Building Enduring Companies Outside Silicon Valley | Santiago Suárez of Addi

Video summary

Addi CEO Santiago Suárez built a Colombian financial platform serving 3 million consumers, with AI agents resolving nearly 80% of customer queries.

Addi founder and CEO Santiago Suárez explains how the Colombian company grew from buy-now-pay-later into a financial and commerce platform with a banking license, serving more than 3 million consumers and 50,000 merchants. After studying at Yale and spending six years at JPMorgan learning how great CEOs operate, Suárez chose Colombia for its widespread smartphone adoption, installment-buying habits and frustratingly poor banking experiences. Lessons from Kazakhstan’s Kaspi shaped Addi’s customer focus and disciplined product sequencing. Early technology choices—including a monorepo, event-sourced architecture and Databricks partnership—later helped make AI adoption possible. Addi’s agents now handle all customer-service inquiries and resolve nearly 80%, while onboarding agents process 2,000–3,000 merchants monthly. Suárez also describes running the company in English, setting explicit standards and focusing on a few North Star metrics. Looking ahead, he wants Addi to expand financial inclusion across countries and become an AI-native company; it is already growing while operating 150 employees below budget.

Chapters

1. 0:00From Yale to JPMorgan: Santiago’s 35-Day Navia CEO Stint and Jamie Dimon Strategy Group
2. 6:42Why Colombia: 75% Smartphone Adoption, Installment Traditions and Painful Banking UX
3. 12:11Lessons from Kaspi: Customer Calls, Addi’s Multi-Product Launch and Modular Biometrics
4. 17:00Monorepo, Event Sourcing and AI: Addi’s 1,000-City Rails and 10 Million Daily Events
5. 22:55Starting with Legal: Colombia’s 48-Hour Tutelas Drove Addi’s AI Pipelines
6. 29:55Getting Addi AI-Pilled from Bogotá: EC2, IDNA, and a Company-Wide Push
7. 37:13North Star Metrics and Written Culture: Addi Narrowed Priorities to Net Income
8. 41:45Addi’s Five-Year Vision: AI-Native Growth and 150 Heads Below Budget

What the full analysis includes

8 chapters · 47 key points · 8 section summaries · mind map

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