David Vélez Osorno
Co-founder 2013Background
David Vélez was born in Medellín, Colombia in 1981 and moved to Costa Rica at age 8 due to violence. He studied Management Science & Engineering at Stanford and worked at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, General Atlantic, and Sequoia Capital before founding Nubank in 2013. His decision to start Nubank was triggered by Sequoia's cancellation of its Brazil expansion plans and his personal frustration with Brazil's banking bureaucracy. Vélez's single most important early decision was recruiting co-founders who filled his gaps: Junqueira for Brazilian banking expertise and Wible for technical leadership.
Role at Nu Holdings Ltd.
Nubank possesses arguably the most reactive, vindictive founding story in the entire history of global fintech, rooted entirely in a frustrating, traumatic personal banking experience that infuriated a young, ambitious venture capitalist. The company was founded in 2013 in São Paulo, Brazil, by David Vélez (a brilliant Colombian who had studied at Stanford and was working for the venture capital firm Sequoia), Cristina Junqueira (an experienced Brazilian banking executive), and Edward Wible (an American software engineer). Vélez possessed a personal 'eureka' moment. When he first moved to São Paulo, he attempted to open a basic bank account at one of the established Brazilian banks. The experience was a nightmare. He was forced to endure humiliating security checks (including armed guards and metal detectors), incomprehensible bureaucracy, and waited for months simply to get a basic credit card that charged fees. He was enraged. He realized that the Brazilian banking oligopoly was lazy, arrogant, and vulnerable to disruption. He heavily recruited Junqueira (who had just quit her lucrative job at Itaú Unibanco out of disgust for their predatory practices). Their foundational masterstroke was rejecting the cynical belief that Latin Americans couldn't be trusted with credit. By heavily utilizing advanced data science to precisely underwrite risk and prioritizing customer obsession (famously sending handwritten notes to users), they transformed a frustrating banking errand into the foundational architecture of the Latin American fintech revolution.