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

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. Pick up. I said, Well, uh hi Sebastian. 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. I told my I I read all the rules of the app store. He'll be check again because we just added a new rule. At nineteen you built an app that became the number one app in nineteen countries. It absolutely exploded. I actually got contacted by a lot of different companies, like multinationals, governments, things like well. You have the number one app. We want you to build an app for us. You oversee something like eighteen thousand developers. We do around thirty thousand 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 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. 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 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 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 eighteen thousand engineers operating in eighteen countries. They deploy an unprecedented thirty thousand times a day. The company owns their own trucks and planes. They deliver over five 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 those about Sebas's early life.

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