UNDERDOG

I got straight D's and F's in school. My teacher told me I would never amount to anything. She was wrong.

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.

We became India's most valuable fintech startup at $7.5 billion. Two guys from Jamshedpur who couldn't get a meeting with a bank five years earlier. India's startup story is being written by people the establishment never saw coming.

Shopee beat Lazada — which is backed by Alibaba — in every Southeast Asian market. A Singaporean startup outcompeted the most powerful e-commerce company in Asia. That wasn't supposed to happen.

We started in Perm, Russia. Not Moscow. Not St. Petersburg. Perm — a city in the Ural Mountains that most investors have never heard of. Location did not matter. The product mattered.

Being underestimated is the biggest competitive advantage you can have.

Hollywood told me my audience didn't matter. My audience told Hollywood it was wrong — with their wallets.

I was drafted 199th overall. Every single day since then has been about proving that was wrong.