How Mercado Libre built Latin America's most valuable company: 18k engineers, 30k deploys a day, and their own fleet of planes | Sebastian Barrios
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What is the story behind the Steve Jobs phone call and the early app you built?
Steve Jobs called you. One day I'm walking in the street and and I get a phone and a blocked number. I was super young by the way at the time. I think I was like sixteen. Pickup and said, Well, uh hi, it's Bastion. This is Steve from Apple. I need to talk to you about your app. We're not gonna be able to have it on the app store. I actually pushed back a little bit until why I I read all the rules of the app store. He told me check again because we just added a new rule at nineteen.
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, 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 five 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 and 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 spice. She would drop us in the middle of the city, Mexico City, and we're 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 Mercado Libre. Mercado Libre 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. Mercado Libre is currently the most valuable company in Latin America, valued at over $100 billion. Dollars, 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, 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 Laz. Oscar Mullen and Farhan Tower for suggesting topics for this conversation.
If you enjoyed 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 Barrios. 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.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the story behind the Steve Jobs phone call and the early app you built?
0:00–7:13
2
How does Mercado Libre operate with 18,000 engineers and 30,000 daily deployments?
7:13–19:43
3
Why does Mercado Libre keep product‑manager titles low and let engineers own product decisions?
19:43–32:30
4
What is the weekly email system you use to keep leadership aligned?
32:30–43:24
5
How is AI changing the way your teams build and ship features?
43:24–53:57
6
How do you create a culture of radical candor and direct feedback in a hierarchical region?
53:57–1:05:05
7
What practices do you use to reduce fear of failure and empower teams to experiment?
1:05:05–1:14:02
8
Why do you avoid coffee, tea, juice and social media, and how does that affect your productivity?
1:14:02–1:19:21
Speakers
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