Nubank

Zoom

Nubank

Nubank makes money from credit card interchange fees (1-3% of every transaction), interest on credit card balances and personal loans, and net interest income from deposits (lending out customer deposits at higher rates than it pays in savings interest). The company also earns fees from insurance products and investment marketplace commissions.

The key insight is that by being digital-only with no branches, Nubank's cost to serve a customer is roughly 85% lower than traditional Brazilian banks.

Zoom

Zoom uses a freemium model. Free accounts get unlimited one-on-one meetings and 40-minute group meetings.

Paid plans start at $13.33/month per user for Pro (meetings up to 30 hours), $18.33/month for Business, and custom pricing for Enterprise. Zoom also charges for add-ons — Zoom Phone (cloud phone system), Zoom Rooms (conference room hardware), and Zoom Contact Center.

The free tier is the hook. The 40-minute limit on group calls creates just enough friction to push power users to pay.

And once one person in a company pays, the whole team follows because nobody wants to be the one whose meetings keep getting cut off.

Nubank

David Vélez grew up in Colombia, studied at Stanford Business School, and worked at Sequoia Capital in Silicon Valley. In 2012, Sequoia sent him to Brazil to find investment opportunities.

What he found instead was the worst banking experience he'd ever encountered.

Brazilian banks were controlled by five massive institutions that charged outrageous fees — annual credit card fees of $200+, account maintenance fees, fees on fees. Customer service was a nightmare.

Branches required hours of waiting. The banks had zero incentive to improve because they had a captive market of 200 million people and no competition.

Vélez saw the opportunity and left Sequoia to start Nubank in 2013 with Cristina Junqueira (a former Itaú banker) and Edward Wible (a Princeton engineer). Their first product was a purple credit card — no annual fee, managed entirely through a beautiful app, with transparent billing and real-time notifications.

In a country where banks treated customers like an inconvenience, Nubank treated them like human beings.

Zoom

Eric Yuan grew up in Tai'an, a mining city in Shandong province, China. In the mid-1990s he was in his twenties and inspired by the internet boom happening in America.

He applied for a US visa. He was rejected.

He applied again. Rejected again.

Eight times in total over about two years before he was finally approved in 1997. He moved to Silicon Valley with barely any English and joined WebEx as one of its first engineers.

Yuan spent 14 years at WebEx, eventually becoming VP of Engineering. Cisco acquired WebEx in 2007 for $3.2 billion.

Yuan watched Cisco slowly bloat the product with enterprise features while the core video quality deteriorated. He kept telling Cisco leadership they needed to rebuild the product from scratch.

They kept saying no.

In 2011, Yuan quit and took 40 WebEx engineers with him. He founded Zoom Video Communications with a simple thesis: video meetings should just work.

No downloads. No lag.

No "can you hear me?" No IT department required. He built the product that Cisco refused to build.

Nubank

Nubank grew through word of mouth in a country where everyone hated their bank. The product was so much better than the alternative that customers became evangelists.

The invite-only launch created exclusivity and a waitlist that hit millions. People would beg friends for an invite code because getting a Nubank card felt like escaping prison.

The cost advantage was structural. Traditional Brazilian banks operated thousands of branches with tens of thousands of employees.

Nubank had an app and a customer service team. This let Nubank offer free products that banks charged hundreds of dollars for.

The unit economics were unbeatable — when your competitor has 4,000 branches and you have zero, you can afford to be generous.

Geographic expansion into Mexico and Colombia replicated the playbook. Both countries had the same banking problem — concentrated, fee-heavy, customer-hostile banks.

Nubank launched in Mexico in 2019 and Colombia in 2020. Mexico alone already has over 8 million Nubank customers.

Zoom

Zoom grew on one thing: it worked. In a world where every video call started with five minutes of technical issues, Zoom calls just connected.

That reliability was the entire marketing strategy for the first five years.

The freemium model did the rest. Teachers, coaches, therapists, book clubs, and small teams all started on the free tier.

When they hit the 40-minute limit, enough of them converted to paid. And every free meeting was essentially a demo — everyone in the meeting saw how good Zoom was.

Yuan obsessed over simplicity. While competitors like WebEx and GoToMeeting required downloads, plugins, and IT involvement, Zoom worked in the browser with one click.

The learning curve was essentially zero. Your grandmother could figure it out.

That turned out to be extremely important when a pandemic suddenly required your grandmother to figure it out.

Then COVID happened. In March 2020, the world shut down.

Every meeting — work, school, family, doctor, church, happy hour — moved to video. Zoom was already the easiest option.

Daily participants exploded from 10 million to 300 million in four months. The stock went from $70 to $588.

Nubank

The IPO timing was terrible. Nubank went public on the NYSE in December 2021 at a $41 billion valuation.

The stock immediately crashed as the global tech sell-off hit and rising interest rates in Brazil increased the cost of capital. The stock fell from $12 to under $4 by mid-2022.

Vélez had to spend a year convincing investors that a Brazilian digital bank was worth owning during a global risk-off environment.

Credit risk in Latin America is inherently higher. Brazil has volatile inflation, currency risk, and a large unbanked population with limited credit history.

Nubank's loan book grew rapidly, and delinquency rates spiked in 2022 as Brazil's economy slowed. Managing credit risk at scale in emerging markets is fundamentally harder than in developed economies.

Nubank has since tightened underwriting and delinquency has improved, but it remains the biggest operational risk.

Regulatory complexity across three countries is a constant headache. Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia each have different banking regulations, consumer protection laws, and compliance requirements.

Navigating three regulatory environments simultaneously while growing at speed requires significant legal and compliance investment.

Zoom

The post-pandemic hangover has been severe. Zoom's stock peaked at $588 in October 2020 and crashed to under $70 by 2022 — an 88% drop.

The company went from the most exciting tech stock on the planet to a cautionary tale about pandemic valuations. Revenue growth slowed from 300%+ to single digits as people returned to offices and competitors caught up.

Security and "Zoombombing" were early crises. In early 2020, as millions of new users flooded in, trolls discovered they could join open Zoom meetings and share offensive content.

Schools, churches, and AA meetings were disrupted. It turned out Zoom's encryption wasn't truly end-to-end as advertised.

Yuan had to halt all feature development for 90 days and focus exclusively on security fixes. It was a near-death reputational crisis.

Competition from Microsoft Teams and Google Meet intensified. Both companies bundled video calling for free into products that hundreds of millions of people already used.

Microsoft Teams integrated directly into Office 365. Google Meet was built into Gmail.

Zoom had to compete against free products from two of the richest companies on Earth.

Nubank

Nu Credit Card is the flagship — a no-annual-fee Mastercard managed entirely through the app. NuConta is the digital bank account with free transfers and bill payments.

Nu Invest is the investment platform offering stocks, ETFs, and fixed income. Personal Loans are offered based on credit behavior within the app.

Nu Life Insurance and other insurance products are distributed through the app. Ultraviolet is the premium tier with higher limits, airport lounges, and additional perks.

NuPay is the payments solution for merchants.

Zoom

Zoom Meetings is the core — video calls that actually work. Zoom Webinars handles large-scale events with up to 50,000 attendees.

Zoom Phone is a full cloud-based phone system replacing traditional office phones. Zoom Rooms turns physical conference rooms into one-click video meeting spaces.

Zoom Contact Center competes with established call center software. Zoom Team Chat is their Slack/Teams competitor.

Zoom Whiteboard is a collaborative digital canvas. Zoom Revenue Accelerator uses AI to analyze sales calls.

And Zoom AI Companion summarizes meetings and drafts messages.

Nubank

Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, DST Global, Tencent, Berkshire Hathaway, SoftBank, Dragoneer

Zoom

Sequoia Capital, Emergence Capital, Horizons Ventures (Li Ka-shing), Qualcomm Ventures