143- Enter: Building AI from Brazil.

Hello everyone, my name is Philippe and this is the podcast live with AI the podcast that you talk about artificial intelligence in a simple way and Today's episode I think it's one of the most important episodes in the history of this podcast if it's not the most important one First I'm here with Matheus Costa Hibero the founder and CEO of enter the company that I work at and Also, this is the podcast one hundred of life with AI incredible and what the funny is is that I stopped doing this podcast in English to keep doing it Only in Portuguese in Portuguese. I have like a hundred forty something episodes and then I stopped doing it in the In the episode ninety nine to say okay, I finished before reaching a hundred but then I came back here to do a very very important And that's all with Matheus and a podcast brought to you by by Sequoia Capital with all the the Sequoia infrastructure and cameras and And microphones at the Sequoia Center Road Office and I heard they're going to send us a term sheet for getting some Dishonored for paying for all the logistics getting some equity. Yeah, I'd enter for an important occasion We need an important place exactly and Philippe got a very warm welcome here at Sequoia because as soon as he arrived such a big coincidence First person he meets is Pat Grady who runs the court and then second person he meets is Alfred who is Coastward along with Pazzo, you know, they really made a made a big preparation to receive you over here at the headquarters And they are super nice by the way. Yeah. Yeah, so for the audience that still don't know myself I will quickly introduce myself and then do a good introduction about Matheus So for me, I'm Philippe. I'm an engineer from U FMG in Brazil I did systems engineering there worked a little bit on research I published some papers on insider trading and NEI for detecting insider trading in the Brazilian market Then I went to France. I did telecom Paris engineering degree in telecom Paris and a master's in AI in Sorbonne University and then I spent some years there working on the AI field I was leading an AI company there for apply the AI on health insurance and last year I decided to come back to Brazil to work with Matheus at Enter and help leading the AI efforts at Enter to become the biggest apply the AI company in Brazil and to introduce Matheus like Before he is the CEO and a good friend of mine But besides that he also has some prizes that he won during his life So he entered university at 14 years old So 14 years old the guy was going to college He did Law degree in Brazil and he was the youngest Brazilian ever to got a Law degree in Brazil Then he went to the U.S. to do an LLM at Harvard and he was the youngest person ever to receive an LLM from Harvard You were like 19 years old 20 years old. I arrived when I was 19. I graduated when I was 20. Yeah crazy I couldn't drink in the U.S. Oh my god. My university years were very unfortunate because I joined University in Brazil when I was 14 and I graduated At 18 right after I was able to drink because in Brazil drinking ages 18 Yeah, but I soon after travel moved to the U.S. where I couldn't drink and I joined my game became began my master's at 19 and Again, it was back to university without being able to drink or go to a proper club He was also the youngest Brazilian to win a case the youngest person actually to win a case in the Brazilian Supreme Court Then he went back to the USA to work as a lawyer came back to Brazil to work in a Brazilian startup and decided to go to Stanford to pursue an MBA with John's Hansey scholarship that we had an amazing discussion with him today and then he made the best decision of his life That is creating the MBA in Stanford to start enter so Matheus thinks a lot for being here my pleasure It's amazing to have you a CEO of enter and work together with you. You bet. I'm so excited for my my first podcast And as you said we are here in the Sequoia headquarters Which is by the way an amazing place. I never saw a place like this huge you have everything like this podcast place here It's the best one I ever saw anyways, so we are here in the Sequoia headquarters. Why did you accept the investments from Sequoia? How was this like conversation to have enter as one of Sequoia's company invested? Yeah, I think The enter Sequoia connections connection begins with Stanford I came to Stanford in August 23 to get my MBA and the primary reason why I applied to the MBA was because I wanted to find an Idea to pursue have the right co-founders and also race capital so three things I was looking for in coming to the valley The thing is that I found those three things much faster than I expected didn't take me the full two years of the MBA And as a result I started the company during my MBA and we already had some customers and so forth Now Sequoia comes in through Constantine who was actually a Stanford undergrad also got his MBA at GSB And he's very plugged into the Stanford at work of course getting to know people who are building companies potential investments And he was generous enough to invite me to a Sequoia host to dinner with a bunch of MBA students that were starting companies Or had already started or we're thinking of building something some also technical potential potential technical founders And I got a code email from him inviting me to this dinner and It was actually my last week at the GSB because I had already decided to drop out and I was going back to Brazil Because I had a company already I was Mike and Hiki and I we were already Talking about partnering up and we had already raised 1.5 million dollars roughly And in that dinner I was obsessed about sitting right beside Constantine because I wanted to pitch him the idea I was I wanted to to get to know him personally However the dinner so I arrived 30 minutes earlier to the dinner because I wanted to sit in the perfect place And get the chance to pitch him have dinner but they had a science seating And I was way back in the corner of the table in the opposite side And so I had to take wait for the whole dinner when dessert was buy-in and one of the students actually went to the bathroom I rushed to take a seat right beside him and I said hey nice to meet you my name is Matthäus And I'm building talisman which was the first name event to actually enter was rebranded With the help of Sequoia's branding team actually right before we came out of public after about a year and a half in stealth And at the time we were called talisman and I pitched him our idea I said we were already working with new bank as a design partner even though the company was still pre-revenue And we spoke for like 20 minutes and we hand shake as we say goodbye And he tells me as soon as you come to the US I want to lead your seed round And I'm like well but we have no and I don't say it out loud at the time but I actually want to build this company from Brazil That's why I'm dropping out of GSB that's how I'm coming back and my chip on the shoulder at the time was I want to prove that it's possible to build an incredible great world class AI company from Brazil And my big role model is actually the people that also led me to apply to the GSB are Marcos and David Marcos the founder and CEO of Mica do Livre, David the founder and CEO of New Bank Who were both GSB MBAs as well Actually there's a 13 year difference between Marcos and David and the 30 year difference between David and my class So it sounded like the perfect place to come to GSB I mean these two role models they're they're now investors at editor And I had the chance to spend some time of them as a result So the mindset was we're going to build this from Brazil And in the next six months Constantine and I we spoke every now and then And I knew that his big objection to potentially investing was you know how big in this company Can you actually build a world class AI company from Brazil? There aren't any at this point we will be the first we'll be trailblazers And I come to the valley six months later I had already dropped out to actually have a one-on-one with Sam Altman at his house At Lumberth Street we basically spoke for an hour I showed him enter the product how we were using open AI We had a we had a nice chat and since I was already in San Francisco I caught up with Constantine I scheduled to have a chat with him at the Sequoia San Francisco office Down in Alabama street and I only focused my conversation around one single topic which was market size How can this company be tremendously successful and actually big operating out of Brazil And the pitch revolved around entirely the Brazilian market how big the opportunity in legal was In fact that Brazil has eight times more consumer lawsuits than the US And primarily our initial enterprise traction fact that companies were paying to use entry we had already signed I think three contracts So he finishes the the conversation in between me leaving the office and getting to my car like that's less than two minutes There's an email in my inbox with the with the subject line energizing And that's Constantine asking for customer intros to two of our customers he spoke to two of them And the feedback was we have no place to hide without enter we need there's no competitor we need this This tool they're driving our wind rates up we need them to can to survive the mass litigation environment in Brazil And you know a week later we fly to San Francisco to San Francisco We come down to Sequoia's partner meeting Monday morning at at Sanjo Road right right where we are And we pitch the partnership and they they give us a term sheet This is incredible I didn't know this story you didn't know the story but at this time that you got the investment You already have in HIKI Vaz and Mike with US co-founders right yeah exactly so from the first conversation And still didn't have them and then when we got the investment Mike and Vaz was we're already with you Yeah, that's the thing when we when I first met Constantine the company was somewhat immature Because I was still a part-time founder I was getting my MBA Mike and in HIKI hadn't yet joined They joined right while when I dropped from GSB they also left their jobs at wildlife And we got together worked working in person from São Paulo And Sequoia invested about six months later after we had some traction, a proven product and so forth And how much of enter success so far to consider of being able to bring Mike and HIKI to the team as co-founders the few That's an incredible part of our success I think I remember perfectly the moment when I decided we were gonna join efforts I was actually spending New Year's Eve right after leaving GSB This is December of 23 with many GSB friends that actually had they had a house in Jose Nasu and Uruguay And we were we were spending time there for New Year's and New Year's was chaos Because Vas is calling me from Japan and he's saying man you know what we're gonna quit wildlife and Mike was on board And we're going to let's get together, let's figure out equity split, how much equity each person gets, what's going to be the division We had to say who's going to be the CEO because the company had no titles at the time Who's going to run product, who's going to run technology, who's going to run people We had to and I didn't know Mike and HIKI that well, actually Mike I didn't know well at all and HIKI knew because we went to Harvard, he went to Harvard College Roughly at the same time as I was at the law school so we had common friends and so forth And I remember walking at the beach in Jose Nasu after we had kind of set the terms of working together And it was a very peaceful moment looking at the beach and my conclusion was to get this to become a generational company I need a lot of technical help, I won't be able to do it on my own And it felt like the right decision And a big contribution was actually came from Julio Vas Gonzalez who wasn't actually an investor at the time And he was helping me look for a CTO co-founder CTO and I was looking for basically folks working at startups and he said no you should try to hire the CTO of New Bank, the CTO of Miracadolid with CTO of Wildlife But he said it kind of in a joking manner but that stuck with me Okay, the bar is this high and it makes sense because enter is going to be such a big company, it's a huge opportunity I may be able to convince a very seasoned CTO to join The thing is it's very hard for these people to be hungry because they already made so much money and I found the hunger in Mike Because he was a technical CTO who had been CTO at Wildlife for 12 years so he had all the experience of actually building incredible software And he brought that to enter while still being hungry for the technology And the way I remember pitching him the following concept Okay, Mike, you're ready the founder of one unicorn like Wildlife is a valuable company you made you made a lot of money You're going to be the first person ever out of Latin America to start and be the CTO of two companies Of two unicorn companies and enter we're going all the way to IPO level going this is the biggest technological change since mobile Which is the tech revolution that Wildlife served an export and we're now going to AI it's going to be such an incredible intellectual journey And we basically decided to join efforts and we never looked back since Yeah, I think it was probably the best idea that you had after the one of dropping out from Stanford to start doing it They only joined because I dropped out that's they were angel investors that's a good story they actually invested I think $10,000 each in September of 23 And then they tracked the company progress and they were impressed by the clients and so forth And when I actually dropped out they said okay, this guy's committed maybe we should we should jump on board I was discussing once with Mike and I asked him why did you really decide to quit everything you had Because you were super comfort in your life, why did you decide to quit to join enter and rebuild everything from scratch And he said because of materials I said him was it about like the apply day I stuff was it about like the specific market that we were trying to do He said no I trusted materials and I think he will be the best CEO that we're going to have in Brazil And that's why I joined and I said if Mike decided to do so who am I to disagree with him Because for folks that don't know Mike and probably he will come to this podcast later also I'm preparing also a special episode with him Mike is a monster like imagine having your situ as an idol for the whole engineering team We fight not really fight but we fight to have time to spend with him because he loves to code So when we have the hardest problems that we need to solve on enter we invite Mike to help us and this is the happiest moment for him Now the engineers at enter they literally fight to see who's going to be seated right beside Mike Yeah this is true And this is actually true and I remember Atuz who is one of our senior engineers He was at the other side of the office a week so I basically sit on one side Mike and he came on the other side The engineering team is all split up and then when Atuz realized he was not sitting beside Mike like all of a sudden one week later he chipped Because he wants to get Mike's feedback and he wants to watch Mike coding It's like watching the Vinci paint that's like he's an artist that's literally what happens with the engineering team And the level of admiration is what keeps the engineering team committed motivated and that's why you joined Because of course you maybe you trust the business sense at enter you trust my business sense and so forth But you're an engineer at heart you want to work with great people that are excited about doing incredible work And that's why bringing Mike as it yo was so key At the same time Mike is is an innovative and creative engineer And I think the way that Enhiki compliments him is perfect because at the same time Enhiki has been decisive in pushing us to be very demanding and have a very high bar for talent Like he is the only person that interviews everybody that's hired at enter no exception And I don't even do that and he's obsessed about talent he was arguing he's the person responsible for probably 80% of the engineering hires that we got And at the same time he understands what makes us money in a way that's very profound while also understanding their architecture So I would say that the way we split ourselves is okay my tail is responsible for a bit of product vision all the salesmanship and we need to and fundraising and like making sure that this company is on track to be very big and defensible Mike is the coder of the architect and and he is the brilliant mind behind engineering And Enhiki has always operated as a bridge between the two and Mike was his best man at his wedding and vice versa so they're also they've worked together for six years and they have this just deep intellectual connection Yeah, I think like the tree of you together is invincible literally and and also this is a little bit why I came to enter the story is quite fun I don't know if you know the full story but I was in Brazil back in Brazil for three months to spend the European winter to have some sort of story You know the full story I just remember this guy from France that Enhiki really wanted to hire and like he said you need to sell him for 30 minutes on coming back to Brazil And I'm like is this guy even does he even want to come to Brazil I'm just wasting my time this and he said no no no you have to do this I remember we met the first time you came by to buy the office Yes it was super cool but the crazy part is that I went to Sao Paulo I never been in Sao Paulo before and the offices are in Sao Paulo I went to Sao Paulo to give a lecture in IBM because they invited me when they saw that I was in Brazil I have an amazing friend from France that worked in Microsoft France that is Gilemi Maha that he said mate I'm working in this new startup You know I came back to Brazil come here to met them and then I went to enter his office and I talked to Enhiki for one hour He explained me a little bit of what they were doing and I said they were doing a lot of document processing Exactly what I worked in France and I said ah you can change this this and this in your architecture it will be a little bit better And then they actually changed it because when I joined the enter two months later I saw that everything I told him was already changing the code which was super cool That's how fast we move I enter that's that's true it's super super fast And then I talked to Enhiki and he said I would be amazing to have you one word with us and I said I'm so sorry I'm going back to France in two weeks So he said no you should come you should come come here tomorrow to talk with Mike and I said I can come but I need to go back to my city And Mike also he studied at Polytechnique so he lived in France for several years and France actually became one of the countries we recruit the most from Yes we have Maha Zamuju there's actually we call the French team French team Do you guys actually have a select channel now we don't because I always joke of the French team selection but we recruited so many folks from the best like Central Polytechnique Telecom etc because of Mike and I think he had an impact in you when you guys spoke Yeah for sure and then when I came back to enter to talk to Mike I said come on I'm going to quit And then he went to give an offer to someone and when he came back he talked to and he can he said that maybe there is a way for you to come here And I said yes I'm going to quit my job on Monday so if you want I'm free and come back to Brazil Yeah and then I talked to him he said amazing let's see what you can do here at enter what you would like to do what we need and so one It's amazing that we're actually having this conversation at Sequoia because once there was a very famous Brazilian banker that came to Silicon Valley And they asked Mike Moritz who was one of Sequoia's legendary investors why they didn't had it invested ever in Brazil I think at the time they hadn't done new bank yet And he said well it's because you don't have the engineering talent to build world class companies this is like 10-15 years ago And part of it is because most of the talented great engineers of Brazil are moving abroad just like you were working in Paris They're working in New York and in Mountain View and Google and so forth So we had a very clear image in our heads myself Mike and Hiki the three of us could have lived international careers and the three of us decided to come to Brazil So we said we have a right to win in hiring and getting the best talent back to Brazil because that's our personal story We're all investing in Brazil with our time our money our resources our families and even though we had visas to live in the US or to live in France and so forth And I think that became we became the most powerful hiring flywheel we could have got because one person brings the other And now you have friends whenever we were trying to hire somebody from Paris they speak to Philippi they're not the first and that just creates a great network effect of talent that really allowed us to build a level of talent density that has never been I think created in Brazil before Yeah I really believe that the talent city that we have at enter is like incredible Not only the brands of universities and previous companies that we have but folks that were working on companies that no one knew about but they're monsters But like we are talking a lot about the founders and the team and so on but we didn't discuss yet about what we do at enter So maybe we think you can talk a little bit about what problem we're trying to solve at enter Yeah of course my vision for enter is that we're building the leading enterprise AI company initially for Latin America but in the future for the entire world And we decided to start off with a very focused niche market which is helping enterprise customers with a self-driving lawyer enters the self-driving lawyer for enterprises in other words We're looking at litigation workflows specifically consumer litigation and labor litigation and we're having we build AI agents that are able to do roughly three things First of all connect to court websites and systems to read every single update on a lawsuit that's been filed for example against Airbnb or new bank to our customers And we understand everything that's going on in these lawsuits Number two we have to integrate with the company's internal systems to figure out what actually happened So if somebody is suing for example Latam Airlines because their luggage got lost or because their flight was cancelled was that flight actually cancelled is this guy lying to get damages paid What's the truth behind that so we need to review internal systems and understand exactly do an evidence collection process to find the truth Now the third step is the final intellectual work product where enter works together with partner law firms to have an AI drafted lawsuit answer or an appeal you know some kind of intellectual evil work that is reviewed properly audited by a human being before it's filed in court Now why is this problem important for me and why is it worth solving well because the way I see it enters not a is not an AI company we're not a startup we're company that's transforming the tech scene in Brazil We're putting Brazil on the map on the artificial intelligence map in the world and that's why we've been very focused on helping the country evolve and join the air revolution in two ways We're bringing talent from a broad just like Philippi joint I left the US come back to Brazil but also we're making the enterprises much more profitable and efficient by for example saving Latam Airlines dozens of millions of dollars every year in damages that they're not paying because answers drafted with the help of of enters AI win lawsuits 30% more than answers that are not drafted with AI assistance So in other words we're helping Latam Airlines win more lawsuits when they're not supposed to be paying damages and we do the same with Airbnb whenever for example somebody suits Airbnb for arriving at some place for vacation and it's not the proper location That's actually a customer that's a coil helped us help to get well we're going to answer that can't complaint in the most profound exhaustive way after using AI to to analyze it and review every single piece of evidence at that Airbnb has to provide because we connect with all of their internal systems And that's in fact position a enter to handle consumer litigation at first which is our wedge inside each company but it's actually the the first step to becoming a full-fledged AI partner for these enterprises that's why the name of the company is enter it's not enter law actually there was an angel investor when we were starting the company that said don't use just enter use enter law And I'm like that's you don't get it it's the opposite of our vision we want to the legal world is the first step into a much bigger vision that's going to last for 20 years And so that's what enter does but more specifically we started the company because I think he key Mike and I we wanted to we had the intrinsic motivation of building a company and working at a place that had absolutely zero tolerance for bullshitting And at a very high bar for quality and speed so starting a company was also the last refuge after not being happy in any other place where I worked I wasn't happy working at a lot firm I wasn't happy working at at at someone else to start up So I felt like we had to build our own company with our own culture and with two big objectives having the intrinsic motivation of building the best team that's obsessed about doing incredible work And we pick the hardest problems to solve precisely because they're hard I really believe that smart people sharp people they're motivated by how hard something is and by the challenges that they face And on the other hand we were also really motivated by having a big impact in the economy of Brazil initially as the first smart you know niche to win you have is like playing risk or war board game you have to choose a continent to start which goes legal specifically consumer litigation as a wedge into a much broader life project for the company And I think what I also worth mentioning is that we are not a copilot for lawyers we package the whole solution we deliver everything ready for them they just need to reveal and well do whatever they want to do Because most of the AI companies and apply they are companies they are copilot for specific niche that would gain like a 20 30% productivity with the software but this is not what we do What we try to do is literally solve the problem for them so we can give them a draft solution but not a draft solution that they need to spend 50% of the time that they previously did by making it perfect No, we make a perfect lawsuit defense for them a perfect understanding of what's happening in the case and they just need to reveal when confirm and for security Exactly and that wasn't an obvious decision when we were starting the company because we had the option of building enter as a very thin layer of AI productivity as part of the of somebody else's workflow as a copilot just like you said And we made the call to have enter be an end to end workflow where the AI is performing everything that the AI can perform and is also managing the work that that is performed by our partner law firms So it's a vision of taking the entire workflow being much more end to end solution but as a result it has lower gross margins because you have a bigger human interaction and as a result you need to focus on lots of workflow as specificities that are not necessarily related to AI But I really believe that that's what makes the business very defensible and extremely sticky because meeting all the core deadlines maybe that's not an AI workflow it's some kind of automation or but it's quite sticky because you know that's mission critical to win lawsuits you need to meet the deadlines if that's done inside enter Well maybe that's not where the value recruits but it makes the product much harder to switch off so going and to end and going vertical just taking the entire workflow was a very big decision we made in 2025 and I'm very proud that we were brave enough to take take to take on the challenge and and going that direction I totally agree and I think that it's even harder for competitors because when we talk about competitors we normally talk about other startups that we try to solve the same problems but when we deal with the amount of LLM that we do at enter maybe just the improvement of open AI is a chat GPs so Gemini Claude just the improvement of these models could literally run our whole business model because the model by itself would be able to be a better copilot and we are ourselves because we would just be a rapper of chat GPs and this is literally what we are not because if the model goes better our solution will go better but it's not at all what we deliver The model will still not be able to deliver lots of defenses without hallucination will not be able to deliver the understanding of the whole process because they're not connected to the systems and so on So I think this decision that you guys made in the beginning to not be a copilot and really focus on the end to end this is something that I think it's very clever Yeah and it's where our mode comes from and it was I had to take away from from chatting with Sam from open AI back in right before we raised our seed round from Sequoia The first thing was you should use fundraising as a way to block competitors and gain credibility early on as a startup So he really you know he's a master fundraiser especially because he was at why coming here and so forth so he really gave that tip you should conflict the funds and bring the best folks to your side so do raise go raise from Sequoia And he he also gave us a big big tip which was you know if you're building the company I actually demoed him the product and he said he pointed out a few features and he said okay this this and that opening I will be able to do it about two years But X Y and Z we're not going this direction and this has some entrenched integrations and access to customer data private data and so forth you need to be extremely good at this because this is what's going to stop people from chat GPT enter away So that concern of again fundraise conflicting the funds and and focusing a lot on access to private data being very good integrations and so forth that's what's going that's that was a step for making enter irreplaceable and I think we've really acted on that feedback Interesting to know I didn't know all these stories but I knew that you discussed with some Altman and you said something to me when I joined that stick to my mind forever that is I don't know if I told you this but he told you and you told me that You should always take a look on stuff that is coming you about AI someone and this was true he also said that it's true And this was something that stick to my mind because when I was in France working there I spent three years developing the best AI internal package because we had to deliver document processing features before chat GPT to nine different countries So I had algorithms reading documents of Thai language in Spanish in Japanese in Chinese completely different so how can I make algorithms in a scalable way that the product will be the same but the algorithms will be completely different for this completely different languages So I spent three years developing it and then when chat GPT came chat GPT was not better than my algorithm so I just ignored it but over time I was not taking a look deeply in the solutions and the improvements that we're having this fields of telelamps that when I joined enter and I saw that everything that I was doing with dozens of algorithms there you were using chat GPT and it was better than what I was doing. Then when you told me this expression the sentence that hit of you I said yes I'm in the right place you can become obsolete in a matter of months and that's part of the stilling the culture of throwing things away as fast as they become obsolete so you need to also have some detachment of your own creation as an engineer or as a founder and be pragmatic about it if the technology is improving and I don't evolve and I'm in denial or I'm just lazy to evolve it any disruptor that's starting today has an edge and that compounds over time especially if you're an older company so having that obsession of basically incorporating the new technology and being detached from your own creation is a key part of how we decided enters architecture from early on because we knew GPT 4 was coming GPT 5 was coming and 10 was coming yeah and I think it's something that we really apply at enter because if you see the product six months of difference it's literally another product that you cannot like if someone sleeps for six months and if I sleep for six months and I come back to enter I said you won't recognize the product not at all yeah before I joined we didn't have superhuman yeah it's crazy classification was a mess we didn't have extractors we were integrated to the court websites that's you're saying we didn't have into us we were not the operational system of the lawyer at the moment and now we are it was not even at our minds at the moment right I think we hadn't even plan because we had just signed uh sent and the bank which was our first sort of enter wise customer and then many others came by but the product was still being conceived of us taking over the entire operating system of tracking everything happens inside enter which was a big leap forward in 25 it was the biggest product decision we made yeah in the year and now entering the labor market yeah and maybe in some months entering another market maybe insurance so the funny story there's a joke with Philippi that he worked in the insurance market previously and he's always like come on the technology we have if we were to apply this insurance we would make so much money like the technology is ready and it's the same thing we would be able to review the documents and the insurance claims for insurance companies and there's one thing where the founders are unanimous it's it's focus like we only do one thing at once which makes some of our team members very anxious that we're missing out and and and not being fast enough on taking over new markets but the time will come let's just for sure we're getting we're going to get there and when it comes we're going to destroy this market because we're doing because we take the values and the culture and the execution discipline and the product velocity just to new market and we hopefully we go to the most adjacent market so that we would take advantage of everything that's been built yeah and one step at a time I think you need to have the long term vision of a 20 year company and mis focusing the company early on can be extremely disruptive if you don't have the the manpower like the the engineers and if you split not I don't have enough troops and you split them it really hurts your first your first market grab and that's why you're the CEO and I'm an engineer because you think about this future and what you focus now and I just need to make sure that the algorithms I'm building right now they will also feed for the new hell of a job there so we're good partners yeah and I think this is at least what I like the most about the company the people that I'm working with I can literally close my eyes and give them the problems and I know that the problem will be solved in the best way possible even better than if I was doing it myself I think this is part of the culture of the company that I like the most and compared to what I had in France because a lot of times we think that in Brazil we don't have the best talents but actually we do but sometimes they are abroad so we don't have the best Brazilian talents in Brazil and I think this is what being great of part of enter that is we are bringing back this talents to Brazil but what I didn't have in France is I couldn't trust the people alongside myself so I had to do a lot of activities such as hiring such as sales such as in business discussions why you being an engineer because I couldn't trust the people alongside me while in enter is completely different I can give them the problems that they will solve in the best way possible and they know that if they give me problems or if they give the engineering team problems we will solve in the best way possible and when someone says I cannot do it now it's because they can't do it now and if it was that important they would do it at the moment so trusting the people with you I think this is the biggest power that we have at least for me that attracted me the most and it's great that you say that because I think it's a direct consequence of a very intentional decision we made of building a product engineering first organization so it's crazy but three quarters of enter or engineers, engineer engineer grads so it's basically the entire engineering team and almost the entire I deployment team which is 80% of the company so these are all builders they have a builder mentality and mindset and additionally we don't compromise on IQ and just brains and sharpness when hiring for any position the fact that we have a very product engineering oriented company makes makes it in a way that we have only three people selling and that's an intentional decision because we want the product to drive and referrals to drive growth as opposed to just having a mass of sales people and when we do hire salesperson it's more of a consultant that is going to co-build the specific way we're going to deploy our AI with the customer so it also has to be a very sharp product centric salesperson in other words everybody at the company is thinking about the product and has some kind of engineering understanding of how enter works even my lines of code are still in our repo I hope they're untouched because they were very carefully and painfully coded when the company was a one person product by a lawyer exactly and unfortunately there is one part of the code that you've written that is still there and it's very hard to take it off it's still there and then like so funny I think we need to translate this creation yeah so Fika in Portuguese is stay and basically instead of using true or false for binary questions for Boolean questions Mattel decided to say stay or do not stay so no stay or empty stay or empty that's true so when we ask Boolean questions to LLM sometimes instead of having true or false we use stay or empty that shows you the grind right the obsession to getting stuff done when the company had only myself and they always argue with the business people I say please put true or false instead of stay and empty but I think they are doing that right not all the times because as it's connected directly to the output it's easier for them to just say stay or empty instead of converting after for true or false and because it works nobody actually stuck to face it you know it actually maybe we should just make it a perpetual part of the company just so we have the anecdotes so we tell the story 10 years from now in the IPO podcast yeah when we do the insurance part we also going to have the stay and empty but I was a lawyer by training and then I left to work as a as a as a product as lead product manager and then ultimately let the product team at a FinTech in Brazil and I for about a year I did several code Academy coding courses because I wanted to learn but also because I thought I had to be autonomous when starting a company like version one I had to be able to direct to build at least an MVP so I I did that for about a year and a half and when enter began the first version was actually a hundred percent build on on top of a Google forms and we had some AWS lambdas just for like API calls so that I could run some Python algorithms on the PDF the people would upload on the Google forms and also make calls to open eyes API and ultimately deliver a word document as output that was the first version of the product and at the time some some the customers were just using it for drafting legal answers it was very restricted product it's nothing like what it is today so no interface no website just a link to a Google forms and it turns out people actually used it and I knocked on the door of the first customer and I said okay this is going to cost you twelve hundred dollars a month and they accepted this was like a month before I left the NBA and I'm like perfect now I can make some trips to Asia while I'm at the NBA but let's speak to a second customer and I went to a second law firm but I said well the first law firm accepted my offer too fast let's make it a bit more expensive now now the Google forms link is going to cost you two two thousand dollars a month and they accept it as well so now I'm at three thousand roughly monthly run rate out of a one person business making plus my night Tennessee scholarship I was making great money I was going to have so much fun but then I knocked on two other doors and at some point we already had eight thousand dollars in monthly revenue before I came to the NBA and I said okay I have to this is too special moment AI is happening it's so obvious I'm actually going to dedicate the next 20 years of my life to doing this you talk a lot about the next 20 years of enter and you say clearly that you will be there and this is something that we discussed in my like first month of the company that is I really saw you a guy that will not sell and you're going to be the CEO forever because I at least I see yourself and I would like to know your point on it that it's like kind of your life is enter I would like to know from you like how do you shape the relationship with your family this the time you spent with them relationships and so on with the love that you have for enter and the long run that you're having with the company yeah so for the first time in my life after starting enter I found what I love doing and before enter it was all about what's the next step what's the next step what's the next step okay I need to am I going to be a lawyer forever am I going to be at the start of forever am I applying to GSB it was always about the next move and I think intrinsic happiness is all about finding motivation and energy from going to the office so whenever I'm feeling down I'm not positive enough like going to work on a Monday and doing our daily meeting with brand new that really pumps me up and makes me excited about about energize about life and so forth and in other words there's a lot of intrinsic motivation about the adrenaline of signing a contract and going to an invest fundraising or building the products seeing the product evolve seeing the product metrics so I found what I love because of the complexity of being a company founder so many domains on a single day so many different tasks but also the adrenaline and the emotion of trying to build something very ambitious and so I think you're right and you told me this after your first month you said the reason I believe in this company because I think you're going to stick around like forever and I think you're having so much fun and it's the truth and I actually asked you a question I said if someone offers you to rate five billion to buy the company would you sell and then you said no I don't know I said you don't want to sell right you said no I don't and I said I imagine and that's why I'm here and and five billion is a great number because it's incredibly irrational of a number so it's obviously economically it makes sense but on the other hand I think it's so hard to do what we've done like to find a great market find this type of talent if we sell the company where it's going to like I don't even know what it would take to build the same talent density again pointed to a single direction and actually Marcos turned down and offered to I think sell a bit of a little bit for I don't think five billion but like something around let's say five billion or along those lines and he didn't sell because he told me medical delivery would not become a landmark company in the and especially the biggest company in the region if he sold and it's like if we sell enter for five billion the talent is going to dissolve and at some point like it doesn't make any sense it's not the project we signed up for so again I think if you find what you love the purpose of life is to find the combination of something you really love and you're really good at sort of like the Japanese ikigai concept and then you take that skill you take that activity to an extreme and you dedicate 12 14 hours of your day to doing only that I think that's the purpose of life it's you know combining what you're incredibly good at and doing it obsessively that leads to greatness and great work so I think that's how I see enter I found what I love I'm good at it I need to do this for for 14 hours a day for the rest of my life and this is going we're I don't know where we're headed and what's going to be the outcome ultimately but it's going to be incredible and that's what really motivates me on the other hand and there's this great novel quote that I really believe in which is your professional life and money they can't buy three things which are a healthy body a peaceful mind and a house full of love and those are three things that I also value a lot so for me what balances incredible incredibly intense work is my deep desire to have a family and a house full of love and a bedrock of going out there and doing incredible work which is just coming back home to my children I'm not I'm not I'm not I'm not but the children that I will have in the future and to my wife and so forth and just feeling that there's intense love and caring in that environment and it's something that you don't fully appreciate once you have it but it's the kind of thing that as soon as you lose it you feel it right away so health for example having a healthy body you just take it for granted in the middle of chaos and work and and and getting shit done but as soon as you become sick you just value health so much and I think the same applies to having a peaceful mind and especially to having the support of your loved ones so for me the balance is you know for for 20 year marathon you can't while you're going up Mount Everest you can't let go along the way of the people that you love because it's not something that money can buy the loyalty the love the support of somebody the true support of somebody that is going to be behind you no matter what happens even if enter is a failure or even if enter is the most successful company ever so that's the thing that is the bedrock for a successful founder and if you look at the folks that I just mentioned are three angel investors well under a street David Vellus Marcos Gauperin and even Matias and Concentine like the folks that we really admire that really helped enter they have something in common the five of them they have very happy successful loving homes they're in love with their wives you know David Marcos under their older so they have children several children and they're just obsessively in love with their family and that has proven to be not a blocker but an enabler to them doing incredible work and working incredibly hard because it's it's sort of the peace it's like being healthy you need that and you need that level of stability emotion stability emotional support and even psychological calmness in order to go to work and then come home to peace and and those are three things that you need to balance out and other not to lose while being a founder and you're talking a lot about family and your future family how much does it come from your family your parents your siblings I think my parents were the biggest source of influence in my life while explicitly deciding not to influence me that much so I'll explain my father is is obsessed with success and he's very ambitious and he's always been concerned about you know having making his children feel confident that they can conquer the world but one funny anecdote is that when we were driving to our farm in Brazil from back back from Brazilian to our farmer and back sometimes we would ask him to go faster and he would jokingly say I can't because I'm carrying the next president of Brazil Matilda is going to be the next president so I I mean I can't risk his life and I was like seven years old and listening that I'm not going to be president listening hearing your father say that really builds a mentality that well I'm invincible I can do anything I want my father selling me I can be president and he's in your seven years old I can be the most important person in the country and he would say that to my siblings as well so for my father came a lot of ambition and he one of his frustrations in life is that he tried to get his PhD in the US but he couldn't quite learn English and the professional life just just took priority because he had three kids he had to put food on the table so he never quite learned English and he never studied abroad so his one priority in life was I need to make my children extremely confident and I want my son to go to Harvard and he took a picture of me when I was five years old at the Harvard Law School sign that we still I still have at my at my house actually and he has in his bedroom it's my picture when I was in my graduation and my five year old picture and so his influence had to do with you know Matheus has to be confident that he can do anything and that's the part where he chose not to influence me too much he needs to fly beyond what I did in life I don't want him to be here in brazilia with me forever I want him to go beyond the limits and the boundaries that I knew and that means going to study in the United States and deciding his life path there so that's why he focused he needs to learn English he needs to do well in school and he needs to go to Harvard and that's why I got my master's degree there and in my LLM and then took the New York bar and ultimately practiced law in the US on the other hand my mother's influence was much more conservative and academic driven my mother is a public school teacher so she she is a teacher's first to fifth grade math sciences and as a result while she was teaching my sister who was two years older math and and how to read and write and so forth I was learning by osmosis because I would also participate and that's why I became a very precocious kid and they asked me to jump a grade when I was in second grade and ultimately I passed I went to university at 14 four years earlier than most kids but my mother like she despised money she's all about academia and being smart and growing in life as a result of your efforts and your intellectual efforts but she didn't have this big business sense of making a lot of money and being very successful it's very Catholic family as well so in the Catholic culture it's not that well seen to be crazy ambitious you know Jesus was a very humble man of course and those were the lessons that my parents communicated especially my mother and the combination of really taking academics extremely serious from my mother and being incredibly ambitious like you're going to be president of a country you need to be confident you're going to Harvard from my father that was a very explosive combination and it made me value significantly being born and raised at a family that was stable my parents never divorced and it created a big impact in me which is why I want that same infrastructure that same logistics and emotional support for my kids this is super cool and thanks a lot for sharing of course and dedicating 20 years of your life to do it comes with a lot of culture that is I think the most important part for a founder over time I think in the beginning of course it's sales, product, market fit and so on but now that we have it I know that you spend most of your time with culture how do you see enters culture? I think I have a culture pitch very crisp in my head but I'd love to hear your version of what the enter culture feels like when you're in the day-to-day working there before I open a more about how we think about culture so how is it working at enter for you? for me working at enter first of all is excellence as I said like I can really trust the people that are together with me and when I mean together they are together if we have a huge problem that we have a deadline for Monday and it's Friday there's no Friday, there's no Saturday, there's no Sunday we work together to solve this problem and we did it multiple times at enter so first of all excellence second we are together we are here to try to solve the biggest problems in AI and so forth and I think the last one but not less important is that people are super nice so it's true I'm happy to be with them I actually think we have no assholes at the company not at all and I think this is a lot because of Enhikis questions in the interview process when I interviewed with him I saw no one never asked discussions for me he really tried to understand my background, who's my family, who are my parents, how's my relationship with them and you can understand deeply, wait, of course it's a one hour conversation but I think he was the best person to understand myself in a one hour conversation and it was in an interview so I think that this is maybe why we don't have assholes because he would definitely see him in them in like minutes so I think those are the three things for me excellence we are together we help each other even though we need to work on the weekends this is not a problem and the third one people are nice so you really want to spend just like when you were back in France working all weekends, working very late hours yeah, this part I also was having thirty five French hours thirty five business days of vacation wow, that's incredible nine to five it was good but I think that when I think of the interculture I think it's in a world that moves so fast it's our number one defensibility it's the fact that we are the fastest company around and which is why the first value that we created so now we actually have four values that the company hears about when somebody is onboarded and so forth but for about a year and a half we only had one value and that value still exists and the value is the ship is sinking like nobody has won anything when we never celebrated around ever so when we raised from Sequoia, when we raised our series A from Founders Fund we never celebrate these things and were obsessed about the next step and I think that's so strong at enter that at some point Paula who joined the company recently she joined from another also technology company and she said she came to me and she said "Matthews, it's shocking, you guys don't celebrate huge wins" like we just signed a five million dollar contract and nobody's celebrating like there's no ritual when I collect like we clap and like for like twenty seconds and that's it and people are back to work and she's like that's insane and she points out that's actually an extension of your behavior because you don't celebrate your wins you don't suffer defeats either so sometimes we have big sidebacks at the company I just treat them as another day and just move on and I realize that the ship is sinking which translates into speed being fast not taking anything for granted just feeling that you know things are up for grabs and if you just relax you're going to lose everything you conquered that mentality of urgency that has been our number one value from the start but it also translated into some bad habits of like not celebrating, not building these rituals being too paranoid to celebrate is also a problem if you're thinking of a 20-year-old company which is what we want to build and I'm not going anywhere hopefully Philippi is not going anywhere I'm not going anywhere and so ship is sinking was our first value but it then translated into our biggest victories especially early on for example Mike, Aiki, Banduki and I we had to work I remember almost three weekends to launch the first version of the Answers product and it wasn't ready the day of the launch so I had to kind of present a version of that to the customer in the launch day because we delayed the launch one day but we didn't actually communicate we were late and so we basically we had to survive we couldn't lose that customer so the ship was sinking and we were super fast we were very scrappy and that was responsible for our big victories but then we also had some shortcomings like not celebrating the victories and that's why we evolved to also include I think one of the most important values which is United Front we are United Front Enter we win and we lose together and if somebody is working late at the office in the AI deployment team because one of our customers say Latam has some urgent things to deliver on Monday and I'm not I'm responsible for I don't know it a new bank I'm not going home on a Friday night I'm actually sticking around because we're a single team and everybody is so nice to each other and in a way that we also saw a second aspect of the culture taking over which was we weren't communicating aggressively enough with each other so we then created our third value which was immediate candor which means basically you need to be very crisp and direct in a front about anything that you dislike about somebody else's behavior or deliverable and that's also something that is now growing more and more in our culture and the fourth value which was also one of the first one which ultimately closes the first four values of enter is the deliverable value which has to do with we just need the smartest people the highest IQ people in the room doing great job because smart people are motivated by hard challenges smart people they look for the hardest mountain to climb and they just go after it to hire these people and point them to the right problem to solve with a very high economic output and let them lose so the way I run my team and the way I see how we need to organize talent at enter is basically bring people on board bring the best people have the best hiring process test them for culture see how they behave in the first two to three months and then kind of set them loose give them a problem give them a scope let them run away with it and that's something that marcos from ricado libra really told me I asked him how come ricado libra has like half of the first 30 people are still at the company 25 years later including marcos the CEO but folks like haco the general council Osvaldo who runs ricado pago like these people have been there forever and he said well the reason is they're excited about the next challenge and I am very focused on giving them space and new responsibilities in a way that each new year at the company feels like a new challenge and so he's now actually stepping down a CEO and handing it over to ideel and he said okay part of it is because I want to retain ideel he said you're a great person so I'm giving him more responsibility so he can have more fun and he can climb an even higher mountain because that's what motivates great people it's giving them a bigger responsibility and it's something that I didn't feel while I was a lawyer I felt that you know I had a lot from career a big corporation I knew exactly where I was going to be 20 years from now and that was mind blowing for me I hated it I needed the unpredictability the adrenaline of my job changing every six months because it's quite different being running enter now from running enter a year ago when you joined for example and I think you kind of see the difference as well and it would be also completely different from one year in the future but regarding what you said I think the deliverable value it really incorporates everything that you said before because again the deliverable wall is something incredible that we did and when I mean incredible we really have a high bar so deliver walls for most companies will be just another day at enter so when we say deliverable wall it's really something big but like this something big actually exists because of a lot of people behind the scenes helping it to work so normally the business team they work more later hours because they need to deliver stuff for the clients but the engineering team is always backing them like I remember multiple times running algorithms at midnight so they would have the answer of these algorithms at 8 a.m. in the next day so then we have a deliverable and I think it makes the engineering job so much easier that when you stay up late you're working with Zamuju like who's incredible or like with Safi or Pimenta or like just incredible AI deployment engineers that they're business oriented many of they're all engineer grads but they sometimes worked in consulting so they have a more bigger business sense but they're just sharp and as high IQ as the engineering team so I think it makes the engineering team excited with the business challenges and that was all by design it's about building a company where we have 80 people at the company it's not that much if you think about how much money we raise we could have five times that and we've decided to keep it pithy, concise and keep the company united front it's like the 300 in the battle of Thermopylai 300 Spartans killed like 5,000 Persians because if you keep the best like they can move mountains together and what you're saying about the engineering and business I think it's worth mentioning to an explaining to the audience this split between engineering and AI deployment because AI deployment is kind of a new career path that exists at enter we have forwarded player engineers at Palantir now all the other AI companies they are also hiring forwarded players slash AI suppliers I think it's worth mentioning like how did you come up with this idea of having the engineering team that is building the platform and the tools so that the AI deployment team can use those tools and actually solve the problem for our clients yeah of course I think historically when you think of B2B companies you have hyper product-oriented companies that are almost entirely self-service you think of Stripe for example these are Stripe as a company that basically an engineer can integrate into Stripe buy themselves there's no there's some customer support for sure but you don't have an allocated Stripe team member helping you out maybe if you're a huge account but in general that's not how the product works and on the other extreme you have services companies engineering services companies that basically they allocate headcount to your enterprise you think of Globund you think of Accenture they're literally charging enterprises for the man hours that they're lending with some kind of spread so that the business makes money and they're allocated on specific projects so maybe an engineering Accenture works the first three months on a project building automation system for hospital and the next three months they're building a credit machine learning algorithm for a bank it's totally different there's very little compound effect and a business without compound effect is a business that isn't going anywhere and doesn't have exponential escape velocity on the other hand if you're fully product driven like Stripe it's much harder for you to be useful to a large company that has an internal IT team and that has very specific requirements so the middle ground is where enter is and I think Palantir is even further down the road of a services business we like to be much more product-oriented which is why the engineering team is bigger than the AI deployment team I think that's also ratio we should track closely but the vision is okay we're going to tackle a single vertical so for all our customers we only work at least for now in litigation and specifically in consumer and labor litigation in Brazil so what we build and the platform is useful across the board but we also know that lawsuits involving flight cancellations for azure lines are very different or very different from banking fraud lawsuits against let's say Banco Bémixier and so we need a last mile branch of customization that is built by the engineering team in a very scalable platform-oriented way and I think that's the business of the future when it comes to building enterprise you need a last mile engineering team that's business-heavy understands the business requirements that's why they're engineering grads but with some sometimes consulting background but they're also highly technical and the challenge that we give to our employers is a technical challenge it's a coding challenge it's not a you know case MBA style hiring process and so the way I see it is the big winner in the enterprise AI revolution will be a company that is verticalized so focused on specific verticals grows from one vertical to the other that way you build compound interest between your customers but at the same time that has a rock solid just a brutal force of AI employers that's incredible at understanding the business requirements extremely fast and delivers enterprise quality white glove high-touch services to accounts that are $5 million $10 million sized and so I think that's the vision of enter and I think it's the winning argument because enterprises are not happy with fully self-service they wouldn't even be able to deploy properly the product because you need to really track the results you need e-vows it's a big problem to solve but at the same time a services business like eccentric they just don't have the same scalability and exponential growth like we're pursuing and I think they also become more dependent from us because we are setting everything up for them so they just okay, give it to them I know they're going to give us a great result and then a switching cost is even higher because if another platform comes and okay, I'm self-serving but you need to do everything yourself these guys are doing everything for me I don't even have the internal people to do it so and I think of efficiency is also much greater because enters workforce is super specialized in doing litigation as opposed to like it's that person doesn't exist an engineer that's trained in solving wind rates and anymore that doesn't exist anywhere else and there is even the internal knowledge like they know which model works the best for this use case they know how to use our product better than anyone else and also what is very interesting about this business team is that as you said they are technical a lot of the solutions that we have today in the engineering team they developed it before for your specific clients and then other business people they started also having the same issue and using the same solution that another I deployed did that we said okay now I think it's time to automate this whole thing that you are doing in the engineering and then their life is way easier and like Safi for example one of our AI deployment leads he used to run a product division at Hotmart which is a big company and and Safi was his very product centric so he comes up beta for example was used to be also running product at Loft before joining so the AI deployment team has some individual folks that they really bring very specific requirements engineering as soon as a workflow begins repeating itself and that's building the platform that we use internally which is basically our back office and it makes us so fast we're so good at implementing a new lawsuit type we're so good at integrating with a new court update and building it is very defensible and enter becomes a one-stop-shop you basically get enter and the problem disappears from your front if you're an enterprise that's a big value proposition much bigger than okay, you hire enter and then you need an outsourced team that's going to develop it and you need an internal team to build the integration that we take it over you just give us API access or some kind of solid RPA access to your databases and we figure everything out that's true all the problems that we deal with are I think this is what motivates me to work in the day to day like the amount of stuff that is already done that can be improved and the amount of stuff that we still didn't do and we will the problems that we're not solved yet that we will solve I think this is literally what motivates me to go every day for sure but give me an example of when you were like man, this company is just fast and you just do it after you joined I think a great example of this was a case that we actually found 7% of fraud in a historical database of a client in less than two days So basically this client had this idea that they were being fraud and then the client founder that was Pimenta he got this message from the client and he said okay, I'm going to check and then he came to us the engineering team saying mate okay, there is this possible fraud engineering that we need to track how can we do it and then we said okay, we have the algorithm to run this and then he said okay, run this algorithm and give me the answer two hours later he had the answer he said maybe there is something but we need to better classify those documents and I said okay, you put some hundred examples of this document there I trained the model one hour later the model was trained we ran this model in their whole historical database ran the algorithms and he said okay, I might have something here one day later he found the 7% fraud in their historical database and in the end of the day this new fraud scenario was in our product working for the client so I never imagine that a new scenario would really appear in two days from the discovery to go into production with the work of three people this is literally crazy and I just had to run the algorithm doing all the job and actually this helped us also to close a huge contract with them in the renew of the contract and like these people working together for me it was just amazing and materials we are here in San Francisco for the board meeting what is the board meeting so basically the board meeting is a three-hour meeting where we get together with Sequoia and Founders Fund are two main investors and we discuss the big decisions we need to make for the next three to six months and also for the next two years so we basically divide the board meeting in those two-time horizons the board is composed today by Constantine from Sequoia and Matthias I spoke a lot about Constantine but the way we partner with Matthias Founders Fund is also a great story and I think he has been able to scale because we raised a $35 million Series A led by Founders Fund and Matthias was the one who discovered us the deal only happened because of him basically and this is this is a guy who I think the best description is you cannot bullshit your way around Matthias because he will spot every single part of it and the funniest anecdote from our Series A we met in São Paulo when he came over I think to meet which was one of his portfolio companies and he started doing diligence and at some point he met our CFO Murilo and Vaz basically to learn more about the company and Vaz leaves the meeting he calls me and says this guy is not investing he knows every single one of our week like he's the best he's the guy that understands exactly the weak spots like I've never seen before and I'm like shit because I had a good feeling about it oh my god and then we grabbed dinner at San Francisco that same day right after he had and he was pretty chill like he understood deeply the risk he was underwriting so he knew the market he had spoken to like several customers and enters a deal that founders would never have invested in even out from Matthias and then he's the one that really had a night till Latin America and really understood the potential he's close to the mucasalibur folks to the new bank folks he has invested before there so it was a very unique relationship and felt like the right partnership because also of Peter Thiel's involvement with Palantir which is in some ways in some aspects of his efforts and Peter is always about monopolies like modes is this company defensible and size is this going to be gigantic so that those are the two things that that we really focused on while raising the Series A and we didn't have the board when we raised and so ultimately when we when they joined we decided to build a group of people who were in the group of people who were in the group of people who were in the group of people who were That was a Sequoia introduction. So being, and we have a big angel investor who was big support under a street, who introduced us to I think from our first six customers, he made four of the intros. And he was very participative. Like he actually would go to these meetings, to meet the CEO of a big bank in Brazil. We would go alongside. He would really put his credibility behind us because he believed in us. But he was also using his own personal credit to help us out. And bringing him specifically to the cap table is an example of somebody who helped us significantly, especially in go-to-market. But also some fundraising decisions we typically call him. When the shit's going south, I always look at Enhiki and I say, "Okay, let's call Andre. "Get his take on this." And the same goes for David at New Bank, Ramacros. Getting tips and advice when you need, on top of getting intros, customer intros, and so forth. Those are the things that moved the needle and drive my decision onto who we're signing with. And I think this is a superpower that we have and you have, that is have all those very smart with a lot of experienced people alongside you to ask those questions, to have those tips. I think this is a game changer for the company, too. Yeah. And it's very scarce to have that operating out of Latin America. So it becomes a huge advantage. Like Sequoia only invested in Brazil once when they backed New Bank in 2012. And it was one of their most successful investments ever. And further down the road, 12 years later, it took them 12 years to back another Brazilian startup. And so it's something very exclusive and that also positions us to have the best talent and sign with the best enterprises because large companies in Brazil, they want to work with a startup like Enter that has access to the Silicon Valley and understands the I Trends. And that's a big differentiator. It was a big differentiator for when we were starting. And the same applies for the entire expertise and the credibility that Peter and Anderson have built around AI transformation. And we are here talking about investments, founders funds, Sequoia, do you have any breaking news? About what? Well, about investments, series B, I don't know. It's up to you to say. - No, I think we, that's a very good podcast, interviewer strategy, right? Having life with AI break news on, I'll enter fundraising. No, but let's wait a few more months. Let's see what happens. - Come on, I want it to buy it. - Let's save it to the life with AI or Wall Street Journal. I think life with AI has a much cooler place to announce. - Of course it is. - Fundraising news, maybe in a future podcast interview. And maybe bring any series B investor to be interviewed as well. - Yeah, it would also be very nice. Yeah, but we are here in San Francisco. What is the goal of this trip? Like, why are we here? So we brought around 30 people from the enter team to spend a week in San Francisco. These are the most, these are all people, the inter partners, the folks that have stock options in the company. They're the most senior folks in the company. The reason we brought them here and the reason we're here is because we want to build a world class company with the most aggressive, fast and ambitious way of operating anywhere in the world. So when we speak to our board and they're giving us feedback on our numbers and quantitative financials, we don't ask them if enter is growing fast enough for Brazil. We ask them, how are we doing compared to the best companies in San Francisco as portfolio and founders for portfolio in the whole world. And they're primarily concentrated in the US. So we're here because we want to spend time with the AI labs, such as opening AI, we're visiting and throwing up at Google. We just spend time this morning with John Hennessey that was incredible. - It was incredible. - The guy is just magnetic. It's unbelievable how charismatic he is. - It's one of his kind. - Yeah, like people left the meeting and they're like, is this for real? He's so sharp and charismatic and energizing. He's talking about Google's AI strategy and why Google's going to win and so forth, just brilliant. And but also visiting some AI application companies that, for example, have an AI deployment team. So we want to understand how are they deploying their products inside these large enterprises integrating with data. You know, we've spoken several times with Palantir team but also with other AI enterprise AI startups. And we want to visit them in person and get to actually watch their teams working, visit maybe their customers. So that's why we're spending a week here and why the company, we believe we, it doesn't make sense to have an office in San Francisco. We really believe in an in-person culture and all our customers are in Sao Paulo. So if you're going to join the company, you have to move to be in person with our team. On the other hand, having this exchange of ideas and coming here often is also a great way to retain talent because many folks at enter, they have a curiosity of studying or brought, visiting the United States. And if they can do that and have that exchange experience through enter, we're also retaining talent. So it's a perfect strategy and plus it combines with us coming for a board meeting and our team is also going to have a very nice talk with the Sequoia investors and partners and on Thursday. So we're just having a good time. And what about folks that would like to join enter? We are hiring a lot of engineering, a lot of AI deployments, CEOs and so on. Like, are we hiring people that are not Brazilian? We hire people that don't speak Portuguese. Do they need to move to San Paulo? I think it enters for our revenue scale, we're one of the most efficient companies ever. Like this is crazy. We've burned. We've spent less than 10% of the money we raised. And so we're hiring aggressively because we'd like to spend money even faster. We're just not willing to compromise on quality and the talent bar. But we're hiring aggressively. And we have basically two requirements-- culture and brains. You have to be solid in your hard skills, and you need to embrace the enter culture of deliver while the ship is sinking speed, working weekend, working long hours, and over the weekend and so forth. And part of that is you need to move to San Paulo to work in person because we're in person five days a week and remote on weekends. Yeah, let's say it's hybrid. It's hybrid because on weekends, it's road, exactly. But it's so hybrid, five days a week in the office, two days a remote. And the reason is, no, no, it's not five days a week because for you, it's six days a week. Multiple times I have came to the office on Sundays and you were there. I think all the Sundays you go, right? Yeah, I go every Sunday because it's just like Saturday, it's working from home and family and basically. But Sunday is basically a business day because it's also calmer, so no emails, no noise, just focused work. I love it. It's the best day of the week. I think it's also important to say that this is not the reality for everyone. I personally almost don't work on weekends. My work is from Monday to Friday. Sometimes if I really need to do something I want to, sometimes I do stuff. But Mike, that is the CEO and the boss of the engineering team, he always says, I don't care if you work on weekends. I want the job to be done. And I really don't care when are you working. I just want the job to be done. And most of the engineering team we don't work on on weekends. And it's created a lot of friction between Mike and I when we were starting. And it's a great story to share because when we started the company, I wanted every team and every person to work the same way. So I thought of running the company like an orchestra. Your everybody is on the same pace and everybody is going in the same direction. And that's great. But when you have 80 people in the team, not everybody has the same gym routine and workout and sleep routine and you need to accommodate some flexibility if you want someone so different from me, for example, to stay at the company for 20 years. So that long-term mentality made me think of enter more like a jazz band. An orchestra is too rigid. There's very, very little room for flexibility and creativity. And that concept made Mike and I kind of come to peace with, OK, we have slightly different work styles. But you know, the same direction. And we're moving in the same direction. We have the same values and the same priority. And the jazz band has flexibility for somebody with a trombone to kind of do their own thing with the trumpet and kind of go on their own pace in the sense of not being super strict about being at the office at 8 a.m. And which is how the company started. We used to do our days at 8 a.m. everybody, every single time. So basically, we were basically we grew more became more, but that's when I get into the office. But then we built more flexibility. And I think now we have the ideal division between hard work but also some flexibility for the long run. For us, for like Philippi to be able to work at enter and be happy and be fulfilled 20 years from now. If you burn your team and you're too aggressive, too fast, then you're not going to finish the marathon. And I think this reflects on our culture because we have sheepy thinking. We have the united front. Like, people know when they should work more because now it's the time. And we are together when we need to do it. But this is not all the time. So I think like now they compromise that we have about working later hours and delivering stuff and having personal life also weekends and so on. I think this is a good compromise we have now. I think some folks in the US, they don't know that like you're kind of a celebrity Brazil. You're being called it for multiple podcasts every time. And I'm super glad that you just came to mind. But also like exclusive interview, exclusive interview, breaking interval with Mattel's Costa Jibirro. Exactly. But the thing is, like, you were the 14 years old kid that went to college, were the youngest to do everything. And then now you raised multiple million dollars from Sequoia, from Founders Fund. You were running a company that in less than two years, like we're two and something. We have already more than 30 million in revenue, a lot of political and CEOs. They are coming to you lately to ask questions about AI, what you believe about the future, how should we legislate our country and so on. But my question is, how do you think Brazil can be a powerhouse for AI compared to other countries such as China or the US? I think the big reason why-- and I'm so happy to be at the podcast-- is because my mindset has always been, how does going to a podcast make that 30, 300 million plus revenue become 300? And I never really found a reason, except that you've done such an exceptional job building life with AI and interviewing incredible people. And Google's running up and down, inviting you to the offices, inviting you to give lectures to Google engineers in Brazil. So it's remarkable that somebody working at Enter has that as their side job. And you bump at me at the offices on Sundays because you're there recording your podcast, teaching people about how models are trained, how are the limbs are trained, and being very technical in a way that educates the Brazilian engineers on AI, because you've learned that and you're worried about sharing that knowledge. So it's a big pleasure to be here. And I'm very excited about that. And how do we transform Brazil into a technological powerhouse? And we make sure that in our country is maybe we're not going to be as successful as the US or China in the short term. But I really believe Brazil can be a more innovative creator of technology companies than any country in Europe. I really believe that in terms of market cap of technology companies operating out of Brazil. I totally agree on that. And that's also what I'm betting. Exactly. And we're going to prove that because we already have Nicado Livre, $100 billion company, new bank, $80 billion company, Enter soon to be $50, $100 billion company. So we're building more and more of that. And I think the cornerstones that Brazil needs is number one, institutional stability. So we're recording just after Trump captured Maduro. That's the sort of thing that happens if a country becomes so unstable, undemocratic, and so forth. Brazil can't go in that direction. We need to make sure that Brazil remains a democracy like it is today. It doesn't matter if it's a leftist government or a right-wing government. It has to be a stable country that believes in capitalism and believes in companies building innovation and raising outside capital from outside investors. So that's core institutional stability that Brazil needs to retain. And additionally, we need the best university system so that folks going to the best engineering school in Brazil, ita, emi, unicampi, wuspi. They're all incredibly well-trained. They have scholarships and a great university infrastructure. But also the Brazilians that managed to go abroad, they have a reason to come back. And because great companies are being built. Ambitious people, they want to tackle impossible problems. They want to dedicate their lives to changing the world and changing how things work. And Brazilian companies need to offer them that runway, that challenge. And I think it's something-- so building the ability to attract talent as opposed to what happened during the pandemic where we had a brain drain. And many folks were going to work for American companies, being paid in US dollars, making more money in the local-- then in the local currency, we need the reverse movement. So talent built by universities, institutional stability, stability. And lastly, we need capital. We need money. We are using the Sequoia investment and the Founders Fund investment and all our angel-invested money, from Atlanta and Chico, from WNBC. We're using that money precisely to hire Philippi and to be a competitive salary. And precisely to-- we actually just had a big salary upgrade company-wide, precisely because we want to be competitive in hiring great talent, and not only with equity, but also with liquidity, because people want to be able to travel for their kids to college, pay for good high schools, good schools, and so forth. So we also need investments. And what brings investments to the country? Other successful investors. So the fact that the new bank investment was so successful at Sequoia allowed Constantine to make the argument of the partnership that maybe Enter will get there as well, because they're precedent. So I think there's a huge weight on our shoulders that we need to prove that Enter can return Sequoia's fund, which we will. And that will pass on the baton for the next generation that more investors are going to look into Latin America. And I think that's what made Sequoia's and Founders Fund decision to baton Enter so early on. So important. And it was visionary, because before those investments, we weren't getting that many phone calls from US investors. And the thesis wasn't obvious. But then when we proved the first initial traction, the team was world-class. We proved the ability to hire talent. Now we have bets placed on Enter. And if we return these investors, we're going to get more attention to Brazil. And so we add institutional stability to talent and academic talent in great universities to capital. I think those are the three things Brazil needs. It's much better than 10 years ago. We're already being able to step on the shoulders of big companies that broke ground to a much less friendly environment, such as new bank, such as Mercado de Libre, for sure. Companies like Noventa and Ovi, I Food, great Brazilian companies. And now we need to keep sure that that movement is-- and the best way to contribute, in my view, is not becoming a politician and improving regulation. It's by building a fucking amazing company. And proving to everybody that the next guy who knocks on Sequoia's door 10 years from now, he can make it, too. And he's going to get Sequoia money and Founders Fund Money and everybody. And people are going to bet on Brazil, because we were able to build this three-part flywheel that positions Brazil to be a technological powerhouse in a way that basically allows us to come closer to the US cycle of prosperity and liquidity and intellectual and technological evolution. I totally agree, and I would have even argued that there is a fourth one that is the perspective to know that it is possible. The belief to know that a Brazilian and a Brazilian-based company is able to be the best AI-applied AI company in the world. And I think this is also something that we are contributing, because if we indeed become the biggest AI-applied company in the world, other Brazilians will also believe that we can build technology in our land. Because Brazil, for the folks that don't know, we are mainly exporting commodities. So we are a commodity country, but we want to be a country that also exports technology, instead of only importing those technology from US, from Europe, from China. So I am super, super happy to be part of it, because this is something that I also wanted to do when I was in France. When I started my podcast, this was one of the goals. I was studying, I was talking to people that were so smart, and that wanted so much to build AI, that I needed to share it with the people that was in Brazil, that couldn't have access to this knowledge that I was getting why I was at university. So now being able to come back and not only teach people, but also show them that this is possible, and also maybe be able to hire them to come them back from France, from the US and come back to Brazil to work alongside us. I think this is amazing, and thanks a lot for having the opportunity to build it in my country. I think you're the one we should be thinking for believing in the mission. And I wouldn't even say believing in us, believing in yourself, because now you're enter. You're part of the team, and you've been for a year now, and over half of our history. So I think it's up to us to roll our sleeves, and get shit done, and prove that it's possible. And that's the big mindset shift that, thank God, my father really pushed me to come to the US, because if I had stayed in Brazil, my siblings, their, my brother's a public servant. He's a judge in Brazil. My sister is studying to also be a public servant. And I had never heard of the possibility of building a billion-dollar company. That's not something you speak about in Brazilia. My hometown, which is the capital of Brazil. You speak about becoming a lawyer, a doctor, working for the government. And when I moved to the US, like, no, no, no. Go crazy, bro, like, here's the money. You're ambitious, you're disciplined, you're diligent. Go do something big. That's the US mentality. That is, I would say 50% of the, of the, of the work. It's basically believing it's possible, and getting people to bet on you. And that's, I think, the ecosystem of embracing failure, of being ambitious, of trying things that are hard, that we need to enable for other young Brazilians to try out. And I think, like, if I make personal money, I really want to invest a lot of that into betting on other people. And basically giving them the capital they need to try stuff out. And it's a very Silicon Valley concept that really opened my mind to, okay, now I'm going to be an entrepreneur. I'm going to try this out. Just to be here in the valley, you can see that it's different, right? We are here, it's been like two days. And, oh my god, we have posters everywhere about AI companies. People put, do you want GPUs? In the streets, like, in Brazil, what you want in the streets, like, do you want some food? The food you're like, I don't know, like, to buy a new phone, but not GPUs. And here, like, the ecosystem is crazy. So just to be here, I can see everything that you're, you're talking now. And I think just to finish this podcast, I think it's almost like two hours of recording and it's been amazing. I would like to end it up with a, with a quiz about entirely food. Yeah. And the first question is, how many labels do you think we can classify? And just to give a brief introduction to folks in the audience, what this question means? Like, jeopardy, rapid fire questions. So, yeah, that's it. So what means to classify a label? In the beginning of our pipeline, we need to understand which document we are receiving because we don't know it beforehand. So we receive a document to say, okay, this is a proof of residence document. Yeah, this is a proof of residence. This is a new file, this is a receipt. How many labels do you think we can classify? I would guess, I mean, we have roughly 3,000 customers. I would guess around 300, 200, 300 labels. 409. Yeah, oh, directionally, and there are. Yeah, it was not bad. How many labels we could classify? 409? 409, 409. So I missed it by. 130, yeah, wrong, okay. And how many labels do you think we could classify in the beginning of next year, last year, when I joined enter? Beginning of 25? Beginning of 25, yeah. When I joined enter, like in March. So for sure, the basic complaint, I'd say around 10 or 15? 42. 42, okay. One year, we did 10x on labels. Almost, almost what we did on revenue. Oh, 42. I was probably, it's because of the new bank labels. There have so many. It's because of integrations. Because now we receive everything. Yeah, and we need to classify everything. Yeah, okay. No, I mean, why did we have so many in the beginning of the year? Because we didn't have integrations. So the people would put the document and give the label manually. Why, oh, now we are integrated. It was 100% like based on, okay, human training at first. Yeah, I see. And how long do you think it takes to train a model and put into prediction for it? After we have a proper data set. A human label data set? Yeah, yeah. So like, we do it weekly with human label data set and things that people change on the product. The model training should take like a few hours. I would guess one or two hours. 40 minutes to prediction. 40 minutes? Yeah, I want to two hours. Exactly. It's quite fast. How many documents do you think we process monthly? Ooh, that one is, any document can be like evidence, any document. Does that include superhuman? Or only case. Yeah, it does. So I'm guessing about between 800 and a million documents. Come on. Really? Is it too much? It's too little. It's a fuck. It's like 20 million. 20 something. It's 20 million? Wow, that's insane. Probably what I got wrong was how much evidence we take. Because I was assuming some of the lawsuits come with little evidence. Small evidence. No, it's actually more. Because in superhuman, we only take the altos. We don't take the evidence. Yeah, exactly. So the way I broke it down is case managed by us. I'm assuming one complaint and five evidence sets that are labeled and not managed by us. I'm assuming just the complaint. Oh, no, but the complaint is broken down. Oh, fuck. Yeah, that's what I got wrong. Because the complaint comes with the complaint, but also proof of residence, power of attorney. So it should be 200,000 multiplied by-- 20? 10. Yeah. OK, interesting. 20 million something. Yeah, the complaint, it's not a single document. It's like a bundle that we unbundled with the classifier, of course. Do you know the open AI tokens that they were giving? We got 10 billion last year. But we're processing. That's also-- we're processing 70 billion-- 70 billion. Of course, this is only open AI and it's the past. But we got 10 billion token. So now, yeah, now we also use on traffic and so on. But yeah, 70 billion monthly, 70 billion. That's insane. So 20 million documents and 70 billion tokens. Yeah, that's a lot of money. We need to raise more money to process all of that. And it's also like we really did an incredible job at bringing down the costs of using LLM incredibly. In a way that the infrastructure just scaled so much. And it's very sustainable. And the last question on this quiz, what is the less book and movie that you read and watched and what's the conclusion from them? That's a great timing to ask that question because I spent New Year's Eve in New Zealand. And the flight to get there's like 30 hours. And then the flight from Auckland to San Francisco like 12 hours. So the less book I read was No Rules Rules from basically the Netflix Bible that actually Paula recommended me. She said, you really need to read this book this and that and so forth. What I took away from it was that maybe this is not the best message to give an interview. But we need to fire people faster. And really apply to everybody that answers to me, everybody, my team, what they call the keeper test, which is to assess, OK, if this person came to me basically asking to quit the company, how unhappy would I be? And from one to 10, it has to be at least eight for everybody, but ideally nine for the majority of the people and 10 for your top folks. Hope you're happy with me. Exactly. Exactly. So the keeper test and it's an incredible mental, like after I read this chapter, I just became obsessed about this question. I'm like, everybody, but now I every time I see somebody, I'm asking myself, OK, if this person came to me and quit, would I be excited about, OK, maybe bringing somebody else that can also kind of cover for their shortcomings or would I be in despair? That's the number one takeaway I got from the book. Also, I also read green lights, which is the Matthew McConaughey. Just just a point about it. Also, you have the point of raising this person in turn. So if they're not an eight, why not to raise them to get to an eight? Yeah. And give immediate candor for them to like, OK, this is what you need to do to be an eight for me. Yeah, for sure. And because we hire so exclusively, and it's a tough process to join the enter team, it doesn't make sense to fire that many people. And we have incredible folks at the team. And I think that the first step should always be to-- that's not the Netflix culture, though, but it's what I believe. I think if you have brains and if you have the culture, maybe the person is not getting to the right output. You need to try to converge them in that direction. And that's where immediate candor's so important, because you're not giving-- you're not making anyone a favor by not giving them feedback and not making sure they clearly understand that they're not doing a good job. You really need to be upfront about it. So that was the number one lesson from No Rules Rules. I also read, actually, on the flight to San Francisco, I bought in the airport Green Line, which is the memoir from Matthew McConaughey. And it's amazing. I really like Interstellar his movie, so I bought the memoir. And I think the lesson there has to do about basically assessing the different aspects of your life in terms of green light, yellow light, red light, basically, how well you're different aspects of your life, but on a consistent basis. It's like every Sunday, having a routine of thinking about your personal life, your relationships, your professional life, the people you lead inside the company. But having a routine around assessing your different parts of your life. But the question I'm most excited about is the movie thing, because the last movie I watched was-- and it's on all airlines, on all available to watch on flights. So I watched Openheimer for the fourth time. It's my favorite movie, and I've watched it so many times because I see Enter in the movie. Because I really believe that when we started the company, it was a big Manhattan project moment. I dropped out of GSB, came back to Brazil. Mike and he, he left wildlife to join. Banduki came from Ilabella with his dogs, and it's a beach town in Brazil. He came back to São Paulo because we were all working in person. So it was a big moment of people sacrificing a lot to be there, with no safety or security net. We were on our own. We had no Sequoia. We had no US investor backing us. We had raised some capital, and we were basically pre-revenue. And the movie gives me very emotional, because it's a beauty when you just forget everything, just committed to getting something done, because it's mission critical and it's critical for your life and your purpose. And the movie is incredible, but my favorite scene from the movie, and the one I love rewatching, is when a paper comes out that they were able to split the uranium nucleus, and Openheimer rushes to the lab. And his first, when he reads the news on the paper, his first intuition is to start drafting equations, trying to replicate exactly the calculations and so forth, while his other physicist, partner, and rushes to the lab and tries to replicate the experiment. So Openheimer is with the equations, and his partner is on the lab. And as soon as this partner comes in to Openheimer's office, he's like, okay, it's proven. They're wrong. It's impossible to split the uranium atom, and sorry, the uranium nucleus. And their reaction is, well, we just did it in the other room. In practice, getting shit done and rolling up your sleeves, while Openheimer was stuck to theory. And then he goes through a personal transformation of joining the Manhattan Project, leading the Manhattan Project. And that's why it's my favorite movie because it's the story of a group of people going to Los Alamos in the middle of nowhere, literally abandoning their lives, taking all of their families together to get something done. And some of the scenes really stuck with me of how you need to be hands-on, practical. Don't lose yourself in theory. Try things faster, iterate. And it was the last movie I watched. - Incredible, super nice. And now I understand why you like it so much. Just to finish, who would win a chess match between you and Mike? - Mike and myself? - Yeah. - I would. - Really? - We've never done that. But we should try it out, let's see. He practices a lot though, he has much more flying hours than I have. Maybe you should bet, like, X% of the company on a chess match. - I'm sorry. - But I know someone that would destroy both of you blindly without a hook. In this very, no, no, in this very same podcast, I interviewed him, Viel, that is the French player. - Oh, the chess player. - Yeah, the chess, the Blitz, were a champion. - I'm not betting any of my interact with him. - I can summon my champion on. Maybe if I have AI support, then I can take him on. - Yeah, yeah. But then you can take everybody on. Mateusz thinks a lot for being here. I think it was an amazing conversation and hope the next one will be, I don't know, when we fundraise. - Maybe in the NASDAQ. - In the NASDAQ. - For the IPO. - When we ring the bell. - Exactly. Thanks a lot. - We'll do it in a podcast. So I never did a podcast in the first 25 years of my life. Next one will be when I'm 50. - No. - I'm kidding. It means that you're just IPOing when you're in 25 years. - That's true. Let's not convoge. - Has to be much, much earlier. Okay, thank you so much for having me. I really had a lot of fun. - See you folks. - See ya.