Building Enduring Companies Outside Silicon Valley | Santiago Suárez of Addi
a16z Deep Dives · 2026-06-17 · 48 min
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7616Z13Q6pMVideo summary
Addi serves 3 million consumers in Colombia, where Santiago Suárez is using AI agents to scale payments, commerce, and banking.
Addi founder and CEO Santiago Suárez describes how the Colombian company grew from a buy-now-pay-later product into a financial and commerce platform serving over 3 million consumers and 50,000 merchants. After Yale and six years at JPMorgan learning from Jamie Dimon’s organization, Suárez chose Colombia for its widespread smartphone adoption, installment-payment habits, and painful banking experiences. A visit to Kazakhstan’s Kaspi reinforced the value of listening to customers, sequencing the product roadmap, and staying focused despite investor skepticism. Addi’s early technology choices—a monorepo and event-sourcing architecture processing over 10 million events daily—helped prepare it for AI. Its agents now handle all customer-service queries and resolve nearly 80%, while onboarding 2,000–3,000 merchants monthly. Suárez also discusses operating in English, written decision-making, profitability metrics, and the goal of expanding financial inclusion while building an AI-native company from Bogotá.
Chapters
- 0:00From Yale to JPMorgan: Suárez’s 35-Day CEO Stint and Six Years Learning from Jamie Dimon
- 6:42Why Colombia: 75% Smartphone Adoption, Installment Rails, and a 22-Minute T-Shirt Purchase
- 12:11Lessons from Kaspi: Customer Calls, Roadmap Sequencing, and Modular Biometric Checks
- 17:00Monorepo, Event Sourcing, and AI: Addi’s 10 Million Daily Events and Customer-Service Agents
- 22:55Starting with Legal: Colombian Tutelas, 48-Hour Deadlines, and a 60%-Resolution Agent
- 29:55Getting Addi AI-Pilled in Bogotá: EC2-Built Stack, IDNA, and Four AI Pillars
- 37:13North Star Metrics and Written Culture: From 2022 Profitability to Three L1 KPIs
- 41:45Addi’s Five-Year Vision: $30,000 Monthly Merchant Sales, AI Agents, and 150 Heads Under Budget
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