Sebastian Kanovich on Building dLocal from Uruguay and Scaling Across Emerging Markets

Sebastian Kanovich met a future dLocal partner by chance at his mother-in-law’s birthday party in Montevideo. He was then trading stocks and bonds at Santander and knew nothing about payments. A decade later, he says, the business still feels like an onion: understanding one layer reveals another.

Kanovich credits both luck and sustained work for his path. The dinner created an opportunity, but he says his aversion to losing pushed him to do everything he could to make the company successful. Neither chance nor effort alone explains the outcome.

To him, high performers bring energy, focus on solutions, take responsibility and deliver rather than simply producing a presentation about what should be done. In a strong team, he says, it quickly becomes clear when someone is not carrying their share.

He does not claim to be especially good at giving people space to fail. He tries to give transparent feedback and distinguishes paralysis from a decision that turns out wrong. If someone owns a mistake, fixes it and learns, he sees that loop as essential to a fast-moving culture.

Speed is especially important when a young company is confronting an unfamiliar problem. When dLocal considered Africa, Kanovich says it had to iterate quickly enough to discover whether an approach could work. As the company grew and became public, he says, it also had to respect regulatory requirements and ensure mistakes were reversible.

Stebbings describes a fast investment decision that cost him money. Kanovich says he has made many mistakes too, including hiring people who did not work out. The danger is falling in love with a decision and continuing to invest in it because of ego or sunk costs even after the signals turn negative.

Kanovich says he has hired on the strength of impressive company names on a résumé. Experience at a large business does not mean someone will solve every problem, and the answer may already be inside the existing team. He now tries to assess the match between a person and the particular situation.

Asked how he prioritizes across roughly 35 countries, he points to enterprise customers. dLocal asks where it should go, what should be built and where it is failing; internal work, including hiring or finance, matters insofar as it improves the customer experience. He says the company does not set its product roadmap in isolation.

Kanovich recalls customers asking for payouts after the company began with incoming payments, helping direct its product development. He says the team looks for recurring signals across customers rather than acting on the first conversation. Multiple requests for a geography or service, he argues, are more useful than a single loud voice.

One painful lesson came from a 2019 process to find an investor. Kanovich says dLocal had not been dreaming big enough: coming from Uruguay, its leaders worried that selling to a larger company might be the only next step. In retrospect, he believes that limited ambition held the business back.

General Atlantic eventually invested and, he says, helped the team see that it could build for the long term. He praises the investor as a partner; that is also a view from a CEO whose company received its backing. The company was profitable, he says, and had sought more than just capital.

Kanovich argues that a formal fundraising process was a poor fit for dLocal. In his experience it could filter out some investors, place too much weight on bankers and make management less able to choose by fit rather than valuation. The company ultimately completed a round independently, about three months after the process.

Bootstrapping was not a grand plan, he says: the founders did not see venture capital readily available to them in Uruguay. They relied on customers paying more than the business spent, and that shaped a frugal culture. Looking back, he might have sought a good investor earlier had he understood the benefits.

Beyond validation, Kanovich says a good investor can provide a network, introductions and a view into how other companies operate. He contrasts that with the difficulty of building alone. He notes that dLocal’s first round was entirely secondary; Stebbings’s suggested sums are hypothetical, not an amount the company confirmed raising for operations.

Kanovich says his disagreements with investors often concerned preserving humility and frugality. At the same time, he listened when experienced investors advised the company to build a finance function and make the investments needed for an IPO. His aim was to accept useful new tools without losing the company’s service culture.

Stebbings asks why dLocal expanded broadly rather than going deeper in fewer countries. Kanovich disputes the premise: payment companies may claim far wider coverage, while dLocal had reached 35 markets after years of work. He says it deliberately selected difficult, high-friction countries and spent time building depth.

Merchants, he argues, value a single provider able to solve problems across several markets. But expansion requires local staff, knowledge of regulation and an understanding of payment behavior. He did not expect the company to leap from 35 to 60 markets in the next quarter.

Having started in Uruguay and processed payments in Brazil, Kanovich says his team is drawn to markets others find difficult. He recalls initially returning from India convinced the problem was nearly impossible, then seeing that the same difficulty could be a barrier for competitors and a source of value for customers.

Geographic expansion needs both company veterans and local hires, in his view. The early China team worked too much like an isolated satellite. Kanovich moved there with colleagues from Uruguay and concluded that dLocal also needed strong Chinese staff to combine local understanding with the company’s culture.

The company encourages people to move between countries, he says, creating bridges between local operations and the rest of the organization. His 2019 experience in China also gave him a firsthand appreciation of the ambition and innovation he saw there; he notes that conditions had changed by the interview.

Stebbings describes a team of roughly 650 people as lean for the company’s size; Kanovich puts the figure at about 640 in the conversation. He favors small teams because they can create ownership, coordinate more easily and deliver substantial outcomes. He says he was not seeking many more hires for the following quarter.

dLocal’s business and customers are spread across the world, and Kanovich says he had lived in Israel for six years. Distance makes it important to empower people and build a shared culture. In his experience, keeping smaller teams coherent is easier even in a distributed organization.

Kanovich describes leadership as a continuing source of insecurity. Each time he began to feel comfortable, the business changed: private-equity backing and then public ownership brought new demands. Comparing himself with other CEOs, he says he is still learning, and hopes never to reach a point where he thinks he knows everything.

He also says he is uncomfortable in the spotlight and with public speaking. He prefers a simple life and suspects a higher personal profile might have made dLocal’s life easier, but does not enjoy presenting himself as a big-shot CEO. Stebbings observes that public visibility has increasingly become part of a leader’s job.

Asked about marriage, Kanovich says he and his wife had been together for 15 years and describes their relationship as a partnership of mutual admiration and support. When he becomes stuck in his own thoughts at work, he tries to act, or step away and spend time with friends and family before returning with perspective.

On the 2021 IPO, Kanovich says General Atlantic pointed out a market window the company had not previously considered. He recalls learning what an IPO involved and saw a public listing as a way to increase visibility and transparency with merchants and providers. His comments about trading above the IPO price describe the interview period, not a current share-price claim.

He found it easier to pitch the business than to speak about himself: discussing its products, expansion and economics was familiar territory. He was surprised by the roles of banks and the number of legal, compliance and tax advisers. In his opinion, aspects of the investment-banking business were open to disruption.

Kanovich says the team coordinated dozens of advisers toward a May listing target, with a one-week delay that he attributes to the timing of an SEC response. He takes pride in executing a complicated project over roughly nine months. The dates and explanation are his recollection of the process.

The biggest change in public ownership, he says, is answering quarterly questions and explaining the business to a new group of stakeholders. That discipline can sharpen thinking, although he is still learning why investors pay attention to tone as well as numerical performance.

Growth brings more tools, access to talent and the benefit of a hard-won reputation. The harder part, Kanovich says, is maintaining a culture he recognizes while the business expands quickly in public view. He repeatedly asks how much the company should evolve and how much of its earlier identity it should preserve.

As a company scales, he says, systems break in stages: sales, finance and HR may each need rebuilding at different points. A solution designed for one size may not work at ten times that size. Leaders must identify what is breaking now and expect to revisit it after another period of growth.

Kanovich resists the idea that someone necessarily needs a particular résumé to lead a larger organization. He says attitude and willingness matter, and favors a low-ego culture in which a person can move between responsibilities without treating a title as permanent property.

He cites the company’s president, who moved through technical and operational roles, as an example of changing responsibilities. Kanovich applies the same principle to himself: he says he should be CEO only while he is doing the job well, and someone better should take over if necessary.

Asked whether he has believed his own hype, Kanovich points to what he sees as Uruguay’s culture of humility. He wants the team to compete and win, but says he remains a learner. Winning, for him, is a group sharing values, delivering on a commitment, celebrating briefly and then beginning again.

His favorite book is Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, which he first read at 18. He says it helped him accept that he could be several things at once, even while balancing basketball, school, travel and later business responsibilities.

Kanovich sees identifying overlooked talent as a strength and taking losses too personally as a weakness. In interviews, he likes asking candidates, ‘What else should I know?’ The open question can reveal things that a conventional interview misses and help both sides assess fit.

His hardest current challenge remains evolving the culture while reporting as a public company. He admires the Dutch payments company Adyen for its humble, global approach and says he would also enjoy being an NBA general manager, making long-term decisions under a clear budget constraint.

What he wishes he had known earlier is that admired business leaders are people learning as they go, not holders of perfect answers. His advice to Uruguayan founders is to dream bigger: birthplace need not prevent them from building globally, although they still have to do the work to earn success.

Looking toward 2027, Kanovich says he hopes dLocal will become a financial-services provider across emerging markets, adding countries and products including payments, payouts and issuing. That is his ambition at the time of the interview, not a guarantee. He is less certain about his own role in five years and says he loves what he does.