Micky Malka

Micky Malka bought his first share of Berkshire Hathaway at thirteen, in Venezuela in November 1987, a month after the crash, on a loan from his grandfather who charged him interest deliberately, as a lesson. He is still a holder.¹

Malka is the Venezuela-born founder of Ribbit Capital, a fintech-focused venture firm he founded in 2012 after building and exiting five prior companies over roughly twenty-five years. He describes himself as an entrepreneur at heart and an investor by design, and says the only labels he actually wants are good friend, good partner, and good father.

In the early 2000s he and Wences Casares put the entire proceeds of a prior exit into Lemon Bank, a self-funded branchless bank for Brazil's unbanked population, growing it to roughly 7,000 physical points of presence and 15 million customers before selling it in 2008.¹ He describes a twenty-year idea latency running through his career: the branchless-banking lessons of Lemon Bank in 2003 became, in his account, the direct template for the joint venture Ribbit co-founded with Walmart in 2020, which became OnePay and is now one of the ways to pay by phone inside Walmart stores. Ribbit also co-led a 2026 funding round in Deel, the payroll and compliance company, whose chief executive named Malka personally as the reason for taking the money.² That sits alongside other fintech bets he made years before they were obvious, including Robinhood before it had a public app or a customer.¹

Malka's operating philosophy is what he calls the infinite game: a decision is never a win or a loss, only a move that puts him ahead or behind, and he says he prefers being behind because being ahead makes him uneasy enough to want the rules to change so he has to innovate again. Despite five successful exits before Ribbit, he calls himself a failed entrepreneur, arguing that the best entrepreneurs never have to sell their company, and says it took him twenty years to design a sixth vehicle built to run forever rather than be sold.¹ His career is now organized around which founders and companies he chooses to back rather than around operating a single business himself.