Career path: Nicolas Arrellaga, Co-founder, Nexoos

1 February, 2019

Katie Llanos-Small

Nicolas Arrellaga is a co-founder of Brazilian peer to peer lending platform Nexoos. Here’s how he got there

First job: Tennis player “I played tennis since I was three. I took it really seriously, and from when I was 13 I trained heavily, 8-10 hours a day. When I was 15 or 16 I started playing in professional tournaments. I never got to a Grand Slam, but I played ATP tours in Spain and Latin America.” Tennis taught me... “Discipline. You don’t only need to be technically good or train a lot, you also need to be disciplined. It trained me to be methodical in everything. And also that you need a lot of luck.” BSC in Information Management, UCL “I was intrigued by business, my father had started their own companies. So I looked for a degree where I could learn the skills for managing and growing a business. This was one of the first years they offered the degree, it was basically about how to launch and scale a tech business” Trainee, Sedex “I was used to tennis training 8 hours a day, so just studying wasn’t enough. I found a part time job at a company that looked after the corporate social responsibility models for multinationals. We mapped their whole supply chains, and surveyed and audited the suppliers.” Community lead, IDEA London “IDEA is a joint venture between UCL and Cisco, it helps startups scale. My main role was as a liaison between startups, the university and Cisco. It was right in the middle of the London fintech hype. The experience gave me a lot of inside perspective on fintech.” Nexoos “I knew I wanted to set up a business, and I met one of our co-founders in London. We started to draft plans. We chose Brazil to start because it’s one of the two markets with the potential for real scale in LatAm, and because we have insane concentration of banks and the second-highest credit spreads in the world.” “My typical day changes every six months. When you start you do everything from cleaning the office to writing the code. Now we have 50 people and we hope to have 140 by the end of the year.” “My biggest professional challenge was to manage the launch of Nexoos at the same time that I got married and moved back to South America. We piloted the product in Paraguay, and straight away the big banks tried to sue us. It taught me persistence - and that’s the main thing an entrepreneur needs” “The image of an entrepreneur can be that it’s easy money and you spend your life at the beach. But actually it’s a lot of responsibility. Every time you grow the company you have more responsibility - you can’t just quit one day to the next. So I think you need to be really thoughtful, really aware of what you’re doing when you start a business.”