Mercado Libre: 18k engineers, 30k deploys a day, & 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 16. I pick up, I say, "Oh, uh, hi, it's Sebastien. 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 and told him, "I, 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, 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 is 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 (laughs) intensely independent way. My mother, mainly, the analogy that she used is that she wanted to train us like spies. She would drop us in the middle of the city, Mexico City, and 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 Sebastien Barrios. Sebas, as most people know him, is currently senior vice president of engineering at Roblox. He was also a long time head of product and engineering at MercadoLibre. MercadoLibre 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. MercadoLibre is currently the most valuable company in Latin America, valued at 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 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 the stories about Sebas' 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 Lazarus, Oscar Mullen, and Farhan Thawer 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 lennysnewsletter.com and click "bundle." With that, I bring you Sebastien 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. Think of Merge like Plaid, but for everything B2B SaaS. Organizations like Ramp, Dorada, and Electric use Merge to access their customer's accounting data to reconcile bill payments, file storage data to create searchable databases in their product, or HRIS data to auto-provision and de-provision access for their customer's 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/lenny and receive a $50 Amazon gift card. That's merge.dev/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 SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market-leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risk. 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/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash Lenny. Sebas, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.