One of the most important companies in the world. And a tech giant. Very few people can grasp the size and complexity of its systems. To build and oversee them, you'd need more than just a systems engineer — you’d need a programming genius. Or a magician. Luckily, Mercado Libre found someone who is all three. Please welcome, Dani Rabinovich.
One of the most important companies in the world. And a tech giant. Very few people can grasp the size and complexity of its systems. To build and oversee them, you'd need more than just a systems engineer — you’d need a programming genius. Or a magician. Luckily, Mercado Libre found someone who is all three. Please welcome, Dani Rabinovich.
S1:E1 Dani Rabinovich: The grill designed 19 times
Federico: [00:00:00] Escaladores combines two words when translating from Spanish to English – climbers and scalers. Climbers, because they climbed mountains of difficulties and prejudices and mountain ranges of impossibilities. And scalers, because they managed to scale their initial idea. An idea is always important, but much more important is to put it into practice and make it grow, even in contexts that seem adverse. Climbers & Scalers is the story of people who think they can. Reaching the summit is not only touching the top, but also enjoying competing in the most challenging league with the best in the world. This is the story of Mercado Libre told in first person by its protagonists. This is Climbers & Scalers, narrated by their own professional AI cloned voices, with full authorizations.
Federico: [00:00:55] Many of us know the path of Mercado Libre from the hand of Marcos Galperin, its co-founder, CEO and Chairman, and we imagine a path of elite universities in the United States such as Stanford. Not everything is like that. Some of Mercado Libre's stories begin in public schools in the middle-class suburbs of Buenos Aires. Work since adolescence. Tutoring in exchange for work. And a bit of magic. Meet Dani Rabinovich, Mercado Libre's Global Product, Technology and Operations Leader.
Dani: [00:01:29] I guess mine is a relatively different story from Meli's other friends. I grew up in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, deep in Wilde. I went to school number eight, to a public school and in the afternoon, I went to another school, to a school of the Jewish community in Avellaneda. So, I went to two schools. In the afternoon they taught me Hebrew, which is very important, but the truth is that it is not the most practical language. It is spoken in only one country, smaller than Tucumán, and they all speak perfect English in that country. But that background was interesting. And I think the most interesting thing in high school is that from very early on I was programming from a very young age. When I was fourteen years old, I decided to work, so my parents helped me a lot because they paid for an institute called IAC. The twists and turns of life made me meet the founders recently and I thanked them because thanks to them I am here. It's as simple as that. And when I was seventeen, eighteen, I started to do magic. At that time, I was living a little bit of that, and in parallel, I met a friend of a cousin who started making PHP 2 websites at the time. It is still a language used, but in fact Facebook was written in PHP much more advanced. It was very, very basic. It was written by a kid. I met him, chased him down and pleaded for help. And I started working with him and a partner they had, and the deal was that on Sundays, the partner, who was a better programmer, had to come over to teach me. So, we made a precursor to Tinder that was called Encontrarse, which means to be found, and it actually still exists. It pivoted to another issue, which is a more social issue. Sergio Naidich, if he happens to be listening to this podcast it is a great pride for me to have met him at that time. In fact, I am user number one of Encontrarse and until not so long ago I was getting some… no, no thanks, but some proposals. So, nothing, I'm a test user, I think now.
Dani: [00:03:14] In the early years of the web there were only two models that made money. The first one was eBay and the second one was Match.com. Match.com which, still exists and was making a lot of money already in 1999. And then we did other things working. And at that same time, I was a professor of Logic at the University of Buenos Aires. I taught for many years, about six or seven. I had a lot of fun, but there was a very, very good student. In so many years I came across one of them, an incredible one. The class had turned into something in between, a kind of mental fencing, between me and this kid, and we had a lot of fun. And this guy told me, you must come and work with me. And at that time, I was quite a hippie, still in college, and I believed that I was in another, in a very different spectrum, and I didn't care much about going to work in a multinational company, in Puerto Madero. But the truth is that this guy caught my attention and melted my ear until I went and met Soko, who was the systems manager of People Soft, a multinational company that Oracle bought and moved it to the United States, in fact. The first big amazing lucky thing is that Soko has a very rustic wisdom in the sense that he also comes from the street and from the world of doing. It's not like he had seven PhDs and then went to work. We hit a very instantaneous wave with Soko and there in People Soft, in the little year that I had with him, we did all kinds of delirium, except making accounting systems that did not amuse me too much. I was very, very energetic at that time. And Soko received a call from Mercado Libre, basically to become the first CTO. Actually, the first one was Marcelo Galperin, Marcos' cousin, but the first CTO hired by Meli was Soko. He chose me and another guy to go with him. Among all the kids who were in People Soft, we were a lot. So, I think that to close this brief story I think there were a lot of incredible things that happened basically by luck. Maybe helped by many things I was doing that helped me. But the reality is there were seven million dotcoms at the time. There were twenty-seven sites that were doing the same thing we were doing. I had no idea. I didn't know Marcos or anybody, and I had no idea where we were going. I was only twenty-two years old and my best professional referent that I knew was leaving. I was taking a big risk, and how could I not take that risk? So, it was incredibly lucky. If I had fallen into any of the other seven thousand that were full of talented people, I think, God knows where I would be today. So, to close this point, I think it's very important to understand that you can help and prepare yourself and that definitely luck can help you, but luck plays a very important component.
Federico: [00:05:40] Luck must be helped. But now it was time to demonstrate. Dani was shaping up to be an incredible programmer trained in the battlefield, a technology genius, and Mercado Libre was a start-up company that needed just that, technology. But Dani, Dani liked something else.
Dani: [00:05:58] I really like design, the concept of design and the concept of software. Actually, we were just talking about it here, about my house. I enjoy almost equally designing a house, designing a chair, or designing software. Of course, software has a wonderful number of abstractions and scope. So, of course that's what I like the most and perhaps what I know how to do the most. But I'm fascinated by the users. The act of designing something that solves a problem. I don't love that technical thing so much because of the abstraction itself. And that is something that haunts us to this day. Mercado Libre is often referred to as a technology company and I like to say that we are not a technology company, we are a product company. A technology company produces basic technology, that is, it could be a laboratory, a Bell Labs, it could be a technology company or perhaps Oracle, a company that basically studies all the technologies available and tries to sell them to others. For us technology is a means, not an end. The means is to solve some problem for our users and that is very important in our leadership inward as well. There are a lot of people who like technology more than users, and those people don't have much place in our team. Maybe in some very particular place, but almost nowhere can you care more about technology than users, because it's going to be kind of random whether you solve a problem or not. It used to happen to us a lot back in the day. I think Marcos used to say that if he went to Nasdaq, the whole investor world would congratulate us a lot, but the cab driver would tell him that he believed Mercado Libre was unusable. It is the worst place you can be. I prefer that some super academic tells me that I don't have some super academic correction, but what happens to me, happens to us much more today. There is an aunt who has 60, and she says to me, the truth is that I go out without money to the street because I can buy anywhere with a QR code. That for me is a much bigger laurel than the academic world, without detracting from it.
Dani: [00:07:45] This was 99. Soko is an absolutely outstanding person in the sense of the team that he put together. Very respectable of the way he put together teams, but Soko had something wonderful which is that he didn't care about your background or where you studied or if you studied or what you did. He chose people based on what he thought was valuable and that's why he put together a unique team. In my opinion, that People Soft team, without detracting from any of the other teams I worked with, was incredible. The way he put it together, assembling all the strange people he brought in. Well, the guy who brought me and also he brought a guy named Matías Suárez, who I doubt he had finished college, and he was the best programmer I've ever met in my life. And there was another guy named Salvador Maiorano, who now I think works at Workday. Very different people, all outstanding, very deep people. There was Juanma, there are a lot of them. But with Matias, in particular, who was programming super low level. Low level in computer science is someone who is very close to the bits, who knew at that time all the Win32 API programming. He was making a Windows system from scratch. A crazy thing, what that kid was doing. And it was like those people that don't suck at anything, that's like let's fix whatever. He had the DNA of making tools and I, of course, was crazy about that kid, and we were basically building tools. I don't know, there were a lot of us working. I remember I didn't know that documenting what we were doing was a total bolt on and we said this can't be. Then we started to build a tool that generalized that and put together all the documentation by itself. For example, it was silly, but it was fun. Then another tool that I remember, one that automated testing, which at that time was not as popular as it is now. Those kinds of things were tools for the programmers on the side. Of course, the rest loved them, we had a lot of fun with them. Quickly you start to say well, let's see, do this, do that. We were like a weirder team. It also served us as a development team because we were, we were not only people who were, let's say, hands-on building accounting systems, but we were also people who contributed with tools from other sides.
Federico: [00:09:29] Dani was surrounded by people who stimulated him, he was having fun, he was creating tools, he had a dream job where he realized that what he was doing, went far beyond just developing technology. But one day his boss calls him into the office, and closes the door, to have a very serious conversation.
Dani: [00:09:46] He calls me to his office and says, look, we are going to leave this place, I'm going to leave this multinational. It's all very nice, but I think it's the moment to take a risk for me. We are probably going to go to a garage. They are people I respect a lot. I know the family. Soko had worked, I don't know exactly on what, but I think he had worked in Sadesa, Marcos’ family business, and had had some kind of relationship with Marcos' family, and they are people I respect a lot and I'm going to take that risk. And I would like to do it because of my profile, because of everything you know about the Internet and because we believe we are going to be in a place where we have to do a lot in a short time. I would like to head any incoming cross. If you feel like it, come, and if you want to think about it, do so. No, I'm going, I said. I don't even know what you're talking about, but I'm going. Are you sure you don't want to think about it? Yes, I said, wherever you tell me to go, I'll go. It's an honour. That's it. Look, it can go very wrong, he told me. Yes, no problem. And it wasn't much more than that. Then out we go to Mercado Libre, and to the garage. I think the first thing I did, almost certainly, was some discussion forums that were all the rage at the time. We had bought a product that was a piece of junk, and we had to somehow update it a little bit to Mercado Libre and I remember that I did it in more or less, in one night. At that time, what happened was that nobody understood the Internet. A lot of people didn't care, and a lot of people cared that nothing new was happening. Internet was, is still based, but much more before, on a system that was not meant to have dynamic pages, to interact a lot. It was designed to make a system, to share documents. That was HTML, let's say the little language that makes browsers show us the pages we see today. So, what we were doing at that time was to create a concept that today is completely natural. Everyone understands that if I go to Google and type a little word, what I see in response is something that some computer wrote for me. But at that time the concept was that there was a document posted on the Internet and we all looked at the same document because there were no personalized things. That ability to have a server generating what were called dynamic web pages was kind of a new concept.
Dani: [00:11:50] Microsoft had something that was typical Microsoft, lousy, because the first in the first long years of the Internet, Microsoft did everything they could to ensure that the Internet didn't work. So, it was all very bad and there was PHP and some other very dynamic languages that you can program in C as well. And these dynamic pages at that time were the ones that produced just the few systems like eBay, Match or Yahoo at that time. Although Yahoo had a lot of static and curation, of course it already had a system at the time. It had a search engine. All search engines were the first dynamic pages par excellence. So, this is a very strong ability to say, stop, I can have servers and make systems that everybody has a client, into something really hyper powerful. And in fact, it is still very powerful today. Of course, there are applications, clients have mutated infinitely, but that concept is a concept that is still going on. One interacts with may be in quotation marks, web pages. Notice that it is still a page, something that was thought for as if they were documents, still works today. Today of course, narrators are no longer as present in the native application system, although they are still present. HTML is so good as a system, the web, that all this, back to them. In fact, there is quite a strong move which is to go back to what are called more hybrid applications or web views between applications. Inside many applications you are starting to see again, let's say, small, embedded HTML pages and that, I think this return, shows how powerful the concept is, because I don't know if you want to program for Android, for iOS. While they are now two hegemonic, you wouldn't want to program the same thing twice and yet many of us must do it. The web was intended to not depend on the operating system you are working on, that you do on the same HTML page, and that works for anyone. That concept is so strong that it is still in force. And I wouldn't be surprised that at some point it will become even more current and that we will have to program less in the native code of the cell phones. In other words, there is a whole dynamic, of very large companies that may or may not find it convenient for the native part to be programmed in their companies. Then there are certain miseries in the world of technology that always occur. But as a concept, I find it interesting to understand that thirty years later it is still very valid.
Federico: [00:13:45] Dani had realized that the team that his boss had put together was impressive. That he loved what he was doing and that he had so much admiration for his boss that he trusted him blindly. Dani follows his boss from the modern offices of a multinational corporation to sit in an office converted from the basement car garage of a windowless building. Little did he know that he would end up building the most important Latin technology company in the world.
Dani: [00:14:14] I went to work at Meli's garage. No doubt, a garage in Saavedra. I open a little door, and I find Gallo, Martin Gallone, who no longer works with us, Jonathan Schwartzman, and Rodri Benzaquen. Rodri Benzaquen at one end, which was, let's say, the whole technology infrastructure team, and it was him, looking at the top. The top for those in Linux, it's kind of a list of the processes that are consuming the most resources and it's in real time, looking at everything. Rodri tackling any kind of penalty. Hello, hello, I said, and off to fix the discussion forums that were not working or were not adapted, that someone had bought that little thing. My energy level is naturally a little high, and in that environment, it was already too high. I think I fixed it, I did it in one night. I didn't sleep, that night. I was completely out of control. And I think it was Pedro, look now that you're telling me… I think Pedro told me, wow, you completed this in one night! I don't know what I told him. Look, Pedro, great, thank you, but there are things that can be done in one night, but there are more complex things. This one was relatively; it was relatively simple, and the forums were used for quite a long time. Later, Nico Berman used those forums a lot in his affiliate program. There was an affiliate forum that lived for a few years. Another nice one, there was no Wi-Fi back then. A nice picture is to understand the router and network cables crossed. Of course, there are no windows in the garage. I don't know if you saw the garage, but the garage is, some offices that are inside a car garage of a very nice building, that it's there on General Paz and Panamericana. Of course, there was no bathroom, you had to go to the bathroom of the bar, that was close by. Anyway, I know that there is a bit of epic and romantic narrative in all this. Even though that word doesn't exist, it looks nice, but it really doesn't have such a great romanticism. Nor was it that I liked being in that garage. The reality is that I didn't care about it at all, just as I didn't care whether there was yogurt in the fridge or not. I cared about being close to those two geniuses I was telling you about, that I met at People Soft. If the office was nice, so much the better, but the only thing that mattered was to be close to these kids, in the same way that when we were studying magic. Nothing mattered. We could go to the first floor of La Paz, which I don't know, if it is still open. The place was awful. But what only mattered was to be close to those kids. At that time, there were very talented people at Mercado Libre, very inspiring and the truth is that it didn't matter at all. I cared about being close to them. It's not that thing of, I'm here because one day I'm going to grow up, it's like maybe someone else had that happen to them. It didn't happen to me that much. I was really enjoying those days, and, in fact, I had a great time. Maybe at some point in history it was worse, in a much more comfortable office than at that moment, because when you are in that, “in the zone”, as gamers say, you don't really care about anything. The truth is that you don't care about anything and it's very nice to be like that. And of course, it's a feeling that I've been trying to recreate more and more. It is the same thing that makes me stay all night long. We were just talking about my pool that you were watching there. I must have, I don't know, fourteen versions of that pool. And I stayed so many nights drawing all night that pool or that grill that I have nineteen versions of that grill. But it's not a sacrifice. It's hard sometimes to explain to people, who don't enjoy, who don't have a certain obsessive trait in their personality. You don't look at the time. You don't say, oh, I'm tired already, what do I do now? It doesn't happen like that. You finish a version, you look at it and you say... Oh, it's a piece of crap, because I'm fixing one thing, but I broke another. And a product is a set of things that must fit together. And the simplicity of all those things together is very difficult to achieve. So, you stay up all night. The same thing happens in the forums. I wanted to do something that says... ah, it's kind of good. And you're past the hour. And there comes a moment when you say, I didn't sleep. Maybe it's good to sleep and tidy up a little more. But at that time, I was a kid, I didn't have children. It is not that there is something so serious about sleeping and getting up at 12 o'clock and continue working. It is not a good message to think that this is an epic, to say that I sacrificed myself. The concept of the martyr, to me it seems to be a horrible concept. It is not that it is wrong. I think it's wrong, but if it's useful for someone, that's good. But this whole thing of, I'm going to sacrifice myself because I want the other person to identify me as a sacrificed person and a martyr? For me it has the libido in the wrong place, which is, that the other person feels sorry for you or who knows.... That he says, “wow!”, how he sacrificed for this one. I think even people who are in those pseudo martyr positions. I don't know any of them, but I imagine those doctors who go to the middle of nowhere to help some people who are dying of some plague. What do you say these kids are thinking? I think they must be thinking the same thing. I mean, they are, the same as I, as I like to design a grill or work in whatever. They should be in that world. I don't think they're waiting for the world to give them some medal. In fact, when you see them being brought to some big place and given a medal, it's like they look visibly uncomfortable, because no, they didn't do it for that, they did it because they enjoyed the trip and I think that's a nice message to think about, because if what you want is the latter, it's not worth it, it's not worth the effort.
Federico: [00:18:30] For Dani, Mercado Libre was a place where he enjoyed working, even in offices with no windows and no bathroom. And he didn't feel that that was a sacrifice, quite the opposite, because he wanted to be around talented people who pushed him to enjoy creating, obsessively, better and better things.
Dani: [00:18:48] I had a split perception about Meli. The part that most people had a hard time digesting, which is if it could really work or not, it didn't take me that long. This thing about, if people are going to buy online, it's either going to happen or it's not going to happen in Latin America. It cost me zero to be sure that this could happen for two reasons. First, because it was already happening in the United States, eBay was a fabulous company at that time. So, we were not talking about something unbelievable or impossible. It would have to happen in Latin America, it could happen a little earlier, a little later. And apart from seeing Marcos, I mean, he convinced me in fifteen minutes. No, no, I didn't. I had no great doubts that the model was going to work. I did have doubts at the beginning about whether we were going to be able to execute that model well. Very early on, I wasn't very proud of our systems and our technology. In the beginning, we had a competitor called De Remate, who I think had a stronger brand, much stronger, in the beginning. Their systems were nicer, they were better designers than we were. We were all pseudo-engineers. And these kids had a much greater sensitivity. And at the beginning, I was obsessed with not losing to these guys, so I was much more hesitant about execution than strategy. And paradoxically, today, the same thing happens to me, not with that company, but with the best company in the world or in the Milky Way, depending on whether we believe that there is life outside. I have no doubt about our strategy. Nothing. Zero doubts, it seems to me to be crystal clear. And it has mutated very little over the years. The doubt is whether we can beat the best in the world today. In other words, what shows an evolution is that today, we are talking about Amazon, which is perhaps the best company in the world. The doubt is one of execution, not strategy. The paranoia is a paranoia of execution, that of saying, I must be able to execute like these guys execute. And that's what did it for us. Amazon was the best thing that ever happened to us. The level of logistics network that we have is absolute science fiction, insanity. Today we have everything from airplanes to people delivering on bicycles, electric cars all over the place, people, millions of packages going around without any courier knowing about it. The whole fintech thing. No, no, no, no, I don't want to make it sound at all self-congratulatory, but there really are things that are science fiction compared to what we thought at some point and projects that we are undertaking that you wouldn't have imagined two years ago that are hilarious. But the point is to execute that and execute all that consistently. That does haunt me because I see all the time that we're executing very sub-par somewhere in the system. Most of my day is diving into things that we're executing horribly to the standard that we have to win at.
Dani: [00:21:18] In that, it's interesting, we have a handicap. We have a problem in Latin America because it is in general, a society, honouring some exceptions, quite mediocre in terms of execution and we don't have so many examples going around. If you live in San Francisco, you turn around, go half a block and you run into some genius around there. Or the same if you lived in a technology hub. Everybody knows Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple. It's kind of vox populi in those cities. So, there's an implicit yardstick in the air that Latin America may not have. So, it is difficult to say well, it's ok, it's fine. And unlike other areas in sports, for example, where feedback is instantaneous. I like tennis, for example, you play tennis badly for an hour. You already realized that you basically got beat six zero in the first set, six zero in the second, and you are out of the match. It is quite clear that you play worse than the other player. In other countries, it is not so simple to realize this. You can have made an IPO, be worth a lot, and play horrible or it can happen to you. You may have done some things well, but it can happen that you are playing horrible. So, the feedback is not so instantaneous, so it is very difficult to do that.
Dani: [00:22:21] And also another very difficult thing is that we have a business model, that depends a lot on what they call network externalities, which is a kind of difficult way of saying, you need a very large set of users for it to be worth more and more. A social network is worth because there are a lot of people. If there were nobody on Facebook, Facebook would be meaningless. It is very difficult to create it and it has a lot of inertia. The point of those models that have network externalities is that there is not much room for the second, for number two. It is worth a lot to be the first in those models. That is both very good and very bad at the same time. Continuing with the sports metaphor. To win Wimbledon you have to beat everyone, not almost everyone. There must be tens of thousands of pseudo-professional players in the world, and a hundred and twenty-eight players enter a Grand Slam. The point is that if you want to win a Grand Slam you have to beat everyone. Rafa, Roger, the whole new generation. And it's very difficult for someone who plays tennis and is extraordinarily good to understand all that is missing to win Wimbledon. In fact, only now we have a new generation of top players, after I think, 15 years. That which is so obvious in sport, that if you can't beat everybody, you're never going to win a Grand Slam, is not so obvious in the world we live in. And that's a problem because if it's not obvious, you can think that because you hit the ball hard, then you're good enough and that's a big problem and it requires a completely obsessive, paranoid, low ego personality. Low ego means the opposite of what it sounds like, which is having so much self-love that you really don't care if you play worse, and you have to want to improve all the time to be able to be there. It's a big challenge.
Federico: [00:23:50] What could go wrong then? For everybody, Amazon is an unreachable, an inimitable giant. For Dani, it's the best thing that ever happened to them. To have the bar set higher. Because not only do they have someone to compare themselves against, but someone to surpass. The question is, do they have the tools to perform like them?
Dani: [00:24:10] Very early on we had acquired a platform that was the recipe to die for. When we were facing the decision of building our storage centres, which are like mega warehouses where we have a lot of products, we had a lot of pressure to acquire third party warehousing systems. The normal way of thinking, and I don't want to put an adjective… well, I'll put mediocre, which is to say, but if you don't know anything about this, why are you going to build something that you know nothing about? If you can buy something and have a better time to market and that kind of thing, it's great to buy sometimes. It's not that we don't buy anything. But I think it's very interesting to see who you compare yourself to, because it's true that there are thousands of companies that buy that software and use it. It's interesting that Amazon didn't buy it, that Apple doesn't buy any, that Facebook doesn't buy almost any of these. So, if you compare yourself to the majority, probably not. But if you compare yourself to the ones that matter, it looks different. The truth is that the benchmark should say the opposite, and it's true that sometimes to get out, you want to do that. But at that time, very early on, there was still a perception that the business is an idea, and the technology is a means. Like saying I buy a table, I buy some chairs, I buy technology.
Dani: [00:25:15] And in fact there's a study and there was a despicable gentleman called, I think Nicolas Carr, who wrote an article called how technology is a commodity. It's the same thing and he talked about trains. All super well known and super smart, but despicable to me. But not because I want to defend technology, but because thinking that business is a layman of parts is a way of seeing the world, that there are many people who did very well, made a lot of money that way, but to me it seems despicable. This is not how Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, who for me are probably the best CEOs in history, set up their businesses. It still happens a lot in the industry that someone says, I raised money, and I buy fifty parts, and I try to integrate some of them. And some of them do quite well. But it happened to me at the beginning that I was worried about acquired technology and then two minutes later I was very worried about how basic our technology was. We were programming in a database with code inside that database, which was fine for that moment, but as architecture, we had a very weak architecture, and that worried me a lot. It's hard out there for people who don't program to understand that, but I could explain it in the following way. The systems are developed in layers. Because they are so complex, those layers in general are designed in such a way that when you solve a layer, the problems of that layer, for example, the data storage layer are kind of encapsulated in that layer and the layer above doesn't have to worry about what the layer below does. The top layer does business logic, the top layer, for example, is a user presentation layer. So that's a way of separating problems into smaller problems so that you don't have to solve all the parts. The way we were working at that time, it is like the devices that were in the systems that were designed to store the data that are called databases, that they were great for doing that. They also had a lot of business logic and presentation logic; everything was a little bit in the middle and that as an architecture was complicated. Luckily, we were able to do things relatively on time, but those were very strong weaknesses of that first period. They were very monolithic systems.
Dani: [00:27:05] A few years later we had to write the entire Mercado Libre from scratch, in something we called New World. Which by the way, was a name that Marcos gave it because he didn't like the name, I had given it, which was Ground Zero. Marcos has infinite virtues. He has one that is devastating, which is courage. This kid has more courage than probably anyone I know. And when you mix that with a certain capacity, intuition, and intelligence, it makes for a very powerful formula. But I didn't have to convince Marcos to rewrite all of it. Not at all. We spent almost two years without putting absolutely nothing into production, being a public company. I repeat, we spent almost two years without putting a feature into production, being already a public company. With the pressure of saying well, that's it. Ground Zero was also not a big name at that time. But the spirit was to drop a bomb on what we had and do it all over again. Which organizationally was very, very risky, it's like you're betting the whole company.
Federico: [00:28:30] Dani realizes that they have to go out and rebuild all the technology. And that would be indispensable for the future. Supported by Marcos' courage, Dani pushes Mercado Libre to bet the company. But what did they really bet? In the next episode of climbers & scalers, Dani will tell us how that combination of courage, intuition and intelligence led them from a windowless garage to become one of the one hundred most important brands in the world.