20VC: From Struggling to Raise Funding to IPOing at Close to $9BN Just Five Years Later; The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | How To Build Large Companies with Small Teams | The Biggest Hiring Lessons and Mistakes with Seba Kanovich, CEO @ dlocal

Seba Kanovich is the CEO @ dlocal, the #1 payments leader with a single solution focused on Latin America and other emerging markets. In June 2021, dlocal raised $617M in their NASDAQ IPO listing valuing the company at nearly $9BN. Before their IPO, dlocal raised from some of the best including General Atlantic, Bond Capital, and Oren Zeev to name a few. Prior to dlocal, Seba was CEO @ AstroPay, a leading payment solution provider in Emerging Markets.

In Todays Episode with Seba Kanovich We Discuss:

1.) The Journey to CEO of an $8BN Company:

• How Seba made his way to the role of CEO of an $8BN company through dinner at his mother-in-law’s house?

• What does Seba know now that he wishes he had known when he first became CEO?

2.) Leadership 101:

• What does “high performance” in business and leadership mean?

• How important are velocity and speed of execution in startups? When should one trade speed for quality? Where is the nuance?

• How does Seba approach prioritization? What framework does he use to determine what to focus on?

• How does Seba think through effective delegation? How can leaders determine what only they can do?

3.) Leadership: The Challenges and Lessons:

• What are Seba’s biggest insecurities in leadership today? How does he manage them? How have they changed over time?

• What is the single most painful leadership lesson Seba has learned that he is also pleased to have learned?

• What gets easier with scale as a leader? What gets harder?

• In a scaling organization, what is the first thing to break? What can be done to mitigate this?

4.) The Funding and The IPO:

• Why did dlocal bootstrap for 4 years instead of raise funding? How did that process change their mindset toward capital efficiency? What was good about it? What was bad?

• What are the single biggest advantages great investors can bring to the table?

• Why did Seba decide 2021 was the right time to go public?

• What was the biggest surprise about going public? What is better and what is worse about being a public company?

Items Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Seba’s Favourite Book: Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse