investment life or life in general, is to try to play this very long infinite game. And the only way to do that well is you have to unique conviction in whatever you do. You got to be willing to be wrong for a long time. But if I write it and we put it in writing and we share it with the world and we get feedback, it allows us to make sure that the compass is in the right direction.

[David Senra]

How long did they take to write?

[Mickey Malka]

Some of them can take us a year, some of them can take us four or five months. But the whole process to get a thesis that we like, sit down, think about it, articulate it, test it, share it, come back, work it, probably like a year, year and a half.

[David Senra]

I know you were a fan of Buffett. You've been a shareholder for all my life. Yeah, like since I was 13. That's crazy. I saw one of your tweets, I think it was from like 2015. And he was like, I think you were holding for like 25 years or something like that at that point. So even more now. And I know you write all his shareholder letters, which I'm a huge fan of. Did that influence your decision to start writing these essays?

[Mickey Malka]

Completely. So I bought my first share of Berkshire when I was 13 years old in Venezuela. It was November of 1987. How it was my.

[David Senra]

Why would a 13 year old be interested in Berkshire?

[Mickey Malka]

I don't know. I had read a few articles in Fortune magazine about him, about American Express, about Coca Cola, about certain brands. And I love the brands he had in his portfolio. I didn't know anything about float or insurance. I was not very familiar with that line of the business.

[David Senra]

I would hope that at 13 and

[Mickey Malka]

back then what he used to say was, buy it and get it shipped mailed to you in physical form. Don't leave it in a broker house so people can add margin against it. And there I was, I was 13. I had had my bar mitzvah in November of 87. The crash had happened a month before the October 87 crash. Stock went down a lot and I didn't collect enough money to buy one share. So I asked to ask my grandfather for a loan, ask for a loan, which he charged me interest as a way to teach me, and bought one share and had it mail in the mail. It showed up in Venezuela. Luckily, I don't know how I didn't lose it. And so since then, every year I got the annual letters by mail and I will read them and I will highlight them and then I will go and learn. That made me have to buy the little book from the Wall Street Journal called Understanding Money and Markets because there were terms I didn't understand in the letter. And my self learning came from doing all of that since I was 13.

[David Senra]

Imagine what a 13 year old kid could do now with AI like if he or she wanted to go through Buffett's letters. And then now it's just this thought partner and companion compared to you having to buy a book and look at the definition.

[Mickey Malka]

I was thinking about it and I was saying if I were to do it at 13, now with all of this, I will go to AI and tell them, do me take those letters, find me the Buffet partnership letters from before which are very hard to find, but you can find them, read them, analyze them, come back to me, give me the. It will be insane what you can do now. I think you will lose a little bit of the nuance because part of it, if you read them carefully enough and you've done it, you, you know that there's the pattern repeats and what you learn from it is not the decisions he makes, it's how in any environment he repeats the same pattern of decision making process. And that's the most important thing that you get from reading it. I don't know if AI can give you that.

[David Senra]

Wait, say more about that.

[Mickey Malka]

So it doesn't matter if you were in the 1970s when there was a little bit of inflation or high inflation in America compared to standards. And he talked there about how he treated float and how float of insurance worked or in the era of zero interest rates. And then how he talked about float and the cost of float. It didn't matter what was the macroeconomic conditions of the world or the macroeconomic conditions of the interest rates. He used the same pattern every single time to define how to think about money.

[David Senra]

Why do you think that's so special that he used the same pattern?

[Mickey Malka]

Because I think it's the discipline that he built. He just was amazing at taking all the noise away, canceling noise and focusing on the three things that matter the most and that only you can do if you study enough. What I learned and I went to the annual meetings for a number of years and I got to meet him and hang out with him afterwards and all of that for a number of years, to me going there was not learning anything new. It was just seeing how he applied those principles to the new economic conditions that every year were around.

[David Senra]

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[David Senra]

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[David Senra]

to me right now because. Have you spent any time with Daniel Ek in person?

[Mickey Malka]

No.

[David Senra]

Okay. He's one of, like the wisest people I know. And I, I just did the right. Like a couple days after I filmed that episode with Rick Rubin, who again, like, I've been making episodes on Rick Rubin forever. Like, I, I grew up loving hip hop, so he, he found a def jam in his dorm room, which is one of the most iconic hip hop record labels. And so, like, you know, for probably a decade and a half, I was a fan of Rick Rubin from afar before I got to meet him. And then I had like, probably, I don't know, a couple days, maybe a week later, I was having a drink with Daniel and he goes, how was the, you know, how was it hanging out with Rick? And I was just like. What was fascinating to me is just like, the aura is still there. But if you actually analyze Rick and his career, Rick Rubin and his career, it's just like he had like, basically when he was 19, when he started Def Jam, and now I think he's 63. He had like four ideas. And these ideas are not fucking complicated. It's like the adherence to the love of simplicity reduction instead of production. Always working with the very best people you possibly can, building the product for yourself. First, he's just making, literally, he is the patient Zero. I'm just building stuff that I want to see. And I was like, yeah, and that's it. And I was like, it's remarkable that those are like the components of that. And I was like, it doesn't even seem that special because they're just so simple ideas. He's like, yeah, but who adheres to the same four ideas for 40 years? I was like, shit, that is what's special. It's very similar to what you just said about Buffett.

[Mickey Malka]

That's what's special. Yeah. And that's why the writing is special for us. We have to adhere to that.

[David Senra]

So do you want to talk about the one that you. You wrote recently on tokens?

[Mickey Malka]

Yeah.

[David Senra]

So I love, I love what you just said. Like, I can you read it. It's very long and there's charts and everything else, but you're like, I can distill it down into a napkin. I think compression is understanding. Let's start with like the. The napkin version of the token essay and then you can expand on it from there.

[Mickey Malka]

The concept is very simple. The word token means something different to everybody. If we start with Ryan from Visa, the world he defines token is different than the world that Sundar has for token at Google or the different world that OpenAI has for token or anthropic. They're all different, but they all mean the same. It's machine readable information. So if you think about companies, we call them token factories because just think about the industrial revolution example in this token revolution era where every company needs a supply of tokens of information, money and knowledge, and then they do something and they deliver something new. And you need basically three components to deliver any service, any promise, or any product. You're going to need to understand identity, you're going to need to understand value, and you need to understand the intelligence that goes into it. Right now, we're in the early innings. What we're starting to see first is the Frontier Labs being the token factories. They're taking all information from the web, from videos, from the world, and they're finding a way to ingest it and create a different set of tokens that somebody else can consume. So they are the raw materials providers to these factories. Now in the next few years, we're going to see that evolution go deeper and deeper and deeper, and it will be much more personalized and it will be much more complete to verticals that we haven't even touched. Like today, token factories don't touch money. That much money's been outside of AI and we're on year four or five. It's funny because money is supposed to be one of the first, most fungible things that should be playing the game, and it's not.

[David Senra]

Why do you think it should be one of the first things to playing the game?

[Mickey Malka]

Because it's one of the things that flows the most in the world. Everything flows through money my whole life. The thing about what keeps my learning going is I follow flows. I believe that nothing static. Right. Money is never static. Money, it's like gravity. It always falls, it always moves, it's always going somewhere. It's like water. It's never stuck. Energy is flowing everywhere from the lights that we're in here, but also our own energies. Right now, we're creating both energies and we're sharing that energy. And so I find that for something that is as dynamic as money, it is not attached to AI yet on anything.

[David Senra]

So how does it get attached?

[Mickey Malka]

I think it's going to be that intersection between probably what blockchains will do and AI will do, because you will need to have intelligent, smart contracts that will do stuff on your behalf. And you can start to see great entrepreneurs and great founders working on it. We can talk about Patrick at Stripe and how they're building all of this.

[David Senra]

Literally, when you were saying that, I just heard John Collison talk about this, and basically he said that that's the only thing he's working on. It's like agentic payments for agents.

[Mickey Malka]

Yeah. And that's the future. Or you can talk to anybody in that space or Vlada Robinhood doing the same for equities, and you can see how they're tokenizing assets. And we're in the early innings, but we're behind compared to knowledge. Knowledge went much faster. Money is. It's behind, which is fine.

[David Senra]

So explain, because I don't know anything about this, and you study this night and day. So explain what you think is going to happen with this in the next year or two.

[Mickey Malka]

I don't know the next year or two. It's hard to know because with the speed of AI, what happens in the next 12 months or.

[David Senra]

Yeah, next few months, whatever.

[Mickey Malka]

But what I will say is that what we should start seeing very soon is agents that are designed for specific functions that will take care of your financial life in ways that you have never been taken care of. Some of the best founders have articulated this really well. David from nubank, David Velez said mobile was the way to put a bank in your pocket. Now AI is going to be the way to get you the banker in your pocket. What I expect to see very soon is an AI agent that can go and do all kinds of investment decisions, recommendations. He can go do all kinds of commerce decisions and recommendations and he can start to do any kind of payment decisions and recommendations on your behalf. And you are going to start to see how that's going to free time and ideas that you don't have today. We're just starting the signals that this is going the right way. Signals. Prediction markets. Prediction markets. It's an interesting market. Some people call it gambling, some people call it a place where you can bet on anything 24. 7. But here's the thing, it's 24. 7. And what agents need are 24. 7 rails. So all of this is building the rails to allow all of this to happen. And what we expect is that we're going to see a bunch of new companies or incumbents that are going to be shipping these features in ways that we have not experienced before.

[David Senra]

That was going to be my next question to you. Who do you think actually wins this? Because you just named three pretty big, well established companies. Stripe, Robinhood, nubank. You think it comes from them or you think it comes from a startup?

[Mickey Malka]

I think it comes from them because first they're still founder led or Revolut also they're still founder led. Those founders are pushing the boundaries of all of this. They are at an age and they are at a place and if you talk to them, they're still as hungry as they were on day one. They're still in that day one mentality and they're just going faster than the incumbents. For a while I thought the incumbents were going to catch up in 20, 21, 22. I thought they were pairing up. There was not much difference between a financial product offer from an incumbent and from one of these new brands. That's different today again, AI has just become a rocket nitro rocket for this breed of technology companies to just accelerate even faster and separate themselves again. Which is the beauty of the infinite game. And the beauty of the infinite game. You never get to win or you never get to lose. You're simply ahead or behind. And they were ahead for a long, long time. And then the other ones were catching up. But the rules change what happens. You're ahead again and the other ones fall behind. But the game never ends. That's the way I live my life. That's the way I think about everything I do. That's the way I make decisions. I don't think about winning or losing ever on anything I do, I just think about, will this put me ahead or put me behind in the game and then just keep playing the game.

[David Senra]

So I know you play the infinite game. You want to play forever, but do you consider yourself a competitive person, though?

[Mickey Malka]

Defined competitor?

[David Senra]

I guess the way I think about this internally, it's just like I'm in a very positive sum industry. If you listen to my podcast today and another podcast tomorrow, I don't lose on that, but I still wake up every day trying to do the best job I possibly can.

[Mickey Malka]

Yes. So if that's a competitor, yes, I try to do the best, but it's

[David Senra]

not relative to other people.

[Mickey Malka]

No. I don't look at other people. Each one is playing their own game. I try really hard to not have fear of missing out. I try really hard to just make sure that I'm playing the best game I can, to play this game until the last day I am alive. It doesn't matter if I win or lose, because you will. That's not the game. You fall behind. Actually, I will tell you that I've learned about myself. I'd rather be behind. I'm a much better person being behind or ahead. When I'm ahead, it means, oh, you guys are doing well. This is going right direction. You were right. This happened. This played out immediately. My spider senses get all activated and said, okay, that means that whatever, I got to change the rules because it's not good to be ahead. You want to be ahead for a while, but you want the rules to change, to fall behind so you can innovate again.

[David Senra]

Yeah, this is why I said that. You. There's so many times when we're talking like, God damn it, Mickey. Sounds just like the people I read books about. I just met James Dyson, who was like a personal hero of mine, and he said the exact same thing on his podcast. He's just like, losing is so much more interesting. He's like, you just learn so much. He likes being behind. Yeah. He just has that chip on his shoulder. Well, really just the desire to constantly improve. He just feels you're going to improve a lot more when you're, like, losing or you're behind 100%.

[Mickey Malka]

I'm much better when I'm behind. I learn more. I. Everything about it just gives you much more energy.

[David Senra]

I want to go back because I interrupted you. I want to go back to your idea of every company is becoming a token factory. The only token factories that you see right now are the labs no.

[Mickey Malka]

So you're starting to see application layers that are starting to show up, that are building token factories. Think about on the Voice AI. Think about 11 Labs or Decagon or Sierra. They're all companies that are, are understanding how they're creating their token factories. They're creating a service that did not exist before in a way that was not possible. We're going to a world where every single piece of information needs to be readable by a machine. And that's how the world will go to the next generation.

[David Senra]

So you finished writing the letter. What do you do next?

[Mickey Malka]

We share it with our founders, people that we work with closely and we allow them to, and our LPs, our investors. Why? Because we want them to hold us accountable. This is our thinking. You have the chance, you can walk out or you can keep believing in our thesis. So we put it out there, and then we go out and we start talking about it with the founders that we met while we wrote it. And what happens, is there founders that

[David Senra]

you've not yet invested in?

[Mickey Malka]

Most of them are founders that we have not yet invested in because as we write the thesis, we have not invested into them yet. We're learning from them. Maybe along the way, we make an investment or two, maybe. But most of the time we don't. And then after that, and what happens is some of the best founders will read and say, oh, wow, you guys really understand it. This is deep. Let's talk about it. And that's how we build those relationships that take a long time to build.

[David Senra]

So I know you spend a lot of time with people in their early 20s. Do you feel that this is the way they're talk market, they're thinking about building companies?

[Mickey Malka]

Good question. I think some of them are. I think some others are not like any other generation. What I believe the people in their 20s have right now is that they are the smartest, fastest learner generation we've ever had in history. They learn the fastest. And it's because they get used to listening to podcasts at 1.52x. They don't have to wait for the mail to arrive with an annual letter a month later. They can read it in real time. Right. So their ability to process information, it's so much faster than our brains ever had been trained for. So you can see it in the way they can process. What I think the best ones can do also is that they can articulate a vision and a story and bring people to follow them. But not all of them have those skills yet. They haven't developed them because that generation, as much as they're super smart learning, they also were not trained to be great communicators on the other side. So the few that are great communicators, I think they have it embedded in them.

[David Senra]

How do you think they view company building differently than somebody that's say, 10 years older than them?

[Mickey Malka]

I think they look at org charts very differently. I think they look at functions very differently. They don't think the orchard structure that we inherited and that we grew up with, I don't think it applies anymore in the same way they did. Humans are key center and they will be for as long as we're alive in our lifetime. But org charts and the way they organize people, completely different. And you can see it, they are self organizing. And I love studying this because one of my mentors is Dee Hawk, the founder of Visa. And I spent with him almost 10 or 12 years visiting him and talking to him and. And he's a creator of the Chaotic organization. He is the believer that you should never. The best expression of humans are in the intersection between chaos and order. If you're too orderly, you don't innovate. If you're too chaotic, you don't communicate and you break. So chaotic is the right place to be. They are actually doing. These kids are doing a great job by pure nature of how they were trained and wired with this era of technology to be in the epicenter of chaotic. So that's how they're working and that's what's different about them.

[David Senra]

What else did you learn from Deep? The fascinating thing, a couple people have asked me before because I've done like two or three episodes on de Hawk. He wrote this great autobiography which tells the story of Issa, but then when he was a much older man, he also has these two books of Maxim. It's called the Autobiography of a Restless Mind, Volume 1 and Volume 2. Again, somebody can compress the language and give you a lot of ideas in like, you know, a sentence or two. A lot of people have asked me, it's like, why do you think, you know, Visa is one of the most successful companies of all time. I think one of the most profitable per employee companies in history. And yet not a lot of people talk about it. And somebody asked me one time or a few people have actually asked me this, like, why do you think that is? It's like, because it's still very confusing on how he actually built it. I've read his book two times and I still don't really understand. So like what else do you think you learned from De Hawk? Did he influence the way you built ribbon at all?

[Mickey Malka]

Yes.

[David Senra]

Okay, I want to know about this.

[Mickey Malka]

And not only Rui, but my previous startups too. Because he taught me so much about how to get people to be the best version of themselves in the kind of organizations that you have to have. Even my go to question on interviews, it's a question he taught me on how to ask. So I've learned so much from him.

[David Senra]

What is that question?

[Mickey Malka]

I give people six words and I tell them to organize them in a certain order and then the way they walk through that order says a lot about the person. And it was a letter that Dee wrote to his team in 1972, I think where he articulates all of this. So I learned that from him. So spending time with Dee, what you get is that he understood human psychology better than anybody in that era. In that particular space. He understood that to get bankers who by their sheer DNA are people that tend to be risk adverse and people that care too much about their reputation. He found a way through this model of association. His biggest success was the legal model he used. No one had ever done a company in that structure and association model allow everybody to save face but at the same time take the credit. And that's how he won because it doesn't matter who you were, which bank competitor with the other one. Indeed, he didn't care because each one can compete by themselves. But at the same time, when if the brand won, that was the beauty of Dee. When you spend time with him, he will say it was the model and people don't get it. So I find that his restless mind was alive even in his early 90s because I would have swear that he could have been Satoshi Nakamoto if he had been 40 years younger. He had explained to me blockchain and what for him, Visa was a failure. If you talk to him because he only got to release the simple version of it, which was payments, he wanted to do a lot more, which looked a lot like blockchains and smart contracts are today. But he was probably 60 years ahead of his time.

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[David Senra]

let's go back to the young kids that you spend time with and the way they think about company building compared to some of your older founders.

[Mickey Malka]

From what sense?

[David Senra]

I think the founders moving forward like obviously going to be way more capital efficient. I think they're going to own larger percentages of their companies because they're going to need to to to raise less money. I think you use the analogy of one time if you go back and look at like some of the robber barons who own like Henry Ford on 100% of his company, you know some of them would go public and they don't 70 or 80% of the company. Yeah. I'm just very curious like how you think they're going to be building companies again. A 21 or 22 year old compared to even like a 35 year old.

[Mickey Malka]

So the first thing about this generation is they understand that if they play by the rules of the game, they will not win the rules of society. Right now they will be stuck in student debt, they will be stuck in a bunch of problems that they've been watching this through YouTube, they've been reading about it on social media, they've been seeing that we have span an era of Elon's, of innovation, of Edison people mindsets that it's allowing the mind to really flow. And surprisingly capital is right now historically levels of almost unlimited capital access, especially if you're younger, there's even more capital than before. It's a perfect scenario for this generation to really create and take risks in ways that you cannot imagine. Funny enough, when you talk to them the most you will find that a lot of them feel that working on software alone is boring. It's not fun, it's not challenging enough. They want to build physical objects, they want to touch materials, they want to get their hands dirty in building stuff that will actually matter and get to our hands one way or the other. Which is super interesting because that was not the generation of the last 15, 20 years. Everybody was trying to go comfort to light. Everybody was trying to build software only and try to go through the cycles as fast as you can. This generation is not afraid of getting their hands dirty. So it's super interesting to see the behaviors. What's the difference? Why? I don't know. Maybe they just find that they grew up with a phone, they grew up with a tablet, they grew up with a computer. So it's not interesting enough to limit the world to just bits and bytes. But the more time I spend with them, the more the biggest thing and the biggest question that I find asking them is because the oldest of the Generation are probably 25, 26, the younger are 18. You ask them what were you doing during COVID And that is the most fascinating question. The most successful ones right now were the ones that during COVID were learning and were on YouTube sucking information about anything and learning about everything in life. So when they go and build companies, they find that first, they're naive, so anything's possible. Second, technology is there, so anything's possible. Third, if you're older, you get knowledge and you get wisdom, but you may not have the motivation, so they need to find out how to bring that from people. And so what you're starting to see is that the best ones are attracting some of the best older people to come join them because they feel that magnet.

[David Senra]

And so the younger people are recruiting the older ones.

[Mickey Malka]

Yes. And they're making them work in little hubs of two or three with two young ones, they're pairing them two 22 year old kids with somebody much later working in teams together. And that's where they're jetting between their knowledge of the new ways of operating systems with the knowledge that you need from 20 years of experience.

[David Senra]

If you play this out over the next five, 10 years, aren't they going to have a massive technical advantage too? Because me and you use AI a lot, but we have other stuff going on in our lives where they can live and breathe it 24, 7.

[Mickey Malka]

Yes, and they will. And we just got what this year? High school class, sorry, college class is the first one that actually went to college and had AI the four years we just started the senior class, the rising senior of college. It's the first class ever that probably used ChatGPT to write an essay to get to college.

[David Senra]

I keep asking questions about the young people that you hang out with because I've had founders literally in their mid-30s and they're the technical leaders of these really successful companies. They're like, I don't know if I can do this anymore. I'm too old. Like, what do you mean you're too old? You're 35 years old. Like, yeah, I think I'm going to get smoked by a 24 year old.

[Mickey Malka]

I don't think you're too old, to be honest. And I don't feel old. And I feel I can, I can, I can still play the game. But you got to understand that you got to play a different game. You cannot keep playing the same game that you were playing in your 20s or in your 30s. You got to understand that the way these dynamics work and what you can bring to them is very different. What can you bring to them? Wisdom, knowledge. Give them experiences, stuff that they don't understand, by the way. The best ones they still lack. And they have to refine its taste. They got to be able to articulate how to build something beautiful. That's not easy. And it's something that we've lost in society is the ability to build beautiful stuff. Silicon Valley has lost that ability a long time ago and we have to bring it back. I'm hoping this generation is the one that spends time thinking how to deliver beautiful experiences.

[David Senra]

Say more about Silicon Valley losing the ability to build beautiful things.

[Mickey Malka]

So if you think about the last 15 years, the incentive systems and every metric of success was wired on scale. Grow, go bigger, have a more nuance, more. But it wasn't about building beautiful products. We have. When was the last time you bought something, a technology product that you loved and you were like, wow, this is beautiful.

[David Senra]

I don't even want to tell you. It's embarrassing. The answer, it was a Dyson vacuum cleaner.

[Mickey Malka]

That's great. And by the way, Dyson comes up a lot when I ask this question. Also air wrap if you have a

[David Senra]

daughter or any women in the house, that's what Dyson's process.

[Mickey Malka]

And somebody in your team here was showing us these two cars. The iPhone, the SE. Yeah, right. The small iPhone. Why? Because it's beautiful. It was one of the first ones designed in a different way. So we have lost that ability. And because we have given a prize and a reward for efficiency, algorithm compounding of those things. And we have put aside how it makes you feel in this world where technology is taking over a lot of our lives in the way we're going, more than any time in history, we're going to need that feeling back again, how it makes you feel. And it's not just the brand with a TV commercial. That's the point I'm less worried about. It's more about what's authentic, what's beautifully designed, and what does it make you feel when you are around it.

[David Senra]

It's the perfect time that you're bringing this up, because right now, literally a few hours this morning, in the last few days, I've been rereading this biography of Jony. I've. I think it's called, like, Jony I've the Genius behind Apple's Greatest products, or something like that. All he talks about is feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling. He didn't think computers were for him. He thought they were ugly and tacky. He starts using a Mac. This is years before even working at Apple. And he's just like, oh, there's a human behind this. You can tell there's a actual human that cares behind this. And all he talks about, he's talking about redesigning hairbrushes and about how it makes them feel, to your point.

[Mickey Malka]

And I think that if we don't bring that back, the founders that will do that will win. And the founders that don't have that ability, they don't have a chance.

[David Senra]

Right before you came over, I was on the phone with my. Our mutual friend Neil Matta, and he keeps telling me about Nick from Revolut, right. And we were talking about some unrelated stuff. And I go, I'm about to see Mickey Malka. He's like, you got to ask him the conversation we had if, if he remembers because he, he said you invested way before he did. I think he's done now the last like two or three rounds, but I think he remembers calling you and passing on Nick. Can you tell? Like, why do I keep hearing about Nick? And like, what do you think makes him so special?

[Mickey Malka]

You got to understand Nick for how he grew up and who he is, understand who he was. Funny enough, I was in London a few weeks ago because they finally got their bank license approved. And, and there was a chancellor there and some public officials speaking. And Nick was there with Vlad, the co founder. And I was looking at my phone and I was remembering when was the first time that we had handshaked our Series A. And it was literally that same day 10 years before.

[David Senra]

Oh, wow.

[Mickey Malka]

And so I went to them and I showed on the phone and said, Listen, 10 years ago, we were drinking vodka shots, we go to the Lush to do our A round. And what was it about them from day one? First, the name Revolut stands for who he was. He wanted to truly create a revolution in money. Like there was nothing in the middle about it. He had come to London, he had left Moscow, he was a trader. He was frustrated with how complex it was to move money, how difficult and how expensive and how unfair it was for everybody in the system. And he says, fuck it, I gotta change this. So that core DNA was there from day one and then he lifted every single day. He will wake up every day and go swimming, he will work in the office. We were the first one to arise, the last one to leave, and the first one to arrive the next day again. And he will swim and stay fit and just relentlessly focus on getting this mission moving forward. And people just either competed with him at that level because it was a performance, a level that, an execution, that it was just a machine. There was nonstop. I just have this mission and I have to do it in my lifetime.

[David Senra]

I'm glad you said the machine because I think that's what Neil described me. He's like a fucking Terminator.

[Mickey Malka]

But that was Nick in his late 20s. That was who he was there in the 20s. Now the Nick of today, 10 years later, he's getting better. He's getting better because now he can lead. He can lead by example, he can lead by mission. He's a missionary also. Now he can lead by taste. He has very strong opinions on how things need to go. He still has 20 people direct report to him and he will work seven days a week and then every number of weeks take two weeks off. You can see his behavior of work. He's fine tuned to who he is now compared to who he was before. So consistency. What I like to do is when we back these teams, we try to understand the DNA of the founder and we try to understand what drives them and how do they work. But more importantly, we want to see if that DNA reflects in the offices, in the team, in the people, in the way they talk, in the way they move. And you still go to the regular offices, which is now in, I don't know, 15, 20 countries. And I've been to the one in the middle east, in Barcelona, in London, in the last year and a half. You still breathe that DNA still there. So that's what keeps it going. It's a very special way that you got to understand the founder really well to know because each org is very different.

[David Senra]

So when you say you want to understand the founder's DNA, how do you go about understanding that you got to

[Mickey Malka]

spend time with them and you got to ask them all the questions and you got to build a level of trust where honestly, you don't have to talk about business that much. What kind of level of trust you got? How do you build that trust to talk to them in a way where they feel that they can trust you back, that they can call you when they cannot sleep at night, that those are the things that you got? I spend most of my time and the team at Rivet spend most of the time doing which is building that level of understanding and relationship. So we know how they behave. Once you know how people behave, then everything's fine because you will see consistency or they will break it.

[David Senra]

Explain why it's important to you to be the person that they call when they have problems. Like you just used the example of like when they can't sleep at night

[Mickey Malka]

because all of us have something that wakes us up at night from time to time. And that particular mind problem that you're trying to solve, it's the biggest thing that you have to get unlocked to keep being the best version of yourself. And when you're there, sometimes it's really hard to trust. If it's a vulnerable question, sometimes it's really deep and has a lot of strategic consequences. And you want to be really. You're going through your mind a lot of. And if we get that phone call, it means that we did 100 things right to deserve the right to be there, to help this person think through it. Never answer the question, just help him or her answer the question. And that meant that you were able to talk about life and family, you were able to talk about society and politics, and you were able to talk about everything because that's the only way you're going to get to really help this person answer the question.

[David Senra]

So you have in many cases, decade plus relationships with a lot of the founders that you back. How does. Can you compare Nick to the other ones? What are the traits that you think they share among the people that you spend the most time with?

[Mickey Malka]

Well, they all want to win in their own way of being. They care about if they are true to themselves. The mission that they wrote on the first day is still present today. And when you find that authenticity, they win. So the ones that are authentic are the ones that you can keep seeing, the ones that faked it to make it and then they change and then they move. And then those are the ones that over time, you just don't have the appetite to spend time with. It's not.

[David Senra]

Is it reflected in the performance of their company too? Sometimes you have people that fake it and then they build massively successful companies.

[Mickey Malka]

Yes, there are, for sure. But sometime, somewhere, somehow down the line, authenticity matters. And as long as you're authentic to yourself and you keep your values authentic and you remember yourself why you're doing what you're doing, and you can wake up every day with that energy, you'll be fine.

[David Senra]

So if we go back to that idea that Rick Rubin has, these four handful of ideas, could be four, could be five, could be six ideas that he just used over multiple decades. What would be the list of traits that you would. If I said, hey, list out the four or five things that you want, the founders that you want to build long term relationships with and partner with over long term have, what would those, what would your answer would be?

[Mickey Malka]

We have this thing called the Isle of the Tiger. It's our way of thinking about the people that we want to back and how we want to partner with them. And as everything, as I told you before, it needs to fit in a napkin. So if we run in a napkin, it means that we thought about it long enough that we have it right. And it's basically the energy of a scientist, the conviction of a missionary, the heart of a partner, the dreams of an athlete, the obsession of an owner. When we meet them and we spend time with them, we want to make sure those things are present. And if they are, that's the kind of people that we want to partner with.

[David Senra]

How long did it take you to develop, like how many. Over several years where you guys figured out these reoccurring traits?

[Mickey Malka]

This is several years. This is probably a decade to anxiety. We probably put it into a napkin five years ago. So it took us almost 10 years.

[David Senra]

Do you consider yourself a patient person?

[Mickey Malka]

Yes.

[David Senra]

Several of the questions I've asked you today is like, oh, yeah, that took a couple of years. And that took a couple of years. You started your first company when you were what, like 17?

[Mickey Malka]

17.

[David Senra]

And you didn't found you founded multiple companies, but you founded Revit 20 years later.

[Mickey Malka]

More than I founded Revit much later. I founded revit Almost. Yeah, 20 years later. Yeah, 21 years later.

[David Senra]

21 years later. You've been doing it for almost 14 years now. 14 years, yes. And I heard you say before, it's like, well, everybody's like, well, you guys had this fantastic record. You've done all this. You're like, yeah, it's like, super early.

[Mickey Malka]

We got a long way to go. Yeah, we found amazing people to partner. We got great ideas. We're still building. I mean, we built a company with Walmart. Think about it. It's the first time ever that that has happened.

[David Senra]

Okay, I just heard about this. We have a mutual friend named Sebastian, former founder of Rappi, and he's like, ask him about the deal he did with Walmart.

[Mickey Malka]

It just speaks to a little bit of this value system of ours. David, we had a chance to meet. I've been a fan of Sam Walton all my life.

[David Senra]

Same.

[Mickey Malka]

And I had read every book. I had never been to Bentonville until a few years ago, but I had read everything about him, and I had a follow. And I remember Buffett owned the stock for a particular period of time until he sold it. And that was when I first learned about Walmart back in the day. And in 2019, through Sarah Fryer, who's now OpenAI, but she was. She was in the board. She's on the board of Walmart. She organized a dinner where I had a chance to meet Doug McMillan, the CEO at the time. And we had a lovely dinner in San Francisco a few months before COVID And Doug says after dinner, he says, listen, if you ever find yourself in Bentonville, come visit me. And I'm like, I don't know what I'm going to do in Bentonville. So I left the dinner. I was so impressed by Doug, his way of speaking, his understanding about macro, the world, the values of Walmart. Everything was so present in him at that dinner. It was a small dinner, so it. It could have been something different, but it was authentic to him that we went as a team to a couple of Walmart stores. We tried every financial product we can buy. We could. We did remittances, prepaid car deal, and we found bugs, and we found all these things that looked like 1990s fintech.

[David Senra]

Were they selling them themselves? So there's, like, vendors inside of them.

[Mickey Malka]

They had vendors and they had partners, and they had their own Walmart car. It was a. Whatever card. So I wrote them in January before COVID and said, listen, if you're in Mentorville, I'd love to go see you. And lo and behold, he said, yes, shut up. Sit down with Doug. And he introduced me to John Furner, who's now the CEO of Walmart, who's alongside with Doug. They were there for almost 30 years at Walmart, both of them since they were 17 and John is my age. So we started at the same time in two different continents and we were sitting in the same room talking about this and I said listen, you guys can build something much better with financial services here. This is not your priority number one, two or three. It is for us, let's figure it out. They did something that they had never done. They created a jv, a company that we both co own and we went together and built a Rockstar team with a new brand. We bought two companies to build the infrastructure run by Omari Smile today and it's called onepei and it's one of the biggest financial brands that you've never

[David Senra]

heard of operating out of all the Walmarts.

[Mickey Malka]

You will see it online on every shopping cart experience on Walmart. You will see it the retails everywhere. If you want to pay with your phone today the only way to pay at Walmart is with OnePay. If you want to have a debit card is the only way you want a loan from Klarna it goes through OnePay. If you want an installment loan, you want a credit card, it goes through OnePay. Every single financial product to millions and millions and millions of of American consumers. And the beauty of that is that with John being and this is the beauty of the Walmart culture John had been in China for a number of years. He had learned how wepay worked and how Alipay did business. They were investors in India and Flipkart and Phonepe. So then they saw what could happen with mobile money. They have been the greatest partners to have. And so together between the founder team Rivet and Walmart we have built this amazing journey together that is quite unique for a big corporation like that.

[Podcast Sponsor/Host Voice]

I found one of my all time favorite quotes when I was reading the

[David Senra]

book 0 to 1.

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[David Senra]

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[David Senra]

tell me if I'm. I'm connecting things that are unrelated or not, but I don't think I am. What was the business that it was either you or your partner built? It was like this bank, this branchless bank in convenience stores or some shit like that in South America, in Brazil. Okay. What was the name of that?

[Mickey Malka]

It was called Lemon Bank.

[Podcast Sponsor/Host Voice]

Okay.

[David Senra]

Lemon Bank.

[Mickey Malka]

Yes.

[David Senra]

Is it sounds like you almost took like an idea that worked in Lemon because you guys, you were the founder of that or.

[Mickey Malka]

Yes.

[David Senra]

Okay. And then you will explain what LemonBank is, but then you sell it to the biggest bank in Brazil.

[Mickey Malka]

Yes.

[David Senra]

Right. Is this not the same idea but kind of with Walmart?

[Mickey Malka]

Yes.

[David Senra]

This speaks to why I keep. I ask you if you're patient as you. What are the traits that like that you notice in greatest founders? Because I noticed them in you. So like patience, long term thinking, reputation, which I want to get to in a minute. Which is how me and you actually met because you helped me like I had a big decision to make in my career and like your reputation preceded you. And I was like I actually need to meet this guy because I have some questions for him. So this is what I mean. It's like you talked about in the Infinite game earlier. It's like I'm going to do this till I die. Which you just said, which I fucking love by the way. And I'm hearing you talk and I knew the rough shape of the Walmart thing. I didn't know what it was called. I'm like wait a minute. This sounds like Lemon Bank.

[Mickey Malka]

Yes.

[David Senra]

Okay, explain the connection between the two.

[Mickey Malka]

That's the infinite game right there. You just said it yourself really well. When you're playing this live game and it's infinite being ahead or behind. In 2003 when we started that business in Brazil and I lived there for three years and grinded few times, almost died trying this business and we almost killed the business twice along the way. I almost lost all the money I have ever made.

[David Senra]

We gotta pause there. We're gonna get to what it does. How did you almost lose all the money you ever made?

[Mickey Malka]

Because when we had sold our first.com company and then we used all the proceeds to start this bank in Brazil. I moved with my wife to Brazil. We were living there.

[David Senra]

So you had no investors or you were just.

[Mickey Malka]

No, we had no investors. It was just my business partner, Wences Casares and myself and Michael.

[David Senra]

You put all your chips back on the table?

[Mickey Malka]

All the chips back on the table. We were 25, 26 and almost lost everything because the economy didn't take off no matter what we did. We just couldn't. Which is how you learn that macro matters. And I learned that growing up in Venezuela with hyperinflation and devaluation. But then another thing is to leave it also when all your money is on the table.

[David Senra]

So wait a minute, you're a 25 year old kid wanting to build essentially like a branchless bank, Is that how you describe it?

[Mickey Malka]

Yes.

[David Senra]

And your idea at the time is to set these little like kiosks, whatever you call them.

[Mickey Malka]

Yeah. There were three models we had inside existing stores at checkout. We had kiosks inside stores, which was a hybrid model and we had franchisee little stores that only did our payment systems. Because this is before the smartphone. Right. But it was mobile or a lot of. So we had to. It was a hybrid of 2003-2007 era. So we had to build all of this and run all of this. At peak we had 7,000 of these physical spaces all over Brazil. We were serving 15 million customers. Half of Brazil back then was unbanked.

[David Senra]

Unbanked, unbanked. So that was the opportunity.

[Mickey Malka]

That was the opportunity to bank them. We were the first to bank them to 50 million people.

[David Senra]

So essentially you did like the legwork for the largest bank where it's like now we've attacked this customer segment that you haven't succeeded with. We succeeded. You essentially rounded up a bunch of now customers for them. They want to buy you.

[Mickey Malka]

That's exactly.

[David Senra]

So you sell in what year?

[Mickey Malka]

2008.

[David Senra]

So 2008. That insight then comes into play. What is that 12 years later? 12 years later you're starting to talk to Walmart in 2020.

[Mickey Malka]

Yes. And that's the long game, that's the infinite game. And by the way, you can tie every single one of our decisions that we've made were big decisions like that in the rivet life to something that happened to me 20 years before.

[David Senra]

This is really important, especially for younger entrepreneurs because you said earlier there's just something wrong about. We're optimizing for just start, scale, sell where it's like, you know, some of your partners you've been partners with for 20 years.

[Mickey Malka]

Yes.

[David Senra]

Some of the people you've backed. You met Vlad at Robinhood, when? I don't think they had a product yet. There was not an app, right?

[Mickey Malka]

No, there was a public facing app. It was not customers? No, no customers.

[David Senra]

So your relationship with them was for like 15 years?

[Mickey Malka]

Yes.

[David Senra]

It's like I always say, it's like when, when I've read, you know, all these biographies for the other podcasts I have, it's like, just stay in the game long enough to get lucky. It's like so much of this stuff is not predictable and I think that maximum. So it just stay in the game long enough to get lucky. So you built a massive business 12, 12 years after you built, you know, a very successful business in South America. Now think about the scale of Walmart. This is like not comparable to anything else.

[Mickey Malka]

And that's the power of compounding.

[David Senra]

Yes.

[Mickey Malka]

And it's compounding relationships and ethics and work and principles and love and passion and time and just don't care about the winning or losing. Just let it be. Because the power of compounding is the most important equation in, in society and everything. On friendships, on family, just be consistent, work every day.

[David Senra]

This is like a very Buffet Munger kind of thing. Like, Munger has that line where he's like, you know, you need to learn the big, the few big ideas in each discipline, they carry most of the freight, I think is the way he describes that. And through all this reading, I was like, my version of this is like, oh, time carries most of the weight. Like, if you're in a good business, like, just stay there and time will actually carry most of the weight to what you want to do. And so that leads. If you're going to play the infant game, then, and you want to do things over long term, you have to protect your reputation. Which is another thing that Buffett would repeat in his shareholders, like, hey, we can lose money. We can lose a lot of money, actually. We can't lose a shred of reputation. I want to know how you think about reputation. And then I want to know, then I'll talk about why it's so important. How it led me to you.

[Mickey Malka]

I started to go to the Berkshire annual meetings when I was 18, and back then they were much smaller. They were on a Friday afternoon on a Holiday Inn, couple hundred people. And as soon as they moved to the bigger convention center a few years later, they had this movie clip playing in the beginning of the annual meeting with a bunch of TV commercials or Buffett interviews over the years. And every time since I was young, that age, they were playing the Buffett getting deposed when he was the chairman of Solomon Brothers, saying that line that you just said, it got sticky in my brain.

[David Senra]

So wait, they replayed it at every annual meeting?

[Mickey Malka]

At every annual meeting. It was there that the position, he said that line on a deposition at Congress for something that Salomon Brothers was doing with the treasury, arbitraging or taking advantage of the treasury issuing market. They played it every single year. And I remember it every single year. Part of the reasons why I wanted to live that life is because it was natural to me. It was the way you wanted to live life. So, yes, reputation matters more than anything.

[David Senra]

There's a handful of people that I really trust and admire, and then the people I trust admire. I want to know who they trust and admire. And I had a decision I had to make, and I wasn't sure how to make it. There was a lot of uncertainty. I didn't have the information I needed and realized that you were actually in possession of this information. We won't talk about, like, the details of this. And I actually never, almost ever asked to meet people. And I asked two separate people. I was like, do you mind making this, like, introduction for me? And then the first time we met, we actually wound up talking for like several hours. And then we like became like fast friends. But I made a big decision in my career based on how fantastic your reputation was. And so therefore, almost like Charlie Munger has that great line where like, trust is one of the greatest economic forces in the world. And it's like the level of trust that you have built up over excessive long time with people I trust made me be able to build a relationship and trust your judgment really fast that I could make a decision based on your reputation. And I think this is super important. It's also something that comes up over and over again. Like, I. I did this episode on Jensen. There's this book called the Nvidia Way, which is kind of like half biography of Jensen, half company history. And it talks about. He pitched Don Valentine. Don Valentine's still alive, still making the investment decision of Sequoia. And Don's like, that was the shittiest pitch I've ever heard. I'm still going to give you money because your reputation precedes you. And it's so excellent, so valuable.

[Mickey Malka]

It is the most valuable asset. It's the only asset we have. It's a reputation. Everything else can come and go, but that's the one thing that we have that it will always stick to us, even when we're there.

[David Senra]

You know who also shaped my thinking on this is like. You've ever heard Palmer Luckey talk about reputation, have you?

[Mickey Malka]

No, I haven't heard him talk about.

[David Senra]

So he says the exact same thing. He's like, any time he thinks this idea where, like, if people tried to destroy reputation, like just, you know, rise above the phrase, like, no, this is bullshit, because you have to fight back. Because the problem is it forecloses opportunities. If this person's damaging reputation, and it's not true, it's going to foreclose future opportunities. And it's not like if somebody. And his whole point is like, this is invisible. And I thought it was really interesting insight. He's like, if. So if somebody. I let somebody destroy my reputation and unfairly. And two years later, I asked for a meeting with a guy who took that story and believes it. He's not gonna tell me. I'm not taking the meeting. Cause your reputation sucks. He's gonna make up some other story. So he's like, you have to protect it and then fight against it. I thought it was interesting. It's very like a Ben Franklin kind of idea. Because Franklin would nurture and then also protect and fight back against his reputation 250 years ago. It's very fascinating.

[Mickey Malka]

I love it. I didn't know that about Ben Franklin. I'm gonna read more about that.

[David Senra]

So I told you right before we started recording that I got the art piece that I ordered at Node, and I don't even know how to describe the fact I could spend about an hour there with you. Can you just describe what the hell Node is and why you're doing it?

[Mickey Malka]

Yes. So I think it's in the spirit of being a rebel. So my wife and I, we love art. We find that art is beautiful. And when you find stuff that speaks to you, it has an immense value. It's been around all of us since the caves, right? It's always been there. And five years ago, we stumbled upon digital art for the first time. I was on Twitter, scrolling, and I saw an art piece that looks something very similar to a physical art piece we had from the 70s. And then we got into it and started to find other artists in digital art that were doing beautiful stuff that match something beautiful in history. So we started to pair them together. And that journey took us, like any journey, to get to know the artists. Because what's the difference of these artists? They're alive and they're all here, and they're all using the old study, computer science one way or the other. And they just decided to be artists and tell a story in a different way. Once you start to meet them, they were rebels in the complete expression of the word, the same way we were describing some of the rebels in companies. Think about right now, we're running a show on people.

[David Senra]

That's the one I saw.

[Mickey Malka]

That's the one you show. So think about people. Think about an entrepreneur who decided for 5,000 days to do an art piece every single day, post it online so he can only get better. His goal was he read a book that said, if you do something every day, you will only get better at it. And he started in 2007, sketching 2011, started to use Photoshop, 2014 Cinema 4D. And so the software evolved and every single day posted an image online that no one bought. People paid attention and just made fun of it or congratulate them or jump against it until in 21, he sells the first 5,000 days. What is it at 14 years for $69 million. And suddenly it's like an IPO moment. No one pays attention for a long time. You sell it. What does a real rebel do? He said, fuck it. We're going to double down. I'm going to build a studio. I'm going to start building a lot more stuff that I couldn't do before. And now he's one of the most prolific artists alive. All he does, his work is digital. And he's not the only one. People see cryptopunks and they see at jpeg. Actually, I see a movement, I see a cultural artifact, the first art on Chain ever created, and it happens to be portraits. Guess what? Every single art movement in history starts with portraits. They always evolve the portrait. So the story is, we went to the museums and we said, this art should be seen because at home we put it around our house. And all my kids, when they were teenagers and brought their friends, guess where their attention went?

[David Senra]

Not the art. You have it hanging on the walls.

[Mickey Malka]

It went to this 15, 20 minutes in front of it, talking to it, interacting, asking questions no one didn't understand. We go to the museums and they said, yes, we can do this 20, 28, five years from now, four years from now, and we'll have to find a curator who's going to curate what the artist wants to do. And my wife and I look at each other and said, no fucking way this needs to happen today. So Node, it's the first digital art studio designed for digital artists. It is a space where the artist is his own curator, because that's what rebels do. You design how you want to show your art. You don't let somebody else tell you how you want to put your art. And it's a place where you come and you get your hands on with the art that speaks to the future. And we put this place in downtown Palo Alto for a particular reason, because Silicon Valley needs creativity. We need to bring it back. So our contribution to society is put it in a place where people can actually walk in and see it. And we've opened it five months ago. We had close to 60,000 people show up already every weekend. We're breaking records. It's free, it's open, and people are interacting. And the most beautiful things kids are bringing their parents. So you told me the last time you went to a museum where the kids are telling, dad, let's go in. Exactly. So that is the difference. So I think we need it going back to beauty, to taste, to creating authentic stuff. And these artists are the most authentic people right now using digital tools. So let's show them, let people interact with them, and let that be the driver for entrepreneurs to use it in their own practices.

[David Senra]

But this is what I meant about, like, you're way more entrepreneur than you are investor because you just like when you, when you start a bank for the unbanked in Brazil, you're like, well, I'm not going to open up branches. I'm like, what opportunity? What's the white space that these incumbents are not? I'm a rebel. What is the white space that these incumbents are not attacking? Well, you just said, like, the museums are like, they don't have the infrastructure to display digital art. And like me, I went to Node with you. Like, the walls are like customizable. The next how the people's in there for what, like two months? Something like that?

[Mickey Malka]

Yes.

[David Senra]

Yeah. And then the next one comes in. The infrastructure still there, but now the artist gets to essentially use the infrastructure as a canvas for his. For his, his or her art.

[Mickey Malka]

We think the world will have a lot of these places. Museums will change, they will evolve. It will take a while.

[David Senra]

The location that you picked speaks to again, you're kind of just identifying what's the way they did it and what's the way I should do it. Now, where you can walk into it, it's in a very small downtown area. It's not Like a destination in and of itself. It's something you could just. It's part of the neighborhood, if that makes any sense.

[Mickey Malka]

If you read history, which is part of the beauty of playing infinite games, where you have to live in the future but also understand the past, this is not very different than what happened in Paris with the rebels in their art movement, when they were not accepted in the museums. And this is how the impressionism came to be. And all the art that was a revolution that changed the way we look at art in the last 100 years. We're living through that same moment. Funny enough, it's not in Paris. Maybe it's starting in Palo Alto.

[David Senra]

And so you look at the first node in Palo Alto almost like a prototype.

[Mickey Malka]

Yes. Because the name node is meant to be a node in the network. So we will be learning here for the next year to perfection our technology, improve our UIs. There's a bunch of engineers working on this. It's a foundation with engineers. Think of how different it is to traditional art and then expanding and opening many other places.

[David Senra]

Another thing they want to talk to you about. What's with your fascination with rebels? It's all over your website. People know you talk about this all the time.

[Mickey Malka]

Well, first, I'm a Star wars generation, right. And I grew up with Star Wars. I'm a big fan of Star wars. And to me growing up in Venezuela, the only way to survive in that environment is you have to be a rebel. The system, the dark side was all over. The chaos was present. You had to race above, above that. And the rebel mindset is one where you know authentically and genuinely that something can be better and you're willing to give your life for it. To me, being a rebel is just a way of being. It's a way of looking at the world. And when you see something, you can always look at it and accept, how do you make it better? How do you make it more beautiful? How can what, what's missing? Like just the mindset of always being willing to know that better means it can still be better.

[David Senra]

I mean, 17 year old company.

[Mickey Malka]

Yes.

[David Senra]

That would lead me to believe that you had this like rebel. You were essentially a born rebel.

[Mickey Malka]

Yes.

[David Senra]

How did you apply that? Because people reference you as like one of the greatest, like venture capitalists. I'm like, that's not how I think of Mickey. I don't think of him as like a venture capitalist. So like when you're building Ribbit, how did you apply like your rebel, like your inherent rebel nature to you're essentially, you're almost like an artist in the sense of like, this is the canvas that I'm building. This is how you think I should do it, but this is how I'm

[Podcast Sponsor/Host Voice]

going to do it.

[David Senra]

How did you think about it when you started?

[Mickey Malka]

If I end up being labeled as a great, first, I hate labels. And second, I will be very depressed because that's not the label. I want no labels. All I want in my tombstone is to say he was a rebel. That's all I want to be said there. And that will say everything about me. The way I raise my kids, the way my relationship with my wife, the way I treat my friends, the way I make business decisions, the way I change my mind. I'm willing to change my mind if I learn something that is different. That's a rebel mindset. Everything that is the opposite is a mindset that I know too well. My kids are perfect. I'm the best at what I do and I run away from any of those things. Actually, I, I find that the rebel mindset is one that you are always asking questions. You're a rebel. You are non stop asking questions. You want to learn, you want to keep. But you and I know a lot of people that get to a point in life when they stop to ask questions and they start to preach that's past the rebel time. And everybody has that breaking point somewhere in their lives. I want that to be the last day of my life. So I need to live by that principle on everything that I do, on every behavior. I'm reveling now against the traditional art world. I'm trying to allow artists to show art in a different way. We revel at rivet the way we design it. People were asking, what are you? Are you a venture guy? Are you an early stage guy? I'm like, yes. Are you a late state guy? Yes. Are you a fintech guy? Yes. But are you doing now defense or yes. Like, yes. What's wrong? I'm not going to let anyone allow that. That is the rebel mindset.

[David Senra]

You are a founder, but you think so much like a founder. So, like this decision in 2012 to start an investment firm, like why?

[Mickey Malka]

I don't think of it as an investment firm.

[David Senra]

Okay. You have to say more about this to me.

[Mickey Malka]

It's a startup, it's a company and we build our own technology stack and we have a small team and we consider ourselves rebels. And our meetings are called Tatooine and we have Jedis and we behave.

[David Senra]

I didn't Know this?

[Mickey Malka]

Yeah, yeah.

[David Senra]

Oh, so you're really into Star Wars?

[Mickey Malka]

Completely.

[David Senra]

Are you backing Jedis or you have Jedis?

[Mickey Malka]

We back Jedis.

[David Senra]

Okay.

[Mickey Malka]

And we have Wookiees. And we are Jedis. We have the whole thematic. Truly alive in the way we think because it has to be authentic. And people that work with us at Rivi, the whole team feels that ownership, that teamwork. Investment firms are very silo in many ways. And I don't love that we want to over communicate, even internally. Right now the entire team knows that we're sitting together. Everybody can see my calendar in my inbox. They can see my emails and I can see anybody's emails. We share all the information so we can actually become better as a team. That mindset is very revel in this environment and how we make decisions. We don't make individual decisions, we make group decisions. And there's no like somebody asked who's the partner responsible for that company? It's like, what partner? And you as a founder, I don't know. I called Mickey for something, I called Nick for something, I called Justin for something. We are just a team that works together in very different ways. So that is the joy of going to the office every day. I love being there and spending time with the team because we just have fun together.

[David Senra]

What was the insight, though that caused you to do this instead of because you started how many companies before this? This is your sixth company? Yes, something like that. So like. But your six company looks vastly different from your first five, correct?

[Mickey Malka]

Yes.

[David Senra]

So like, what was the insight between five and six though?

[Mickey Malka]

I had to. In the infinite game, I just had to learn how to do it right. And this time I do it right because I consider myself. Even though they were successful and they created a lot of impact and changed other people's lives around the world, I consider myself a failed entrepreneur.

[David Senra]

That's absurd. That's what you got to say, like, why?

[Mickey Malka]

Because the best entrepreneurs never have to sell their company.

[David Senra]

Okay, Not a fist bump on that. There you go.

[Mickey Malka]

So I had to learn for 20 years how to get to the point to design the structure, the culture, the team, the knowledge, the aperture, the brand. Compound all those values to a place where we can do something for forever.

[David Senra]

This is the infinite game.

[Mickey Malka]

This is the infinite game.

[David Senra]

Nick Sleep has one of my favorite lines ever. And he goes, the best investors aren't investors. They're entrepreneurs who never sold 100%.

[Mickey Malka]

I agree.

[David Senra]

So that's fascinating. Look, okay, the fact is, I'm a failed entrepreneur because I had to Exit. You had crazy successful exits, too, for my first five, because I didn't find the vehicle in which I can do forever, which is again, when. When again, like, I'm, like, new to being relatively known in, like, this community in the last, like, five years for podcasts. And I didn't understand because I sat in a room by myself for a decade, just talked into a microphone and read books, and I didn't think about the outside world at all. And then everything kind of came to me. And so now I have to, like, constantly vet everybody around me. And I get a lot of advice from, like, especially, like, older, more successful entrepreneurs. Like, man, you have to be so careful with, like, because there's. Goes back to Charlie Munger. It's like, most people are rat poison. Yeah, right. And, like. And it's just like, you have to, like, vet them in all different directions. But when I. And even people I want to have dinner with or talk to, like, you, you ask a bunch of people, and they're just like, he's obsessed with this infinite game, this infinite game. He's like, he doesn't need more money and he doesn't need to do another deal in his life, but he just can't stop.

[Mickey Malka]

But it's this joy. It's this thing that every day you get better, and you just are improving. And, you know, I sat with Charlie Munger once after another meeting at the Hoppy Hollow Golf Club, where Warren had this thing afterwards. And I saw myself, and I only had one stock of pressure. I was probably 24 years old and 25. And I sit next to him. Well, he sits next to me. I'm sitting. He says, is he sitting? I said, no, come on, sit here, Charlie. And we started to talk. And that room was everybody. Bill Gates was there, all these big CEOs of all these companies. And I was, like the youngest guy by an order of magnitude. And he looks at me and says, you must be very wealthy to be here. And I said, actually, no. I only own one share. He says, you don't get it. You are the wealthiest guy in the room. And I said, you're wrong, Charlie. No, no, you are. Why? You have the power of time. All of us here are in our last chapter. You're just starting your time. You will compound for the next 70 years of your life. So never forget the rule I'm about to tell you. You only need to get rich once. And then that was it. He says, and now I'm going to eat. And just sat down and eat.

[David Senra]

I love that time is the only true currency you have.

[Mickey Malka]

It's the only true currency you have.

[David Senra]

I appreciate you spending your time giving it to us today. Nice talking.

[Mickey Malka]

Thank you for having me.

[David Senra]

I hope you enjoyed this episode.

[Podcast Sponsor/Host Voice]

Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read

[David Senra]

over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work.

[Podcast Sponsor/Host Voice]

Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through founders.