The most dangerous thing in the world is an old institution that has not yet realized it is obsolete.
Our whole goal is to make Uber so efficient that it's cheaper than owning a car.
Credit cards were designed in the 1950s. We thought maybe financial technology should actually use some technology.
In Brazil, the five biggest banks controlled everything. They didn't compete with each other because they didn't have to. We gave 200 million people a reason to leave.
Our AI chatbot does the work of 700 customer service agents. That's not a talking point — that's our actual headcount reduction.
Banks hide their fees inside the exchange rate. We show you the real rate and charge you a small honest fee. It's not complicated. They just don't want you to know.
The cost of intelligence is going to drop to nearly zero. That changes everything about every industry on Earth.
Search hasn't changed in 25 years. It's still a list of links. AI makes that obsolete.
The lesson from Ukraine is clear: cheap autonomous systems beat expensive legacy platforms. The $500 drone is the new $50 million fighter jet.
The defense industry hasn't innovated in 30 years. They build the same planes slower and more expensively. We build new things fast and cheap.
We didn't solve piracy by fighting it. We solved it by making the legal option better than the illegal one.
I built Expedia to make travel prices transparent. Then Zillow for home prices. Glassdoor does the same for salaries. My whole career is ruining information asymmetry.
ZoomInfo charges $30,000 a year. We charge a fraction of that for data that's just as accurate. The sales data market was overpriced for decades. We fixed that.
Dentists were still mailing physical molds through UPS in 2020. That's not an industry ripe for disruption — that's an industry begging for it.
Glasses have been around for 800 years. The technology hasn't changed much. The only innovation in the last century was figuring out how to charge $700 for them.
Luxottica owns the brands, the stores, the insurance company, and the licensing. They set the price at every step. We just decided to skip all of that.
Trade shows cost brands $10,000 to $50,000 per event for a booth. We give them access to 700,000 retailers for the cost of listing on our platform. The math isn't hard.
The FDA regulates based on intended use. We intended to give people information. That shouldn't require a prescription.
People have a right to their own genetic information. Period.
We wanted to make buying a used car as easy as buying something on Amazon. No dealership. No haggling. Just click and it shows up at your door.
A country that runs on oil is a country that runs on a countdown clock. We wanted to stop that clock.
The average financial advisor charges 1% of assets to do what an algorithm can do better. That's a trillion-dollar inefficiency. We're fixing it.
Two Brazilian immigrants, 22 years old, telling American banks we're going to take their corporate card business. Nobody took us seriously. That was our advantage.
The old banks charge you to exist. Monthly fees, transfer fees, paper statement fees. We charge zero. And we still make money. That tells you how much they were overcharging.
The dealership model is designed to confuse you. Hidden fees, four-hour negotiations, a guy in a bad suit telling you he needs to "talk to his manager." We eliminated all of it.
Brazil has the highest interest rates in the world for consumer lending. Banks charge 300% APR on personal loans. That's not banking — that's robbery with a license.
Lawyers bill $1,000 an hour to read documents. AI can read them in seconds. The math is so obvious it's almost embarrassing that it took this long.
We sell generic finasteride for $25 a month. A dermatologist visit plus brand-name Propecia costs $300. Same drug. Same result. 12x cheaper. That's the whole pitch.
British banks charge you £35 for going overdrawn by £1. Then they charge you interest on the overdraft fee. It's predatory and everyone knows it. We just said: we won't do that.
Opening a bank account takes 8 minutes on N26. Eight minutes. At Deutsche Bank it takes two weeks and a physical branch visit. That's not competition. That's two different centuries.
Weight Watchers has been around for 60 years. They still make you go to meetings. We said: the meeting can happen on your phone, the coach can message you, and the community can be digital. Same outcomes. Modern delivery.
Banks didn't want to work with us at first. We were screen-scraping their data. They hated it. Then they realized their customers wanted fintech apps, and fintech apps needed Plaid. Now they work with us willingly.
A dress on Shein costs $8. A similar dress at Zara costs $50. We can do that because we ship directly from the factory to the customer. No warehouse. No retail store. No middleman. That's $42 of fat we cut out.
Hertz and Avis spent decades building fleets and airport counters. We built a marketplace and let the cars come to us. Turns out there were millions of them.
FICO scores are a 30-year-old technology pretending to be modern. They ignore education, employment, and dozens of variables that actually predict whether someone will repay a loan.
The financial services industry is built on one lie — that you need a human advisor to manage your money well. You do not. You need discipline and diversification. A robot does both better.
Indian brokers were charging 0.5 percent per trade. We charged a flat 20 rupees. That is like charging 25 cents instead of 50 dollars. The industry thought we were insane.
In China, if you don't cannibalize your own product, someone else will. WeChat was designed to kill QQ before a competitor could.
A $2,000 phone that does the same thing as a $500 phone is not a superior product. It is a tax on people who don't know any better.
Banks are essentially technology companies with bad technology. We're fixing that. Every bank charges you fees for things that should cost nothing. Currency exchange should be free. Transfers should be instant. We make them so.
You don't need permission to change things. You just need to build something better and cheaper. The incumbents will fight you. The customers will thank you. Guess which one matters more.
I created 42 because the education system produces employees, not entrepreneurs. No teachers, no tuition, no diploma — just problems to solve and people to solve them with. If you can survive 42, you can survive anything.
When I launched Free Mobile at €2 per month, the telecom industry called me insane. Their stock prices called them overpriced. The market agreed with me within weeks.
The financial industry was built by men, for men, using language that excludes everyone else. I'm not here to ask permission to be at the table. I'm building my own table — and everyone's invited.
The traditional university model — pay $200,000 for four years in a classroom — is not the only way to learn. It never should have been.
ChatGPT did to Chegg what Chegg did to textbooks. Disruption is only fun when you are the one disrupting.
The trucking industry has a driver shortage crisis. Autonomous trucks do not solve it — they make it irrelevant.
Antivirus is dead. I spent 18 years at McAfee watching it die. CrowdStrike was built to replace it.
The mortgage industry is broken. It takes 45 days to close a loan that should take 45 minutes.
Every manufacturer rejected my design because vacuum bags were a 500 million dollar industry. Nobody wanted to kill it.
We put scooters on sidewalks in Santa Monica without asking permission. The city was furious. Users loved it.
I'm a catalyst for change. You can't be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place.
The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.
The record labels are suing us because they're scared. They should be building with us instead.
Western Union has 500,000 physical locations. We have a phone app. The phone is winning.
We took the most hated shopping experience in America — buying a mattress — and made it fun.
Insurance hasn't been reinvented in 100 years. That's not because it's perfect. It's because nobody tried.
We created a category. That's the good news. The bad news is 50 competitors copied it immediately.
Buying a used car in Mexico was terrifying. No history, no warranty, frequent fraud. We fixed that.
My sister spent $2,000 on a dress she wore once. That's insane. That's why Rent the Runway exists.
I left Citigroup because I realized big banks would never serve average Americans well. The incentives don't align.
Traditional insurers price on who you are. We price on how you drive. One of those is fair.
Insurance in Europe is stuck in the 1990s. Paper forms. Phone calls. Opaque pricing. We're changing all of it.
I look for the next paradigm shift. File sharing, social networking, streaming — each one was dismissed before it was inevitable.
Napster was right about everything except the business model. The music industry proved us right 10 years later.
Mint Mobile proved that you don't need a billion-dollar ad budget. You need one funny ad and the internet.
Blockchain is a fundamental shift in how value is transferred. This is internet-level change.
The internet disintermediated everything except banking. We were trying to change that.
Why should banks make 18% on credit cards when borrowers could pay 8% and investors could earn 6%?
M-Pesa moves more money in Kenya than the formal banking system. We didn't disrupt banks — we replaced them.
We've been trying to disrupt the 6% commission for 20 years. The NAR settlement might finally do it.
The real estate industry has resisted change for 100 years. We're not going anywhere.
Freight logistics tracked with phone calls and faxes. In 2024. We're fixing a 1990s problem.
The banks in Brazil were so bad that we didn't need to be great. We just needed to not be terrible.
Why does it cost $10 to trade a stock when the actual cost is a fraction of a penny? That question started Robinhood.
Skype carried 40% of international phone calls at its peak. We turned a $0 product into a $8.5 billion company. Free can be very expensive for incumbents.
Lab diamonds will get better and cheaper. That's why we sold. You don't fight technology. You adapt or exit.
The music industry tried to kill us for five years before they realized we were their only hope.
I left Itaú to start Nubank because I saw from the inside how broken the system was. The best disruption comes from people who understand the incumbents.
Brazilian banks charged outrageous fees because they could. We proved they didn't have to.
The history of economic progress is a history of creative destruction. The question is always: who bears the cost of the disruption?
The Pentagon spends $800 billion a year and most of it goes to five companies using 1990s technology. That’s the opportunity.
The insurance industry moves slowly because incumbents have no incentive to change. They are profitable doing exactly what they have always done. Startups have to force the change.
Legal services will follow the same path as tax preparation. TurboTax didn't kill accountants. It made basic tax filing accessible to everyone.
Insurance in India was built around agents. We asked: what if we built it around the customer instead?
Business travel was a $1.4 trillion industry run on fax machines and phone calls. We just applied consumer-grade UX to it.
Big ag companies are not happy about us. When you save farmers 30% on seed costs, someone's 30% margin just disappeared. They notice.
Enterprise software should not cost more than a car. That is a market failure we can fix.
Disruptors come and go. Good products last. The best response to disruption is to make something better.
We did not set out to be disruptive. We set out to solve a real problem. The disruption was just what happened when the solution worked.
The incumbents in telecoms were not positioned to move fast. They had everything to lose by competing with themselves.
If you don't reinvent yourself every few years in tech, someone else will reinvent you out of existence.
If you want to change an industry, you can't ask permission.
You have to be willing to cannibalize your own business before someone else does it for you.
We are in an era of disruption, and we have to be honest with society about the scale of the challenge and the urgency of the need for change.