How We Built a Fintech on Top of Government Tax Data

Sean Weisbrot: Sebastian Carlsson is the co-founder and COO of syn, a B2B platform that allows access to Mexican business data. This episode is gonna be more on the personal side, and experience side. Because like myself, he is an expat, living in a foreign land doing business, locally.

Sean Weisbrot: At least that was my experience in China a long time ago. And so, While his business is interesting in itself or on its own, the fact that he is so curious about other countries and cultures, aligns with me quite well. And so I want to explore that with him today. since I think curiosity is one of the reasons why entrepreneurship and capitalism exist, to begin with.

Sean Weisbrot: So. Why don't you tell everyone a little bit more about your business and about yourself, and how you found yourself in Mexico, and then we'll go from there.

Sebastian Carlsson: I grew up in Sweden, haven't lived back home for, for quite some time, and the kind of story between leaving Sweden and ending up in Mexico. has a lot to do with curiosity.

Sebastian Carlsson: So, so happy to discuss that further. So today I find myself in Mexico City, where I run. I'm the COO of the company, we call syn. I say that 'cause we recently changed names to syn from, from a less commercially popular app name. We are a business data platform that allows for, allows, allows our customers to, aggregate processes and, and consume. Through business data. The most common use case is for creating risk analysis. So many of our customers are financial institutions that work with SMBs and businesses, providing loans, and obviously, assessing the risk of those interactions. So we, aggregate, we extract data from different data sources, we processes, process this data and, and present it in a, in a sort of, in a sort of consumable way for our, for our customers that tend to be credit risk analysis analysts and other, and other, and on the me members of the ecosystem.

Sebastian Carlsson: They could also be investors. Anyone interested in analyzing other businesses, really, or tends to be interested in our platform. It's a business that we've had for two years. We started out bootstrapping. We grew really, really quickly. Currently sits on about 170 institutional customers.

Sebastian Carlsson: We have a team of 30, and raised a bit of capital last year. And we're really looking forward to, to this 2023 and, and, the challenges and the opportunities that we will face in Mexico and possibly elsewhere as well.

Sebastian Carlsson: I would like you to touch on how you got to Mexico. So I did my studies in,

Sebastian Carlsson: in the UK after leaving, after leaving Sweden, studies in, in the UK and Spain. And, graduated in 2005 and ended up working in the fi in, in a financial institution like everyone else at the time. so this was obviously before 2000 and 2007. so I started working for a broker quickly, then moved over to American Express, which was in Madrid. And in 2007 I was picked up by Santander.

Sebastian Carlsson: Where I started working in kind of a private banking role where Santander was speci, specifically targeting these sort of mid wealthy families. There's mostly expats on the Spanish coast. So Spain has this little sort of function like Florida in the States where, where a lot of expats move from, from northern Europe, to Spain, and they tend to be retired, might have sold their house back home now living with renting.

Sebastian Carlsson: So they have a bit of liquidity to invest. That was our, our kind of target market. so that's a really good introduction to banking. After three years, I was chosen to join one of the sort of corporate development pro programs co, or corporate tourism programs as, as, as some people tend to, to name them.

Sebastian Carlsson: I was sent from Spain to work in, to work in London for some time. After London, I moved to Sao Paulo in Brazil. I worked for some time in both of those destinations, were in corporate banking, moved back to headquarters in Madrid for some time. Work in strategy to end up in Frankfurt, back and back in corporate banking. In corporate investment banking.

Sebastian Carlsson: All this time I kind of always dreamt about two things, to leave the bank as everyone who tends to work in a bank. Another one was to start my own business, as everyone who works in corporations tends to do. And then I, I also really wanted to come to Mexico. A ago, I had really good experiences in Mexico. I was really sort of interested in the opportunities, the culture in general. And a bit of a plus was that my brother, back in the year 2000, when he and I went on a sort of backpacking trip in Mexico, fell in love and ended up in Mexico. And in 2016 my niece was born.

Sebastian Carlsson: and out of this sort of curiosity, interest in Mexico on one end. the interest of being a present uncle and a good job, job opportunity that was landed, I actually left the bank too, to pick up on this opportunity and move to Mexico City. It's quite interesting because the bank I was working for has a very big presence in Mexico, and I always ask them, like, please move it to Mexico.

Sebastian Carlsson: I'm like, I'm, I'm happy to move around. and when I asked Mexico, they were just like, Hey, I'll send you to Mexico. We're just gonna, we just, you just have to, spend a few years in London beforehand. And I'm just saying, yeah, I'm happy to spend a few years in London. And then it became a few years in Brazil and a few years at headquarters and a few years in Germany.

Sebastian Carlsson: And basically when I've been everywhere at the bank, except in Mexico, I had to take action myself and, and move. and it was not pure coincidence. I contacted an old buddy of mine that I had met in, actually met surfing in, in Brazil, asking if he had an opportunity at the company that was called EFL at the time, entrepreneurial finance lab, working with credit scoring, working commercially with the banks.

Sebastian Carlsson: I called him up and saw if he had an opportunity for me in Mexico, and it turned out he did, and I moved here back in 2017. So I've actually lived now more in Mexico than I've lived anywhere else in my life. It doesn't mean that I'm turning Mexican, I'm still sort of very, very Swedish. but it's good.

Sebastian Carlsson: It is good. it's a really, it's, it is really turned into a land of opportunities and, and it's a culture, that, That I find myself very, very in peace with. I started working for EFL, EFL did some very alternative credit scoring, back in 2017. And before that, mostly based on psychometric data.

Sebastian Carlsson: So, what the company, the company there was to give the subject the credit applicant. A questionnaire and extract metadata from that questionnaire and understand their credit worthiness, especially applicable on micro credits and on the base of the pyramid that previously has had no loans and has no credit score or, or no reliable data around it.

Sebastian Carlsson: So it's a way to create data from scratch. we, it worked really well with certain financial institutions in, in Latin America, especially, sort of microfinance institutes, et cetera. later in 2018, if I'm not wrong, we merged with a company they called Lendo to become Lendo, EFL. On paper the two companies matched really well.

Sebastian Carlsson: Lando came with other kinds of data sources by tapping a lot into sort of Android data, social network data, email data. but unfortunately, the merger did not work out real very well. I'm sure there were other factors for, but from my point of view at the time, it was too much of a culture clash, which basically led to the beginning of the end of that organization.

Sebastian Carlsson: It's still around, but much, much more scaled than, than it was back in 2018. and yeah, that's pretty much the story, how I ended up here in early 2020. I met my co-founder, Mateos Pedroso. Mateos had then previously worked as a CTO of a Mexican startup called Clearly sto. And, based on his experiences, his idea, he was sort of, he was sort of. Playing around with or with different data sources and ideas of how, could become kinda a data provider for Mexican fintechs. We saw, I, I joined as an advisor, coming from the industry understanding corporate banking and also a bit of startup experience. and he showed me the sort of different alternatives that he was working on and I saw the absolute potential of, of, um.

Sebastian Carlsson: Or using the Mexican tax authorities as a database. The data that the Mexican tax authority has is, extremely, extremely rich when it comes to business data. But, it comes at the advantage for us that it is really not a tech company, and it's definitely not data, a data analysis company. So it comes with a lot of. Failures, if you wanna call it. So the basic, basic idea was to kind of create an API data, infrastructure layer on top of the Mexican tax, tax authorities in order to facilitate the sharing of data. So it facilitates SMBs to share their data with third parties. and that's how we started.

Sebastian Carlsson: We have built a lot on top of that since then. But, that's how we started. And, it turned out to be an idea that has worked really well. so we've had, decent growth, growth over the last couple of years and, and yeah, that's pretty much how I ended up here. Very fascinating. This idea of building something savvy on top of government data, which is usually not well done. so. Let's, let's go into the curiosity stuff and, and we will, I'm sure Mexico will, will come back into it somehow, and your business and all of that. How do you define curiosity?

Sebastian Carlsson: That's really the, the, the, the feature that makes us interested in, in, in, in, in learning new stuff and, and having your experiences, of course.

Sebastian Carlsson: But the interesting thing about, it's really what has, has, has allowed me to be, to end up where I am, in an all -sensitive world geographically, as well as sort of, as well as sort of, career wise, et cetera. I'm sure it's something that you and I share as well, Sean, like, listen to your podcast. I can, I can tell that you, you, you sit on a lot of curiosity.

Sebastian Carlsson: I ended up in China because I was curious about what it was like to live outside of America. Especially because Americans tend to be pretty rigid in their understanding of the world and, despite how ignorant it is in general. and so they kind of have this opinion that America is the greatest in the world.

Sebastian Carlsson: and my, my lack of understanding of the world made me go, yeah, but you have no information to base this on. You say America's the best country in the world, but do you have a passport? Have you ever left the country? no. Okay. Well, you should probably go check out other countries before you claim that America is the best. So I, I kind of felt that as a teenager and, and felt like it was something I owed to myself to go and live somewhere else and, and try it. And, see what it was like. Did you discover that, that that America is the, is the, is the best country in the world? Or, or, or how, how, how, how did that fall though?

Sebastian Carlsson: I'm still gathering data, but based on my experience in 36 countries over the last 19 years, I would say. There is no best country.

Sebastian Carlsson: I like that idea. I kind of, I kind of tend to defend the idea that it's not a sort of linear relationship where you, where, where, where, where, where it's like a scale or it is like a, kind of like a credit score and like the top score is, is is the best country and the word. There's definitely no such thing. I completely agree. I lived there. I think we added eight countries. No, I, I, I've lived it for, for, for, yeah. Lived extended periods of time and so more than one year, at least in, in seven countries. And, I, in most of these countries, I can find something that's the best sort of, this, this country, it has to be the best.

Sebastian Carlsson: For example, Mexico must be the best country in the world for taco. Like there, there's no competition. Like definitely the best hacks in the world you find in Mexico. And that's only an illustrative example of course, but you can always find things that are the best in every country. you could probably find things that are worse as well. Like, I, I have no that, there's no, there's no question about, so, so, so, yeah. it's a, it's a really valid point and, and I'm not. I'm not particularly surprised to hear that you haven't, that the conclusion is, well, that the conclusion so far at least, is that there's no such thing as the best country in the world.

Sebastian Carlsson: I, I think the conclusions I take are the country that's the best for me at the moment, is the country I decide to live in, and when I feel like that country is no longer the best country for me, I leave,

Sebastian Carlsson: Of course, that becomes very subjective and I, I think that's, that's, that's the way it should be because the idea of the best country in the world is a really sort of subjective idea.

Sebastian Carlsson: But on the way, I don't know if you agree that, I'm sure you do, that there's sort of certain, sort of objective, features that you can find or sort of features of culture or, or components of cultures that you can find that are kind of the best. Like I was, I was actually in the States the other day and, and I, I, I, I, I, it was an unexpected trip and I, I, I went by myself. I was in Chicago. This was not when it was minus. 30 foreign hikes in Chicago. But, but anyway, it's slightly after, just after. And I just went into my bar by myself in the evening, just a random sort of bar in downtown Chicago. And it took me about a minute, someone, someone just to approach me in a really friendly manner and just start a conversation just out of the blue, just conversation with a half empty bar.

Sebastian Carlsson: And someone else joined the conversation. First guy left, someone, and the third person joined the conversation. It turned into a full evening or just long conversations and that kind of conversational culture and the possibility to approach someone like that without there being any sort of, and without creating sort of misunderstanding. So, you know what, what is this weird up to? I think it is something that is spectacular in American culture and. One of the sort of components that I can say that that is the best in the states, and I bring that with me to other countries. So for example, I was in Portugal until November and a few weeks before I left, I was at a restaurant working in the daytime and there was a stranger, a girl who ended up at the table next to me.

Sebastian Carlsson: We were both backs against the wall facing the rest of the room. And the restaurant was designed so that there was kind of like a basement area and a street level area. And you can get like coffee and dessert on the bottom and you order, you have to order like meals on the top. So if you leave your laptop or whatever on the, the, the bottom floor basement and and you go to order food, then like you're leaving your stuff there. And a lot of people in a lot of countries would feel uncomfortable with that. Fine. But in Portugal it's kind of safe. People won't touch your things. However, I don't wanna leave my stuff there Anyways, so it turned out, one of the, like, one of the waitresses, came by and I was like, Hey, how do I order?

Sebastian Carlsson: And she's like, oh, you have to go upstairs. And the girl then felt like that was an opportunity to talk. And she was like, oh, like that's my problem too. Like, I want to get food, but I gotta go upstairs. And I was like, look, why don't I go upstairs and order meals for both of us so that you can stay and watch my things and, and your things. She's like, really, you would do that? I'm like, you're like sitting right next to me and you've got a bunch of stuff with you. The chances of you taking my things and running in the next two minutes are quite low. So yeah, I'll do that. So, she gave me some, some cash to pay for her meal and I got our food and came back and then she was like, Hey, like, why don't you sit at my table and eat with me?

Sebastian Carlsson: It's like, okay, fine. And turns out she's from Kosovo. a lot of people don't know. Kosovo is a very small country, Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe, and she was like, this is why I love Portugal. I like it. What, why? Because you would never meet someone in my country who had the courage to just talk to a stranger or feel the desire to talk to a stranger in a public place like that.

Sebastian Carlsson: And I'm dying to meet people just like you that are like willing to be, vulnerable and, and outgoing and just talk with strangers. And so we ended up chatting for a few hours while we were still working. And, I was supposed to go out for dinner with some other friends that I had, and she was just in town visiting for like a week or two. And so I invited her to dinner with us and she came to dinner with us and we went for a walk after dinner with this couple. And it was just this really nice kind of, you know. Innocent meeting of a stranger and, and making her feel at home in a foreign country for her. that I, I think part of it is the American me that enables me to go. I'm here to make friends. I'm here to live life. I don't care. There's no point in being afraid or ashamed or embarrassed for craving sociability. So, yeah, that was just one of a number of really, really cool experiences I've had and we still keep in contact and she's decided to actually move to Lisbon and she's in the process of making that happen now, which is pretty cool.

Sebastian Carlsson: Something that has been sort of, has been sort of one of the milestones and one of the sort of. One of, one of the biggest sort of points to pinpoint on American culture is the way that how Americans move around, are they the, the, the, the highest level of mobility in the world. when there was, when, when there, when there were, when jobs were created in, back in the fifties in, in Detroit, people moved from the south to, to, to, to, to the north to.

Sebastian Carlsson: To, to, to get jobs. And that's something that is always created. So that might be sort of a, it might be like an economic fun fundamental of that kind of, that kind of openness to, to get to know new people. something that's very much lacking in, in a lot of European countries where, where mobility is very low.

Sebastian Carlsson: Interesting thing about Lisbon here, correct me if I'm wrong, but. I have a feeling that Lisbon is becoming a bit of a home office hub, should we call it that sort of distant worker sort of, sort of digital nomads, moving about. And, I don't know if she was in the same kind of situation as you are, but obviously, it would've been, that kind of situation might have been much more difficult if it was actually someone from, from this spot or, or, or a group of people from this point.

Sebastian Carlsson: Yes, you're right. Portuguese people are a lot more reserved. They are,

Sebastian Carlsson: Maybe when they are, but she was with Kosovo and, and maybe if you would go to Kosovo, you would find the right, same thing. But if you find a Portuguese person in say, here in Mexico City or in London, you would, that kind of situation, that kind of, that kind of conversation, that kind of excuse to interact might, might have made much more sense.

Sebastian Carlsson: It is culture specific because I've noticed in China and Vietnam, other countries in Asia, I mean especially as a white man, as a white person, They're already really curious and wanna communicate with you, even just as friends and especially when you walk up to them and you're speaking their language, they're like really, really like blown away and really want to communicate like as deeply as they possibly can and test your ability to communicate.

Sebastian Carlsson: It's a nice pull back to curiosity and I find that a lot in Mexico as well. Maybe not so much where I live with, which is in a part of Mexico City where there's a lot of expats, so it's, you know. Who, who are they gonna pick from, from all, all the thousands of experts living in this, in this neighborhood, but especially when I'm outside, different sort of, maybe more sort of local neighborhoods in, in Mexico City or elsewhere in Mexico.

Sebastian Carlsson: In fact, you get a lot of curiosity and, and curiosity from, from their end. And it gives a good excuse for people to approach you and, and, and make contact in a way that might not be so typical if it was between, in this case Mexican to Mexican, right?

Sebastian Carlsson: I. Have much more experience in Asia than in Europe. Where in Asia, I generally had a few expat friends, but the majority of my friends were locals. And so I thought moving to Portugal would do the same thing. I'd have a lot of local friends and maybe a few expat friends. What I've found is I have. like one or two Portuguese friends, but like I have known dozens of expats and I met them all very easily.

Sebastian Carlsson: So the, it's not just that in Asia, you're more likely, first of all, in Asia, you're less likely to meet expats because there just really aren't that many people making lives for themselves in Asian countries.

Sebastian Carlsson: In what, in what cities did you live?

Sebastian Carlsson: I was in Wuhan, Shenzhen and Saigon. So, what was interesting was, to start with, there weren't many expats, but then a lot of them really kept to themselves in small groups, and you just either wouldn't get the chance to meet them, or if you met them, you. Probably wouldn't pick to be their friend normally, because they're a bit weird. You gotta be a bit weird to like make a home in Asia as a white person basically. but what I found in Europe, yeah, but what I found in Lisbon so far is that they've got, like tech jobs or they're company founders or whatever.

Sebastian Carlsson: They're, they're doing something. They're scientists, they're researchers, they're. They're developers, they're doing things that are worthwhile to communicate about. They have salaries that enable them to have that mobility where a lot of the expats in Asia were mostly English teachers with lower salaries. It was hard to have upward social mobility for a lot of expats, especially if they didn't know the language, especially because those languages are very hard. like Chinese, I was. Honestly, I had only ever met two or three other people who could speak Chinese better than me, and that was because they worked for a TV station.

Sebastian Carlsson: So they were speaking Chinese on TV every day. and so they had a real job outside of education. And so it's really, really hard in Asia to make a life for yourself that's outside of the education sector unless you start a business. And even then it's hard as a foreigner to start a business and run a business unless you've got a local partner, maybe that's got 51% of the business, or you've got really strong relationships.

Sebastian Carlsson: So Europe is like a completely different lifestyle than I am. I'm trying to get used to it, but it's also really interesting because I meet so many people and they're so wonderful and they're so interesting and they really wanna spend time with me and, and do things. And it's just, it's a completely different lifestyle, but I really like it. And, and that's why I'm, I'm gonna stick in Portugal for a while because I just really love the experience of the city and the people I meet there.

Sebastian Carlsson: I can imagine. And, I dunno, I, I've, I've only been a tourist, and I've been to business work a few times. seems like a lovely, lovely place to live. And it's probably relatively economical, like relatively cheap. maybe not, maybe not anymore. and of course like it helps that, of course, that that Portuguese tend to speak very good, tend to speak very good English as well. So it depends where you are in Lisbon. Oh yeah. Like I've, I've walked into random businesses where nobody speaks English and that's totally fine.

Sebastian Carlsson: I'll pull out the Portuguese words I know. but I also find there's places where they can speak English and then I don't get a chance to speak. So anyways, I, I'm curious, I'm curious, what, what do you think made you become curious?

Sebastian Carlsson: I grew up in Stockholm, but only for the first eight years of my life before moving to the south of Sweden. And that move always made me feel a bit out. I had a different accent. I looked a bit different. I was a bit different, so I always felt a bit outside, local, local community. and, that kind of in, in, in, in almost like a perverse kind of awakens your curiosity because that, that allows you, that allows you not to be so stuck in the, in the, in the place where you, where, where, where you come from, which is kind of the example that you gave about in, in, in the first part of the conversation.

Sebastian Carlsson: another component, and related to that is that. My parents are very, very curious beings. So they are both Swedish, but actually met in London. so they lived in London in the sixties, seventies, which at the time, now doesn't sound like much, but at the time was a very, very, very, exotic right to move to a different, to a different country in, in Europe.

Sebastian Carlsson: So, and I can see that a lot in my dad. He's very, very curious. And that has sort of, that has affected me a lot. then it, it, it's kind of a snowball effect as well because when you sort of start to become interested in something and learn a bit more, it kind of learns into this learning. System of roots like this learning ecosystem, right?

Sebastian Carlsson: When you start to learn something about, say a piece of culture or a specific FE feature in a culture. to understand that, and if you have that, if you have that pre predisposition of sort of being interested in understanding something, then in order to understand anything that you need to be, you need to understand other different components. And it kind of, it's kind of a snowball effect that, we start exploring stuff then you want. Explore other stuff. and, there's also diff very different kinds of curiosity, right? I am very much curious about exploring and sort of human behavior. I. it's something that I think that I shared with you is, sort of exploring different cultures and feeling, taking one step away and sort of understanding there's different levels of curiosity.

Sebastian Carlsson: I see that a lot of our team members, for example, might be very, very, very good at research and their curiosity is more in sort of more into things than into, than into. Into people, in my sense of people. My kind of curiosity is very much related to peoples and cultures. and that might come just from, first of all, from being, very extrovert to, to my background and sort of moving around from, from early childhood and also having parents that, that, that obviously had been moving around a lot and, have that curiosity in them as well.

Sebastian Carlsson: There might also be, there might also be a deeper sort of cultural, component in that of, of Scandinavians having a long, I see from started exploring this is sort of, vikings might have been the first explorers in the world and there is a long culture of, of, of traveling and living different places.

Sebastian Carlsson: and that might come just from a natural sort of need. Right. obviously the Scandinavian lands were not. Auto sufficient when it comes to, when it comes to, supplies. So, people had stock elsewhere and, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a, there's a bit of that in my jets.

Sebastian Carlsson: I agree. It starts with, whoever is around you. Right. So I was, I was, I was going to ask you how do you drive curiosity in others, but I think it's clear that. Curiosity has to be sparked from someone in your life or some experience in your life. So I moved from Miami to Pembroke Pines. It's not very far, it's like 30 minutes by car, but I was like 12 when it happened. So it, my entire world changed and, and I sounded like everyone, yeah, I, I looked like everyone, I sounded like everyone, nothing changed in that regard. It was just that everyone was different. and actually two of my best friends, they're twins, they ended up moving right across the street from me. Like I didn't know them until they moved there. and, and their, their family's from Cuba, like their parents literally were on rafts as kids from Cuba. So they had this like, very different mentality and, and it was their first language. Even though they were also fluent in English, they, so the parents raised them bilingual. And, their parents could speak English.

Sebastian Carlsson: Had learned to speak English, obviously living in the States for all those decades. But, but yeah, I got, I was around them quite a lot and they were extremely intelligent and they were a year, a year or two younger than me, and yet they ended up graduating two years ahead of me because of the fact that like in summertime they were. In middle school, they were doing high school classes during the summertime and in high school they were doubling up and doing college classes. And so they ended up graduating high school in two years and were already juniors in college when they were like 16 or 17. And they ended up having double, double degrees from the, we ended up going to the same university together.

Sebastian Carlsson: but anyways, it started with my parents. My mom said that. I was reading an encyclopedia at the age of three. Right.

Sebastian Carlsson: That sounds like me. Like reading the encyclopedia, reading the atlas. I was into the atlas from the very beginning, sort of got an atlas when I was kid and sort of started exploring that kind of, possibly those kinds of simple actions also kind of, generate your curious mind or kind of kinda help towards that. Right.

Sebastian Carlsson: My mom taught me how to write cursive when I was like five or six. And she was constantly pushing books on me, taking me to the library, taking me to the bookstore, getting me whatever I wanted, and just kind of like giving me the opportunity to, to do whatever it was. And, I think those things were also very helpful. And like when I was 12 or 13, they got me a bank account and they taught me about checks and balances. Obviously it's useless now. And my brother was really into finance and so I saw him like buying and selling things on eBay and his teens and like I saw him always hustling to try to make money and he taught me a lot more about personal finance and things when I was a lot younger. So I just had like these, these people around me, very close to me that were always just encouraging me by example. To be curious.

Sebastian Carlsson: I think it is a really cool example we gave there on the, on your, on your neighbors. In entrepreneurship,there's a mad unproportional concentration of people who have migrated. and they could be a lot behind that. So, the mere necessity of, of, especially if you're, if you're moving, if you're in, if you're a refugee.

Sebastian Carlsson: You move into a new country, you should sort of, starting your own business is your own new option. But, but I'm sure there, there's also a sort of, there's also relation to, to how, how migrating or how moving sort of opens your mind, allows you to see things from different angles, allows you to sort of, to, to, to understand opportunities that if you have never sort of. left your, if you've always lived in the same spot or you, it obviously makes it much more difficult to think outside the box and, and, and to see those opportunities. So I think there's a lot, I think there's a lot, a lot to that. and that might sort of, that might be very cultural as well.

Sebastian Carlsson: Sort of going back to how Scandinavians were might have been the first explorers. That's probably a myth, because they were probably explorers long before. But the reason why people started. going to different continents on, on, to continental Europe on, on boats was basically 'cause of necessity. So, and if we look at states, which probably has the sort of strongest, one of the strongest entrepreneurial cultures in the world, I wouldn't be surprised if that has to do with it being a country of now probably down to 56 generations of immigrants. But in the end, the States is quite a new co new company in that sense, right. They actually ended up going on to create a company, not the parents but them, the two of them. and, and their mom was actually a teacher and so she was the one that was encouraging them to learn more and to take more classes and to get outta school faster. And, so yeah, they ended up starting a B2B SaaS and they've been running it for like, I think 10 years. And they make multiple millions a year from the business. They gross multiple millions. So

Sebastian Carlsson: in Mexico, you see, especially in the, in the sort of the current startup scene or the sort of startup scene that we could, that we could, that has sort of grown over, maybe not so much during 2022, but especially the years before that. Right. The 2017, 2021, there is an appro, there's an, proportionate amount of. of people coming from other countries in Mexico. And that doesn't mean that Mexicans are bad entrepreneurs, just I think it's just, it sort of natural foldout. And you can see that in, those Mexican entrepreneurs might be sort of, they, they might be people moved to elsewhere, right? To, to the states or elsewhere in Latin America. to have a stronger disposition of, of, of creating companies, sort of thinking outside the box. I think it comes down to.

Sebastian Carlsson: So I've experienced in China, Vietnam, and Portugal, the same exact thing, which is generally locals who start businesses tend to not speak English and tend to only look at their domestic market for their business and. I think the reason why you may not hear of businesses being successful globally from many different countries is because they're either those people left their country and went to the us, for example, to get access to VCs or a greater market or a different understanding of the world to be able to look at it globally or. An American went to another country and, and started a business and, and that business was determined to be focused globally even though they chose this country as a base of operations.

Sebastian Carlsson: And so, for example, I met a French guy who was living in Vietnam a few years back, and he was building a business, but he wasn't going to serve the Vietnamese company, the Vietnamese economy. I, as an American living in Vietnam, had a Singaporean company and I wasn't looking to serve the Vietnamese economy. Right? So I think a lot of expats generally aren't really looking at the domestic economy. They're generally looking at a global economy. for what they wanna serve. But then when you have locals, if they're in their own country, they tend to just focus domestically. And I, I think that, I've heard of this quite a lot in Europe as well. So in Asia and Europe specifically, they're very focused on their own economy.

Sebastian Carlsson: That's kind of interesting in, in our case because, the way that we have mounted it, so I am obviously Swedish and my, my business for co-founder is Brazilian. so we are classic examples of, of, of, of, of migrants really, of, of, people that have come from elsewhere and, and ended up in Mexico for different reasons. Our business has been fully focused on the Mexican market. it's kind of, maybe it's kinda a short to mid run, approach. We don't, we, we, we plan to launch in other countries in the future when we have, when it makes sense from a sort of synergy perspective.

Sebastian Carlsson: So when the product has enough exportable features, and for it, for us to make, for us, for it to make sense to launch another country, then, then we will do so. So, and it, not necessarily the product, but also the team, right. We have a, when we have a big enough of a talent pool. Then we can sort of take the idea that has worked here and if we know that we have a strong enough team that are working on, on, on that kind of development, then that then it will make a lot of sense to, to, to, to start in other countries. This is quite a bit different to approach to many of the startups, some of our competitors that have kind of tried to launch everything everywhere at the same time.

Sebastian Carlsson: which. Could also be a successful approach, especially if they sort of launched with a lot of seed and instead of understanding where it grows and focus on that. I guess we were a bit lucky there in that sense that we had a, a, a strong feeling that, that our, that our business model, that we actually had a good product market fit from the beginning. It turned out we had a decent fit and, and we're working on that. but that there's obviously a series of different approaches to that and, and sort of international expansion. can, it obviously works well in certain business lines, there's no question about it.

Sebastian Carlsson: You have a unique position in that as a foreigner you could see something domestically that was like, oh, there's an opportunity here that maybe other people didn't see or didn't try or tried and didn't know how to do it in a way that could work. So, you know. In hindsight, you have a great business and focusing on the Mexican Mexican economy is great. If you came to me a few years ago and you were like, Hey, Sean, I wanna do this thing in Mexico, what do you think? I'd be like, you're nuts. Why would you wanna do that? You're a foreigner, right? From my experience in a lot of countries that I've been to, being a foreigner and opening a business in that country, focusing on that economy is. A really bad idea because you're just gonna get destroyed by other companies that know the language and have relationships. And so yeah, you, you were in a good position and, and it makes sense. I think if someone were to try to compete against you by launching this all over the world, it wouldn't work because you need to make a certain set of APIs for that country.

Sebastian Carlsson: So you'd have to have. A hundred million dollars ready to just throw it, like 2 million in this country, 2 million on, like, you just, you just can't do it too, to create APIs at scale, across different use cases for different econom. It just doesn't make sense. So the way you're doing it is right.

Sebastian Carlsson: It sounds so 2020 to me, that that approach is just throwing, throwing money on stuff. But, we'll see how, how that, how that sort of folds up is actually really interesting. And, and I'm, I'm curious, I'm aware that we're running out time, but. it, it kind of falls back into one, one of the sort of main, kind of main fundamental, main basis for, for our idea is actually based on trust.

Sebastian Carlsson: And this falls back really nicely into, into curiosity. So one thing that having worked a lot with Latin marks in Latin America, more than anything. And also a bit in Southern Europe and coming from Northern Europe. Allow me to see an absolute market failure and it's a market failure. That's, that's, that's common for emerging markets, but also elsewhere as related to trust.

Sebastian Carlsson: Scandinavia has one of the highest sort of social trust levels in the world. And if we met, it's very difficult to measure of course, but there are measurements and sort of this a trust index showing, you know. where people trust others more than elsewhere. And within Scandinavia, those trust levels are extremely high.

Sebastian Carlsson: People trust them, it's actually gone down a bit in Sweden, but if we, Scandinavia as a whole, it's still on top of, of any sort of, of any sort of trust index or neighbors trust each other. people trust each other in the community. People trust politicians, people trust sort of public figures, et cetera, which is very different, especially to emerging markets like.

Sebastian Carlsson: some of the Latin American countries in some of the Latin American countries have some of the slowest trust indexes in the world. and One thing that this plays out for, and this is a bit of a chicken egg and is it called a chicken and egg situation? Is that what we call it? Yeah, we, you know what I mean?

Sebastian Carlsson: is that, access to information and to data often, allows for more trust. And trust often comes to the public if it is often related to public information. So it's not surprising that it would not be as surprising to learn that in. In, in Sweden, as is the closest example, in the end of the 18th century, there was a public policy called the public policy or Public Information established, basically saying that everything that's governmental or local government or, or, or, or, or state government, any kind of information coming from that should be made public.

Sebastian Carlsson: And that's something that still exists. And I remember growing up in the library, seeing all the people reading. The, informa the tax information about other people. So it was published, how much tax each and everyone pays in, in a book in the library. Now it's obviously available in light, so bad but basically people could go to the library and see how much money their neighbors were, were, were making.

Sebastian Carlsson: There's public information about, you say, you name it, you know how much, who's a policeman and who says who's a prisoner, what cell, what prison they sit in, what for? That can be information that elsewhere, it's just unheard of, is made public in Scandinavia. And I'm sure that the level of trust has allowed for that to happen.

Sebastian Carlsson: But there's also, that also adds to the level of trust. And I see that a lot of the market fails in, in, in, in financial services, in, in, in the Latin American countries. Where, financial institutions basically do not have enough information to make solid credit decisions, not on consumers or on, or on, on companies.

Sebastian Carlsson: And that has led to the access to finance being extremely, extremely low. that always obviously folds in the rd. And it's been something I've been, I've been questioning since, since I started working in Latin America, which basically started in the year 2008. Being, why, you know what, what's, what's, what's happening in these, in these cultures? Why do people not share data? and that's, that's been a strong mission for us since, since, since the beginning of our idea and something that we are working hard for. And it's false nightly back into how curiosity allows us to sort of develop an idea. And also back into trust, right? Like the availability of data has a very close relationship with the level of data I should say, but the availability of information has a very close relationship to sort of public trust and, and, and trust in, in, in the community and society as a whole.

Sebastian Carlsson: Yes. It's a very interesting conversation and I'm sure that we could definitely talk for a few more hours about it.