- 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)