Building a Global Hardcore Financial Technology Company from Brazil: Ricardo Josua, CEO of Pismo (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Pinpoint for me exactly what problem you are solving now.

Ricardo Josua: We are solving agility with robustness for core banking capabilities. What banks have done for the past 10 years is take an agile team or a group of young developers and build experiences that are very cool but have to integrate with old legacy infrastructure. In 99% of the cases, that’s a major bottleneck. What we were providing is the backbone to match the chops of their customer experience needs. We have agile, microservices-oriented solutions for banking infrastructure.

Sramana Mitra: How much of it is product versus services?

Ricardo Josua: It’s 100% product. It’s one of those things that we had learned before. You never keep up the pace with demand from your clients. You’ll never have enough resources to fill their backlogs. The only way to do it is to have the basic components and let all the customization be as easy as possible from their side. Our clients are building on our APIs and systems with maybe a thousand engineers of their own. This is both for FinTechs and large incumbent banks.

This has allowed us to go to different countries. When we deployed in India about a month ago, we didn’t have to go through all the local requisites because we’re providing the same universal services for everyone. All these have the same basic behavior everywhere. The customization is built by our clients.

Sramana Mitra: In 2016 when you raised your seed round, how much of this was fleshed out? You were raising money on a concept?

Ricardo Josua: At that point, we had spent countless days in our living rooms discussing the specifics of the product more than the market. We were trying to flesh out what the product will look like. My partners were all executives at that point. We all rolled up our sleeves and started programming and designing products. I was drawing out the front-end application myself. They were writing code. It was all hands on deck.

When we raised, we had a POC running with a small client. We had a very decent product MVP. In the end, it was a closed-loop digital wallet service for health that we have to this day. It was a very specific product. It gave the confidence investors that we could deliver in production and that we were not a PowerPoint team.

Sramana Mitra: I think what your investors funded was the team. You were four people who had worked together and had a pretty good track record. You had technical depth and were able to figure things out. The hypothesis didn’t check out. They looked at the team and saw that this is a decent hypothesis and a decent team that can make the journey.

Ricardo Josua: I think it’s true. The two things that we were told by current and prospective investors are that they look at teams and they invest in addressable markets. I’m not talking on behalf of my investors. This is just my personal take. When you get people that have been around for a while, you become too detached from the actuality of execution. It was one of the reasons why Daniela was able to bring me to the fold again.

Sramana Mitra: Lots of people become managers and lose the ability to execute on anything.

Ricardo Josua: Right.

Sramana Mitra: You got the seed funding. At what point did you pivot?

Ricardo Josua: It was very fast. In retrospect, it was fast. This happens a lot. While we were presenting, our investors were looking at this from a different perspective. We were looking at smaller and more sophisticated out-of-the-box solutions. They knew that this was a pain for larger institutions. We knew as well but we thought that we would never be able to get them. At that point, there was this very strong zeitgeist. They said, “Go talk to the largest players. Go pitch to them. We’ll open the doors.” They did open the doors.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a Global Hardcore Financial Technology Company from Brazil: Ricardo Josua, CEO of Pismo
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