Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - How Mercado Libre built Latin America's most valuable company: 18k engineers, 30k deploys a day, and their own fleet of planes | Sebastian Barrios

Episode Date: June 8, 2025

Sebastian Barrios was the longtime head of product and engineering at Mercado Libre, the largest company in Latin America—valued at over $100 billion and home to more than 100,000 employees. There, he led a team of more than 18,000 engineers across 18 countries and oversaw an astonishing 30,000 code deployments a day. Before Mercado Libre, he founded multiple startups, including a ridesharing company that competed directly with Uber in Latin America. And at just 17, he got a personal phone call from Steve Jobs asking him to take his app off the App Store. Today, Sebastian is the SVP of Engineering at Roblox.What you’ll learn:• Why Mercado Libre operates with 95% fewer PMs than typical tech companies (and how it actually works)• How to maintain product quality with 30,000 daily deployments and distributed ownership• The weekly email system Sebastian uses to maintain alignment with leadership• How to build a culture of radical candor and direct feedback in a traditionally hierarchical region• The counterintuitive approach to product reviews that keeps 18,000 engineers aligned• How to evaluate hype cycles (crypto, AI) pragmatically while staying innovative—Brought to you by:Merge—A single API to add hundreds of integrations into your appVanta—Automate compliance. Simplify securityLinkedIn Ads—Reach professionals and drive results for your business—Where to find Sebastian Barrios:• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zebas/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Sebastian Barrios and Mercado Libre(05:03) Mercado Libre’s scale and unique ways of operating(14:48) AI’s impact on operations(19:19) Empowering teams and reducing fear of failure(34:20) The importance of radical candor(38:26) Weekly updates(41:03) Avoiding hype cycles(44:24) When Steve Jobs personally called 17-year-old Sebastian(49:00) Building successful app businesses(55:33) Unique personal habits(01:04:00) Raising independent children(01:07:15) Lightning round and final thoughts—Referenced:• Mercado Libre: https://www.mercadolibre.com/• Claude: https://claude.ai/• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/• Nvidia: https://www.nvidia.com/• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/• Adobe: https://www.adobe.com/• Uber: https://www.uber.com/• OpenAI: https://openai.com/• Marcos Galperin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcosgalperin/• Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/• Windsurf: https://windsurf.com/• Which companies produce the best product managers: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/which-companies-produce-the-best• Which companies accelerate PM careers most: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/which-companies-accelerate-your-pm• How Revolut trains world-class product managers: The “local CEO” model, raw intellect over experience, and a cultural obsession with building wow products | Dmitry Zlokazov (Head of Product): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-revolut-trains-world-class-product-managers• Intercom: https://www.intercom.com/• Atlassian: https://www.atlassian.com/• Radical Candor: From theory to practice with author Kim Scott: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/radical-candor-from-theory-to-practice• Managing up: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/managing-up• Steve Jobs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs• Tobi Lütke’s leadership playbook: Playing infinite games, operating from first principles, and maximizing human potential (founder and CEO of Shopify): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/tobi-lutkes-leadership-playbook• Everything Everywhere All at Once: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6710474/• Dune on Max: https://www.max.com/movies/dune/e7dc7b3a-a494-4ef1-8107-f4308aa6bbf7• Bluey on Disney+: https://www.disneyplus.com/browse/entity-fa6973b9-e7cf-49fb-81a2-d4908e4bf694• Mentava: https://www.mentava.com/• Matt Bateman’s website: https://mattbateman.xyz/• Beast Academy: https://beastacademy.com/• David protein bars: https://davidprotein.com/• Marc Andreessen on X: https://x.com/pmarca• Tatami mats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatami—Recommended books:• Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Candor-Kick-Ass-Without-Humanity/dp/1250103509• High Output Management: https://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove/dp/0679762884/• The Odyssey: https://www.amazon.com/Odyssey-Homer/dp/0140268863• The Dream Machine: https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-M-Mitchell-Waldrop/dp/1732265119/• Dune: https://www.amazon.com/Dune-Chronicles-Book-1/dp/0441013597/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [e-mail].—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

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 Bashan. 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. I told him 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. It absolutely exploded. I actually got contacted by a lot of different companies, 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 is the owner. Is there anything else? 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 Spice. She would drop us in the middle of the city, Mexico City. 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. Sebus, as most people know him, is currently Senior Vice President of Engineering at Roblox.

He was also a long-time head of product in engineering at Mercado Libre. Mercado Libre might be the biggest and most interesting company that you have never heard of, and Sebus might also be the most interesting product leader that you've never heard of. Mercado Libre is currently the most valuable company in Latin America valued it 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,

juice, why he doesn't listen to music, and 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 Thauer for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of Bolt, Linear, Superhuman, Notion, Perplexity, Granola, and more. Check it out at Lenny's newsletter.com and click bundle.

With that, I bring you Sebastian Farios. This episode is brought to you by Merge. Product leaders, yes, like you, cringe when they hear the word integration. They're not fun for you to scope, build, launch, or maintain, and integrations probably aren't what led you to product work in the first place. Lucky for you, the folks at Merge are obsessed with integrations. Their single API helps SaaS companies. launch over 200 product integrations in weeks, not quarters.

Think of Merge like Plaid, but for everything B2B SaaS. Organizations like Ramp, Drata, and Electric, use Merge to access their customers' accounting data to reconcile bill payments, file storage data to create searchable databases in their product, or HRIS data to auto-provision and deprovision access for their customers' employees. And yes, if you need AI-ready data for your SaaS product, then Merge is the fastest way to get it. So, want to solve your organization's integration dilemma once and for all, book and attend a meeting at merge.dev slash lenny and receive a $50.com Amazon gift card. That's merge.d.v slash Lenny. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance. for SOC2, ISO-271, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, VANTA.

VANTTA's market-leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risks. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with VANTA AI. Join thousands of global companies that use VANTA to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to Vanta.com slash Lenny. That's V-A-M-T-A-D-A-com slash Lenny. Sebass, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Well, 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. his 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, Open AI. 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 Mercado Libre. A lot of listeners are in the U.S., other parts of the country outside of Latin America. Give us just like a brief explanation of what does Mercado Libre 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 e-commerce marketplace. Oh, 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 or 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 fund statistics specifically with deliveries we delivered. over 5 million packages per day or items. So we 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 capitality on 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 platform.

and as you mentioned, one of the larger engineering and product building teams on the planet. Hopefully people now get a 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 talk to a lot of people that work with you.

working Mercado Libre. 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 Mercado Libre, 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 I believe that have the product manager title, but the ratio is much smaller than any other tech company that you would think of. And the way we think about it is like that.

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. And it turns out that for us in the majority of the cases, it's the engineering leaders, it's the tech leads, the people that can understand what's technically possible, possible and they're also good about, okay, what are the business needs, what are the user needs, what are the users doing, how am I going to measure that, no, and combine that into a single role? So to make this even clear, you have 18,000-ish developers. How many people have the PM title? So 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 followups here. One is just why do you think operating this way is more effective in the way 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, for like 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 the questions. 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 is a bias towards the, the tech side of it. And then once you're inside Mercado Libre, 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 should, 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 people, these engineers realize I don't want to be doing all this bullshit PM work. Like I just want to code. I want to to build. What am I in meetings all day, writing specs? And it's interesting, you guys have scaled to a $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 sea level meetings and the kind of questions, the kind of level of attention. I know founder mode is now like 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, we're using that copy.

That's way too many words. It's not clear. Hey, what is this pixel here where, we could use that space for something a lot more useful. And these are literally conversations at the sea level, asking, okay, how does this work for users? When you present a feature, and here I'm going to stereotype other companies,

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 in the long term, which is what you're looking for. 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? Like 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. Oh, 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 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 all operate? It's a great question because you probably always hear it from the other side, no? Like, okay, now 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. 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, no, 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 like advanced auto-complete and now you have agentic frameworks and cursor and windsurf. OpenEI 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'll 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 until 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 prompter 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 and 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 any 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 like UIs and apps are sort of like entirely generated. Now we're like these are like all the things that you can do inside Mercado Libre, you can buy stuff, you can get a credit card, you can move money around, and then have like a completely personalized UI for user predicting what are you going to do next and just having that as a main screen. Maybe you have like other screens, obviously, that allow you to do everything. but 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 have to pick, like, I don't know, two or three key ways of work, 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. Like, no one's going to get fired for releasing something that didn't work in the sense that maybe the market was not ready or we had the wrong idea on where I have to implement. Obviously, there's a lot less tolerance for bad quality and it failed because, the product wasn't good or is going offline or 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.

So, for example, we don't operate with OKRs where everything just like trickles down into what every team is supposed to do. We have very high-level objectives on where we want the. 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, okay, 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 the teams. We just escape 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 sort of 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. I think that's probably the main one. We also talked about putting users before revenue.

I think that's another big one that we've liked. And there's another tricky aspect of it. Life is tradeoffs, no? But as we say, okay, let's be very distributed on what the teams are going to be working on. Then you can end up with a project. 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 will write both because that's what they're asking on 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 level deeper, how do you actually operate? rationalize that sort of way of operating where teams can do their own thing, but you also share 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 the term that they would probably use in, or product reviews in the U.S. 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, and 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. It turns out it's not, and we can pivot very quickly into,

a new thing. So no big secrets. Oh, just, 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, yeah, like changes. changes to a system. It can be configuration changes. It can be database updates or whatever. Things that change.

So there's no way anyone can check what those 30,000 changes are doing. That's more than one per developer. Yeah, some of them are automated changes as well. But yeah, we have a very high speed of execution. And yeah, it's quite fun to do. 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 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. Well, we like competition, especially when you're competing with sort of like 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 and 26. 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 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 of and the capital of technology. So how can you build amazing technology? There are advantages as well. I think you, 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 the region where there's great talent, no, and by statistical definition, there's great talent everywhere. It's probably follows a probabilistic distribution. So it's everywhere. A lot of it does flow into the,

the U.S., and it's absolutely true that there is 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. And I'm exaggerating a bit, right? They're great companies throughout the world and in Latin America, and you have unicorns and there are 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. But, well, correct. I said intercom. I don't think, I think they're technically a U.S.-based company,

but I think a lot of it, 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. I feel like there's this really, like, 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, no, if you want to

like have that flywheel running. It's hard to start and be the best and the biggest, you know, 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, no, so like, okay, 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 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 have 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 like how does culture work at any company, especially at hours? 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 something, 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? 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, 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? like, no, what announcements are made on new products. How do we talk about things that didn't work, no?

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's not more complicated than that. You need to live it. You need to show it. And you also need to, like, 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. Today's episode is brought to you by LinkedIn ads. One of the hardest and also most important parts of V2B marketing is reaching the right people. I'm constantly getting ads for products that I will never buy. And I almost feel sorry for the money that these companies are spending,

pitching me on their spend management software or some kind of cybersecurity solution that my one-man business just does not need. When you're ready to reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over one billion professionals, including 130 million decision makers. And that's where it stands apart from other ad platforms. You can target your ad buyers by job title, industry, company, role, seniority, skills, even company revenue, all the professionals that you need to reach in one place. Stop wasting budget on the wrong audience and start targeting the right professionals only on LinkedIn ads.

LinkedIn will even give you $100 credit on your next campaign so that you can try it for yourself. Just go to LinkedIn.com slash pod Lenny. That's LinkedIn.com slash pod lenny. Terms and conditions apply only on LinkedIn ads. 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,

very popular. The book Radical Gander. Yeah. It's a... 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 becoming offensive, especially ones that are true, where there's a lot of high. 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. And 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.

All 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're traveled. Everyone will smile at you. It will be very hard for someone to say no to something. even like meetings or whatnot or else. 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 founded is an exception to that where people are very direct. I will tell my boss if he's wrong. It's something that I love about the company and we've been able to sort of export that and also select for people that will actually behave

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. You know, 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 even. But my experience has been if you're coming from a place of honesty, again, if you're sort of like not insulting anyone or kind of like 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? I was like, well, he's doing great. Everything's perfect. Thank you for being a part of the company. Oh, like, what could I be doing better?

What's not working? It's also a skill to separate that from your person. We do have situations where I've had to have conversations on like, well, you got this strong feedback, but it's on the product, you know, it's like maybe on the vision that we are pursuing or on the execution that there work has nothing to do with you. We can go out. out and have lunch and will 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 mind, 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 uninteresting things. But when you are talking about work and the performance and it'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 this, you do something that it was a little controversial these days, but you did this a long time ago,

which is you sent it weekly email, asking what did you get done this week, and you share what you got done this week? Talk about just that. Yeah, yeah. So it became a meme, what was it, like one or two years ago. I used to do it before that,

I should say. And I should also clarify that I don't actually have an expectation that people are going to send that to me. It's something I do myself. So I'll sort of like go over what I did in the week, what worked, 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 that some of them with my team. It's 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 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 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. 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. And basically every week, it was a weekly thing for me, not a daily thing. I email my 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 something extremely familiar. So I send a 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 like important things are happening, new releases. That also frees up a lot of time, for example, with my C.O.

Or like, okay, on the weekly meeting, we don't have to talk about like those specific things where we can pick out from that email, what's relevant, what's working, what's not working. So it's definitely a great tool. And I'm pretty sure I got from your post just hearing you. What a circle of life 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 A.I 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 haven'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.

So I think I bought or even mine my first Bitcoin in like 2010 or 12 or something like that. We can leave it undisclosed, how many and how many are still working? No, not enough for that. a lot of great lessons on selling and won the right time and whatnot. Yeah, 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 get 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 put in there, at least with the technology that we had at the time. All the 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 what I would call, quote, quote, quote, the real world in a business and understanding the scale of what's necessary for things to work is helpful. Keeping a level ahead on like what are some of the main characteristics. So we can talk about. And by the way, like we have crypto and Mercado Libre. We have our own cryptocurrency. So it's not like we, to say like, well, crypto is not useful and it's actually very useful in Latin America. And countries where access to the 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 I 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 in the 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, again, I'm going to turn them all on at the same time. And that's going to really warm up 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 very 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 then like drain it. I like that there's a reason for this because I could see 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 the App Store was starting and the app review process and people were actually getting very mad that their apps were getting rejected or used to 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 was not approving my app and then articles were 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 sticking off the app store, kind of like trying to avoid them going to the press and just 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. It's just draining people's batteries, and we don't want that for people. I actually pushed back a little bit. I told, like, well, you know, 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, we 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 that voice sounded extremely familiar. And I was like, okay. And then articles started popping up of like 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 himself. Founder mode, right? Like, how did he have the time? I just love that he took, you know, that they realize this is important.

And if people hear from us, that will actually go for back. even though people kept posting, right? Like people were like, Steve Jobs, Colbate, touched on my app. So a little backfired maybe. And how did he sound? Was he just like, was he this nice radical candor balance of nice?

Yeah, yeah. And it's not what you would, again, stereotypically hear from him. No, he was a lot more mercurial, I think it was a term that people use. But none of that on the call. He was actually pretty nice and chill and said 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. Wow.

Okay. Amazing story. Did that discourage you from building more apps or are you just like, holy shit? No, absolutely. I was very happy to talk to Steve. I sent him a few emails. I never got a reply, to be honest, but yeah, send some emails on feedback. Again, like the app store, the iOS and whatnot.

I was super young by that. way at the time I think I was like 16 or 17 or 18 when I developed that that app. So I was like, yeah, I didn't know what it meant, no, to get a call from him and to send him emails and expect a reply and whatnot. It was a fun experience. And I kept building more apps. I actually started a mobile app development company a few months after that, which is another phone 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 U.S., but in many Latin American countries, and I think they're at the world, phone companies came out with something where you could call five numbers for five minutes for free, like a 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. I don'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 saw 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, and to sell like around 100, copies. I mean, there were 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 a lot of other different countries. It was not a free app. And it was also like completely local. So there was like 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, no? I'm saying like, 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, Cuneo 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. 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. like this is new, like 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 devout company, did that for two years. And it turns out to be a very good business, but it's also like boring to have to start over new projects and new projects and 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, instead of 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 was open to a lot of people. I thought, well, that would work great for taxis. And Mexico City is the

city with the most taxis on the planet, at least outside Asia. And 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 whatnot. But in Mexico, they used 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 like 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 like, don't trust people on the internet and don't get into strangers' cars. So we're like 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. Like we could not deal with the demand. We actually had to build like an intermediary call center to like 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 sharing of just like at 16. I think you built that app that Steve Jobs College, you about it was, right? Yeah, 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, yeah, very intense competition.

I've always enjoyed competition. That's the epitome of intense competition. what I hear. Okay, another interesting thing about you that I've heard is that you drink no alcohol, which I think is common these days, but there'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 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? Like, 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, like, younger than in the U.S. So people actually start drinking when they're 16, right? So very early I got to see like 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 or 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 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 flavor but I don't think it starts with the with the flavor so again I never got into it tea I think is something that I could drink but I just never think of of drinking it and I'll probably erase you even one stranger that I don't know if my my the friends you interviewed mentioned but actually also don't listen to a lot of music also when I program not heard that I like the program in silence

which I know seems like 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 like hundreds of concerts for 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

and 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. 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.

We do what 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. So even though we have a TV now, we don't use it very often. I love reading. and the social media thing, I think it's worth qualifying as well. Like, I enjoy X a lot, like Twitter and reading what people are thinking, what's happening, what's not happening. That's probably like my main source of news.

I don't follow any, like, news organizations just because I feel like I'm going to find out if something extremely important is happening. Like now 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 was 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 like news and she didn't get into the whole misinformation thing and whatnot. It was mostly on like, well, you're going to watch cartoons of like people flying and be careful, like don't jump off the roof of the house. And I think it was more in that sense.

But it probably stuck with me of like being very independent minded and do your own research. and actually understand what you're hoping for and what do you want to do. Again, I'm not like closing my ears and eyes to what's happening in the world. And I do follow a lot of tech coverage and that I enjoy a lot, like new programming languages and new frameworks, new model developments. So when I talk about news, it's probably like the bad news that I think people can sometimes even get addicted to.

of like, okay, if I turn on the TV and put the local news channel, it's just going to be bad news. And I know that statistically is not all bad news. So why am I going to 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 unloaded 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 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 Jobshut down to running a company and the team the 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 stricter routine as you would expect when you talk to executives and whatnot. Like, well, this is the time that I do this, 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, like, well, this is a formula for what you should focus on today. I 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 learning. I think that's probably what's been the guiding principle for me. I'll like 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 Lutki 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.

Like, 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. I'm saying like, it's not probably enough to just be curious, be curious and go get what you want. we were raised in a very intensely independent way.

So my mother mainly had these fun ideas on how she wanted us to be. And she wanted us to be able to handle, quote unquote, any situation. And the analogy that she used is that she wanted to train us like Spice. I was thinking Sparta. Yeah, I'll share one fun story. One morning she wakes us up like hey we're going camping Everyone get ready like no warning. Oh we're we're leaving right now. I remember my little brother So you understand how how that plant work his only question was should I go on my pajamas or should I change

Or something so we go and turns out we're I think it would be actually hard to call it camping because we we were camping with no gear So it was a survival camp training is what we were going to do. There was an instructor and it wasn't completely irresponsible, but it was like find your own water, build your own shelter, boil it, start your own fire. 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, as this is a 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 you have to know public transit or ask someone for help and basically, like, solve problems. She would send us

on international trips also alone. So I think there are many things that she did. She called it independence. No, 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. So 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, you know, like also the action parts of the spy experience. We used to tease her still that she didn't enjoy activities

that didn't have like 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 Mercado Libre 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 a very exciting lightning round. I think we covered a lot. I also happy to be able to share. Mercard Liberty doesn't operate in the US. I think that's the main reason

why it's like not a such a well-known tech company. I think it's changing. With the stock growing as well, it helps like a lot of people actually know it from investing. and being very happy with the performance. So thank you for letting me share some of what we do

and some of what I've been doing. Absolutely. And 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 also have been recently recommending people read The Odyssey. It's a super, super, like, inspiring story. Like, 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 Aloha Net before. So it's also a great one to understand some of like the things that we rely on. and these are like 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 doing it. I love science fiction and what you would expect. Okay. This next question, I know you to 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. 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. Just really fun movie, great acting, low budget. I didn't know when I watched 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 shows from time. at the time. There, I'm sure someone just 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 then? Yes, I do, and I'm a new parents, so I can think of that. 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. Yeah. Okay, yes. Say more.

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it is 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. I know 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 it's 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's 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. 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 to 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 or 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.

Like, 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 the result. But that's probably the main one. I've heard it phrased in many different ways. See, 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. This is a new meme known and the world will probably reconfigure itself to help you, which is that one's from Mark Andreessen. Yeah, just understanding that you can actually change the world. It doesn't have to be in a massive way. It's also possible just in not just getting locked down to, well, you know, this is how it's done, or this is a culture here, or this is how it's always been done. I think we can change whatever we want. What I'm hearing is your mom's goal of instilling agency in you work. 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 Tamir Room, not an expert, but basically a room in your house where you have tatamis and you can meditate there or train or practice. My room, like my childhood bedroom was strange in that it had kind of like a basement. So it was. 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. I decided that that was the best place for putting the tatamis, but I didn't want to have like a roof on top of that. So I went and bought like construction gear and like huge diamond cutters and actually caught a big hole in the middle of my of my room. Put a stair and put the tatamis underneath. So I kind of like 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. Had a lot of fun with Arduino 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 Joe Bonfeel 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, I think people were interested. They didn't sell the house, but they used to rent it. And I was like, well, this is 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 Tommy Matt. It's like a thin mattress, basically. So at the tammy is not something you would sleep. on directly, but it's kind of made out of bamboo. Like if you like Google for just a Japanese

house, what they have on the floor is at the Tami like block. So they'll put two, three, five, 10 together. So it's kind of like that green floor that that that you see in many like traditional hotels or photos. So I made kind of like a miniature version of that. And the newly added second floor of my room. Sebba. 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. 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. They both have their place. So yeah, happy to connect and feel free to reach out. Something that I love about the tech industry, you can just do things, just reach out to people and they'll probably help be helpful 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. So, Buzz, thank you so much

for being here. Thank you for hosting me. It was awesome. Happy to be here. It was awesome. It's my pleasure. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com. See you in the next episode.