Micky Malka

He was born and raised in Venezuela.⁠[1][2]

Public documents give his age as follows: the Form 8-K that MercadoLibre signed on March 7, 2013 gives it as 38 and prints his full name as Meyer “Micky” Malka Rais; the Institutional Investor article of November 9, 2015 gives 41; the annual report that Ribbit LEAP signed on March 30, 2021 gives 46; RobinhoodRobinhoodRobinhood is a financial services brand co-founded in 2013 by Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt; its publicly listed parent company is Robinhood Markets, Inc., headquartered in Menlo Park, California, United States. The company has grown from commission-free mobile securities trading into crypto assets, retirement accounts, and other financial services, and trades on Nasdaq under the symbol HOOD.Open the full entry’s 2022 proxy statement, whose notice of meeting is dated May 2, 2022, gives 47; and the Forbes profile page, whose editor’s notes are marked as last updated on May 27, 2026, gives 52.⁠[3][4][5][6][1]

In the interview that Endeavor published in January 2025 he said, “I grew up middle-class; my parents were doctors.” The interviewer, Allen Taylor, said in it that Spanish is his first language and that he was six years old when he went to summer camp; his parents, he said, sent him to a Jewish summer camp in PennsylvaniaPennsylvaniaPennsylvania (officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania) is a Middle Atlantic state of the United States; its capital is Harrisburg, and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are its two great metropolitan areas. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on December 12, 1787, the second state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 13,002,700.Open the full entry for eight weeks, he knew only how to say “yes” and “no,” and that was how he learned English.⁠[7]

In the same interview he recounted that in 1983 he wrote a letter to the tooth fairy in which, not trusting the local currency, he asked for dollars instead. Shortly afterwards the bolívar, the Venezuelan currency, devalued for the first time in thirty years: three months later in the article’s introduction, four months later in his own words in the transcript. When he turned 35, he said, his mother gave him an album in which he found the letter, and he later made it part of his pitch when raising Ribbit Capital’s first fund.⁠[7]

The 2022 Midas List survey that TrueBridge Capital Partners published on ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry’s website states that in Venezuela he witnessed firsthand what devaluation and hyperinflation can do to a nation. In the 2026 David SenraDavid SenraDavid Senra is the founder and host of the Founders podcast, on which he reads biographies of entrepreneurs to discuss starting and running businesses and making personal decisions. He began producing the show in 2016, partnered with Colossus in 2022, and in 2025 launched David Senra, a long-form interview show under his own name.Open the full entry interview he likewise said that he grew up in Venezuela with hyperinflation and devaluation.⁠[8][9]

He recalled that in November 1987, at the age of 13 and in Venezuela, he bought his first share of Berkshire HathawayBerkshire HathawayBerkshire Hathaway Inc. is a multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, United States (NYSE: BRK.A/BRK.B), with businesses spanning insurance, railroads, energy, manufacturing, and retail. Warren Buffett took control of the company in 1965 and ran it until 2025, and Greg Abel succeeded him as CEO at the start of 2026. The company long held stakes in several U.S. banks, including M&T (1991–2020), Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, which it successively reduced or exited between 2020 and 2024.Open the full entry. He had read a few articles in Fortune Magazine about Warren BuffettWarren BuffettWarren Buffett is an American investor who took control of Berkshire Hathaway in 1965 and served as its chairman and chief executive from 1970; he handed the chief executive role to Greg Abel on January 1, 2026 and became chairman emeritus, while remaining a director, on September 18, 2026.Open the full entry and about brands such as American ExpressAmerican ExpressAmerican Express Company is a payments company headquartered in New York that issues credit and charge cards and operates its own payments network; founded in 1850, it is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.Open the full entry and Coca-Cola, and he loved the brands in Buffett’s portfolio; he knew little about insurance float.⁠[9]

That month, he said, he had just had his Bar Mitzvah, and the stock market crash of October 1987 had taken place a month earlier and the stock had fallen a great deal; he had not collected enough money to buy one share, so he asked his grandfather for a loan, on which his grandfather charged him interest as a way of teaching him.⁠[9][9]

Following what Buffett advised at the time, he said, he had the share mailed to him as a physical certificate and not left with a broker, and it arrived in Venezuela. From then on he received the annual letters to shareholders by mail every year and read and highlighted them; when a letter used terms he did not understand, he bought the little book Understanding Money and Markets from The Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal is a U.S. news publication founded in 1889, with a focus on business, finance and economics. It is published by Dow Jones, part of News Corp.Open the full entry to look them up. His self-education, he said, came from doing all of this from the age of 13.⁠[9][9][10]

The Ribbit LEAP annual report and the MercadoLibre Form 8-K both state that in 1991, at the age of 18, he co-founded Heptagon Group, a securities and investment broker-dealer serving the Venezuelan and U.S. markets, where he was chief operating officer; Robinhood’s 2022 proxy statement states that he held that post until 1999.⁠[5][3][6]

Accounts of his age when he founded the firm differ. The director biography on Upgrade’s website gives 19. In the Endeavor interview he said, “At 16, I founded a broker-dealer focused on capital markets.” In Venezuela, he said, where the economy revolves around oil, one learns about cycles; he understood how the economy reacted to swings in the oil price and built a business around that insight. Those were times of high inflation, he said, and he found a way to exploit a quirk of the banking system that allowed double-counting on weekends. In the David Senra interview, asked whether he started his first company at 17, he answered “17.”⁠[11][7][9]

The Forbes profile states that he founded and sold his first business, a financial brokerage, while still a teenager. The Institutional Investor article of 2015 states that he formed and sold two start-ups in Venezuela.⁠[1][12][4]

In 1996 he graduated from the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas with a degree in economics; the Forbes profile lists the degree as “Bachelor of Arts/Economics.” In the Endeavor interview he said that he did go to college and graduate, but that “my friends deserve 90% of the credit for helping me while I focused on my business.”⁠[13][5][1][7]

The Forbes profile states that in 1996 he opened the first Wendy’s franchises in Venezuela and even met Dave Thomas, the late founder of Wendy’s.⁠[1]

The biographies in securities filings state that in 1998 he developed the online brokerage Patagon.com, Inc., which Banco Santander acquired in March 2000; the biography on Upgrade’s website says that he co-developed the online brokerage.⁠[5][3][11]

The article that TrueBridge Capital Partners published on Forbes’s website calls Patagon Latin America’s first comprehensive internet-based financial services portal and dealer and states that it expanded its online services to the United States and the rest of South America and was acquired in 2000 by the Spanish bank Banco Santander for $750 million.⁠[8]

The MercadoLibre Form 8-K states that he also served as interim chief executive officer of OpenBank, an online bank in Spain and Germany.⁠[3]

In the Endeavor interview he said that at 23 he was introduced through a mutual friend in New York to the Argentine entrepreneur Wences Casares and that their first meeting, in Buenos Aires, did not go well; a later invitation for a beer ended in a bar fight in which he helped out, and it was then that the two revisited the idea of a partnership.⁠[7]

The biographies in securities filings state that in 2003 he co-founded Banco Lemon, a Brazilian retail bank serving the underbanked population, which became one of the largest private microfinance institutions in Brazil and was acquired by Banco do Brasil in 2009.⁠[5][6]

In the David Senra interview he calls the business Lemon Bank. After selling their first dot-com company, he said, he and his business partner Wences Casares put all of the proceeds into the bank in Brazil, with no outside investors; he moved to Brazil with his wife and lived there for three years. The two of them were then 25 and 26, he said, and because the Brazilian economy did not take off, nothing they did worked; he almost lost all the money he had ever made, and the business nearly died twice.⁠[9][9][9][10]

The bank had no branches, he said, and worked through three kinds of outlet: counters at the checkout of existing stores, kiosks inside stores, and small franchised shops that ran only its payment system, a model of the years 2003 to 2007, before the smartphone. At its peak, he said, it had 7,000 physical points across Brazil and served 15 million customers, at a time when half of Brazil was unbanked.⁠[9][9]

Two years are given for the sale: asked in this interview in what year he sold, he answered 2008; the securities filings give 2009 as the year of the acquisition by Banco do Brasil.⁠[9][5]

The Forbes profile states that he moved to the Bay Area in 2007 to launch Bling Nation, a payments startup that ultimately failed. Speaking of the move in the Endeavor interview, he said, “Family was a big factor—we wanted a safe place to raise kids.” Professionally, he added, Silicon Valley is like playing in the Champions League, and the couple had thought that they would stay for a few years, but it has been much longer.⁠[1][7]

In the interview that Le Random published in January 2026 he said that he and Becky Kleiner left Venezuela as immigrants because of the turmoil there and lived in Brazil; it was probably a fifteen-year journey to reach Silicon Valley, he said, and by the time of that interview they had spent another eighteen years there; he has worked in the same office, he said, for the eighteen years since he moved to Palo Alto with Becky Kleiner.⁠[14]

The MercadoLibre Form 8-K states that in July 2008 he co-founded Bling Nation, a mobile payments company based in Palo Alto, and was its co-chief executive officer until July 2011, when it evolved into Lemon Inc.; the Ribbit LEAP annual report gives 2008 to 2011 as the years in which he held that post at Bling Nation Ltd.⁠[3][5]

TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry wrote on October 30, 2009 that Bling Nation had raised $20 million in Series B funding from Balderton Capital, bringing its total to $33 million since its launch in 2007, and that its chief executive was Wences Casares. As the article describes it, the company partnered with local banks in small American towns, which gave depositors a chip that could be attached to any cell phone and used to pay directly from a checking account at local merchants equipped with readers; the system was then in use in two ColoradoColoradoColorado is a U.S. state classified as one of the Mountain states, with Denver as its capital. It was admitted to the Union on August 1, 1876, as the 38th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 5,773,714.Open the full entry towns, La Junta and Woodland Park.⁠[15]

The MercadoLibre Form 8-K states that in May 2011 he co-founded Banco Bracce, a Brazilian financial institution specializing in lending to mid-sized companies, and served as a director; the biography on Upgrade’s website states that the bank was sold in 2015.⁠[3][11]

TechCrunch wrote that Lemon.com formally launched on October 13, 2011, at that point a free cloud-based service for organizing receipts and tracking spending, with Wences Casares as co-founder and co-chief executive officer; an update later added to the article states that the funding of more than $10 million it mentioned belonged to the predecessor company, Bling Nation, and that Lemon was then bootstrapped. The MercadoLibre Form 8-K of March 2013 describes him as the co-founder and then chairman of Lemon, Inc.⁠[16][3]

On December 12, 2013, TechCrunch wrote that the identity-protection company LifeLock had acquired the digital wallet platform Lemon for approximately $42.6 million; the article lists Maveron, Lightspeed Venture PartnersLightspeed Venture PartnersLightspeed Venture Partners backs companies from seed through late-stage financing. Its website distinguishes Lightspeed Management Company (LSVP) from Lightspeed India Partners (LSIP): the two are separately operated investment advisers, with the U.S., European, and Israeli offices belonging to LSVP and the India and Southeast Asia offices belonging to LSIP.Open the full entry, CampVentures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Chamath PalihapitiyaChamath PalihapitiyaChamath Palihapitiya is an investor and business operator who founded and leads Social Capital, and is also co-founder and CEO of the AI software company 8090 and a co-host of the All-In podcast. He previously ran user growth at Facebook and took part in taking several companies public through the Social Capital Hedosophia series of special purpose acquisition companies; he is also an early investor in and director of Beast Industries.Open the full entry’s Social+CapitalSocial CapitalSocial Capital is a US technology investment firm founded in 2011 and led by Chamath Palihapitiya. Its activities evolved from venture funds toward investing and incubation with permanent proprietary capital.Open the full entry Partnership among Lemon’s investors, states that Lemon had raised $8 million in Series A funding in 2012 and that Casares became general manager of mobile at LifeLock, and describes the earlier Bling Nation as an innovative but perhaps too early company originally focused on contactless mobile payments. The Institutional Investor article of 2015 gives the sale price as $50 million. The Fortune Magazine article of June 2015 states that LifeLock paid $42.6 million for Lemon in December 2013, of which $5 million was placed in an escrow that LifeLock later claimed for performance issues.⁠[17][4][18]

He has been managing partner of Ribbit Capital since May 2012. Institutional Investor wrote that the Palo Alto firm invests in financial services and is named for the sound a frog makes, to connote leapfrogging; it states that he “decided it was the right time to become a premier investor in financial services,” pointing to the banks’ recovery from the 2008 crisis, the spread of smartphones and consumers’ openness to new products.⁠[13][3][4][6]

In the Endeavor interview he said that Ribbit’s mantra was written in 2012 and that not a word of it has changed since; he described Ribbit as “a company that happens to deploy capital” and not a venture firm in the usual sense.⁠[7]

In the David Senra interview he said that he does not think of Ribbit as an investment firm but as a startup, with a technology stack it built itself and a small team. He confirmed that Ribbit is his sixth company. Although the first five were successful, he said, he considers himself “a failed entrepreneur,” because the best entrepreneurs never have to sell their company; it took him twenty years, he said, to learn how to design the structure, the culture and the team so that something could be done forever.⁠[9][9][9]

Forbes wrote in April 2021 that he led Ribbit Capital’s investment in CoinbaseCoinbaseCoinbase is a U.S. operator of crypto asset trading platforms, founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, whose listed parent is Coinbase Global, Inc.; it went public through a direct listing on Nasdaq (ticker COIN) in April 2021 and joined the S&P 500 in May 2025. It provides crypto trading, custody, staking, and stablecoin-related services, launched USDC with Circle, develops the Ethereum layer-2 network Base, and acquired the crypto options exchange Deribit in 2025; its venture investing operates as Coinbase Ventures.Open the full entry’s $6.1 million Series A round in 2013. The TrueBridge Capital Partners article states that he secured this early stake a year after founding Ribbit.⁠[19][8]

Fortune Magazine wrote that on March 13, 2014 Wences Casares announced the launch of the bitcoin company Xapo with $20 million in venture capital from Benchmark, Ribbit Capital and Fortress Investment GroupFortress Investment GroupFortress Investment Group is a global alternative investment manager active in credit, real estate, private equity and asset-based finance.Open the full entry.⁠[18]

The TrueBridge Capital Partners article also states that Ribbit first backed Robinhood in its $13 million Series A round in 2014, took part in the Series D round of the Brazilian digital bank Nubank in 2016 and in Brex’s Series A round in 2017.⁠[8]

On March 5, 2013, on the recommendation of its Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee, the board of MercadoLibre appointed him a Class II director and a member of its Audit Committee; the board determined that he was independent under the Nasdaq listing requirements and the company’s corporate governance guidelines. The Form 8-K states that he receives the same fees as the other independent directors, prorated for the period from March 5 to June 13, 2013.⁠[3]

The Form 8-K lists his other board seats at the time: Wonga, a loan company; Peixe Urbano, which it calls the first and largest Latin American local e-commerce company; MECK, Ltd., a private investment firm based in Santiago, Chile; and Revista Climax, a Venezuelan magazine.⁠[3]

Robinhood’s 2022 proxy statement states that he served on the board of MercadoLibre from March 2013 to April 2021.⁠[6]

Institutional Investor’s “Fintech Finance 35” ranking, published on November 9, 2015, placed him ninth. The article states that Ribbit had by then made more than two dozen investments, among them the Bitcoin-related companies BTCjam, Coinbase and Xapo, as well as Credit KarmaCredit KarmaCredit Karma is a US personal finance platform owned by Intuit. It grew from free credit scores and reports beginning in 2007 into financial-product comparisons, cash-flow and net-worth tools. It earns revenue through arrangements including referral commissions from financial partners and is not a bank.Open the full entry, the U.K.–U.S. lending platform Funding Circle, the low-cost brokerage Robinhood, the robo-adviser Wealthfront, Invoice2go of Australia and ContaAzul of Brazil. He said, the article states, that Ribbit tries to find companies around the world that will become “the next Charles Schwab or GEICO.”⁠[4]

The article states that he was then a director of the Bitcoin Foundation. It adds that Ribbit’s website listed its mantra, team biographies and portfolio but gave no email address or telephone number; he said that he wanted to hear only from people who made the effort to find him.⁠[4]

On September 15, 2020, the special purpose acquisition company Ribbit LEAP, Ltd. consummated its initial public offering of 40,250,000 units, generating gross proceeds of $402.5 million; he was its chairman and chief executive officer. Robinhood’s 2022 proxy statement states that he had served on the board of Ribbit LEAP since September 2020.⁠[5][6]

The company’s annual report for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020 states that its sponsor, Ribbit LEAP Sponsor, Ltd., is a Cayman Islands exempted company with limited liability that held 4,407,222 Class B ordinary shares as of March 1, 2021, or 98% of that class and 20% of the voting power; he is a director of the sponsor, his own row in the ownership table is blank, and a footnote states that the table excludes shares that he owns indirectly through his interest in the sponsor. LEAP Ribbit Opportunity VI, LLC, an affiliate of the sponsor, agreed to subscribe for 10,000,000 forward purchase shares and 2,000,000 forward purchase warrants for an aggregate of $100 million. The report states that no executive officer or director received any cash compensation for services.⁠[5]

The report also states that on July 20, 2020 the sponsor paid $25,000 for 25,000 ordinary shares, which were subdivided on September 2, 2020 into 4,472,222 Class B ordinary shares and 12,777,778 Class L ordinary shares, and that the sponsor separately purchased 1,005,000 Class A ordinary shares at $10.00 per share, for gross proceeds of $10.1 million. A fee of $10,000 a month that the company was to pay the sponsor for office space and related services was waived in writing in September 2020. The company was required to complete a business combination within 24 months of the closing of its initial public offering.⁠[5]

He signed the annual report as chairman and chief executive officer on March 30, 2021, together with the chief operating officer, Cynthia McAdam, and the directors Joseph Kauffman and Susan Segal. In describing the sponsor, the report states that Ribbit Capital manages more than $2.6 billion of committed capital on behalf of its investors, with a portfolio that includes AffirmAffirmU.S. pay-over-time and financial technology company offering purchase financing, cards and related payment services to consumers and merchants.Open the full entry, Brex, Coalition, Coinbase and Credit Karma, and calls him an entrepreneur and investor with more than 25 years of experience.⁠[5]

In the David Senra interview he described how this came about. He had admired Sam Walton all his life, he said, and had read every book about him; in 2019, at a small dinner in San Francisco arranged by Sarah Friar, a WalmartWalmartWalmart is an American retailer founded by Sam Walton in 1962, with businesses spanning physical retail, membership warehouse clubs, e-commerce and related services. Its businesses include Walmart and Sam’s Club, and it has expanded into other markets through international investments; its shares trade on Nasdaq under the ticker WMT.Open the full entry director, he met Doug McMillon, the chief executive at the time, a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic. After the dinner Ribbit’s team went to a couple of Walmart stores and tried every financial product on sale there, among them remittances, prepaid cards and bill payment, and found bugs; the products, he said, looked like the fintech of the 1990s.⁠[9][9][9][9][10]

In the January before the pandemic, he said, he wrote to McMillon, then visited him in Bentonville, ArkansasArkansasArkansas is a U.S. state bounded on the east by the Mississippi River; its capital and largest city is Little Rock. Arkansas was admitted to the Union on June 15, 1836, as the 25th state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 3,011,524.Open the full entry, and was introduced by him to John Furner. He put it to the two men that financial services were not Walmart’s first, second or third priority but were Ribbit’s; Walmart then did something it had never done before and set up with Ribbit a joint venture that the two co-own.⁠[9][9][20]

The news release that Walmart issued on January 11, 2021 announced a new fintech startup to be created in a strategic partnership with Ribbit Capital and majority-owned by Walmart; its board was to include John Furner, president and chief executive officer of Walmart U.S., Brett Biggs, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Walmart, and Meyer Malka, managing partner of Ribbit Capital, with independent industry experts to be added. The release states that growth was expected to come through partnerships with and acquisitions of fintech companies. In the release he said that Walmart has a relationship with millions of customers and associates that is built on trust, security and integrity, and that combining Ribbit’s deep knowledge of technology-driven financial businesses and its ability to move with speed with Walmart’s mission and reach would make it possible to create and deliver financial offerings that are second to none.⁠[20]

On January 26, 2022, the company, under the name Hazel, announced in a release carried on Walmart’s corporate news site that it had signed definitive agreements to acquire the fintech platforms Even and ONE; the combined business was to operate under the brand name ONE, with Omer Ismail as chief executive officer. The release states that the combined business would have more than 200 employees and more than $250 million in cash on its balance sheet and that the transactions were expected to close in the first half of 2022, pending approvals. It describes Hazel as the independent fintech launched in partnership with Walmart and Ribbit Capital, its strategic investors, and names him as managing partner of Ribbit Capital and a board member of the combined business. Consumers, he said in the release, are always seeking better services, which in financial services means transparency, access and simplicity, and the combination of the two teams and products would give ONE the opportunity to bring a new level of service and access to millions of Americans.⁠[21]

Modern Retail wrote on October 20, 2025 that the company took on the brand name One when it acquired two financial services firms and was renamed OnePay in a rebrand in March, and that its chief executive is Omer Ismail, a former Goldman SachsGoldman SachsGoldman Sachs is an American financial services group headquartered in New York whose businesses include investment banking, securities trading, asset management, and wealth management. It traces its origins to the commercial paper business Marcus Goldman founded in 1869; it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1999 under the ticker GS and became a bank holding company in 2008. David Solomon serves as chairman and chief executive officer.Open the full entry executive; the app offers banking, credit cards and loans and serves as a digital wallet at checkout in Walmart stores and on Walmart’s website. The article adds that OnePay said in March that its app would handle Walmart’s buy-now-pay-later loans, which are now provided by Klarna in place of Affirm. The article states that OnePay has not disclosed its current ownership structure or the number of its users.⁠[22]

In the interview he said that the joint venture bought two companies to build its infrastructure and is now called OnePay; a customer who wants to pay by phone at Walmart, or to get a debit card, an installment loan or a credit card there, goes through OnePay. He agreed with David Senra that this was the same idea as Lemon Bank years earlier, and he said that “you can tie every single one of our decisions” to something that happened to him twenty years before.⁠[9][9][9][9]

Robinhood’s 2022 proxy statement states that in February 2021 the company issued two tranches of convertible notes, Tranche I with a principal amount of $2,532.0 million and Tranche II with $1,020.0 million, and that two entities affiliated with Ribbit Capital, Bullfrog Capital, L.P. and RH-N Bullfrog Opportunity I, LLC, purchased $501.6 million of the Tranche I notes. Each Tranche I purchaser also received a warrant for equity securities equal in value to 15% of its purchase. On Robinhood’s initial public offering all of the convertible notes converted automatically into 137,305,156 shares of Class A common stock at a conversion price of $26.60 per share.⁠[6]

The TrueBridge Capital Partners article states that Ribbit agreed to lead this round of convertible debt financing in Robinhood in 2021 and that the turnaround time was one day.⁠[8]

Forbes wrote on April 13, 2021 that he, Santi SubotovskySanti SubotovskySanti Subotovsky is an Argentina-born entrepreneur and venture investor, a General Partner at Emergence Capital and a Zoom director. He founded AXG Tecnonexo, joined Emergence in 2010, led its investment in Zoom and has worked with Crunchbase and other enterprise software companies.Open the full entry of Emergence CapitalEmergence CapitalEmergence Capital is a US venture capital firm founded in 2003 by Gordon Ritter, Jason Green and Brian Jacobs. It focuses on early-stage enterprise software and cloud services, with investments including Salesforce, Veeva, Zoom and Crunchbase, and has expanded its focus to AI software and services.Open the full entry and Nicolás Szekasy of Kaszek Ventures were the first three investors born in Latin America to make the Midas List; the article notes that he could not be reached for comment. The survey of newcomers that TrueBridge Capital Partners published the same day placed him at No. 58, called him one of the most successful Latin American venture capital investors and noted that Coinbase and Robinhood, in which he held stakes, were both close to a public listing and that expectations were high for an exit from Nubank.⁠[19][2]

In the Le Random interview he said that he had seen CryptoKitties and CryptoPunks early on but did not buy then. Only after the field blew up in 2022, he said, did he come across in his Twitter feed a piece by the Mexican artist Juan Rodriguez Garcia that resembled a work from the 1970s by a Latin American artist that the couple owned; Becky Kleiner named that artist as the Brazilian Beatriz Milhazes. From there the two began buying digital works paired with pieces in their existing collection; “We didn’t start by going OG, OG with XCOPYs or Punks. Those were not our first purchases,” he said. In the David Senra interview he dated the couple’s first encounter with digital art to five years earlier.⁠[14][9]

The experience, he said, introduced them to a number of artists and practitioners: Seth Goldstein and Phil Mohun of Bright Moments, Snowfro, whom they met at his home in Houston, and Sam Spratt and Michael Kozlowski, whom they met in Venice; two and a half to three years before the interview they visited Beeple’s studio in Charleston for the first time. The two of them, he said, also live-minted their own CryptoCitizens.⁠[14]

They hung the digital works at home and in the office, he said, and their children and the children’s friends would stop in front of the pieces for five, ten or fifteen minutes. “It was speaking to the youth in ways that no other art could,” he said.⁠[14][9]

The two first approached art institutions in the hope that the works could be shown to the public; in the Le Random interview he said that the earliest they were offered was a day in 2028 with a small room, and that the institution could not confirm how it would curate the show. In the David Senra interview he said that on hearing this answer he and his wife both felt that it had to happen now.⁠[14][9]

Robinhood’s 2022 proxy statement states that he has been a director of the company since March 2022; he is a Class II director whose term expires at the 2023 annual meeting of stockholders and a member of the Safety, Risk and Regulatory Committee, which is chaired by Robert Zoellick and also includes Paula Loop. The board determined that he is independent; in doing so it considered that entities associated with Ribbit Capital held more than 5% of the company’s common stock at its initial public offering and continued to hold more than 5% of its Class A common stock, and it concluded that this relationship does not interfere with his exercise of independent judgment.⁠[6]

The ownership table in the proxy statement is as of April 5, 2022: 102,626 shares of Class A common stock, less than 0.1%, are listed for him, of which 102,183 are held by the Tibbir DE Trust, of which he is settlor and investment adviser. Entities associated with Ribbit Capital together held 54,873,416 Class A shares, or 7.3% of the Class A stock and 2.7% of the voting power, a figure taken from a Schedule 13G filed on February 14, 2022 with information as of December 31, 2021. The footnotes name Bullfrog Capital, L.P., Ribbit Capital II, L.P. and Ribbit Capital III, L.P. among the holding entities and state that he is the sole director of the general partners of the funds concerned and may be deemed to have sole voting power and sole investment power over those shares; he disclaims beneficial ownership of the shares held by the trust and by the Ribbit Capital entities except to the extent of his pecuniary interest.⁠[6]

The Midas List published in April 2022 placed him second. Forbes Perú wrote that Coinbase, Nubank and Robinhood, in which he held stakes, were among the highest-profile public listings of 2021. Alexandra Sternlicht of Forbes wrote that he stood behind Chris DixonChris DixonChris Dixon is a programmer, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist, and the founder and managing partner of a16z crypto. He co-founded SiteAdvisor and Hunch, helped create Founder Collective, and later joined Andreessen Horowitz, investing in technology companies such as Coinbase. He is also the author of Read Write Own and has long written about blockchains, network ownership, the open internet, and the combination of AI and crypto.Open the full entry of Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry and that the ranking owed something to the returns from Coinbase going public in April 2021 at a market capitalization of $85 billion.⁠[12][23][8]

The 2023 list article that TrueBridge Capital Partners published on Forbes’s website on May 4, 2023 marks him as No. 2 in its section on Coinbase. Forbes Argentina wrote that he placed second in the 2022, 2023 and 2024 editions of the list and is No. 14 on the 2026 list, with six years on it. The page description of the Forbes profile gives him as No. 14 on the 2026 Midas List, and its editor’s notes state that this is his sixth year on the list; the notes add that Capital OneCapital OneCapital One Financial Corporation is a diversified financial services holding company headquartered in McLean, Virginia, with Credit Card, Consumer Banking and Commercial Banking segments; since completing its acquisition of Discover in 2025 it has owned the Discover, PULSE and Diners Club International networks, and its stock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.Open the full entry’s acquisition of Brex for $5.15 billion gave him another major exit and that he has invested in artificial intelligence and energy companies such as the market research startup Listen Labs and the British power company Fuse Energy.⁠[24][25][1]

Speaking of such rankings in the Endeavor interview, he said, “They’re vanity metrics.” What matters, he said, is being a good partner, parent and friend.⁠[7]

On August 2, 2022, Ribbit LEAP issued a press release and filed a Form 8-K: the company would not consummate an initial business combination within the required time period and would redeem all of its outstanding Class A ordinary shares, effective as of the close of business on August 15, 2022. The Form 8-K was signed by the chief operating officer, Cynthia McAdam.⁠[26]

On January 21, 2025, Endeavor published his conversation with Allen Taylor, managing partner of Endeavor Catalyst, which was recorded in San Francisco; the page carries a video and a transcript. In it he said, “Fintech, as we’ve known it for the past decade, is dead,” and “Our goal isn’t just to write checks. It’s to deposit ideas.”⁠[7]

The article lists Brex, Robinhood, Affirm, Coinbase, Nubank, Groww and Revolut among Ribbit’s investments. In the conversation he also mentioned that Ribbit backed a team in Africa through whose system 80% of their country’s gross domestic product now moves, and two French students who went on to build one of the largest decentralized finance companies. On valuations he said, “It’s okay to reset valuations.”⁠[7]

NODE (the Infinite Node Foundation) is a nonprofit foundation, and the Le Random interview introduces him and Becky Kleiner each as its founder. TechCrunch wrote on May 13, 2025 that NODE had received a $25 million grant that April from him and Becky Kleiner and that he is the foundation’s chair; the article states that Yuga LabsYuga LabsYuga Labs is a company that develops NFT brands, digital content, and virtual worlds; it launched Bored Ape Yacht Club in 2021, and its businesses include BAYC-related collections and Otherside, along with participation in building the ApeChain ecosystem. The company acquired CryptoPunks, Meebits, Moonbirds, and 10KTF, and later transferred these projects one after another. In 2026, Michael Figge became chief executive officer and Greg Solano became chairman.Open the full entry had sold CryptoPunks to NODE for an undisclosed price.⁠[14][27][28]

The Blockworks article states that the new foundation had been created the month before and was made possible through the generosity of him and Becky Kleiner, with $25 million to put toward its mission of preserving and elevating digital art and onchain culture. It adds that NFT Now put the purchase price at about $20 million, a figure on which a NODE spokesperson declined to comment; that NODE would have a permanent exhibition space of 12,000 square feet in Palo Alto, where it planned to show all 10,000 CryptoPunks; and that its advisory board includes Wylie Aronow, a co-founder of Yuga Labs, Erick Calderon, the founder of Art Blocks, and Matt Hall and John Watkinson, the co-founders of Larva LabsLarva LabsLarva Labs is the art and technology duo established by Matt Hall and John Watkinson in 2005. Its projects include CryptoPunks, Autoglyphs, Meebits and Quine. The pair uses code to explore digital identity, generative art and blockchain collecting. It sold the CryptoPunks and Meebits intellectual property in 2022 while remaining independent.Open the full entry.⁠[29]

In a news release distributed through Business Wire, NODE announced that it had acquired the full intellectual property rights for CryptoPunks from Yuga Labs and that the full collection would debut alongside the opening of its permanent exhibition space in Palo Alto. The release quotes him: “CryptoPunks sparked a cultural movement that blended code, community, and commerce”; by pairing museum-grade conservation with an evergreen endowment, he said, the foundation intended to future-proof the work and to make it easier for scholars, curators and collectors to engage with it. The CryptoPunks timeline on NODE’s website dates the acquisition to May 2025 and states that it was the first time a nonprofit had acquired the full intellectual property of a major internet-native artwork.⁠[28][30]

Forbes wrote on January 14, 2026 that Ribbit Capital had led the $69 million Series B round of Listen Labs, a company that conducts customer interviews with artificial intelligence and was valued at more than $500 million. The article states that he had for years run online surveys to test investment ideas at Ribbit and, frustrated by poor data quality, rising costs and panel delays of weeks in traditional data collection, began using Listen Labs; Ribbit now uses it every week to research new and existing investments, and he has recommended it to the companies in Ribbit’s portfolio. “Listen is the best tool to understand the customer,” he said.⁠[31]

The interview that Le Random published on January 19, 2026 calls NODE a Palo Alto hub for code-based art and states that it opens on January 23 with the exhibition 10,000 by Matt Hall and John Watkinson, curated by Amanda Schmitt and produced by Natalie Stone. In the interview he said that the CryptoPunks web page and what its smart contract allows have been greatly enriched since NODE bought the collection six months earlier. Right Click Save wrote on January 28, 2026 that the NODE Foundation had opened its new space in Palo Alto on January 23, 2026 and that 10,000 was the first major exhibition of the full CryptoPunks collection; the timeline on NODE’s website likewise places the opening of the permanent hub with 10,000 in January 2026.⁠[14][32][30]

NODE, he said, is on the same street as his office, two blocks away. “I still remember watching Steve JobsSteve JobsSteve Jobs (1955–2011) was a technology entrepreneur, Apple co-founder, NeXT founder, and investor and former CEO of Pixar. His career spanned personal computing, digital music, smartphones and animated films, with an emphasis on product design, user experience and multidisciplinary teams.Open the full entry walking to the first AppleAppleApple is a public technology company founded in 1976 and headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Its business includes the iPhone, Mac, iPad, wearables, and services such as digital content, payments, and cloud storage. The company builds its product system through in-house hardware, operating systems, and services.Open the full entry retail store, which is a block away,” he said; Jobs spent the first year customizing every element of the experience, he added, and NODE was honored to try to replicate that, starting in a small town. He also said, “Today’s gallery experience is a white room with white walls and no place to sit or even talk.”⁠[14]

The two said in the interview that NODE employs engineers and has no curators, the artists themselves deciding how their work is shown; it plans four to five main exhibitions a year, with rotating shows in between, had hosted twenty-five to thirty artists by the time of the interview, and accepts submissions from artists anywhere. Its executive director is Phil Mohun. He hopes, he said, to see more NODE locations around the world and to see museums take up the model within their own walls; Becky Kleiner said that they are also approaching museums and universities to collaborate on programming.⁠[14][33]

NODE’s website calls it “a nonprofit foundation dedicated to transforming how digital art is experienced” and lists ten commandments, among them “Have serious fun,” “No one leaves empty-handed,” “Bring a beginner’s mindset” and “There’s always a place for Punks.”⁠[34]

On June 7, 2026, Right Click Save published an interview on NODE by its managing editor, Louis Jebb, whose interviewee biographies introduce him and Phil Mohun; the article states that NODE’s opening shows presented work by Larva Labs and Beeple, and it is illustrated with an installation view of Beeple’s exhibition “BEEPLE: / INFINITE_LOOP” at NODE.⁠[33]

In the David Senra interview published in August 2026 he said that NODE is the first digital art studio designed for digital artists, a place where artists are their own curators, and that it was put in downtown Palo Alto because Silicon Valley needs creativity. In the five months since it opened, he said, close to 60,000 people had come; admission is free, every weekend was breaking records, and often it was children who brought their parents. The name, he explained, is meant as a node in a network: they intend to spend a year there perfecting the technology and the interfaces and then open in many more places.⁠[9][9][9][9]

In this interview he called digital artists “rebels” and took Beeple, then on show at NODE, as his example: by his account the artist made and posted a work online every day from 2007 for 5,000 days, sold the set in 2021 for $69 million, and then doubled down and built a studio. CryptoPunks, he said, were the first art created on chain, and they are portraits, as every art movement in history has begun with portraits. He also compared the moment to that of the painters in Paris who were not accepted by the museums and became the Impressionists.⁠[9][9][9][9][9][10][33]

On August 2, 2026, David Senra’s YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel published an interview with him under the title “Lessons From Backing The Best Founders In Fintech | Micky Malka.” The conversation opens with his dislike of labels (0:02); he calls himself “an entrepreneur at heart, an investor by design” (1:11). It moves on to Ribbit Capital’s practice of writing long essays (3:23) and to his purchase of a Berkshire Hathaway share at 13 and his reading of Warren Buffett’s letters to shareholders (5:35). David Senra’s website carries a page for the episode, dated the same day, with a summary and a transcript.⁠[9][9][9][9][10]

The topics that follow are, in order: Ribbit’s essay on tokens and its phrase “token factories” (12:08); artificial intelligence agents in personal finance, and prediction markets (15:27); why he expects companies still led by their founders to win (17:04); what he calls the infinite game (17:37); founders in their twenties and how they organize companies (21:59); his mentor Dee Hock, the founder of Visa (23:40); the youngest generation of founders and what they learned during the COVID-19 pandemic (29:19); and taste, and Silicon Valley’s loss of the ability to build beautiful products (33:44).⁠[9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9][10]

The second half of the interview covers RevolutRevolutRevolut is a London-based digital banking and fintech group founded in 2015 by Nik Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko. It began with low-cost currency exchange and cross-border transfers and expanded into a mobile app offering payments, savings, investing, crypto assets, lending and business accounts. The group conducts banking in the European Economic Area through Revolut Bank UAB in Lithuania, and in March 2026 the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) lifted the restrictions on its UK bank, Revolut Bank UK Ltd; at the end of 2025 the group had 68.3 million retail customers, and in 2025 it reported revenue of £4.5 billion and profit before tax of £1.7 billion.Open the full entry and its founder Nik StoronskyNik StoronskyNik Storonsky (Nikolay Storonsky) is a British entrepreneur and the co-founder and chief executive of the digital banking and fintech group Revolut. After working as a trader at investment banks in London, he co-founded Revolut with Vlad Yatsenko in 2015 and built it into a fintech group with more than 70 million customers; he is also the founder of the venture capital firm QuantumLight.Open the full entry (37:31); how to get to know founders and become the person they call when they cannot sleep (40:50); the criteria for choosing founders that Ribbit calls the “Eye of the Tiger” (44:06); how OnePay came to be built with Walmart (45:45); the years of running Lemon Bank in Brazil (50:42); compounding and long relationships (55:31); his visits to Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholder meetings, and reputation (56:37); NODE, the digital art space he founded with his wife (1:00:28); his fondness for rebels and for Star WarsStar WarsStar Wars is a space-fantasy film and entertainment franchise created by George Lucas and now owned by Lucasfilm, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company.Open the full entry (1:07:40); and why he runs Ribbit as a startup (1:10:56). It closes with a conversation he once had with Charlie MungerCharlie MungerCharlie Munger (1924–2023) was an American lawyer, investor and philanthropist who served as vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway from 1978, worked alongside Warren Buffett for decades, and led Wesco Financial and the Daily Journal Corp.Open the full entry (1:14:45).⁠[9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9][9][10]

In the interview David Senra described how the two came to know each other: he had a major career decision to make and lacked the information he needed, so he asked two people separately to introduce him to Malka; at their first meeting the two talked for several hours, and in the end he made his decision on the strength of Malka’s reputation.⁠[9][9]

As of November 2026, the director page on Robinhood’s investor relations website lists him as an independent director and a member of the People and Compensation Committee and describes him as the founder and managing partner of Ribbit Capital, with more than 25 years of experience building and investing in technology and financial services companies in the United States, Europe and Latin America, and as a director of several private companies.⁠[13]

As of November 11, 2026, the “Board of Directors” section of Upgrade’s website carries a biography page for him; under his name it prints “Founder, Ribbit Capital,” and it states that Ribbit Capital is invested in more than 40 companies globally, that he has more than twenty years of experience building and investing in technology and financial services companies across four continents, and that he serves on the boards of many privately held companies. The page states that he serves on the board of directors of Mercado Libre, whereas the term on MercadoLibre’s board given in Robinhood’s 2022 proxy statement ends in April 2021.⁠[11][6]

As of November 2026, Ribbit Capital’s website carries the line “the future belongs to the rebels” and states that, from artificial intelligence, global commerce, infrastructure, wealth management, money movement and identity to data and energy, the greatest breakthroughs come from those willing to challenge what is safe, familiar and comfortable, and that Ribbit partners with these rebels. The site adds that Ribbit brings conviction, capital and a global network and, most importantly, an obsession with brand.⁠[35]

His LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry profile carries the name Meyer “Micky” Malka. The education it lists is Moral y Luces Herzl Bialik from 1987 to 1991 and Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (UCAB) from 1991 to 1996, with the degree given as “Economista” (economist).⁠[36]

The experience it lists: co-founder of the Wendy’s hamburger franchise in Venezuela from April 1996 to June 2007; co-founder of Patagon and its chief executive for Venezuela from March 1999 to March 2002; co-founder of Banco Lemon from February 2002 to December 2010; partner and chief executive of Meck Ltd. from February 2002 to December 2012; co-founder and co-chief executive of Bling Nation from January 2007 to May 2011; co-founder of Banco Bracce from December 2010 to March 2013; co-founder of Lemon, Inc. from May 2011 to December 2013; Ribbit Capital since May 2012; board member of MercadoLibre from March 2013 to May 2021; and board member of the Bitcoin Foundation from October 2013 to July 2015.⁠[36]

His wife is Becky Kleiner, whom the Le Random interview introduces as an investor. The two have collected art together, he said, since they were dating in their twenties; he recalled that he got one piece in college and asked his parents for another, choosing an artwork that he liked. When the two married, she said, her siblings gave them a work by a Venezuelan artist; in their early years they had perhaps three or four pieces, which they always kept with them.⁠[14][9]

He said in the interview that when the two were growing up in Venezuela there was art everywhere, in the streets, on the highways, in the airports and in the universities they attended. Of Becky Kleiner’s alma mater in Caracas he said, “The auditorium was designed by Calder,” and he said that the airport floor is the work of Carlos Cruz-Diez. Becky Kleiner said, “Then you would drive on a highway and see sculptures by Soto.” They moved, she said, from Venezuela to Brazil, back to Venezuela and then to CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry; they bought their first piece twenty-five years ago, and until some six years before the interview it remained the only one they had bought.⁠[14]

The couple have three children. In the interview that Endeavor published in January 2025 he said that his eldest was 19 and that he gave his children BitcoinBitcoinBitcoin (common symbol BTC) is an open peer-to-peer electronic cash protocol, network, and native digital asset. Full nodes independently verify transactions and blocks according to the consensus rules; transactions are recorded as UTXOs, and blocks are organized into a public ledger through proof of work. Bitcoin is not issued or managed by any single institution, but using, holding in custody, and trading it still involve key, privacy, market, and legal risks.Open the full entry for their lost teeth.⁠[14][7]

The MercadoLibre Form 8-K of March 2013 states that he resides in Palo Alto, California. The Forbes profile gives his residence as Palo Alto and his citizenship as Venezuela.⁠[3][1]

In the David Senra interview he said that he hates being labeled, which he traces to growing up in Venezuela; people who saw that he was tall, for example, assumed that he must be good at basketball, to which his answer was that he was terrible at it. The only labels he wants, he said, are that people call him a great friend, a great partner and a good father.⁠[9][9][9]

He grew up with Star Wars, he said, and is a great fan of it; in the Venezuela of his youth the only way to survive was to be a rebel. “All I want in my tombstone is to say he was a rebel,” he said.⁠[9][9]

He explained the rebel’s mindset as always asking questions and being willing to change one’s mind on learning something different; many people, he said, reach a point in life at which they stop asking questions and start preaching, and he wants that point to come for him only on the last day of his life.⁠[9][9]

He considers himself a patient person, he said. He also said that he would rather be behind than ahead: when he is behind he learns more and has more energy, and as soon as people say that his team was right, he feels that it is time to change the rules and innovate again.⁠[9][9][9][9]

In the David Senra interview he said that he has been a shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway all his life and began attending its shareholder meetings at 18; the meetings were then much smaller than they later became, held on a Friday afternoon at a Holiday Inn with a couple of hundred people. A few years later they moved to a larger convention center and opened with a film that every year included the clip of Warren Buffett testifying before Congress as chairman of Salomon Brothers, on reputation as the thing that, unlike money, could not be lost; the passage, he said, stuck in his mind.⁠[9][9][9][10]

He went to the meetings for a number of years, he said, and got to meet Buffett and spend time with him afterwards; going there was for him not a matter of learning anything new but of seeing how Buffett applied the same principles to the new economic conditions of each year. The most important thing he took from the letters, he said, was not the decisions Buffett made but that, whether in the inflation of the 1970s or in the era of zero interest rates, Buffett repeated the same pattern of decision-making. Asked whether the letters influenced Ribbit’s decision to write essays, he answered, “Completely.”⁠[9][9][9][9]

He also described a conversation with Charlie Munger: after one of the meetings Buffett held a gathering at the Happy Hollow golf club; he was then about 25 and owned a single share of Berkshire, Bill GatesBill GatesBill Gates is an American entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist who cofounded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975 and served as its chief executive and chairman. He later shifted his focus toward global health, education and climate, chairs the Gates Foundation, and manages investments through arrangements including Cascade.Open the full entry and the chief executives of many large companies were present, and he was the youngest person in the room. By his account Munger sat down beside him and remarked that he must be very wealthy to be there; when he answered that he owned only one share, Munger said that he was the wealthiest person in the room, because he had time and would compound for another seventy years, and gave him a rule never to forget: “You only need to get rich once.”⁠[9][9][10]

In the David Senra interview he said that Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, was one of his mentors and that for almost ten or twelve years he kept visiting Hock and talking with him. He called Hock the creator of the “chaordic” organization and relayed Hock’s view that the best expression of human beings is found at the intersection between chaos and order: too orderly, and one does not innovate; too chaotic, and one cannot communicate and breaks.⁠[9][9][10]

Hock’s influence, he said, shows not only in Ribbit but in his earlier startups as well. His standard interview question is one that Hock taught him: he gives a candidate six words, asks for them to be put in order, and listens to how the candidate explains the order; as he remembers it, the exercise comes from a letter that Hock wrote to his team in 1972.⁠[9][9]

Hock’s greatest success, in his view, lay in the legal structure he chose: an association allowed banks that competed with one another to save face, each competing on its own while sharing one brand. Hock’s mind was still restless in his early nineties, he said, and Hock explained blockchain to him; in Hock’s own eyes VisaVisaVisa Inc. is one of the world’s leaders in digital payments, with roots going back to 1958, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.Open the full entry was a failure, because only its simplest part, payments, was ever released, whereas what Hock had wanted to build went much further and looked much like today’s blockchains and smart contracts. Had Hock been forty years younger, he said, he would have taken him for Satoshi NakamotoSatoshi NakamotoSatoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, who published the Bitcoin white paper in 2008, released the first Bitcoin software and launched the blockchain in 2009, and stopped public activity around 2011; the person’s true identity has never been confirmed.Open the full entry.⁠[9][9][10]

In the David Senra interview he said that Ribbit begins by putting its ideas into long essays: an essay starts at about 20 pages, yet he can explain each one on a napkin; some take a year to write, others four or five months, and the whole process of arriving at a thesis, testing it, sharing it and reworking it takes about a year to a year and a half. The finished essay goes to the founders Ribbit works closely with and to the investors in its funds, so that they can hold the firm accountable; Ribbit then talks it over with the founders it met while writing, most of whom it has not yet invested in.⁠[9][9][9][9]

He summed up the essay on tokens as follows: the word means something different at each company but always denotes machine-readable information; every company needs a supply of tokens in the form of information, money and knowledge, and so Ribbit calls companies “token factories.” To deliver any service or product, he said, one has to understand three things, identity, value and intelligence; the frontier artificial intelligence laboratories are the first token factories, while money has so far remained largely untouched by artificial intelligence. He expects the link to come from the meeting of blockchains and artificial intelligence, and he expects agents to appear soon that make investment, commerce and payment decisions and recommendations on a person’s behalf.⁠[9][9][9][9][9]

The winners of this round, he believes, will be companies still led by their founders, such as Stripe, Robinhood, Nubank and Revolut, and he mentioned that Vlad TenevVlad TenevVlad Tenev is an entrepreneur and the co-founder, chairman, chief executive officer, and president of Robinhood, as well as the co-founder and executive chairman of Harmonic, an artificial intelligence company focused on mathematical reasoning. He has a background in mathematics, worked early on in trading technology ventures, and later built a financial services platform for individual investors with Baiju Bhatt.Open the full entry of Robinhood is tokenizing equities and other assets. Between 2021 and 2023, he said, he had thought that the incumbent financial institutions were catching up and that there was little difference between their products and those of the newer firms, but artificial intelligence has let these technology companies pull away again.⁠[9][9][9][6]

Ribbit calls its criteria for choosing founders the “Eye of the Tiger,” which, he said, also fits on a napkin: “the energy of a scientist, the conviction of a missionary, the heart of a partner, the dreams of an athlete, the obsession of an owner.” Arriving at these traits took almost ten years, he said, and they were put on a napkin about five years ago.⁠[9][9][25]

Of Revolut he said that after its banking license was finally approved he went to London for an event at which a chancellor and other public officials spoke, and that he found on his phone that the day fell exactly ten years after the handshake with the founders on the seed round. What drew him to Nik Storonsky at the start, he said, was that the company’s name stood for who its founder was: Storonsky had left Moscow for London, had been a trader, was frustrated at how complex, expensive and unfair it was to move money, and resolved to change it. He described the Storonsky of his late twenties as swimming every day and being the first to arrive at the office and the last to leave, and said that Storonsky still has 20 people reporting directly to him. In the previous year and a half, he said, he had visited Revolut’s offices in the Middle East, Barcelona and London. Banking Dive wrote on March 11, 2026 that the Prudential Regulation Authority had lifted the restrictions on Revolut’s license, allowing it to launch as a full bank in the United Kingdom; the article names Nik Storonsky as a co-founder of Revolut.⁠[9][9][9][9][9][9][37][10]

Ribbit’s internal meetings, he said, are called Tatooine and the team has its Jedi and its Wookiees, a Star Wars vocabulary that runs through the firm’s daily life. Everyone on the team can see his calendar and his inbox, he said, as he can see anyone’s email, and all information is shared; decisions are made by the group and not by individuals, and Ribbit has no notion of a single partner being responsible for a given company.⁠[9][9][9][10]

Of founders in their twenties he said that theirs is the fastest-learning generation in history and that many of them find working on software alone unchallenging and want to build physical things. His favorite question for them is what they were doing during the COVID-19 pandemic; the most successful of them today, he said, were then on YouTube learning about everything. What this generation still lacks, in his view, is taste; over the past fifteen years, he said, Silicon Valley, in pursuing scale and growth alone, lost the ability to build beautiful things, and the founders who bring that ability back will win.⁠[9][9][9][9][9][9]

The Colossus website carries the page for episode 401 of the podcast Invest Like the BestInvest Like the BestInvest Like the Best is a business and investing interview podcast hosted by Patrick O’Shaughnessy. Launched in 2016, it features conversations with investors, founders and experts about their ideas, methods and stories; the show is now part of the Colossus podcast network.Open the full entry, “Building Ribbit,” hosted by Patrick O’ShaughnessyPatrick O’ShaughnessyPatrick O’Shaughnessy is an investor and podcast host who has hosted the interview show Invest Like the Best since 2016, founded the early-stage investment firm Positive Sum in 2020 and serves as its CEO, and is also founder and CEO of the media company Colossus.Open the full entry; the page prints the date as “12.10.2024,” and the Apple Podcasts listing of the episode gives December 10, 2024 as its release date. The episode introduction calls Ribbit one of the most influential investing firms in fintech and mentions his interest in digital art; the chapters listed on the page include Ribbit’s structure and philosophy, its early investments and the crypto angle, the Robinhood story, stablecoins, the Walmart partnership, lessons from Nubank, and art and its future.⁠[38][39]

He holds that an idea has been thought through only once it is written down: anyone who can explain something complex on a napkin has studied it enough to know how to articulate it (video at 3:23).⁠[9]

Playing a long game, he said, takes conviction, without which one’s mood swings with the markets; one has to be willing to be wrong for a long time (video at 4:30).⁠[9]

He does not measure things by winning or losing; he asks only whether a decision will put him ahead or behind in a game that has no end, and then keeps playing (video at 18:09).⁠[9]

He does not compare himself with other people, he said: each person is playing their own game, and he works hard at not having a fear of missing out (video at 18:40).⁠[9]

When a founder calls because he or she cannot sleep, he said, one should never answer the question for them but help them answer it themselves (video at 42:26).⁠[9]

Authenticity, he said, sooner or later shows its weight: be authentic to yourself, keep your values, and remember why you are doing what you do (video at 43:34).⁠[9]

He regards compounding as the most important law and holds that it applies equally to relationships, friendships and family; the way to earn it is to be consistent, work every day and be there (video at 55:31).⁠[9]

Reputation, he said, is the most valuable asset and the only one a person has; everything else can come and go (video at 58:51).⁠[9]

Ribbit Capital: Official website: https://www.ribbitcap.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[35]

MercadoLibre: Official website: https://investor.mercadolibre.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[40]

Robinhood: Official website: https://robinhood.com/us/en/ (opens in a new window).⁠[13]

Upgrade: Official website: https://www.upgrade.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]

NODE: Official website: https://nodefoundation.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[41]

X: Public account: https://x.com/mickymalka (opens in a new window).⁠[14][10]

LinkedIn: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meyermalka/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10]