One of the first conversations with the dLocal operations team was a warning. “Please don’t ask me anything about payments, because I have no idea what I’m talking about,” Carolina Samsing, recently hired as country manager for Chile, told them.
He thought that with that he would lose his job. But he preferred to be transparent than lie, and he promised them that during the first three months he would do everything possible to learn.
Carolina describes herself as a superactive person. At school she was class president and head of the bar; At 18 he ran marathons; At the university he toured Chile three times with a volunteer service that took more than 2,000 young people to 25 areas, and he reached the UC student federation.
Today he starts the day doing sports at 6:30, he skis in season, like a good family descended from Punta Arenas, and he tours Santiago with his two daughters “like a tourist”, so that they are curious and enthusiastic.
From the magazine to La Moneda
He chose journalism, he says, without knowing what he wanted to study. What he did like was telling stories and discovering new things. She defines herself as a “weirdo”: a journalist and manager of technology companies, something unusual in Chile.
But his training, he says, helps him do the most important thing when leading: communicating clearly, especially when the team exceeds 20 people and no longer fits in a room.
He worked at Capital Magazine in 2010 and 2011, when digital topics were just starting out, and he got into digital marketing. She was called to the government not because she was an expert, but because of her time in the student federation: those she met there now worked at La Moneda and knew that she made things happen.
In the cabinet, almost everything had to be put together: there was no marketing team or digital strategy, and each ministry had its own logo.
They unified the corporate image, which is still in force, and centralized the purchase of media to negotiate better: two ministries would no longer pay, each, half a million dollars for the same influenza vaccination campaign.
That, he says, is the common thread of his career: putting together new things that didn’t exist before and helping them scale.
An experiment called Latam
She did an MBA in Boston to demonstrate “on paper” that she could lead commercial teams: in Chile, she remembers, it was rare for a journalist to be hired as a manager. In a class he learned about the case of HubSpot, which at that time almost no one knew about, and he decided to work there.
He made a list of everyone who had any contact with the company until he sat in front of the head of marketing.
“I told them I wanted to do Latam. They looked at me with a look like ‘we don’t do Latam.'”
In his first interview they told him no. She did an internship at another company and three weeks later HubSpot called her. The Latin American project had two clients, one in Chile and one in Mexico; She put together the site, the blog and the emails in Spanish.
She was the only person who spoke Spanish in the entire company, so they let her continue while she finished her MBA.
He stayed five years, opened the Bogotá office in 2018 and went from two clients to around 3,000. “It was like a mini startup within a startup.”
She returned to Chile in 2019 for a personal reason: her eldest daughter, three years old, asked her why they didn’t live in the same city as her grandmother, and she didn’t have a good answer. And he had a hypothesis, which he believes he has confirmed: in the region there were good products and talent, but there was a lack of strategy and culture to scale.
He wanted to try it in a Chilean or Latin American company.
- Why do you think the role of companies in the scaling stage is undervalued?
“I don’t think it’s undervalued: there are still many companies that haven’t reached that stage. There are very good people at starting a company, who can do everything, but if you put them in a structured job, where they have to do the same thing every day, they die hard. And that’s perfect. The difficult thing is to understand that at each stage you have to put together different teams, and it sounds painful: I’ve had to live it four times”
“The people who were useful for the first stages are often not the right ones for the next”
Define the correct plays
In 2025 he arrived at dLocal, a payments company that allows large international companies, such as LinkedIn or Microsoft, to get paid in emerging countries with local methods. Today he is in charge of South America. The first months were difficult, he acknowledges, between the pressure of running a country without knowing the industry.
- How do you learn an industry from scratch?
“Payments are an industry of oral tradition: you have to get together with another human being who explains how it works, and after getting together with several you put together the picture. There are very few things written down. It was my own experiment: sometimes you are afraid of changing and think that you are too old to learn something new. But we are going to live 100 years, so no one is old.”
“I am genuine proof that at 40 you can still change industries.”
He believes that, with artificial intelligence, technical knowledge will increasingly be a commodity, and that what is valued are soft skills and the ability to assemble teams. dLocal operates in more than 45 countries with about 1,300 people, and the key, he explains, is to prioritize: country managers where regulation is complex and products and integrations centralized.
- How do you balance work, motherhood and everything else?
“I think work-life balance is a myth. You have to choose the balls you want to have in the air and consciously leave others on the floor, because some are going to fall. You can’t be the best friend, the best wife, the best mom and the best leader: the day has 24 hours. That choice is difficult, but it becomes more bearable if you make it conscious.”
She recognizes that she lives with guilt and that she is not the mother who goes to pick up her daughters from school, but she tries to focus on quality moments.
And she took over as general manager, she says, partly to be an example: later, several women told her that thanks to her they dared to apply for positions like that.
- What advice would you give to Carolina who was just starting out?
“Have genuine curiosity and question what has always been done in the same way. And understand the business well, even if you work in development or people: you have to know how the company makes money and how it loses money. And have an owner’s mentality: even if you are not, act as if you were.”
