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

Jun 8, 2025 1h 19m 19 insights Episode Page ↗
Sebastian Barrios, SVP of Engineering at Roblox and former Head of Product/Engineering at MercadoLibre, discusses MercadoLibre's unique product-engineering integration, massive scale, and culture of independence. He also shares personal stories, including a call from Steve Jobs, and his distinct personal habits.
Actionable Insights

1. Embrace World’s Malleability

Recognize that life and the world are malleable and not set in stone, empowering you to challenge existing norms, change what you want, and actively pursue your goals.

2. Cultivate Agency for Goals

Cultivate a strong sense of agency, combining curiosity with the drive to actively pursue and achieve your goals, rather than passively waiting for things to happen.

3. Develop Extreme Independence

Train yourself to be intensely independent and capable of handling any situation, actively solving problems and getting things done, rather than relying on others.

4. Follow Your Curiosity

Follow your curiosity and what excites you in life and work, as this naturally aligns with what you’ll be good at and passionate about, making it easier to excel.

5. Prioritize User Experience

When evaluating new features, prioritize the user experience and understanding how users will interact with the product, as putting users first ultimately leads to long-term revenue.

6. Empower Teams to Take Risks

Foster a culture where teams are empowered to take risks and make mistakes on what they work on, as long as it’s not due to bad quality or system outages, encouraging bold visions.

7. Live Company Culture

Ensure that company culture, especially around acceptable failures and risk-taking, is demonstrated and lived by the leadership team through their actions, performance reviews, and public praise.

8. Prioritize Technical Skills in Hiring

When hiring, prioritize deep technical and engineering skills, testing for product inclination but maintaining a strong bias for technical depth, ensuring a team capable of understanding and building complex products.

9. Delegate with High-Level Objectives

Provide teams with high-level, non-long-term objectives and areas to explore, then grant them freedom and responsibility to decide what to work on, trusting them to align with the main company vision.

10. Maintain Skepticism & Deep Research

Approach new trends with skepticism, conducting deep research into fundamentals and understanding real-world business applications and scale, to avoid hype cycles and make pragmatic decisions.

11. Leverage Internal AI Platforms

Build internal development platforms that abstract away complexities like data access and authorization, enabling AI agents to combine existing microservices and create new features with a UI without writing new code.

12. Conduct Candid Product Reviews

Regularly conduct design and product reviews where the leadership team provides extremely candid and honest feedback on what’s working and not working, while maintaining a cordial work environment.

13. Adopt High-Performance Team Mindset

View your team as a high-performance sports team, clearly distinguishing between having fun and focusing on work performance, where results are transparent and openly discussed.

14. Observe Users for Insights

Prioritize observing users during user research sessions to understand their actual behavior and pain points, as this often reveals more valuable insights than directly asking them what they want.

15. Send Weekly Updates

Send a weekly email to your boss or executive team detailing what you got done, important happenings, new releases, and any blockers, which helps track progress and frees up meeting time.

16. Limit News & Social Media

Avoid traditional news and excessive social media, instead relying on curated sources like X (Twitter) for important updates and focusing on reading, to avoid the negative bias of traditional news.

17. Drink Only Water

Drink only water and avoid alcohol, coffee, tea, and juice, as this can contribute to good sleep and a preference for not altering one’s brain with stimulants.

18. Work in Silence

Work in silence, especially when programming, to enhance focus and concentration, as a personal preference.

19. Engage in Hands-on Building

Engage in hands-on “hacker projects” and “maker things” to build both digital products and physical objects, fostering creativity and a love for creation.