Show Notes
Micky Malka is the founder of Ribbit Capital and helped create Node, which he describes as the first digital art studio designed for digital artists. He calls himself “an entrepreneur at heart and an investor by design”—a deliberately broad description that allows him to resist labels, which is precisely the point. The one label he wants on his tombstone: “He was a rebel.”
In his mid-20s, Malka and his partners put all the proceeds from their first dot-com exit into starting Lemon Bank in Brazil. He says they nearly lost everything when the economy failed to take off. At its peak Lemon Bank operated roughly 7,000 locations and served 50 million customers while targeting Brazil’s large unbanked population. He later sold it to Brazil’s largest bank.
Years later, after meeting Walmart CEO Doug McMillon in 2019, Malka proposed that Walmart and Ribbit build a better financial-services business together. That effort became OnePay, which now provides payments, debit, credit and lending products across Walmart’s ecosystem.
At Ribbit, decisions are made as a group, no single partner is assigned to a company, and the team shares calendars, inboxes and emails. Malka confirms that Ribbit is his sixth company and says he intends to keep building it indefinitely. As he puts it, “The best entrepreneurs never have to sell their company.”
Show notes: https://www.davidsenra.com/episode/micky-malka
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Chapters
(00:00:00) Why Micky Malka Refuses to Be Labeled
(00:03:00) Writing Your Way to Conviction
(00:05:41) Buying Berkshire at 13 and Learning Buffett's Operating System
(00:11:48) Token Factories, AI Bankers, and the Future of Money
(00:18:38) The Infinite Game: Why It's Better to Be Behind
(00:22:09) Gen Z Founders and the Chaordic Company
(00:29:00) Why Young Founders Want to Build Atoms, Not Just Bits
(00:34:29) Bringing Beauty and Taste Back to Technology
(00:36:56) Revolut, Founder DNA, and Earning Deep Trust
(00:45:54) Building OnePay With Walmart
(00:50:53) From Lemon Bank to OnePay: A 20-Year Idea
(00:56:00) Compounding Trust and Protecting Your Reputation
(01:00:30) Node and the Rebel Case for Digital Art
(01:07:34) What It Means to Live as a Rebel
(01:10:50) Why Ribbit Is Built Like a Startup
(01:14:41) Charlie Munger and the Power of Time Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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