Fireside Chat, Interview
dLocal CEO Sebastian Kanovich: The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | 20VC #926
- Seba Sacerdotte joined D-Local ten years ago by chance at a mother-in-law's birthday party in Montevideo, despite having no prior background in payments.
- He defines high performance as employees who bring energy to the workspace, focus on solutions rather than problems, and take personal ownership to fix issues immediately.
- Sacerdotte emphasizes that while luck played a role in his career start, success is driven by 10 years of hard work and a deliberate aversion to losing, which motivates rapid execution.
- The company's growth strategy prioritizes speed of execution, iterating quickly to test assumptions and learn, though regulatory barriers and public market status now require more structured risk management.
- A major hiring lesson learned was avoiding the "logo trap," where candidates are recruited based on their past corporate affiliations rather than their fit for specific, immediate situational needs.
- D-Local's product strategy is entirely customer-led, with no internal roadmaps developed without direct signals from enterprise clients regarding expansion needs or new product requests.
- In 2019, the company ran a failed fundraising process which taught leadership to prioritize finding the right strategic partner over optimizing for valuation or following standard investment banking procedures.
- D-Local operated as a profitable bootstrapped company from 2016 to 2019 without venture capital, a constraint that ingrained a culture of extreme frugality and customer-funded growth.
- The decision to raise capital from General Atlantic unlocked a mindset shift from short-term survival to building a company intended to last 100 years.
- Geographic expansion focuses on high-friction emerging markets (Latin America, India, Africa, APAC) where competitors are scarce, rather than deep penetration in low-friction developed markets.
- The company maintains a lean workforce of approximately 650 employees across 35 countries, leveraging remote operations and a low-ego culture where titles are viewed as temporary responsibilities.
- Leadership utilizes a "bridge" model for international expansion, mixing local hires with expatriates from the core team to balance local market knowledge with company culture.
- The company went public in 2021, driven by the need for increased transparency to build trust with merchants and providers, despite the CEO's personal discomfort with public speaking.
- Post-IPO challenges include adapting to quarterly reporting cycles and managing market sentiment, which Sacerdotte notes requires balancing financial metrics with the "tone" of communication.
- Sacerdotte identifies his biggest leadership insecurity as a fear of age and irrelevance, specifically the prospect of becoming a "Macaulay Culkin" figure of venture capital who is no longer useful.
- His personal philosophy is to avoid overthinking; he believes in acting efficiently and stepping away from problems to gain perspective in different ecosystems.
- The company's long-term vision is to evolve from a payment processor into a comprehensive financial services provider for emerging markets, expanding beyond pay-ins to payouts and issuing.