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Kauê Curti knows it’s always an interesting time to be at ByteDance, parent company of social media app TikTok. Ever since TikTok exploded, ByteDance has been in the headlines. But ByteDance’s global lead counsel for payments business at all wasn’t distracted by the external noise. Curti says one of his strengths is focusing on what’s in front of him.
“I’ve found that focusing on the work keeps me from expending too much energy on things I don’t personally control,” the lawyer says, laughing. “Whether that’s the way our company may be perceived at the moment, I focus on the work and delivering the results I’m expected to deliver, because that’s what drives and inspires me.”
ByteDance recruited Curti after he proved himself invaluable as an outside counsel. While practicing in his home country of Brazil, Curti saw TikTok usage explode in 2021. ByteDance saw the need to build a Brazil-based team and named Curti the second in-house counsel hired for the Latin America team. At the time, his responsibilities may as well have read “everything.”
“It was two of us, and I used to joke that we were the goalkeepers,” Curti says. “Every ball that someone would kick, we had to catch it. Fortunately, the operation expanded quite quickly in Brazil and across Latin America.”
One area of expansion was payment services, a critical part of ByteDance’s growth strategy. ByteDance didn’t have a dedicated payment services legal team yet, so every time the company wanted to expand into a new market, it had to rely on a local legal team to handle it. Many of those local teams didn’t have payment or financial services expertise and weren’t well versed in how the larger business needed to interact with a heavily regulated financial industry.
The company identified the issue and asked Curti to support building a dedicated legal team from scratch. The lawyer spent most of 2023 building out what that team should look like. He identified gaps, created processes and efficiencies, and developed relationships with other teams he would need to interact with regularly, like IP, privacy, and litigation.
For Curti, working at ByteDance is an ideal fit because of his implicit need to do something different every day. Early on, he had a stable job at the Brazilian stock exchange, but it was too repetitive for him to be happy.
“I’ve found that focusing on the work keeps me from expending too much energy on things I don’t personally control.”
Kauê Curti
“When I know exactly what I’m going to be doing every day, my brain starts trying to fix problems that aren’t part of my job,” Curti explains. “They may not even be work problems, but I’m built to solve problems, even when there aren’t any. I love working [at ByteDance] because I’m not entirely sure what the next day will bring. I have yet to wake up and dread going to work.”
“Kauê’s leadership in the payments space exemplifies his exceptional ability to navigate complex challenges with innovation and focus,” say Greenberg Traurig’s Marina Olman-Pal, shareholder and co-chair in the financial regulatory and compliance practice, and Hilary R. Sledge-Sarnor, a corporate practice shareholder. “We’re proud to celebrate his achievements and grateful for our long-standing partnership.”
The lawyer knows his job is a special one, and he believes it may have something to do with his ability to navigate personalities and cultures well. Curti says he took this skill for granted until someone pointed it out to him.
“It’s a skill so many Latin Americans possess,” the attorney explains. “We don’t want to operate in an environment where we don’t understand the people we’re working with. We want to know people and connect with people.”
As for the skill that’s most important for Curti today, the lead counsel says that as he’s ascended in his career and became a manager, he found himself doing more listening and not trying to have the answer ready immediately. He knows his multicultural team has different ideas, ways of being successful, and needs. But it’s that variety and diversity that keep him interested in coming to work every day.
A Study of Culture Through Karaoke
Kauê Curti is the perfect match for ByteDance, and not just because he’s a great in-house performer. He may also be singing the latest TikTok–famous song at karaoke. The global lead counsel is an avid karaoke singer and says that he’s spent enough time in karaoke bars all over the world that it’s become an anthropological exercise.
“The way that people behave at karaoke, the songs they sing, all of this says a lot about the culture surrounding it,” the lawyer explains. “In Mexico City, I found myself in a very affluent area with a lot of people speaking English, but almost all the songs I heard were sung in Spanish. That says a lot about the relationship people they have with their culture and their relationship to art. In other countries where English isn’t the primary language, you’ll still hear most songs being sung in English.”
It sounds like a multipart “Karaoke Around the World” TikTok waiting to go viral.
