How Mercado Libre built Latin America's most valuable company: 18k engineers, 30k deploys a day, and their own fleet of planes | Sebastian Barrios
Guests: Sebastian Barrios
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript · 00:00–19:05
Steve Jobs called you.
One day I'm walking in the street and I get a phone and a blocked number.
I was super young, by the way, at the time.
I think I was like 16.
Pick up.
I said, well, hi, it's Sebastian.
This is Steve from Apple.
I need to talk to you about your app.
We're not going to be able to have it on the App Store.
I actually pushed back a little bit until I read all the rules of the App Store.
He told me check again because we just added a new rule.
At 19, you built an app that became the number one app in 19 countries.
absolutely exploded.
I actually got contacted by a lot of different companies like multinationals,
governments saying like,
well,
you have the number one app.
We want you to build an app for us.
You oversee something like 18,000 developers.
We do around 30,000 deployments per day.
We deliver over 5 million packages per day.
You're really big on not creating a big distinction between engineering and product.
It's hard to separate where engineering stops and product begins.
We don't feel like just having a title should determine who was the owner.
Is there anything else that might be helpful for folks either about how you operate as a human,
morning routine, we were raised in a very intensely independent way.
My mother mainly, the analogy that she used is that she wanted to train us like spies.
She would drop us in the middle of the city,
Mexico City,
and we'd be like,
you have to get back home.
You have to like know public transit or ask someone for help and basically solve problems.
Just go and get things done.
Today, my guest is Sebastian Barrios.
Sebas, as most people know him, is currently Senior Vice President of Engineering at Roblox.
He was also a longtime Head of Product and Engineering at MercadoLibre.
MercadoLibre might be the biggest and most interesting company that you have never heard of.
And Sebas might also be the most interesting product leader that you've never heard of.
MercadoLibre is currently the most valuable company in Latin America valued at over
$100 billion,
which also makes them one of the 150 most valuable companies on the planet.
They also have one of the largest engineering teams on the planet with over 18,000
engineers operating in 18 countries.
They deploy an unprecedented 30,000 times a day.
The company owns their own trucks and planes.
They deliver over 5 million packages a day.
At one point, eBay tried to acquire them.
They ended up acquiring PayPal instead.
Now they are larger than both eBay and PayPal combined.
Also,
just wait till you hear the stories about Sebas's early life,
including how his mom trained him like a spy,
why he only drinks water,
no coffee or tea or juice,
why he doesn't listen to music,
also why steve jobs personally called him when he was 17 years old telling him that
they are booting his app from the app store and forever changing the app store
policies as a result a huge thank you to christopher lazarus oscar mullen and
farhan thaur for suggesting topics for this conversation
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With that, I bring you Sebastian Barrios.
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Sebas, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
I'm super happy to be here.
Thank you for hosting me.
This is the first time that you're doing a major, let's call it major podcast.
I think you can call it major podcast.
You can be proud of what you've done.
I appreciate that.
So let me just start with a stat that I think is going to blow a lot of people's minds.
You oversee something like 18,000 developers.
Is that right?
Is that the right number?
That is the right number.
18,000 and climbing.
I just specify that they don't report all directly to me.
We can talk about how the company is structured.
But yes, I lead the technology team that basically powers all of what they do.
I think essentially you guys are in the top 10 of most engineers at a company.
You're like above Salesforce and TikTok, NVIDIA, Adobe, Uber, OpenAI.
That's right.
I think you have to go into like big tech or huge banks to get a larger number.
Okay.
So a lot of people listening to this have not heard of MercadoLibre.
A lot of listeners are in the US, other parts of the country outside of Latin America.
Give us just like a brief explanation of what does MercadoLibre do.
And then give us a few more stats that will blow people's minds to the scale of
this business at this point.
Happy to.
Happy to.
So you can think of us as a completely vertically integrated
That means buying and selling any product you can think of.
And the vertically integrated part means we have our own distribution network,
we have our own airplanes,
we have our own trucks.
We have to do all the technology and coordination behind that.
But even or in addition to that, we also have a very large fintech operation.
The two sides of the business are actually almost the same size.
So we also offer accounts,
we offer credit cards,
we offer loans,
all of that are like integrated with each other into what we call an ecosystem.
Okay.
And I saw a stat that you guys plan to have over 100,000 employees by the end of this year.
That's right.
There's a lot of operations that need to happen for all those packages to be delivered.
You asked about some fun statistics,
specifically with deliveries,
we deliver over 5 million packages per day or items.
So you visit most of Latin America.
We have some very cool visualizations where if you track the
routes of our trucks and delivery vans and whatnot.
You sort of like paint a picture of Latin America, which is pretty fun.
We obviously operate in major cities,
but we have very,
very large capillarity and reach all the different corners of Latin America.
Okay, a couple more stats that you didn't mention.
You guys are valued over $100 billion.
It's a large company.
We don't focus on the stock price that much.
But yes, $100 billion.
Even more so now, depends on how the market's feeling and what the global news are.
But yes, one of the top valued companies on the planet.
We have around 100 million users, customers, sellers, people interacting in the
in the platform and as you mentioned,
one of the larger engineering and product building teams on the planet.
Hopefully people now get the sense of like, holy shit, there's a lot to learn here.
There's kind of two buckets to the way I want to approach this conversation.
One is just really unique,
interesting ways you all operate and how you scale a business like this,
how you build product.
The other is just you as a human are really interesting.
And there's a lot of stories I've heard that I want to talk about,
but I'm going to save that for next.
Let's start with how you all operate.
So I talked to a lot of people that work with you, that work at MercadoLibre.
One of the themes that came up again and again is you're really big on not creating
a big distinction between engineering and product.
It's essentially one team for you guys.
Talk about just how that works specifically,
just like what does that mean and why that's so important to you.
For me and for MercadoLibre,
it's hard to separate where sort of like engineering stops and product begins.
We do have...
a small product organization there are people in medical leave that have the the
product manager title but the the ratio is much smaller than any other tech company
that that you would think of and the way we we think about it is like that we we're
not going to determine who's going to own the product just based on the title it's
going to be based on who's the best for that role no and then uh
It turns out that for us,
in the majority of the cases,
it's the engineering leaders,
it's the tech leads,
it's the people that can understand what's technically possible,
and they're also good.
What are the business needs?
What are the user needs?
What are the users doing?
How am I going to measure that?
Combine that into a single role.
To make this even clearer, you have 18,000-ish developers.
How many people have the PM title?
I think it's less than 1,000.
I think that would make like 5% work in other companies.
Maybe you have 10, 20, 30%, even more other companies.
So two follow-ups here.
One is just why do you think operating this way is more effective in your business?
And do you need to hire engineers in a different way for them to succeed in this
way where they're basically playing the PM role?
This works because you want to be as close to the problem as possible.
And that probably works being as close to the technology as possible,
being as close to the users as possible.
You can have it with two different people that have to interact and coordinate.
And that obviously works as well, right?
I'm not saying this is the only way to do it.
Clearly, there are a lot more examples.
Maybe we are actually the exception and it would be hard to replicate anywhere else.
But if you're able to have that whole context in a single mind,
in a single person that can then deliver that vision to the team,
I think it leads to great products that users are going to love and enjoy.
In terms of hiring,
we do,
in the interview process,
test for product skills,
but we mainly do test for engineering skills.
I think it's worth being honest about,
like,
we have a strong bias for engineering,
for being technical,
for being deep into the details.
There's not a lot of tolerance for being in a meeting and getting asked a question.
It's like,
well,
I need to check with this person to understand the details because,
you know,
I'm not sure what technology we're using.
Like,
That would not fly.
So there's a bias towards the tech side of it.
And then once you're inside MercadoLibre,
we'll probably get to know you a lot more and it'll be very clear if you have the
product inclination or if you would be more comfortable just with the engineering.
What's really interesting about this is a lot of companies start with no PMs and
they're like,
we never need PMs.
We're just going to be engineers leading products.
It's going to be amazing.
And then usually,
eventually,
these engineers realize,
I don't want to be doing all this bullshit PM work.
I just want to code.
I want to build.
What am I in meetings all day writing specs?
And it's interesting.
You guys have scaled to $100 billion market cap, 18,000.
people on the product team developers and still you're working this way.
It's really rare.
What do you think has allowed you to operate this way at this scale that maybe
other companies can't?
Yeah, I think it's also a top down thing where a lot of the leadership
is very technical.
They're very into the product.
They're also very into the business, into the numbers, into the details.
It's amazing to be on the C-level meetings and the kind of questions,
the kind of level of attention.
I know founder mode is now a term that's there, but
The company has been operating like that for a while,
where discussions will even go as deep as,
okay,
why are we using that copy?
That's way too many words.
It's not clear.
Hey, why is this pixel here where we could use that space for something a lot more useful?
And these are literally conversations at the C-level,
asking,
okay,
how does this work for users?
When you
present a feature.
And here I'm going to stereotype other companies.
No,
it might not be the case,
but my understanding is anytime it's okay,
how much revenue can we get from this new feature?
Or what's the metric that's going to move?
For Marcos, our CEO, the first question is,
Always, okay, how's the user going to experience this?
Show me the flow.
Show me the user experience.
Are they understanding it?
Show me the metrics that people are actually liking what we're doing.
Putting the users before the revenue obviously turns into revenue in the future or
in the long term,
which is what you're
So again,
I think the top-down version of that,
maintaining the culture and being able to select for the top of the top talent in a
whole region,
in multiple countries,
I think it's what's allowed that to happen.
And the business, as you said, there's a lot of technology, right?
You need to do the routing for all the buses, the trucks, the planes, the distribution centers.
You need to do routing for picking items within the distribution centers,
risk,
content moderation,
search,
robotics.
There's a really long list of really fun initiatives that we're working on.
They're all very technical and turn into value for our users.
I can't help but ask how does AI impact this way of working where engineers are
doing more and more of the PM work?
Is that just accelerating that further?
Is there anything you can share about just how AI is changing the way you operate?
It's a great question because you probably always hear it from the other side.
People who are more product oriented are not going to need engineers as much.
So for us, the change is accelerating what people can do on both sides.
I don't think there's any competition.
And again, we don't see a line between product and engineering as strongly as other companies.
So I'm extremely happy when someone who's more product oriented
comes in and can actually start developing more stuff on their own, even just demos.
We can talk about the AI hype a little bit in the future,
but it's definitely great to make demos,
to actually turn ideas into something that you can touch,
something that you can see.
designs and seeing a lot more people enabled to do that.
I think it's just accelerating everything we do.
On the actual coding side,
of course,
it started as advanced autocomplete and now you have agentic frameworks and Cursor
and Windsurf.
OpenAI just made an acquisition.
Clearly, it's sort of like a big shift in the way we develop technology.
It's not at the point where it can sort of like do anything and everything and
security,
compliance,
all the different things that go around actually turning a demo or a product into
something that's going to reach the production or the market takes time.
But I would say we're taking it even further.
We always like to think in terms of platforms.
It's one of the reasons why we've been able to scale the team so much.
We have a great internal development platform that takes care of a lot of scaling,
security,
building,
testing,
compliance.
So developers and teams can just focus on adding value.
And we're taking the same approach with AI.
We
developed an internal platform called Verdi that basically abstracts away a lot of
the complexities around,
okay,
where are you going to get the data?
How is it going to be authorized?
And that in itself has been evolving as the models become more capable.
Now you can have more
It's called agents, agentic frameworks, things taking action, taking over longer tasks.
And we're seeing great results with skipping code entirely.
I think it's a fun one where
The prompt or what you actually want the product to do is everything you tell the system.
We came up with ways to use our existing code.
So it's not like there's no code in any of what I'm talking about.
But we basically can extract the functionality of every single one of our microservices.
And then we can have agents build and use different parts of different services and
create new features for users end to end.
with a UI.
So that's something that is still experimental,
obviously,
but it's happening,
and it's just going to accelerate as the models get better.
So we literally have things that are taking existing code,
so it's not like code doesn't exist,
but you don't have to write any new code.
There's a lot of functionality that we already have on the platform,
and you can combine different parts of it and turn it into a new feature or product
without any intervention from anybody.
code, extra code.
That is very cool.
So essentially you have all these APIs and microservices and your agents can just
use what already exists to add new features.
Exactly.
And if you extend it a little more, you could even
reach a point where UIs and apps are entirely generated.
These are all the things that you can do inside MercadoLibre.
You can buy stuff,
you can get a credit card,
you can move money around,
and then have a completely personalized UI for a user predicting what are you going
to do next and just having that as the main screen.
Maybe you have other screens, obviously, that allow you to do everything, but
§02Transcript · 19:05–40:19
It's an exciting future.
I think we're going to see a lot more automated UI.
Wow.
Okay.
I'm going to try to resist just making every conversation about AI.
So let's leave that aside and maybe we'll come back to it, but let's zoom out a little bit.
And I want to hear other key or very unique ways of working that you have figured
out that allow you to operate this team of 18,000 developers and continue to ship
great product.
So if you had to pick like, I don't know, two or three key ways of working, what would those be?
One big one, it's a cliche but it's true, is the fear of failure.
We actually empower our teams to make mistakes.
No one's going to get fired for releasing something that
It didn't work in the sense that maybe the market was not ready or we had the wrong
idea on where we had to implement.
Obviously,
there's a lot less tolerance for bad quality and it failed because the product
wasn't good or it was going offline.
Those kinds of failures are...
much less tolerated.
But we do encourage our teams to take a lot of risks on what we should actually be working on.
We also let them be very independent.
I think it goes hand in hand.
For example,
we don't operate with OKRs where everything just trickles down into what every team
is supposed to do.
We have very high level objectives on where we want the company to be.
And they're not even that long term.
It's not like we have a 10 year plan.
And I think in a market that's changing so much,
even before AI,
I know this is an extremely competitive market with very dynamic regulations in
multiple countries.
So it's hard to say like, OK, this is a plan for 10 years and these are the OKRs.
And now everyone go into your teams and implement the specific features that are
going to point to that.
The way we run it is these are the objectives.
These are maybe some of the new businesses or areas where we would like to explore.
But everything else is up to teams.
We just cascade the main vision of where the company is going.
And there's a lot of another cliche, freedom and responsibility.
Saying like, okay, do whatever, literally whatever you think is best.
for our users, for the company, for what we want to accomplish.
There's going to be tight feedback loops on that to also make sure everyone's
pointing in the same direction.
But you can't be telling 18,000 people exactly what they should be working on every
day and expect that to work.
So there's a fun combination of what can you delegate, what can you not delegate.
We're also, I think, very hands-on
wherever we can be.
So we can't be on every single detail.
But in the projects that we feel are most important,
the whole leadership team goes extremely deep into working with the team,
understanding what the restrictions are,
what's working,
what's not working,
and pushing the team forward.
So I think that's probably the main one.
We also talked about putting users before revenue.
I think that's another...
A big one that we've liked.
And there's another tricky aspect of it because life is trade-offs.
So you say, okay, let's be very distributed on what the teams are going to be working on.
Then you can end up with a product that has great parts.
But once you put them all together, it's horrible and it sucks.
People don't like it.
So you also need a mix of, okay, this is a holistic vision.
This is what we want to accomplish.
This is what probably the end product is going to look like.
And then you can build the features.
And there's no like one rule that basically applies to all projects.
There are times where you can have more freedom.
There are times where you do require a lot more sort of like, yeah.
one vision of where things are going.
So I think that's another important one.
What else?
We like to observe users more than talk to users.
You always hear, talk to users, listen to users.
They're going to tell you what they want, what they need.
That works sometimes.
We've seen that what works best is just to observe them,
whether that's literally like user research sessions and just seeing what people
are doing with the
product.
I'm sure this has happened to you and to many people that listen to your show and
you cringe at all the assumptions that are being crushed before your eyes as
someone types in their email and their name in the same field because your field
said email,
comma,
name.
So you could either have the email or the username and people say,
well,
I'll write both because that's what they're asking of me.
So a lot of examples like this where
observing users is extremely valuable.
I think those are the ones that come to mind.
Okay, this is great.
Let me follow up in a couple of these.
So what I'm hearing is there's a lot of independence and kind of distribution of
ownership where teams can kind of go off and build their own stuff.
As you pointed out,
it's important to have a vision and some sense of what success looks like and make
sure everyone's rowing in the same direction.
Just going at a level deeper,
how do you actually operationalize that sort of way of operating where teams can do
their own thing,
but you also share a vision?
Like how often do you
update that vision?
How do you communicate it?
And then how do you check in with teams to make sure they're heading towards the
right direction?
We don't do anything magical there.
We do a lot of design reviews,
I think is a term that they would probably use,
or product reviews.
in the US where it's like, okay, this is what we're working on.
This is what it looks like.
This is what all the pieces together are doing and working or not working.
And there the leadership team is extremely candid and honest on their feedback,
always cordial and a happy work environment,
but definitely on the side of being honest about what's working,
what's not working.
Whether the vision was mistaken as well.
There are many times where we've thought this was the right direction.
Turns out it's not.
And we can pivot very quickly into a new thing.
So no big secrets.
Maybe the only secret is
You can't check absolutely everything when you have 18,000 people.
So to give you another crazy statistic,
we do around 30,000 deployments per day,
like changes to production.
30,000.
PRs, a day.
PRs, deploys, changes to a system.
It can be configuration changes.
It can be database updates or whatever.
Things that change.
There's no way anyone can check what those 30,000 changes are doing.
That's more than one per developer.
Yeah.
Yeah, some of them are automated changes as well.
But yeah,
we have a very high speed of execution and it's quite fun to be around something
that's changing that rapidly and that dramatically.
We,
again,
have many different businesses,
many different competitors in different businesses who operate at world class,
whether it's finance,
whether it's e-commerce,
I would even say business.
Brazil is probably one of the most competitive markets on the planet for e-commerce.
You have local players,
you have international players,
you have players from Asia that are even funded by video game revenue and profits.
So it's a great dynamic market to be around.
I like that optimism, that way of framing it.
We like competition,
especially when you're competing with the top of the top and it pushes you to be
better as well.
This point you made earlier about being the top company in a market is really interesting.
I was wondering if I wanted to come to this,
but I think it's interesting to talk about for a bit.
So I've had a few product leaders from companies like Revolut, N26.
I haven't had Intercom on yet, but the co-founder is coming on soon.
And a theme across all those conversations about how they've built companies
such a strong product team that pumps out incredible product leaders is they're the
top startup in their market and it's just an interesting thread of just how much
power comes with being the most successful company in a market and just like the
cycle of success that comes from that in terms of hiring amazing people is there
anything else there that you think might be interesting to folks that are i don't
know that want to try to do something like this other than just build a successful
business
I think it applies to many things.
And you often also hear like, well, you're not in the Bay Area.
You're not in the pinnacle and the capital of technology.
So how can you build amazing technology?
There are advantages as well.
I think you would find the same with,
you mentioned a bunch of companies that have experienced that where,
okay,
if you can be the top in a region where there's great talent,
by statistical definition,
there's great talent everywhere.
It probably follows a probabilistic distribution, so it's everywhere.
A lot of it does flow into the U.S., and it's absolutely true that there's...
a very high concentration of talent outside specific companies.
I think that's probably the one thing you don't get outside of the big tech hubs
where you are the top company,
but you are the only top company.
I'm exaggerating a bit.
There are great companies throughout the world and in Latin America.
unicorns and their outliers but the truth is you're setting your own path and
you're setting your own map and setting your own destination you're building things
that have not been built before in a different way and it's very fun that's for
sure
By the way, I'll correct.
I said Intercom.
I think they're technically a U.S.-based company,
but I think a lot of their team is in Ireland or is originally in Ireland,
just to be clear there.
And then there's other companies like Canva and Atlassian.
What I'm taking away from this is if you want to build a company outside of the U.S.,
You need to be the best in that market to take advantage of this cycle that happens
where the best come to you.
Yeah,
maybe you could say you have to be the best eventually if you want to have that
flywheel running.
It's hard to start and be the best and the biggest.
when you're just getting started.
But I think knowing that there's great talent everywhere and that it is possible to
attract them without being in a specific tech hub.
Maybe even empowering.
I want to start a company here.
I think we can also be honest that it will be harder.
It is easier to recruit and build a team where you're in a place where the high
density is all over.
Another thing that happens to us is that many people try to recruit from us and
that's something that we have to deal with.
But if you actually get that flywheel going, it becomes into a clear advantage.
I want to come back to something you said that I think
might be there might be something more there which is around reducing the fear of
failure a lot of companies and leaders say that they're like yeah yeah we let
people fail totally no problem but then in reality you know they performance
reviews they got to show impact they have to show success is there something you do
to actually create that sort of culture where failing is okay like what can people
learn from you to actually create that sort of culture
I think that question is even more on how does culture work at any company, especially at ours.
It's very clear that it's not what you write on the walls or what you put on your website.
From what I've learned and what we've seen, it's what you do.
It's what the leadership team is doing,
is how I get my performance reviews,
how I get either praise or not praise.
And in public, what are the
acceptable errors, where are the not acceptable errors?
Because again, if we have a system outage, it's obviously unacceptable.
That's not the kind of error that we're going for.
We're going for,
well,
if you took a risk in a very bold vision and it turns out it was not the right
path,
you're not going to get penalized for that.
You might even get a promotion and those messages that you send are extremely powerful.
Who has what title?
Who gets promoted?
Who doesn't get promoted?
Who is getting what praise in public?
What announcements are made on new products?
How do we talk about things that didn't work?
One very clear one is like, okay, this didn't work.
And yes, we like risk with the person that led the project was fired.
It's like, well, then you're not sort of like living what you have on your website.
So I think it is not more complicated than that.
You need to live it.
You need to show it.
And you also need to have people that will take in that culture and also propagate
it into their teams.
That's also the way...
It scales in the organization,
but it definitely starts with the top management of the company and again,
what they are focused on,
what messages they're sending to the rest of the company.
They participate in the product reviews.
They are very aware,
at least of all the big features that we launch and the feedback is direct and
clear.
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You talked about this idea of being direct and honest,
but also maintaining a cordial environment.
Talk about just that balance in the culture you've created of being direct,
kind of this idea of radical candor is what I'm hearing.
Yeah, so the book became very popular.
The book Radical Candor?
Yeah.
Oh, awesome.
We had Kim Scott on the podcast.
It's a great book, and the concept is also great.
I would even say it's even more important in Latin America,
in some Asian countries where you have a culture,
and I'm Latin American,
so I can
Talk a little bit about stereotypes without it becoming offensive,
especially ones that are true,
where there's a lot of hierarchy and I'm not going to tell my boss that he's wrong.
We're just going to do this because he said so or she said so.
This is the way it works.
This is the way it's always been done, so that's the way we're going to do it.
I don't want to stand out.
These are sort of like cultural stereotypes that we are extremely aware of when we operate.
People are extremely polite in Latin America as well.
I don't know if you've traveled, everyone will smile at you.
It will be very hard for someone to say no to something.
Even like meetings or whatnot, they'll say, yes, but later, yes, but later.
And they actually...
mean no i think they're argentina and other countries but argentina where the
company was was founded is an exception to that where people are uh very direct uh
i will tell my boss if he if he's wrong uh it's something that i love about the
company and we've been able to sort of like export that and also select for people
that will actually uh behave in in that way but yes we're
extremely direct, extremely candid.
We're honest about what's working, what's not working.
And it's a learning that every manager or leader goes through.
Like, well, I don't want to hurt people's feelings.
I want to be friends with everyone.
I think we all start on that path.
And eventually you realize that people like the honest.
They might not like it in the very short term or in the medium term sometimes.
But my experience has been,
if you're coming from a place of honesty,
again,
if you're not insulting anyone or crossing a line where things feel personal,
people appreciate the feedback.
People like growing.
If you have your performance review and everything comes back positive,
what are you going to do with that?
It's like, well, he's doing great.
Everything's perfect.
Thank you for being a part of the company.
like what could i be doing better what's not working it's also a skill to separate
that from from your person no that we do have situations where uh i've had to have
conversations on like oh you got this strong feedback but but it's on the product
you know it's like maybe on on the vision that we are pursuing or on the execution
uh that their work has nothing to do like with you we can we can go out and and and
and have lunch and we'll still be cordial.
But this idea of,
well,
the companies should be like families and it's not true because you behave
extremely different with your family.
There's no expectation of high performance.
I mean, in some families, obviously, and in some cases, even in mine, we can talk about that.
But it's always from a different perspective,
whereas I think the analogy that we use much more often is of a high-performance
sports team where it's very clear where the line is between,
yes,
we can have fun together and we should as we work on interesting things.
But when you are talking about work and the performance and what's working, what's not working,
The results speak for themselves usually, and we just don't hide that from anyone.
Speaking of that,
along those same lines I heard,
you do something that is a little controversial these days,
but you did this a long time ago,
which is you send a weekly email asking what did you get done this week,
and you share what you got done this week.
uh talk about just that yeah yeah so so it became a a meme uh what was it like one
or two years ago i used to do it before that i should uh i should say and i should
also clarify that i don't actually have an expectation that the that people are
going to send that to me it's something i do myself you know so i'll uh sort of
like go over what i did in the week what worked and
what didn't work, even what interesting things I discovered.
And I will share that with the executive team, with our CEO, who I report to.
I'll share some of that with my team.
It basically helps me keep track of what's working, what's not working.
I usually also get feedback on those emails or help or saying like,
well,
let's talk about this and this and that.
So I think that's something super simple that anyone can do, right?
You can write like a weekly email to your boss or to your team and saying like,
well,
this is what happened this week.
This is what worked.
This is what didn't work.
This is maybe something I need help with or something that's stuck.
Maybe we can unlock it together.
I think it's strange that not...
I haven't heard a lot of people doing it.
I think I actually read it somewhere a couple of years ago and that's probably
where I got the idea.
I'll look it up to see if we can link it on your notes so I don't take credit for it.
I wrote a post about this actually.
I called it the state of me.
Okay, maybe it was you.
I wonder if it was.
Maybe it was you.
Either way, I'll link to this post.
And the whole idea,
and there's like a less controversial way of asking this instead of what did you
get done this week,
which is I call it the state of me.
I call it the state of Lenny email.
§03Transcript · 40:19–59:14
And basically every week, it was a weekly thing for me, not a daily thing.
I email my end manager.
Here's what I got done.
Here's my next set of priorities.
And here's blockers.
I need you to help.
Oh, I probably got it from you.
It's sounding extremely familiar.
So I send the weekly email.
I call it a weekly update.
It's also not like, what did I get done this week?
It can be what I got done on the week.
But important things are happening, new releases.
That also frees up a lot of time, for example, with my COO.
We're like,
okay,
on the weekly meeting,
we don't have to talk about those specific things where we can pick out from that
email what's relevant,
what's working,
what's not working.
So definitely a great tool.
And I'm pretty sure I got from your post just hearing you.
What a circle of light you've got here.
Okay,
so speaking of things that you did before other people,
something else that came up a lot in chatting with folks that work with you is
They pointed out that you're really good at not falling for hype cycles.
You're good at being really pragmatic about things that everyone's really excited
about,
like crypto,
gen AI these days.
How do you approach stuff?
How do you approach new things that everyone's like super excited about and not
kind of fall into this trap of just like,
oh,
we all got to pivot and do this thing that everyone else is doing?
I hadn't thought about it that way, but it's true.
It's true in some sense because it's not like I just ignore it.
I think I bought or even mined my first Bitcoin in 2010 or 2012 or something like that.
We can leave it undisclosed how many and how many I still have.
Why are you even working?
No, not enough for that.
A lot of great lessons on selling.
and won the right time and whatnot.
I had those lessons too.
So it's not like I ignored what was happening.
No, but I'm definitely skeptic of most things, I would say, even.
I like doing a lot of research.
Deep research is a great tool.
I use it all the time for a lot of things.
I do it myself as well.
So with crypto, for example, I love the technology, actually.
I think there are some very fun breakthroughs there,
the distributed consensus and how you got like a single thing.
But then you start to run some of the numbers on like, okay, so what's the throughput?
And then what can you actually...
But in there,
at least with the technology that we had at the time,
a lot of things are moving quickly and you get layer two and layer three and
whatnot.
But I think having a good understanding of the fundamentals and also being involved
probably in like
what I would call the real world in a business and understanding the scale of
what's necessary for things to work is helpful.
Keeping a level head on what are some of the main characteristics of
And by the way, we have crypto in Mercado Libre.
We have our own cryptocurrency.
So it's not like we just say,
well,
crypto is not useful and it's actually very useful in Latin America and countries
where access to U.S.
dollars are...
It's not as easy as in other places.
But I think going from that to saying like,
okay,
every single thing on the planet is going to run on the blockchain,
that's where some of my alarms start to go off.
And it's like,
well,
it can be a great technology and it can be very successful without having to take
over the world,
which can also turn into AI where,
again,
the claims are that it will take over the world and happy to...
Talk about that.
But just understanding the fundamentals of the technology that's being potentially
hyped and having a good understanding of how it could be applied to something
useful for people.
I think it's where it's been helpful.
Awesome.
Okay.
Let's pivot to talking about you as a human.
There's just like so many stories I heard from people that I want to hear about.
Okay.
So one is that you built an app.
You put an app store.
Steve Jobs called you and he's like, Sebastian, we got to remove your app.
Yeah.
Talk about that story.
Yeah.
So we should clarify that the app was a bit strange.
So it was an app that
literally helped you drain your phone's battery.
There were two reasons why I made it.
One was because I was learning about all the different sensors on the phone,
like GPS and gyroscope and the screen and whatnot.
So I said, okay, I'm going to turn them all on at the same time.
And that's going to really warm up your
your phone.
On the other end,
there was like this trend,
I'm not even sure where that ended up,
where it was better for your phone to run completely out of battery and then
recharge it.
I think now the recommendation is actually that it should stay between like 10% and
80% at all times to maintain battery health.
I was like,
okay,
so when you have like 2% left and you just want to get it over with and get the
battery down,
you open this app and like,
drain it.
I like that there's a reason for this because I could see you just doing it for
fun,
but I like there's functionality here.
Yeah, yeah.
I always try to make it useful, at least for me.
So I put it on the App Store and this was the time where
Like the App Store was starting and the app review process and people were actually
getting very mad that their apps were getting rejected.
We're used to like a world where I just put my app out there and anyone can download it.
So developers were going to the press to say like,
well,
Apple is not approving my app and then articles will be written and it would be
like a PR thing.
So the executive team at Apple,
including Steve,
were actually calling developers to inform them that their apps were not going to
be approved,
that they were not taken off the app store,
kind of like trying to avoid them going to the press and just...
Like being more personal and explaining what was wrong with the app.
And so one day I'm walking in the street and I get a phone and a blocked number.
Like you can't identify it.
Pick up.
I said, well, hi, it's Sebastian.
This is Steve from Apple.
I'm here to, well, I need to talk to you about your app.
We're not going to be able to have it on the app store.
This is draining people's batteries and we don't want that for everybody.
for people, actually pushed back a little bit.
I read all the rules of the App Store before making this app,
and there's no rule against draining the battery.
And he told me, check again, because we just added a new rule that apps cannot
overly drain the battery on the phones.
So I'm happy to say there is an App Store rule that was made specifically for me at the time.
I actually didn't realize I had spoken to Steve Jobs until like a couple of minutes later.
I was like, well, yeah, someone called Steve from Apple.
There's probably a lot of Steve's.
I was like, well, you know, that voice sounded extremely familiar.
And I was like, okay.
And then articles started popping up of Steve and the rest of the executive team
calling developers to let them know that this was happening.
So I was happy to confirm that I had at least had a short phone conversation with
Steve,
quite the legend.
That is an incredible story.
First of all, I just love that Steve Jobs was calling random app developers.
Founder Moth, right?
Like, how did he have the time?
I just love that he took, you know, that they realized this is important.
And if people hear from us, that'll actually go for better.
Even though people kept posting, right?
Like people were like, Steve Jobs called me, touched on my app.
So a little backfired, maybe.
And he, how did he sound?
Was he just like, did he, was he this nice radical candor balance of, of
Nice.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's not what you would, again, stereotypically hear from him.
He was a lot more mercurial, I think is a term that people use.
But none of that on the call.
He was actually pretty nice and chill and felt like, well, we're not going to allow your app.
Just matter of fact.
Yeah.
And then you said that they added this rule before he called you.
We have a new rule.
I guess they could do that, right?
It's like our place, our store.
Yeah.
Wow.
Okay.
Amazing story.
Did that discourage you from building more apps or are you just like, holy shit?
No, absolutely not.
I was very happy to talk to Steve.
I sent him a few emails.
I never got a reply,
to be honest,
but I sent some emails on feedback on,
again,
like the App Store,
the iOS and whatnot.
I was super young, by the way, at the time.
I think I was like 16 or 17, 17 or 18 when I developed that app.
So I was like,
I didn't know what it meant to get a call from him and to send him emails and
expect a reply and whatnot.
It was a fun experience.
I kept building more apps.
I actually started a mobile app development company a few months after that,
which is another fun story.
Well,
maybe this is the story,
but I know that at 19,
you built an app that became the number one app in 19 countries.
Maybe just briefly share that story.
That one is super fun.
So I had a girlfriend who I really liked at the time.
I don't know if that happened in the US,
but in many Latin American countries,
and I think throughout the world,
And phone companies came out with something where you could call five numbers for
five minutes for free,
like five for five for five.
So I had my girlfriend's number on there and we would talk for five minutes.
But what they did is if you went over like one second, they would charge the whole five minutes.
And phone bills were expensive.
Now, we're going to sound like old people when we talk about this soon.
It was like a big deal, especially for a teenager.
No, I didn't have like...
money to throw around and on my phone bill.
So I made this app that was extremely simple.
It alarmed you or like it sent a notification when you're close to reaching the five minutes.
So you could just hang up and call again and have another five free minutes and then call again.
I did it for myself.
It turned out to be a good investment because I ended up marrying my girlfriend and
she's still my wife and we have a beautiful family together.
It also turned out to be a good business decision.
So it costs $100, I think it still does, to upload an app to the App Store.
I thought, okay, I need to sell like
Around 100 copies.
I mean,
there are fees and whatnot,
but let's say I have to sell 100 copies for $1,
so I'll put it on the App Store.
That was my business plan, and it absolutely exploded.
It became the top-selling app in Mexico and in a lot of other different countries.
It was not a free app,
and it was also completely local,
so there was no back-end,
no cost,
no advertising.
So it was a very profitable endeavor.
That also very quickly turned into a business in itself.
And then a separate business where people,
this was when the app store was just starting,
when the iPhone was getting big.
So I actually got contacted by a lot of different companies,
like multinationals,
governments,
saying,
well,
you have the number one app,
so we want you to build an app for us.
There weren't that many people.
Into iPhone OS at the time, it was called development.
Pune Objective-C and all the ways to build a good app.
So I started building apps myself for a bunch of different people and companies.
Eventually, I couldn't scale that and had to hire people.
So I hired my friends from college and taught them how to do apps.
We actually all learned from a free online course from Stanford.
It was a great course on how to build apps online.
Because I remember going to my university professors and saying, hey, the iPhone is cool.
I want to learn how to make these apps.
Who can teach me?
And they're like, no one.
This is new.
No one knows how to do it.
So I also had to learn on my own.
But then I was able to teach people, turn that into a mobile app company.
Did that for, well,
two years and it turns out to be a very good business but it's also boring to have
to start over new projects and new projects and new projects.
I like going deep into things and iterating and actually creating products that people love.
So we decided to sell the consulting side of that,
keep the mainly mobile team,
start working on fun products that we could actually scale and scale exponentially.
One of those was ordering taxis from your phone.
So at the time Uber was starting in San Francisco,
they started kind of like a private network of drivers and like fancy cars and
eventually it was open to
uh to a lot of people i thought well that would work great for for taxis and and
mexico city is is the city with the most taxis on the planet uh at least outside um
asia and the the at the time in san francisco for example at least taxis had kind
of like a clunky computer and they were like these tracked by gps or not but like
In Mexico,
they use radios and you had to call a number and you never knew if your taxi was
coming or not.
So we developed a very simple test.
It sounds silly now that these companies are huge,
but I was actually not sure,
are people going to trust getting on a car that they got from a phone in Mexico
City when your parents have told you,
don't trust people on the internet and don't get into strangers' cars.
So we're combining two things that people were taught not to do by their parents.
We decided to just do the passenger app and test whether people actually like this.
So when you requested a car,
we would call a taxi company and basically just call for you and send the car over.
And that was enough for it to explode.
We could not deal with the demand.
We actually had to build
like an intermediary call center to call other call centers while we developed the
driver side of the marketplace and actually got drivers on board.
And once you got the flywheel and you got a lot of drivers and a lot of riders and
the network effects,
then it started to scale and work.
That was a fun experience.
Oh man, you're just a well of fascinating stories.
I love this kind of journey of sharing of just like,
at 16,
I think you built that app that Steve Jobs called you about,
was that right?
Yeah, maybe 17.
Okay, from that to now managing something like 18,000 engineers.
I love this journey.
Also competing with Uber along the way.
Yeah, very intense competition.
I've always enjoyed competition.
That's the epitome of intense competition from what I hear.
Okay, another interesting thing about you that I've heard is that you drink...
You drink no alcohol,
which I think is common these days,
but it's something you've been doing for a long time.
You also drink no tea, no coffee, no juice, no soda, just water.
What's going on there?
Why is that?
I just love water.
Water is amazing.
I think it's not like the same reason for everything.
It has turned now into like, well, I'm happy with water.
Like, why do I have to like
alter my brain with chemicals.
I like my brain.
We have a good relationship and I sleep well and I don't feel like I need
stimulants of any kind.
I already have a lot of fun.
It did start in different ways.
So the legal drinking age in Mexico is 18.
younger than in the US.
So people actually start drinking when they're 16.
So very early, I got to see the effects of at least drinking a lot can have on your body.
And I just never wanted to be in that situation where I didn't have like
control of my destiny and I mean control, right?
We don't have a lot of control on our destinies,
but at least,
you know,
like physical control,
like I want to walk there and can I walk there?
I think that really marks you when you see like young people over drinking.
It's not a fun picture.
Then I understand people like adults can drink responsibly and have fun with
friends and whatnot,
but I never got into it.
And I think it's like an acquired taste.
I don't particularly enjoy the flavor
of like beer and and different alcohols coffee it's also similar i don't like how
it tastes it takes extremely bitter to me i also think it's an acquired taste where
it's like okay well the effect is great because i get like a lot of energy and then
you start to like appreciate the the flavor but i don't think it starts with the
with the flavor so again i never got into it uh tea i think is is something that
I could drink, but I just never think of drinking it.
And I'll probably erase you even one stranger that I don't know if the friends you
interviewed mentioned,
but actually also don't listen to a lot of music.
When I program,
I like to program in silence,
which I know seems extremely strange to a lot of programmers and developers.
And I think the reason for that one,
and also talking about the interesting background,
is my dad's an orchestra conductor.
So I went to maybe hundreds of concerts for podcasts.
big orchestras and backstage and it was actually very fun but I think I had enough
music for a while and it's not like I don't enjoy music my wife is really into
music and we listen to music together with our kids and everything but I never have
like the idea of putting on music myself so that's another strange one to share
That was a good one.
I had not heard that one.
And then another couple things I heard is that you basically don't do any social media.
You also don't watch the news.
You don't watch TV, really.
Is that all true?
That is true.
That is true.
For a really long time, we didn't even have a TV.
like the device.
We bought one when my son was born and we couldn't go to the movies anymore.
So I do like media.
I like movies from time to time.
§04Transcript · 59:15–1:19:01
We do watch shows from time to time, but we can watch them on an iPad.
I think it's a lot less addictive if the screen is small.
Uh, so even though we have a, a TV now, we don't, we don't use it very often.
Um, I love reading.
Um, I love the, and the, the social media thing, I think it's worth, uh,
qualifying as well like i enjoy x a lot like twitter uh and reading like what
people are thinking what's happening what's not happening uh that's probably like
my my main source of news uh i don't follow any like news organizations just
because i feel like i'm gonna find out if something extremely important is
happening uh like now the the the
whole political and geopolitical environment is extremely volatile.
And I hear about that from people that I follow and sometimes I'll retweet articles
and I'll read them.
There was a fun memory of my childhood when...
We had a TV in the house,
and my mom,
who's also a very curious character,
stuck a sign to it that said,
everything you see here is a lie.
She stuck the sign to the TV?
Yeah,
I don't think she meant it to news,
and she didn't get into the whole misinformation thing and whatnot.
It was mostly on,
well,
you're going to watch cartoons of people flying,
and be careful,
don't jump off the roof of the house.
I think it was more in that sense,
but it probably stuck with me of being very independent-minded and do your own
research and actually understand what you're hoping for and what you want to do.
Again, I'm not closing my ears and eyes to what's happening in the world.
And I do follow a lot of tech companies.
coverage and that i enjoy a lot like new programming languages new frameworks new
model developments uh so when i talk about news it's probably like the bad news
that i think people can sometimes even get addicted to if like okay if i turn on
the tv and put the local news channel it's just gonna be bad news uh and i know
that like statistically it's not all bad news so why am i gonna like watch a show
that's
pointing out very unique things that don't happen very often that are not happy stories.
I don't know who said this once,
but it's always stuck with me along these lines of what you just said,
that we're just not designed to know all the bad things happening in the world
every day.
Like we lived in small tribes where a couple, maybe something bad happened that day.
We're not evolved to...
comprehend so many calamities globally that we should not even know.
Absolutely right.
I can't imagine our brains were evolved into,
well,
you know,
you open your phone and you get like unlimited information about any single topic
that you want.
I think you have to be like purposeful of what you're reading, what you're seeing.
You can find absolutely anything, amazing things, horrible things.
So why am I going to like focus on the horrible things?
I love that.
And I feel the same way.
This is such a cool glimpse into just what it takes to be extremely successful,
to go from building this app that Steve Jobs shut down to running a company and a
team this size.
Is there anything else along those lines that we haven't talked about that might be
helpful for folks,
either about how you operate as a human,
morning routine,
trick?
I don't know.
Anything else that we haven't touched on along those lines?
I don't have a strict routine as you would expect when you talk to executives and whatnot.
Like, well, this is the time that I do this.
This is the time that I do this.
I think what's worked great for me is to follow my curiosity.
Thankfully, I think I have good intuition.
But even in life and in my work,
it's hard to say,
well,
this is a formula for what you should focus on today.
have an intuition of what I'm most curious about.
And thankfully,
that usually aligns with what we should be working on and where I can add the most
value to my teams,
to the company,
to my family,
to my career,
to the things I'm
I'm learning.
I think that's probably what's been the guiding principle for me.
Follow your curiosity, what excites you.
It's also probably what you're going to be good at because it's hard to compete
with someone who loves what they're doing if you don't love that thing.
But if you go in and say, well, this is my curiosity.
This is what I love.
I'm probably going to be good at it.
And it's not going to be like something I have to force myself into.
So I think that's something that I've done throughout my whole life and career
that's worked very well.
I had Toby Lutke on the podcast and we were talking about raising kids for a little bit.
And we chatted about what do you want your kid to learn most?
What's the most important trait to develop?
And his inkling is developing curiosity.
Developing curiosity, I think I would agree.
I think the other one that you need is probably, it's also a trending topic now, but agency.
It's not probably enough to just be curious.
Be curious and go get what you...
what you want.
We were raised in a very intensely independent way.
My mother mainly had these fun ideas on how she wanted us to be.
She wanted us to be able to handle any situation.
The analogy that she used is that she wanted to train us like spies.
I was thinking Sparta.
I'll share one fun story.
Uh, one, one morning she wakes us up like, Hey, we're going camping.
Uh, everyone get ready.
Like no warning.
Oh, we're, we're, we're leaning right now.
Uh, I remember, uh, my, my little brother, just so you understand how, how, how that plant work.
His only question was, should I go on my pajamas or should I change, uh, or something?
uh so we go and uh turns out we're we're i think it would be actually hard to call
it camping because we we were camping with no gear you know so it was a survival
camp training uh is what we were going to do uh there was an instructor and it
wasn't like uh completely uh irresponsible but it was like find your own water
build your own shelter boil it start your own fire uh
That was a fun one.
Another fun one, and that was to celebrate New Year's.
Another fun one was she would drop us in the middle of the city.
This is Mexico City.
She says she would then just leave us alone.
I don't remember.
I think she was just following us.
But it would be like, you have to get back home.
and then you have to like know public transit or ask someone for help and basically
like uh solve problems uh she would send us on international trips also alone so i
i think there are many things that she did uh she she called it independence no she
she wanted us to be independent i think the term that we could use now is like
agency if like solve your problems just go and get things and and
get things done.
I think that was also very formative of the way I am and I approach different problems.
Do you feel like she might have actually been training you to be a spy?
Maybe.
We also did a lot of skiing, biking, trekking, and also the action parts of the spy experience.
We used to tease her still that she didn't enjoy activities that didn't have a
liability release before you did them.
So yeah, rappel, climbing.
We had a very fun childhood.
This explains a lot.
I feel like I could do another hour just diving into your childhood and what made
you who you are today,
but maybe we'll save that for part two.
I feel like we've done a great job giving people a sense of just how interesting
you are as a person and also just the uniqueness of MercadoLibre and what they've
built in the business that you help run.
Is there anything else that we haven't touched on that you think might be helpful
to folks or that you want to leave listeners with before we get to our very
exciting lightning round?
I think we covered a lot.
I'm also happy to be able to share.
MercadoLibre doesn't operate in the US.
I think that's the main reason why it's not such a well-known tech company.
I think it's changing.
With the stock growing as well,
it helps a lot of people actually know it from investing and being very happy with
the performance.
Thank you for letting me share some of what we do and some of what I've been doing.
Absolutely.
With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round.
I've got five questions for you.
Are you ready?
I'm ready.
What are two or three books that you recommend most to other people?
This is a good one.
I think it depends on
the person that I'm recommended to, I try to actually make it relevant to what they're doing.
If we go statistically, it's usually within the company.
So management-related, high-output management, I think is a great one.
But I also have been recently recommending people read The Odyssey.
It's a super, super inspiring story.
It's not a coincidence that it's survived for thousands of years.
It's like,
A really fun read and something that just resonates with a lot of people.
Another book that I really like, it's called The Dream Machine.
And it's kind of like the story of computers and computing and the internet.
And like, for example, why is Ethernet called Ethernet?
There was AlohaNet before.
So I think that's also a great one to understand some of like
The things that we rely on and we stand in the shoulders of giants constantly to
build the things we do.
I think that's another great one because the rest are probably more fiction.
I love Dune.
I love science fiction.
What you would expect.
Okay.
This next question,
I know you don't watch TV,
so let me just ask,
is there a favorite recent movie that you've watched that you really enjoyed?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, recent, I don't go to the movies as often as I used to since I had kids.
But sometimes we go with them.
But I think probably the last one that resonated with me or that I thought was
awesome was Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Yeah.
Really fun movie, great acting, low budget.
I didn't know when I watched it at the time.
I sort of did research on it later.
That one was super fun.
Dune, I enjoyed a lot because I like the books.
It's one of my favorite books.
But I do watch children's shows from time to time.
There, I'm sure someone has probably mentioned Bluey already.
But it's amazing.
It's really well made for the kids, for the parents.
Great messages, great animation.
That's just a gem that I really recommend.
Yeah, Bluey does come up a bunch.
I feel like it's one of the more mentioned shows.
Do you interview a lot of parents as well?
Yes, I do.
And I'm a new parent, so I'm pulling them in.
Okay, do you have a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you really love?
Yeah, this one is going to be fun for you as well as a parent.
I'm not sure if you've heard of Mentava.
No.
It's a new kind of like way of teaching kids to read.
Oh, the company.
Okay, yes.
Say more.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's a product and it's great.
I did it with my son and
Kind of like I quote-unquote taught him how to read using the program.
And now he's probably the top reader in his class.
How old is he?
So he's five.
It's actually designed for three, four, five-year-olds.
So he was probably late to the...
reading early bandwagon because I haven't really seen strong evidence that it
actually changes outcomes in the future.
The best argument I've seen for it from Matt Bateman,
I'm not sure if you're familiar with him,
but he's
great on education and Montessori is that it can lead to a very enjoyable childhood
if you can read early.
So if you're like a four-year-old,
a five-year-old that can read very well,
you'll have a fun childhood with access to a lot more information.
So for us, it wasn't like a reading early.
It was just making sure you have a really good fundamental on reading because it
was just a base skill that
propagates to the rest.
And in that vein,
actually,
Beast Academy for math is another great one that I would recommend to parents.
That one's great.
And maybe the last product I would mention, David Protein Bars.
They're very good.
I really like weightlifting.
It's sort of like one of the things I do too.
get my blood flowing.
Super high quality ingredients, very high protein.
I think it's actually a venture backed company.
I haven't talked to the founders, but reach out.
I would love to meet you.
You guys are doing something fun.
I think those are the ones that come to mind.
3D printers are also fun.
I made a telescope with my son a couple of months ago.
That was very fun.
There's a lot of new products now.
It's a fun time to be alive.
This is your category right here.
Cool, fun gadgets and products.
I feel like this could be another hour of podcasting.
Probably.
Okay.
Two more questions.
One,
do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful in work
or in life?
That life and the world are malleable.
Things aren't as set in stone as you would think.
There's usually a way to get what you're after.
You actually have to be careful, I think, about what you want.
Because if you have enough agency, you can probably get quote-unquote anything.
So make sure you're looking for something good and that you're going to be happy
with everything.
But the result, that's probably the main one.
I've heard it phrased in many different ways.
Steve Jobs said of like, well, you know, the world was built by people like you, like me.
Some of them not smarter than you.
Some of them may be smarter than you.
So you can just go out and do things as a new meme known.
the world will probably reconfigure itself to help you,
which is that one's from,
from Mark Andreessen.
Uh, yeah, just understanding that, that you can, uh, actually change the world.
It doesn't have to be in a massive way.
It's also possible,
uh,
just in,
uh,
not just getting locked down to,
well,
you know,
this is how it's done,
or this is a culture here,
or,
uh,
this is how it's always been done.
Uh,
I think we can change whatever we want.
What I'm hearing is your mom's goal of instilling agency in you works.
I would say so.
Yes, I have fun solving problems.
Finding your way home from the center of Mexico City worked.
Final question.
A colleague of yours,
maybe friend,
Christopher Lazarus,
wanted me to ask you about something called the Tatami Project.
Does that ring a bell?
Talk about what that was.
Yeah, yeah.
That's from a long time ago.
So you did your very good research.
yeah talking about agency at some point I wanted to have what's called I think it's
called Tammy room not an expert but basically a room in your house where you have
tatamis and you can like meditate there or train or practice my room like my
childhood bedroom was strange in that it had kind of like a basement like two
floors you could open a hatch on the floor and go down I think it was like a thing
from how the house was built but
I decided that that was the best place for putting the tatamis,
but I didn't want to have a roof on top of that,
so I went and bought construction gear and huge diamond cutters and actually cut a
big hole in the middle of my room.
I put a stair and put the tatamis underneath, so I turned my room into a two-floor loft.
which was pretty fun.
I hadn't thought about that in a while.
I used to do a lot of hacker projects and maker things, and I love using my hands.
I love building products, technology, code, but also physical things.
I had a lot of fun with Arduinos and building tiny robots.
Yeah, that's a fun memory.
But I did put a hole in the middle of my room.
My parents were always happy with us having projects.
I was going to ask, how did your mom feel about this?
I don't think they were thinking about the future sale value of the house or whatnot.
It actually turned out to be a thing people were interested.
They didn't sell the house, but they used to rent it.
And I was like, well, this is like
strange maybe we'll put like something here and it turned out to be a good decision
but they were very open to us exploring and making mistakes then going back even to
the start of our conversation on how to not get stuck as a big company as a big
team you need to make mistakes and take risks and that's something that was always
encouraged by my parents
That is a hilarious story.
And just to be clear, it's a tatami mat.
It's like a thin mattress, basically.
So a tatami is not something you would sleep on directly, but it's kind of made out of bamboo.
If you Google for just a Japanese house, what they have on the floor is a tatami block.
So they'll put two, three, five, ten together.
So it's kind of like that green floor that you see in many traditional hotels or
for photos.
So I made kind of like a miniature version of that in the newly added second floor of my room.
Sebas, this was everything I was hoping to be.
We covered so much ground.
You, the company, things you've learned.
I feel like we could do another follow-up with just as many insights and lessons and stories.
But other than that, two final questions.
Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out,
learn more,
and how can listeners be useful to you?
Perfect.
I am not so active on Twitter.
I mostly...
Read and find interesting ideas, but happy to see you there.
LinkedIn is another one.
I know some people who are very into X and Twitter actually don't like LinkedIn a
lot,
but I think both work and they're both good.
uh they'll both have have their place uh so yeah happy to connect and feel free to
reach out uh something that i love about the the tech industry uh you can just just
do things just reach out to people and they'll probably help be helpful and and
help you that has certainly been the case with me and i'm also happy to do that for
anyone who has any question or wants to connect
Amazing.
Sebas, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for hosting me.
It was awesome.
Happy to be here.
It was awesome.
My pleasure.
Bye, everyone.
See you in the next episode.