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What does it take to lead - and live - when the world won’t sit still?
Hosted by executive advisor and bestselling author Jimmy Allen, Founder’s Mentality: The CEO Sessions is a leadership development podcast that goes beyond the boardroom.
Each episode features a conversation with a prominent CEO—from the likes of Audible, Walmart, and AWS—who reflects on the lessons that reshaped their business and their personal growth. But you won’t just hear from business leaders. Jimmy brings in artists, musicians, comedians, and other unconventional thinkers who explore the same lessons through a completely different lens.
These conversations surface aha moments from some of the world’s most influential leaders and thinkers. Intensely curious and open to new experiences and perspectives, they seek inspiration in unexpected places as they constantly reinvent their businesses and themselves.
In turn, you’ll walk away with a fresh take on how we all grow as individuals, what we are capable of building, and the legacy we leave behind.
So, whether you’re a CEO, a rising executive, or simply passionate about leadership, influence, and business at scale, this podcast will challenge and inspire you—one story at a time.
About the Host:
Jimmy Allen is an Advisory Partner at Bain & Company with over 35 years’ experience advising leading organizations. He’s the author of multiple best-selling books on growth and leadership and the host and founder of Bain’s Global CEO Community Forum. James is a regular speaker at global business events, including the World Economic Forum, and serves on the Botswana Economic Advisory Council. Outside of consulting, James started his own record label (Abubilla Music) in 2008 and supports Singing Wells, a project dedicated to preserving Kenyan village music.
Bain & Company:
Founder’s Mentality: The CEO Sessions is brought to you by Bain & Company, a global consultancy trusted by the world’s most influential business leaders. With decades of experience guiding organizations through growth, transformation, and leadership development, Bain’s executive insights offer what it takes to lead at scale.
- When you were building out e-commerce,
especially in emerging markets,
there was absolutely no playbook.
And that meant that
everything was very adaptable
to our reality, our customer
set, our stakeholders
reinvention was the constant throughout.
- Startups fight to survive,
scale ups are different.
These are the very few startups
that take off like rocket ships.
And of these only a handful grow without
becoming sole destroying bureaucracies.
And because there's so few
of them, it's really rare
we get to study their
successes and their failures.
So how does a hyperscaler pull this off?
How do you sustain the
energy to stay relevant
year after year after
year when it's so easy
to coast and celebrate your success?
Well, maybe the answer can be found
I don't know in antibodies in EEQI jail
or the CEO crossroads.
(bright music)
I'm Jimmy Allen and this
is "Founder's Mentality,
The CEO sessions."
My guest today is Petro
Arnt, he's CEO of dLocal,
and NASDAQ listed payments company
built for emerging markets.
Think about it this way, it
helps global giants like Amazon,
Spotify, and Nike move money seamlessly
in places where the payments
are well, anything but simple.
Before that, Petro spent
20 years at Mercado Libre,
also known as MeLI.
Latin America's e-commerce giant.
Co-founded and led by Marcus Galperin.
You'll hear the name Marcos a lot today.
MELI grew from a scrappy
online marketplace
to a 100 billion dollar powerhouse.
Now it spans 18 countries
in e-commerce and FinTech.
And as Chief Financial Officer
Pedro is in the cockpit
of that rocket ship for that entire ride.
Pedro, I think you've
probably had more experience
than any executive I'm
aware of in a hyperscaling
period of a company.
And I'd love just to understand from you
what were the biggest scaling challenges
you guys faced at MELI?
- So there were hundreds I'm sure,
but there's three that
I think are the ones
that we probably spent the most time on
and were the most challenging ones.
So the first one is so massive,
massive consumer platform
across an entire region.
And so what were normally edge cases
of consumer experiences gone afoul,
when you actually looked at
in terms of absolute numbers,
they were massive.
So the sheer scale of the business
meant that it was extremely challenging
and you had to deal even with edge cases
of consumer experience going afoul.
Second thing, the beauty
of a platform business
is how powerful the go-to market strategy
becomes of being able to
move into adjacencies.
So MELI was a retail platform
that was able to build
on top of that, one of the
most successful neobanks
in the region.
The most successful logistics network
is now moving into entertainment,
so on and so forth.
So from a business potential
perspective, fascinating.
Now the complexity creep of
scaling up not one business
but scaling up multiple business
units is massive, right?
And then the third one
is the age old adage
of the people who got you
here are not the people
that are gonna get you there
and you have to make
these difficult decisions.
Despite that meaning that a
lot of loyal and contributors
that were very instrumental for the phase
you've just exited somehow
probably had to be left
by the wayside.
- So how do you deal with that
given that it's an ongoing issue?
And do you want to both thank the pioneers
but also make sure that
they don't get in the way
of the next stage?
How do you do that?
- If you're going to be
a successful scale up
I would say that almost for sure
you have a very clearly defined culture
and that culture is not static.
Even as the requirements
of your human capital
and the type of personality
you need to be successful
changes the culture immediately adapts
and therefore singles out
those that aren't fitting it.
The system generates an antibody
and it becomes very easy for leadership
for the people organization
to realize because everyone's
speaking up and saying,
I don't think he's holding
up his end of the bargain.
- And in my guess I'm curious about this,
is that that probably
wasn't a surprise to them
'cause you probably also had people
that were often very
self-aware and recognize
they weren't ready for the next phase.
- By and large absolutely.
And again it goes to the antibodies.
They had began to feel
that in their interactions
with peers and whatnot.
Those exits, I think by and large,
especially with the
really important people,
were never traumatic to be quite honest.
There were times where you
could find roles for them
within the organization where
you could still leverage
some of that DNA and those
skills that they did have.
Now that's not always the case.
Like if you just keep
trying to find pockets
to store away the old timers
and you're getting it wrong.
The other thing that we
did at MELI during a period
and that it's not easy,
but I beyond recommend it,
I would say if you're not doing
this then you're gonna have
a hard time scaling up.
Is there should be a point
in your company growth
where you institute some
form of stack ranking
or forced curve and you force your leaders
to cull the lowest performers.
It's only when you
force them to stack rank
and you force them to start on a scale,
compare them amongst each
other that you begin to realize
that a lot of those
old timers consistently
are falling to the bottom.
At MELI I think there was a period
of maybe six or seven years
where the decision was the
lowest performers is out.
- As you were scaling and
bringing in all these people,
many of whom were better
than the existing people,
your culling people that have been there,
how did you keep the
culture strong and the same?
How did you keep the founder's mentality,
the sense of insurgency
as you keep bringing in
these new people?
- There was a moment where we
were very deliberate about it.
I remember a conversation we
had where I was really worried
'cause I said, we're growing too much,
we're beginning to lose culture.
And it was Marcos actually.
He said, look, two things, first of all,
we're gonna have to
deliberately work on culture.
We also need to realize
that when you're growing
to the size we're growing,
law of large numbers starts creeping in.
And so what we need to hold
steadfast to is leadership.
If we get leadership to
really, really reflect
the core cultural aspects
of who we want to be,
then that trickles down.
So we may not be able
to ensure in our maximum
of hire for culture and fire for culture
across the organization
where it has more than 10,000 people.
But at the leadership level
this is non-negotiable.
And so when we got deliberate,
the first one was hire for
culture and fire for culture.
So you actually built
into your hiring process
a final interview which was
mainly focused on cultural fit.
And then the fire for
culture is I think my years
have taught me that the famous
case of the effective asshole
who delivers the results
but everyone kind of knows
is culturally misaligned.
It inevitably over the
long run doesn't work.
I think we learn that
when just from scars.
The second piece is we
were very, very consistent
about baking in culture assessment
into the quote unquote "HR platforms."
There was always a matching
for do they embody our
leadership principles,
do they embody our culture,
who we want our people to be?
And then the third piece is
you need to evangelize, right?
The narrative around
what MELI's culture is
and what's important is really a key piece
of the communication.
And Marcos that's so much of what he did
is just remind people all the time
of what those key cultural attributes are.
- You know, scaling is tough.
Culture slips, performance drifts.
Every new recruit has
dozens of new clever ideas
that lead to a rainstorm of KPIs.
To fight this drift demands
clarity on what matters
and a maniacal focus on
those one or two things.
And it starts with the leaders
and their set of non-negotiables.
So Pedro put in place stack ranking,
brutal but effective.
Cold hard numbers that forced
leaders to face reality
even when it meant parting
ways with people they liked.
During its hypergrowth phase,
the leaders of Enterprise Rent-A-Car
were also brutally clear on what mattered.
For their former CEO Andy Taylor,
this was customer loyalty.
Every branch was measured on one score,
the enterprise service quality
index, also known as ESQI,
which is the percentage of customers
who said they were completely satisfied.
But here's the kicker,
if your branch was below
the company average,
you and the whole branch
were stuck in ESQI jail,
nobody got promoted, no exceptions.
You could be the hardest
worker in the room
but if your customers weren't satisfied,
you are not gonna be happy.
That's focus.
You say what you want, you
measure it, you reward it.
But there's a warning here.
Focus is great when it's
pointed in the right direction,
but you also have to be open
to new things to be willing
to change direction.
If focus was Pedro's
first leadership lesson,
flexibility was his second.
- I'd like to think that
it's exactly the willingness
and the self-consciousness
and the commitment
to changing that was the biggest change
that I went through as a leader.
I used to be damn stubborn
and I used to be the
smartest guy in the room.
And I think what I learned
along the MELI journey
is that you need to
constantly reinvent yourself.
And that means you need
to be very open to learn.
You need to be extremely willing
to say what's working
may not continue to work.
And so I think it's the whole
growth mentality mindset.
Not only push yourself to that
but have the constant process
of self-assessment and
really questioning yourself
to see am I changing, am
I learning, am I adapting?
That was instrumental
for us in that journey.
We always say right?
When you were building out e-commerce,
especially in emerging markets,
there was absolutely no playbook.
And I think that serves us brilliantly
because it kept us away
from standard solutions
and that meant that
everything was very adaptable
to our reality, our customer
set, our stakeholders.
Reinvention was the constant throughout.
- For your own journey, is
there a single leadership moment
or moment of truth for you
when you went from I've got the answer,
I'm the smartest guy in
the to I'm vulnerable,
I have questions, I'm curious.
- I have an early anecdote
but it really ingrained something in me.
My first job at MELI
was business development
and this was in the heydays
of the first internet bubble.
And so we didn't have any
revenue, we were pre-revenue.
It was all about
confirmed registered users
and you could IPO a company
'cause you had a lot of
confirmed registered users.
And so I started and Marcos
sent me off to sign a deal
with who was back then one
of the largest portals,
which was Lycos.
You would pay Lycos, you know
this massive amount of money,
they would put you on their homepage
and then you'd get all these
confirmed registered users.
And so I signed this
contract was this massive
multimillion dollar contract
to have some sort of static
link on the Lycos homepage.
It would've been a massive
misallocation of capital,
Massive, I was 27 years old.
And about three weeks
after I signed the deal
and I had started to realize
what, ugh, they call me
and they say, look, we have
some uncomfortable news
we need to relay to you
but we've just been bought
by Telefonica.
And the first thing the
Spaniards are doing are reviewing
all recent contracts.
And so we may have to negotiate
some way of way out clause on this.
And I thought this is
my opportunity, right?
And we got outta that contract.
Sheer luck, it would've
been millions of dollars
thrown down the drain.
And so little things like that,
especially when you're dealing
with excessive resources,
I think start to make you
realize, you know what,
be humble, learn, realize
you're gonna get it wrong
and be open about that.
'Cause it's such a central
part of the learning process.
- Did you have a moment,
a decade or two later where
there was a young Pedro
who made the exact same mistake
and that you were able to say, great,
now you've got a lesson for life.
- So as a leader, I think
this is interesting,
but maybe this is where it comes from.
There's this phrase, A
poor plan well executed
will almost always be a
good plan, poorly executed.
I always tell the people I
work with that working with me
is probably going to look
a little bit like this.
If there are 10 times that we disagree
on the course forward,
you're almost guaranteed
to be told that nine
of them do it your way
and I'm gonna hold you
accountable for the results.
I believe that there's
not one way to do things.
There's probably multiple
ways to get the result.
And what's more important is
the buy-in and the conviction
when execution happens.
So if people are executing
my plan all the time,
it doesn't work.
There will be one out of 10
times where I will tell you,
look, I'm really sorry on
this one I will not seed
and you just need to disagree
and go commit to my plan.
- I love that one of the world's
top executives talks about
almost losing millions on his first deal.
That's vulnerability.
But second, I become quite obsessed
with the fact that most CEOs
discover their step back moment.
It's this crossroads,
if they continue as is,
they become the micromanager
and start wearing the capes
of the energy vampire.
If they shift, if they step back,
if they learn to trust each others,
they redefine their role
such that they're giving others wings.
If anyone knows those
crossroads, it's Ann Wright,
Founder of the Right Approach.
She spent 20 years coaching leaders.
Think of her as a kind of CEO whisperer.
Ann gets past the armor and she finds out
what's really keeping leaders up at night
and then helps them face
those fears head on.
And her first question to
CEOs, well it's old but gold.
But she asked, what is
it that only you can do?
- [Anne] It's an age old question
but the what can only you
do is increasingly important
because people can get seduced
about now I'm CEO, I need to.
And a lot of what they
think they need to do
isn't exactly what they need to do.
Getting their teams in place is essential.
If they came up within the organization,
the most important role is the
person who's replacing them.
So they're not trying to do both jobs.
And I have people do the exercise of okay
if these are the three
most important things
you said you wanted to do,
where is the time in your
calendar for doing that?
- [Jimmy] You're saying it's
almost increasingly important
that they ask the question,
what can only you uniquely do?
Why is it increasingly
important? I'm just curious.
- [Anne] Because everybody
will want them, right?
When you've come up through the ranks,
all the people who think
they're your friend
or had a previous
relationship with you just,
you know, want a cup of
coffee or want to drop in
and before you know it,
you could spend your whole day doing that.
So you have to change.
And this thing about not
being friends anymore
or not being of the troops
is quite hard because again,
it's something that
gets said all the time,
it's lonely at the top right?
And people say it very
glibly. It's really true.
Once you are in that role,
there isn't a single
person in your organization
you can tell everything to.
I think there's something else around
if people are feeling a bit overwhelmed,
they want to go to the thing
they really know how to do, right?
You know, I used to be the sales director
and I'm really good at that so
I'll just go there and help.
And so I feel good, right?
Which is a short term gratification
and in the long run
stop them from really
thinking about the fact
that their finance
department needs attention
and that may not be their strength.
- [Jimmy] What I talk about
a lot in the CEO forum
is the problem of our time
is that CEOs are exhausted
and if you're exhausted you'd complicate.
Is that what you're seeing when you're?
- [Anne] Absolutely
Apparently there was a piece in the FT
or something recently
about how tenure for CEOs
is getting shorter and shorter.
And some of that is energy.
Interestingly, I just
had this conversation
with a client yesterday
and she said, I really thought I knew
what I was getting into
'cause she'd been so close
to it for so long.
And she said I had no idea.
- [Jimmy] What unlocked
my energy in my day job
had nothing to do with my day job.
- [Anne] Exactly right.
- And it was a specific
moment when I was going down,
I think a very typical pattern
and telling you that I'm in
the wealth accumulation stage
of my career and then I'll be at the point
that I can do things I love.
And then you kind of
ask what's stopping you
from doing both?
And I then you know, went down to 80%
and started my music businesses.
Is that typical?
- [Anne] And sometimes I'll meet somebody
and they've already got lots of interests
and one of my favorite stories
is of a very senior lawyer
who was also a concert pianist
and a dressage competitor
and a photographer
and an artist and had
two lots of children.
You know, an older lot and a younger lot.
Astonishing, right?
But he made it work because
he got so much energy
from those activities
that he was even better
in his in quotes day job.
And he was inspiring to another generation
that you could do both.
- There are two things to unpack here.
First, it is so critical
that CEOs pick the right path
at the crossroads.
Do what only you the CEO can do
and then empower others
to get on with their job.
That's exactly the shift
Pedro was describing.
Second, take care of
yourself. The job is lonely.
The job demands more energy
than you actually have.
Now most CEOs will tell
you the biggest battle
they fight every day
is with their calendar.
So the last thing they
want to hear is some idiot
saying sign up for improv
or take up sailing.
But passions matter.
Every leader we've heard on the podcast
has said the same thing.
An outlet outside of work
doesn't drain your energy.
It multiplies it. Don
Katz plays ice hockey.
Christina Jou reads poetry.
David Haynes rides motorcycles.
Leaders need energy because
exhausted leaders complicate.
Because exhausted leaders
allow their organizations
to drift into irrelevance.
- You know, if you talk to
Marcos, you talk to all of us
who have been there since the beginning.
It's not true that we were a
customer-centric organization
from the get go, right?
This was B2C, it was very
hard to get that one voice
of the consumer, but
there was something else,
which turns out is a phenomenal proxy
for customer centricity,
and that's product.
So the one thing that
was always core at MELI
and that was Marcos.
So at one point moving
to sit with the engineers
to send a message to
all of his leadership,
product technology matters
and I want you involved in the details.
Like you couldn't say it
MELI oh I've RFD'd this off
to the product organization.
Ask them for the delivery date.
If you were a leader
and you weren't on top
of what was working with the product,
what wasn't working with the product,
what the product roadmap was,
you were not gonna last there.
- You know, one of the
things I talk a lot about
is first fall in love with your product.
The customer follows,
this idea of customer first doesn't work.
'Cause if you don't have a great
product that delights them,
there's no point in
doing customer research.
But then let's just
use product as a proxy.
How did you keep that
relentless focus on being great,
being relevant to everybody
in the marketplace?
- Yeah, so the center
of gravity within MELI
was always around product and technology.
The decisions were not
made around the P&L,
I always say I had the least relevant
of all the C-level positions
'cause I was the CFO.
And then you had the business
guys who were very important.
But the real place where
decisions were made
were in product and technology.
The second piece is there
was always a strong element
of long-term thinking,
which I think also helps you
to focus on the product
and the experience.
Then at one point, I'd say
fairly early on in the journey,
late 2000s beginning of the teens,
something else did begin to get introduced
in a more mechanized and methodical way,
which was the voice of the customer
through very detailed
listening and NPS, right?
So because it's a large B2C platform,
you could ask consumers,
what do you like about the platform?
What do you dislike about platform?
The customer service metric
was actually instrumental
because we started
measuring per each journey
within the customer experience
where the NPS is higher
and where the NPS is lower.
And that feedback loop back into product
I think became incredibly,
incredibly powerful
because you were looking at
a data-driven enunciation
of where consumers are
complaining the most.
Oh it's the billing, oh it's the returns,
oh it's the search, right?
And then that was feeding back
into product and tech teams,
and business teams and
that was the first metric
to try to move.
- And just on that, you know,
when you have this maniacal
focus on the technology
and product, this maniacal
focus then on NPS.
You end up with a culture
where you have to love the idea
that red is good.
Meaning that these problems are something
we're gonna embrace and celebrate.
But every time I listen to you,
every time I listen to Marcos,
it is hard not to get exhausted
with this relentlessness.
How did you guys keep the energy levels
going that the organization
didn't just exhaust itself
and fall over and collapse?
What did you do about energy specifically?
- We were working with
these coaches I remember.
And actually people I respect a lot
and I still use till this day,
but at one point they started
veering some of the stuff
they were trying to get us to do
away from sort of these more
engineer like approaches
to sort of conscious
business and you know,
esoteric is an unfair word,
but softer areas of this stuff.
And I remember getting off
and calling the partner in
and saying, you know, what are you doing?
This is not what we want.
We're an engineering type organization.
And his concern was he said,
"Look, I worry you guys are
going to burn out the motor.
I'm looking your organization,
I'm working with you.
And it's just too intense."
And I think that was just not
understanding what drove us.
If you were to ask me what
drives you in your business life?
I think the answer would be seeing impact.
Seeing something that's
broken, trying to fix it,
designing something to fix it
and then actually seeing it get fixed.
That's what keeps me
walking into work every day
so motivated.
So I think when you have that
kind of a group of people
where impact and fixing and
seeing things get better,
that kind of intensity doesn't drain you,
quite the opposite it energizes you.
And then there's a second
piece which is related,
which is we at MELi were very
fortunate to see the results.
We saw the results in the
growth of the business,
we saw the results in performance
in terms of capital markets
recognition by peers.
We'd always used to say
at first we had to explain
to everyone what our company did.
And then at one point
everyone used our company.
So I think when you have
that combination of people
that are driven by wanting to fix things
and wanting to have impact
and then you see the
concrete results of that,
that is not draining, that's
incredibly energizing.
- Guys, this is a mic drop moment.
We are hearing a former
CFO say that his job
was the least important.
What mattered was the folks
in product and technology
because with them the
customers would follow.
Second, we are hearing a
CFO say that the one number
that really mattered was
NPS, net promoter score,
a system for feedback, recovery action,
not a financial number.
Pedro's beginning to give us
the shape of the new rules
of scaling, product and
customer at the center.
Execution matters more than management.
A founder once told me
after he had a meeting
with a very polished HR recruit,
he said the following,
"Everything about the professional
management system tells you that execution
and keeping customer
promises is a job to escape.
Do it well and we will
promote you out of it."
Well I believe the opposite.
I want executors free from admin
and quote unquote management.
I want them to get rich by
being great at execution.
You know we're so conditioned
we don't even realize
how much our language and rewards say
your job only matters if you
leave it to become a manager.
No wonder bureaucracies are soul crushed.
As CEOs, the one thing you
can't delegate is the job
of putting the executor at the center.
You have to celebrate them
and then you gotta rewire
the company around them.
Because here's the twist,
in bureaucracies processes suffocate
and good leaders have to work around them.
Paradoxically in scale
insurgents, they love process
because it liberates
the people who matter.
- I think what attracted
me to the current challenge
of grabbing an earlier
stage publicly traded,
very large organization but
much earlier stage than MELI,
was that the scale up phase
is really what makes me tick.
If someone were to give me
a blank canvas of a company
that was in that scale up phase again
that actually needed the
introduction of some elements
of mechanization, that's exactly my pond.
That's where I want it to be.
So that's what I hope to be bringing
to dLocal at this point,
which is we need to scale up,
we need to become more mature,
but we're gonna do it in a way that works
and that means the
right amount of process,
which is probably little
and indispensable,
but it also means being
acutely aware of honoring
how it became the global
south juggernaut that it is,
to try to not break any of that.
And by the way, Jimmy, it's
a lot easier to narrate,
a lot easier in theory
than it is in practice.
In practice it is extremely difficult.
- What's interesting
listening to you today is,
you're describing bad processes
as if it begins to erode the
buy-in and the conviction
of the person that's supposed
to be benefiting from it.
It's a bad process.
If it's disempowering
in the name of scale,
it's a bad process
that's 23 years at MELI.
That's not taught in any
business book anywhere.
- And it's just one small thought on that,
which is this, process
has a very scary tendency
to become an end in itself.
When that's the exact opposite reason
why you institute process.
Where I learned that as a CFO
is planning and budgeting.
It's amazing how you look
at most organizations
and you'd think that the actual business
moves in line with the
budget and the processing
because companies spend months
trying to do fortune telling, months.
And you have business unit leaders
who instead of being running a business,
are stressing and sweating
the whole gaming around
what my annual targets
and my three year targets
are gonna be.
So that to me was incredibly instrumental
about how process
becomes an end in itself,
which is the last reason
why you instituted process.
- My example of that is HR,
where you put in systems
for your people so that
they support your people.
So the promotion processes
are not capricious, et cetera.
But then you go into a review meeting
and someone says, "Yes,
Jack is a superstar
but we can't double promote him
because it will erode the
integrity of our system."
And you're like, why does this system
suddenly become more important than Jack?
And yet you hear it in every
performance review meeting
in every room around the world.
- And that's the other thing,
I observe my leaders and my
team a lot to see how they deal
with mechanization and process.
And I think there's two extremes.
There are those that very quickly
devolve into the process
is what I am here for.
And I think the HR is a great example.
The second thing is in a lot of startups
at the scale up phase,
you also have those early stage people
that worked entirely in
the absence of process
and say, process is
crap, I want none of it.
And both extremes, you
have to identify quickly
and probably get rid of.
What you need is to find the people
that really understand how
mechanization of an organization
has to serve the ultimate purpose,
which is the end user, the
merchant, the consumer.
And I'm very deliberate about observing
how my people deal with
process when it's introduced.
'Cause you need to start
figuring out as a big part
of who is equipped for a scale up phase,
how they are able to work with process.
- Listen, before I go to our final,
'cause, we're out of time.
To the final list of fun questions.
Is there anything you
wished I had asked you
or that you wanted to say?
- We had a conversation the other day
that made me reflect on something.
And it's this of the moments of truth
or the big moments around my
career where big decisions
were made and they were a turning point.
I thought long and hard about this.
I was trying to come
up with a list of these
and I kept resisting
it and then I realized
why I resisted it Jimmy.
'Cause I think that what
happens in that moment of truth
is not that relevant.
It's everything you
were doing the previous
10 or 15 years, the little things,
the things that you would
bore the crap out of people
if I had to narrate them on the podcast.
Which actually made it
work at that moment.
And the reason I say this is,
and I remember I was at
MELI when this happened.
So when COVID hit, we
went into this immediate
sort of cost cutting,
what would get rid of.
And we started looking at the
data and obviously e-commerce,
the business was just taking off
like it had never taken off, right?
And so we talked a lot about
what made that possible.
How smart were we around
the COVID decisions
and this and that.
And the conclusion was the reason MELI
hit escape velocity is because
of what it had been building
the prior 10 years.
Those moments of truth are a consequence
of everything you did before.
We shouldn't be highlighting
the moment of truth.
We should be highlighting all that work
that went in to when that
big, big moment happens.
The company being able to
take advantage of that.
- Two quick points, first
hyperscalers love processes.
They just rejected the processes
of the professional management system.
Second, I think it's worth
pausing on Pedro's insight
on moments of truth.
He notes that greatness isn't
one breakthrough, one moment,
it's actually the result
of thousands of decisions
that create the foundation
for that moment.
And on the Founder's Mentality site,
we've tried to collect lots
of stories of other CEOs
talking about that journey,
the journey where you restore primacy
to the people who keep customer promises
and then the magic starts,
so hit the show loads.
Now let's get back to Pedro
and a round of rapid fire questions.
What brings you energy?
- Learning more than anything else.
- What drains you of energy?
- Self-interested people
and what kills me the most,
false agenda-driven conversations.
So conversations about A, when
really what's going on is C.
- This really brings the next one.
Do you have energy vampires
that you have to encounter in your work?
And if so, how do you deal with them.
- It's the non-straight
shooters and the people
who are not really saying
it as it should be.
Eventually those people are very, very bad
for any organization and
they shouldn't be around.
Fortunately I've worked at organizations
again where the cultures were right,
and so the entire organization
had antibodies for those people.
And so the culture
itself takes care of it.
What's the best advice you ever received?
- Look at the movie and not the picture.
Direction of travel matters more
than where you are at a
specific point in time.
And that has been incredibly useful for me
when it comes to sort of
looking at where we are
and maintaining the rudder steady.
Is are we at least moving
in the right direction?
- Alright, let's recap the key takeaways
from our conversation with Pedro.
We're gonna have to
deliberately work on culture.
We also need to realize
that when you're growing
to the size we're growing,
law of large numbers
starts creeping in.
And so what we need to hold
steadfast too is leadership.
- The risk that comes with
scaling is the culture fades.
We've got to be intentional.
Culture isn't something you do
to the rest of the organization.
It actually starts with how leaders act.
- It's not true that we were a
customer-centric organization
from the get go.
But there was something else,
which turns out is a phenomenal proxy
for customer centricity
and that's product.
- No matter how big our companies
get, it's always possible
to find a way back to the
voice of the customer.
And for MELI, that journey
begins with the product
and the teams that make it.
- When you have that combination
of people that are driven
by wanting to fix things
and wanting to have impact,
and then you see the
concrete results of that,
that is not draining, that's
incredibly energizing.
- The right culture and
mission always energizes.
It attracts energy givers
and creates antibodies
against energy vampires.
That's how companies stay relevant.
How about leaders, focus
your personal journey
on these two questions.
What can I uniquely do?
And what passions must
I pursue to reenergize?
Because sometimes playing
ice hockey or reading poetry,
that's the secret to leadership.
Scale insurgents are rare.
They keep their founder mentality
while also giving customers
the benefits of their size.
They win in a turbulent world
because they're using
new rules for scaling.
And that's why we're
sticking with Mercado Libre
It's a rare scale insurgent.
And in our next episode,
we're going right to the top.
We'll be talking directly
to Marcus Galperin,
Co-founder and Executive
Chairman of Mercado Libre.
So we'll be back in two weeks.
Until then, stay curious.
(bright music)