Santiago Suárez

Size-wise, we serve over 3 million consumers, over 50,000 merchant partners.

That's a little bit about the scale of Adyen, what we do today.

Yeah.

So it really starts with coming here for college.

I think I've been increasingly open about this most recent years, but for a while I was like, no one needs to know this.

But the first time I ever left Columbia was to come to college.

And I came to the US for college on a full ride because my parents couldn't afford college in the US, certainly, and most places in Columbia.

So that to me was...

probably the first time that I could really see doing something that no one thought was possible.

I mean, to the degree that I wrote my college essays on a borrowed computer because we didn't have a computer because in that particular case, those years were pretty tough.

We didn't have one.

So I had to borrow someone's computer to write the college essays and be able to go from doing that to just getting a scholarship to this incredible place.

And it remains incredible more so at the time Yale for an undergraduate education.

It just really changes everything

your definition of what's possible.

I think that also led me to work at Navia, the first startup.

Navia was doing probabilistic computing back in 2010.

And we used to say, this is, by the way, 16 years ago, we used to say our programs are so special because every time you run them, you get a different output.

It was back in 2010.

And we were pre-transformers, pre-ImageNet, pre-all these things.