Dani doesn’t really enjoy awards, or celebrations. Not even results. For him, the key to success is sustainable enjoyment. A much-needed concept whether you’re running a regatta, managing the systems of a company like Mercado Libre, or playing the tango El Choclo on a guitar duo.
Dani doesn’t really enjoy awards, or celebrations. Not even results. For him, the key to success is sustainable enjoyment. A much-needed concept whether you’re running a regatta, managing the systems of a company like Mercado Libre, or playing the tango El Choclo on a guitar duo.
S1:E3 Dani Rabinovich and Sole Dematteo: Racing a regatta or sailing
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: [00:01:09] Dani defines what is the most important trait to succeed in any endeavour. It is something that Vilas, Nadal and Paco de Lucia have in common. And here's a spoiler. No, it's not talent.
Dani: [00:01:23] I definitely have an above average level of curiosity. Sure, above average doesn't mean that I am. It's true that I do have a friend, Edmund Husserl is his name. I remember to this day having, it must have been 25 years ago, of reading Sartre. He's very well known, but he's rough. They are rough people to read. It's true that facing these things requires a certain curiosity and it requires more than curiosity, because curiosity makes you open the book. What it requires is to sit down for a very large number of hours to be able to at least understand what this gentleman is talking about. I think that is more important than curiosity. In fact, I know a lot of very curious people who know very superficially a little bit about something, about everything, but they are reading, as I say, people who have read many back covers of books. There are no more back covers, but that's the point. I think it’s a skill, which is not merit. Because I think it is an obsessive trait, that I have it, and that helped me a lot. I don't know if it's my own merit. For example, being able to spend a great number of hours doing the same nonsense with the guitar, because with all these guys you don't just read them, you're half a page in, and you don't understand anything. You read half a page; you understand. It's not that he's telling a story. I don't understand anything and every word he says is like you have to go to the manual to understand what he's talking about. So, it's when you spend many hours reading a paragraph and it is this thing of saying, it’s the paragraph or me. So, this obsessive issue, which for me is not a merit in the sense that I have it as a personality deformation, let's say, it can be at a certain level, a pathology too. I don't think it is in me, or I think it’s not, I don't know. That is definitely a merit. I don't know anyone who is good at anything who doesn't have that trait. The other day I was listening to quite a few interviews of Paco de Lucia, who is one of the best guitar players in history, certainly the best flamenco player in history, a super guitar player. Everybody shows him as a genius, and I love what the guy does. The only thing I know is the work. What he did well was sit down at eight years old, lock himself in a room, twelve hours a day with a guitar and be able to sustain that for a lot of years. He doesn’t think he’s a genius or anything like that. And then he found other things. He found that all that bohemian nightlife, he used to stay up all night studying music and, in the morning, he would listen to it and it sucked. The night is very nice, but it was not the best time. He started getting up early, getting up at six in the morning to start playing the guitar. And the ability to put that many hours into whatever it is that you care about, that's what differentiates one from the other. I think Gladwell's little book, I think it's Outliers, he talks about the 10,000 hours, and he gives endless examples of that, many, many, many. I mean, the Beatles playing in Hamburg from Monday to Monday. In that book, if I remember correctly, he also talked about Bill Gates, who was walking, an anecdote that they lent him a mainframe, I don't know where, which was super lucky. But then, as you said, the kid got up at four o'clock in the morning because they lent it to him at night. So, I think he had it from one in the morning to six. The kid went every night, he was twenty years old, everyone else was at the bowling alley. I think there is a very large common denominator. There are geniuses, yes there are. I don't know, Bobby Fisher was probably a genius, also obsessive. In chess, Sultan Khan was a genius. Sultan Khan was the servant, he was Indian, I don't want to say slave, but he had a master. And he went to England. He didn't know how to play chess and in a short time he was an elite chess player. Then the sad thing about that guy is that he went back to India and was never heard from again. There are geniuses, but there are very, very few. And you don't have to be a genius to get anywhere relevant in the world. Following the sports metaphor that I like very much, my first class with Gaby Mena, a fabulous tennis coach who left long before his time. First lesson. We pass some balls. He says, look, there are two types of players. There are the talented and the untalented. You are not talented. Now don't get confused, Vilas was not talented. Nadal is not talented. Not talented means that it takes you longer than someone else to learn the same thing. I don't know if you saw Vilas' biography. The Romanian coach said that the guy had to spend up to six hours to sharpen his backhand. Vilas was terrible at tennis. Number one in the world. He wasn't because he was robbed, but he was clearly number one in the world. One of the best tennis players in history. You can really go very far. Clearly Vilas was a guy who trained more than the rest. Of course, he had conditions, he had a great physique. No, we are not saying, belittling talent. I think the point is the best predictor of going far is the ability to put in sustained, pseudo-obsessive work on some subject. My opinion.
Federico: [00:05:54] Obsession is an indispensable element. But it is healthy to be obsessed. Dani explains how you can be in the zone all the time, that is, always at full speed, motivated. A formula that includes sustainability, experimentation, and a bit of the tango El Choclo.
Dani: [00:06:12] We have diametrically different personalities. I would almost say that it is very difficult to find two similarities, at least in the senior team, but take a mental tour and see for yourself. Pedro studied Literature. I think he studied at Oxford. I don't know, somewhere in England. I think it's much more interesting, without belittling what he does, to talk to Pedro about anything else than what he does now. Stelleo is a scholarly guy. So is Ozzie. Ozzie must read forty books a year. Incredibly knowledgeable and learned guy. And he cares about that. And he has that level of energy to do something. Marcos is all day studying, watching, reading, helping entrepreneurs. I mean, obviously I'm not talking about his private life. I'm just saying that they are very angry people, very curious, angry in the sense that every time something happens that he didn't see, it's like he goes into that moment of madness and wants to know because he can't stand not being able to handle it. He is a guy who has done everything he has done, and that people with a micro nth of what Marcos did, with all due respect, would be retired, lying on the beach a million years ago. In other words, he has, he doesn't care about that. You can see that he has the desire to grow and progress. And we don't need to talk only about the senior team. A lot of other guys that when you look at it, I know them, when they're working on whatever they're working on, or designing their house or doing whatever sport or whatever they like, they're doing, not to win a Grammy, because I'm not going to win a Grammy. The point is, that moment being in the zone, like the gamer is. If it wasn't like that, I don't think anyone could stand many years doing something like that, having the means to not have to do it. So, the only way is to have fun. The only way is to enjoy. So, it seems to me that it is a consequence. One could look at it the other way around, that is, everyone who is now after so many years, is because he really enjoys it and has that characteristic.
Dani: [00:08:00] I don't know what came first. I realized pretty quickly that it was a very sustainable way to enjoy. Let me explain that to you because it seems like a concept, it seems very powerful to me. If you ask me if, I don't know if I like cars. I might love cars. Now let's imagine a non-sustainable hobby. Being a car collector. Great. But what's it like to be a car collector? First, I got one. Now it went a little better for me. But imagine you must at least have fortunes of money to have a shed. A lot of that joke is looking at it every day. Having people come and admire your car. It's like there's something that I look at it and you say, I could love it, I could. But the truth is I'm not really interested in just liking it and that's it. The trip is kind of annoying. I wouldn't like the journey of being a car collector. The journey of being with El Choclo for five months is mind-blowing. Why is that? Because at one point El Choclo went out of complexity, so I had to turn it into a score that I had never written before. So, I was having fun learning. Then I started looking at software to write music. I found one that on top of that is free and incredible. When you write music you start to realize that it opens up other possibilities. Then I started talking to teachers. I started to interact with them. When writing it's much easier to vary things and see, because writing is something that you don't necessarily need your fingers to be able to do. So, when you do the things that your fingers can do, you are limited to what your fingers can do. When you write you can write anything. And it was a whole journey just the writing. And then the arrangement. And then the mixing. And today we were talking to him about microphones. And whatever you can think of looking at microphones are a marvel in themselves. In fact, I'm looking here. This microphone is a Neumann that the first thing I saw is a marvel. Neumann is the Ferrari in that world. It's a fun ride, why get there fast. What would be the point of getting there fast? And that's not something I invented, far from it. I mean, you read Kahneman, and he speaks clearly when he talks about happiness, he talks about his two self that we all have. The self that he remembers and the self that he experiences. We are two, they live in us, and the self that remembers is the ego. It is the kid who says I want to have played El Choclo. There are people who like to have read, they don't like to read. Those two things are very different. Then, the question of the photo, the social networks, there is a lot of question of whether you like to run a marathon, or you like to have run a marathon. You like to climb a mountain, or you like to have climbed a mountain. It's not sustainable that you like having climbed mountains because it's a lot of effort to train and climb. So, it's like a relatively thankless situation. When the self who experiences is the one who likes the journey, so to speak, life becomes very enjoyable. There is no way to do all this if you don't enjoy the journey and that yes, at some point, consciously or unconsciously, I understood that, and the journey becomes very enjoyable. That implies a constant struggle with the ego because the ego likes to have its picture taken and to be admired by others. You like to show off. Today we are talking about the final result, which is not final, that is, I change it every week. That is a part that the ego enjoys. You count and they tell you how nice it sounds, even if it doesn't sound so nice. But that is 1% of the time. 99% of the time, I am with myself doing that and the enjoyment of that is more business for me, because it is that 99% that I am with myself enjoying that.
Federico: [00:11:44] All of Meli's senior team have similar characteristics. They are curious and obsessive, they have a low ego, they enjoy the journey, not wanting to get there fast. And the obsessive enjoyment model can be applied to other things as well, not just at work. Yes, you guessed it, also with the tango, El Choclo.
Dani: [00:12:03] First of all I was born surrounded by music, that is to say, I opened my eyes in my bed when I was a little boy and just as I was in front of it there was a piano. My mother was a piano teacher, she likes piano, she plays music and there was a big pile of sheet music in my house, half classical, half tango. I knew tango when I was very little, but it remained there. It was a childhood memory. I could play three chords and squawk a tango on a campfire, but never, I have always played very badly. And it was always an account, a pending account. I started to study guitar a little bit. I used to travel, so I bought a travel guitar, and then I could take it with me on the plane. I was on a plane for twelve hours or eight, and instead of watching the latest Mission Impossible, I started to try to speed up my fingers. I had a certain agility from years of doing magic. The deck of cards is held with the left hand and the guitar, the most complex part is the left hand. More or less, I came with a certain question there. I knew a little bit about music, but I had not catalysed it until I started a very ambitious project, which is to make a tango album. It is not that I want to play El Choclo, but Choclo is the fourth track of an album that I am putting together for myself, which I will never publish anywhere. So, I did four songs, now I'm doing the fifth one. Choclo was more complex, and I had the enormous luck that, obviously with the right quotation marks, that a pandemic exploded and on March ten, while skiing, I broke my cruciate ligaments and I returned to Buenos Aires just when the whole world was closing with a broken knee, and it gave me the possibility to be at home with a guitar nearby. And before, just going to and from the office, I had an hour and a half every day, and suddenly I started to have hours of practice and that's when the project of making a guitar duo album crystallized. The lead guitar is extremely difficult to play well. There are of course genius guitarists who do solo tangos very, very well, but the guitar duo is better, at least for me, to learn, because the tango was usually played on guitar accompanies and it is very difficult to play the melody and the back at the same time. So, I decided to make a guitar duo to be able to pluck and to be able to do the accompaniment and the arrangements of songs that I loved all my life. Then my Mum sent me the sheet music of El Choclo from the year 60, which was 55 years before El Choclo was created, so it was a mega reissue. I am playing tangos, some classics that I have always loved and others that nobody knows, but I like them just the same.
Federico: [00:14:28] But it's not all about enjoyment. Dani explains the transition from being a quiet person to having to set the course with rigor. He confesses that he is not there to maximize the enjoyment of those who work with him, but to avoid inefficiency. He found a very precise system for that, which includes 80% fluidity, 15% tension and 5% rough. That's where Dani goes to the bone.
Dani: [00:14:53] People who know me personally are very surprised when people who work with me tell them what it's like to work with me. I am extremely quiet in my personal life. It's very rare that a friend who has known me for 40 years tells me that he remembers the last time he had an argument with me. Very, very difficult. That doesn't happen because what I maximize in my personal life is enjoyment. And obviously, even when there are issues to resolve, it is very rare, it almost never happens, in situations of affection, that I experience an argument. In a parallel with sailing, I could say that it is like the cruise of sailing. When you go out for a sailing cruise, the whole objective is to enjoy yourself. It doesn't matter if you get there fast, slow. The whole objective is to enjoy. Following the same parallel, working, it is not the goal to enjoy. Of course, you have to have fun and that, but fun is not the logic. There you are racing a regatta, it's like something else. And when you race a regatta the concept changes radically. The concept is that I don't care if in a regatta I must spend seven hours hanging, holding the sail with my hand because something broke. Because the goal is to win and if you don't like it, don't race a regatta. But that's the concept of a regatta. Working, many, many times it happens that, for different reasons, we are not going with the boat as fast as we can go. And then my head changes mode, in the sense that I'm not maximizing how much fun the person who is arguing with me is having. Not because there is an issue of respect, which of course you can imagine that the canons are never violated, but, if I have to tell someone that something that they are thinking seems to me to be all wrong and that they don't have a foothold, it's not like saying well, half of it seems right to me, because if I tell them that everything seems wrong to me it's like what are they going to think. I am not thinking about that, I am thinking that we want to win this regatta, and that we want to be world champions and that may or may not be a mistake, but I do not know a more efficient way of working and sometimes the discussions get rough, not when there is a discussion of reasonable ideas, but when sometimes people may have biases. If I perceive that someone is not really trying to solve the problem, but is, for example, trying to make themselves look as bad as possible or to mask a mistake or to achieve something for their team, that's the end of it. I mean, if I really perceive that someone is genuinely asking me not to understand something, I'm never going to say they don't know how to add. I mean, I can sit down and write, we take two plus two plus four, we put the four beans and count them as many times as it takes. But we are human, and we have a lot of humanities at work. And in one, for example, in an organization it happens very often that error is more expensive than inefficiency. So, someone may be more afraid of making a mistake than, for example, committing great inefficiencies. When this type of, for example, humanities occur, I go to the bone, because otherwise we can waste endless hours thinking about it, making chicanery, or trying to intellectualize too much, or there are a thousand devices that happen in a corporation. I do it for that reason and for a cultural issue, to make sure that as we grow, we do not return to the most well-known terminal illness of companies, which is that they become protocol inside, lose courage and start to enter into those infinite lethargies of death. One imagines GE and says what it will be like to work there, or in those mega-banks. And when I look at the companies, I most admire Tesla or Amazon itself, or Facebook, everything you read about them is not. There are no light discussions inside. Maybe in some cases you hear cases of people who are border on quasi-sociopathic. You read very ugly things about Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. I don't think I'm like that. You hear horror stories about these guys who really have no empathy for anyone else. I really believe that people who, for example, cause inefficiencies for their own benefit need to know that there are penalties, that it is not worth the same to say or not to say anything. I think so and that does not imply working hard, I was working overtime on the greatest possible humanity in leadership. Of course, at the end of the day it is a very large, human group. But to put it another way and to wrap up the idea, it seems to me that, if you go to play soccer with friends, it is not that your best friend of all your childhood, he kicks at the goal from anywhere in the 40th minute and there is only one teammate, and you say well, don't worry, now let's go to the feedback meeting, and I'll tell you about it. You tell him to fuck off and he is still your friend, and he knows that you told him that because he deserved it. And the kid at some point, in that angry moment or later, will decode that it's wrong. And it happens in the NBA, it happens in hyper-professional teams too. It's not just with friends. It seems to me that that does a little bit to the competitive essence of being able to say in a WhatsApp group, as I read today, that doesn't make sense what we're doing. Somebody said in our senior team group, this doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense at all what we're doing, what we just did, please, let's do it all back. To me, I'm fine with that. If anybody gets offended by that, go work somewhere else. The same as in any couple that lasts for many, many years or in any very strong relationship. The basis, in my opinion, the central basis of, for example, the couple relationship, to make a dangerous parallel, but I'm still going to try, is to treat each other very well. Having said that, you have to talk about rough things, because in life rough things happen, in a company rough things happen. So, if you only deal with the protocol part, the protocol part of the head is not really trying to solve a problem. You're trying all the time to figure out how not to hurt a lot of people's feelings. The problem is that that's not fixing the problem but generating another one. So, you have to be able to base that on something we didn't say, but I think it's very important. All of that is based on trust. I can be telling you what you did, I think it is all wrong, do it all over again, only if you believe me that I am telling you, because I genuinely believe that it is all wrong and not because I am subtly declaring war or to look good with the other party, or how the political logic works, that one goes out to bitch at you because in reality that speaks to the base that has to bitch at you because you are looking for an alliance against the other party. All of that is all nefarious. When there is trust, that what I am saying seems bad to me, is because it really seems bad to me and at the end of the day, I am trying to help you in the shortest possible way. And if you want, we sit down together, and I help you as I think it should be. Now, this seems simple, but it is not an easy recipe to apply because trust is something extremely difficult to generate. So, an efficient team is one that has the trust to work well in full harmony 80% of the time, work 15% of the time in tension and maybe a five to have, because that is the proportion as well. Rough discussions remain in the memory much more than those that are not. It's not that I am all day long in tension. 80% of the time it is completely normal, 15% has a little bit of tension and maybe 5% of the time are rougher situations, which sometimes remain in the memory a lot. But it seems to me that with all the care that we are talking about and that none of it goes out of respect and obviously always with all the asterisks that I think the situation deserves, building trust so that all that happens, I think that is the most efficient way to work.
Federico: [00:22:36] Sailing and racing. For Dani they are two different things. Using a parallelism from the technological world, on a trusted platform you can run a system that includes 15% stress and 5% rough meetings with the team. According to Dani, this is possible. What does Sole think?
Sole: [00:22:57] He has a difficult personality because he is tough at one point, but you always have the peace of mind that he wants to do what is right and what is best for the business. And on the other hand, you think that we must somehow make some kind of approach to him, we must be sure we go well prepared because we know that at least on one of them he will always find you. He is a brilliant guy from whom you learn a lot and the truth is that you must get to know him in order to adapt and understand his logic, which is never really, never personal. He is always talking about the problem or the idea or what you are proposing, never any of them. If one understands that it's easier. But what's difficult about working with Dani is that he is so brilliant that you must be prepared. With time you learn how he works. And the truth is that he is spectacular. You learn a lot working with him. He always has a point of view that you never thought of and that's great, really, because he thinks differently from many people and it makes us all build better products, to think things better or, if not, maybe in the same way, to cover some hole that we had missed. But well, one must learn to accept that mistakes are found so easily. It's great, the truth is that you learn a lot with Dani and all these years I am grateful to have worked with him, because I think that since I started working directly with him, I learned like never before.
Federico: [00:24:14] It's clear that you learn a lot from Dani. What else can we learn from his experience? How about discovering that celebrating success is not so important. Or that you can be happy being paranoid. Although it sounds strange, in Dani's voice, it makes perfect sense.
Dani: [00:24:29] There's a catastrophic but genially macabre phrase, which IBM invented, which is no systems manager got fired for hiring IBM. That reflects everything that's wrong with the world. It is everything that is wrong, because it is not appealing to common sense, it is appealing to you take care, pay dearly, inefficient, whatever you want, but nobody is going to tell you that you were wrong to hire IBM. Now, if you, for whatever reason, take risks and it goes wrong, you are the one who will probably end up on the outside. So that way of thinking is a way of thinking that when I don't know if I trust at all, the other guy is trying to hire IBM because he thinks it's better or he's trying to hire IBM for another reason, it becomes a rough discussion. At the end of the day, maybe it's paranoia on my part, and maybe somebody had a rougher discussion than is appropriate, because maybe the other guy genuinely thought IBM was the best. I can tell you, my opinion. Paranoia is a disease. I have people very close to me who have some psychiatric and mind illnesses, and I assure you it is living hell. Paranoid people, indeed, cannot be happy. The paranoid, the paranoid suffers. The paranoid, in the sense in which we are using it, can be extremely happy. I believe that, in happiness, as I like to see it, that enjoying the journey, that is the experience self is the one that is the happiest. The experience self doesn't care much if there are photos or no photos of the trip. The experiencing self has twice as much fun spending two hours on the beach than one hour on the beach. For the person who took the photo, it doesn't matter if he or she took the photo for one hour or two hours, because he or she already took it. For the happiness that at least I am interested in pursuing, which is that of the one who enjoys the trip, paranoia, indeed, is a great way to be happy. I recently recorded a version; I sent it to several acquaintances. One of them said you are a genius, I deleted it and never sent it to him again. And another one says to me, hey great, look, here you missed a note, here you made a shot, you uploaded it, that is, it happened to me. Thank you. That madness of saying that this note doesn't sound good to me is what makes me want to pick up the guitar in a little while. And to say that we didn't stop to celebrate enough, I respect that vision, I don't agree with that vision. For me we celebrate too much. That's it. I mean, we do an event once a quarter. Every ten minutes, someone posts on the internal network some fantastic thing we did. I think it is spectacular, but it seems to me that happiness is related to the feeling of having reached the top of the mountain, it is precisely that it reinforces the area of the mind or the self that is more insatiable, which is because once you know how social networks work, and it does not make you enjoy the trip so much, it makes you focus more on the moment of the celebration. And that, it is respectable that everyone chooses the self they want, to be happy. But I don't agree with what some people in Mercado Libre say that we don't celebrate enough. I think we celebrate a lot and I think that what we should reinforce much more is to enjoy paranoia more and more, to enjoy the example I gave just now, having worked hard on something that someone tells you that part sounds bad and that is what makes you want to sit for seven hours rehearsing. That seems to me to produce the best sweet spot. But well, we are many, different, and they are all valid.
Federico:
[00:28:07]
In this journey inside one of the most important companies in the world, I'm discovering what makes Meli one of a kind. What makes them great and what we can learn, replicate, and adapt from their experiences, to be able to scale in each of our organizations. It is always healthy to find people who believe in the attitude to excel, to become outstanding. Dani shows us that dreams can shape the world and that it is possible to climb any peak. I am Federico Eisner; this is climbers & scalers. See you in the next episode, as we continue to get inside Mercado Libre and learn from its success, first-hand.