Linda Rottenberg is the founder and CEO of Endeavor, the leading community of high impact entrepreneurs worldwide. In the late 1990s, Linda flies down to South America and settles in Argentina. She starts helping the social sector until she concludes that the region doesn´t need more Microcredits, but rather more Microsofts, starting-up in the region. She gets the first funding and the first entrepreneurs. Her story and that of Endeavor changes forever, when she gets to meet Marcos and Hernán, co-founders of Mercado Libre.
Linda Rottenberg is the founder and CEO of Endeavor, the leading community of high impact entrepreneurs worldwide. In the late 1990s, Linda flies down to South America and settles in Argentina. She starts helping the social sector until she concludes that the region doesn´t need more Microcredits, but rather more Microsofts, starting-up in the region. She gets the first funding and the first entrepreneurs. Her story and that of Endeavor changes forever, when she gets to meet Marcos and Hernán, co-founders of Mercado Libre.
If you want to read the transcript of the interview (slightly edited) you can find it here, searching for this episode: https://escaladores.simplecast.com/episodes
If you want to follow its creator, Federico Eisner, you can do it here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/feisner/ and can follow escaladores in: https://www.linkedin.com/company/escaladores/
If, while listening, you get curious about Carlos Nino and the Nino boys' impact in Argentina, you might be interested in reading this https://www.law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/faculty/papers/DeathPublicIntellectual.pdf
S1:E25 Linda Rottenberg: Unveiling Mercado Libre’s Role in Cultivating the Entrepreneurship Ecosystem
Federico: [00:01:08] We need to do this one episode in English. I am sorry, but it's worth it. All throughout this series of Escaladores and the Mercado Libre story, you have been hearing about Endeavor and how relevant they have been in Mercado Libre's journey and in founding the entrepreneurship ecosystem in Latin America. Endeavor is the leading global community of, by and for high impact entrepreneurs. Linda Rottenberg is the founder and CEO.
Linda: [00:01:42] I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. And my parents actually had been high school sweethearts. They were their first in their families to go to college. So, the importance of education was always front of mind. But I think that because I had such a stable family, I always dreamed of traveling and doing something that was not traditional, even though I think they thought I was going to become a lawyer or a doctor or a banker or something traditional. So, I started off on that path. I went to Harvard for college, and then I ended up going to Yale for law school and all was going well, according to my parents. And then I decided that I had no interest in practicing law. I thought that's why people went to Yale Law School. They had no interest in practicing law, and a few professors took pity on me. And there had been an Argentine professor named Carlos Nino. And Carlos's dream was the first interdisciplinary law and business school in Argentina and to have full time faculty members. So, I got shipped down first to Chile and then to Argentina on behalf of Yale Law School. And my parents were confused, but they thought, okay, she is taking a, you know, a sabbatical. But that's what really set me out on the journey. It was just the sense that I had had stability. My parents had, you know, always taught me about hard work and about education. But I thought you used that to change the world and to do something more, more interesting and impactful and exotic. So, I guess that was my upbringing.
Linda: [00:03:33] So it was so this was this was 1993. And as I said, I had been in Chile for the summer working on a Law and Policy magazine at Diego Portales. And I got a phone call from my professor at Yale, a professor named Owen Fiss, explaining that Carlos Nino, who had been this really important Argentine law professor, had actually written the Constitution after the military junta, and he had been invited by the president of Bolivia to rewrite the Bolivian constitution. And he had a heart condition that was not suitable to high altitude. So, he got to the La Paz airport and unfortunately had a heart attack and did not survive. And so, I was asked to come to the funeral in Buenos Aires and to basically go home, pack my bags and come back and spend a year working with Los Nino boys, these young trained, U.S. trained Argentine law lawyers, including Carlos Rosenkrantz, who ended up becoming part of the early Endeavor story, and Martin Bohmer and Roberto Saba, and Luis Moreno Ocampo, who ended up becoming an Endeavor Entrepreneur. So, it was this whole group that I would go and help. So that was how I ended up in Buenos Aires in the fall of 1993. And I stayed over a year. I watched all of the football matches. I became an Independiente fan, and I ended up, in 1994, when the Argentine team practiced in Boston, I ended up taking them all and all the press around Boston and getting to watch their practices, before the World Cup. That was fun. And so, I stayed. And then about a year later, the law school was up and running and it just seemed like it was time to move forward. And I ended up, at that point, joining an organization called Ashoka, founded by Bill Drayton, who had been a McKinsey partner and had left to go, found the first social venture capital fund. And and so that was in 1994. I joined Ashoka.
Federico: [00:06:05] Linda started thinking that she needs to help the private sector, not the non-profit world. And through a conversation with a taxi driver in Buenos Aires, she finds her eureka moment.
Linda: [00:06:15] Yeah, well, it was really a combination of a couple of things. You know, I had many late-night conversations with, as I said, the Los Nino boys, talking about law and politics and economics and business and they were all dreaming of becoming new justices or making sure the legal system was fair and due process. For me, I was looking back at the United States and seeing Steve Jobs going back to Apple Computer and seeing Yahoo! And Netscape. And I kept asking, where are the entrepreneurs? Why don't you want to be entrepreneurs? And even when I was at Ashoka, which was really supporting these innovative non-profits, I kept telling Bill Drayton, hey, you need Ashoka for the private sector. We don't need microcredit. We need Microsoft, coming out of Argentina and Brazil and Chile and the rest of Latin America, and emerging markets. People thought I was insane. They didn't understand. And I remember I was giving a talk and it was actually a talk in Brazil, but it was an Argentine student there, came up to me, after I started telling the story of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak starting Apple Computer in the garage and the Apple story. And this guy Esteban says to me, Linda, that's a nice story, but how does it apply to me in Latin America? No one's going to fund me for my crazy idea, and I don't even have a garage. And that was one of the aha moments where I thought, wow, here are my parents and I'm crazy for going to Latin America and not joining a law firm or a consulting firm or a bank, right? But at least there's some sense of, okay, you know what I'm doing. Imagine if there's no word for entrepreneur. You can't, there's no story. There's no backers.
Linda: [00:08:11] I was thinking about this, and then I took this taxi ride in Buenos Aires and learned that my driver had an engineering degree. And I thought, okay, this guy is going to understand Silicon Valley. He's an engineer, an entrepreneur. And we started talking, and he kept saying that no one would hire him. The reason he was driving a taxi with an engineering degree. I'm like, are you kidding me? Everybody wants an engineer. Like you should be the hottest commodity. And we went back and forth. We were talking in Spanish, and there was no word at that point for entrepreneur because "empresario" meant the big businessman, right, with the government connections and Swiss bank accounts. And so, that's when I just said, you know what? We've got to start something. We've got to solve this. We've got to find a way to showcase local role models so that people can say, if he did it, if she did it, I can, too. And just to scroll years later to after Endeavor was about five years in operation in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil, we got a call from the Brazilian Portuguese dictionary editor saying they were adding the words "emprendedor" and "emprendedorismo", which existed in Spanish and in Portuguese, but were really not popular. But because of Endeavor's work and the sense that there were these young entrepreneurs, they were adding that into the dictionary. And so I thought, okay, now, now the next kid who goes and tells his mom that they want to become or she wants to become an entrepreneur, at least there's a word.
Federico: [00:09:41] You have to be insane to think you could build an organization for entrepreneurs when the word "emprendedores" didn't even exist in the dictionary. Well, Linda was indeed crazy, and she finds it a compliment.
Linda: [00:09:57] It took a couple of years. So, we founded Endeavor in 1997, myself and Peter Kellner. Peter was someone who I had met through Bill Drayton, the founder of Ashoka, and also Bill Salmon, who had become a mentor of mine and who was a Harvard Business School professor. And Ted Marmor, a professor at the Yale School of Management. So, three independent mentors kept hearing talk about entrepreneurs in emerging markets and kept saying, oh, you two crazy kids, like you've got to meet one another each other. And so finally, Peter and I connected, and we ended up co-founding Endeavor in 1997. And the idea was, at that point, we now have a fund, but at that point there was no capital going to these markets. This was right after the Thai baht had collapsed and emerging markets were in a state of collapse. And so, there was no venture capital in these markets. So, we decided, even more than money, the missing ingredient was trust. And that while you had talent and while you had capital, and you had know-how, there was no trust among them. And so, this was the story of that young kid, Esteban saying, hey, who's going to support me? He was going to give me money for my crazy idea. I don't have a garage. I don't have the right last name. There is no one who looks like me. You know, I don't have the family connections. And so, Endeavor was really set up initially to identify, support and help scale the highest growth, what we call high impact entrepreneurs, and then shine a spotlight on them to inspire the next generation. So, this was always about finding, supporting, these iconic role models to end up creating entrepreneurial ecosystems, because the idea that one or two or three success stories can really ferment an entire, you know, entrepreneurial revolution. Well, today, Endeavor is the leading community of high impact entrepreneurs worldwide. We have a co-investment fund, Endeavor Catalyst, that's a rules-based fund that invests in Endeavor Entrepreneurs. And we also have Endeavor, the main organization, that identifies and selects and helps scale these companies. So, we have both the capital and the mentorship. What we were always looking for are the big dreamers with the biggest ideas, the ability to execute on those ideas and the ones who were, now we look at the scale up phase. So, I think early on and we'll talk about the early stories, we took a bet on some more start-ups because there was nothing. Now, with incubators and accelerators and seed funds, Endeavor is really about that scale. And can you access new markets, new sources of capital, new, you know, what are the challenges that founders go through at various stages and how can we sort of support that founder’s journey. And then, Endeavor was always also set up as a mechanism to enable the top founders to pay it forward, to reinvest in the next, in the next group of founders, because that's how we believe Silicon Valley was founded, right? It was the earliest success stories fuelling, investing, inspiring, mentoring, that next generation. And so back to the trust issue. We didn't want to create one or two success stories. To create an ecosystem, you needed to not only get these first success stories to have successful exits, to get funded, to get right, to get the capital they need to grow, but then to actually fuel that next generation, which I'm happy to say is exactly the story we've seen in Argentina. No one believed this would happen, by the way. That's why I was called Chica Loca. Linda, you'll never find entrepreneurs. If you do, you're not going to be able to trust them, and they certainly won't pay it forward and reinvest in the next generation. That's just insane. So today, you know, this is, why I say that crazy is a compliment.
Federico: [00:14:02] Well, you guessed, a crazy Linda, goes after its first backers and first entrepreneurs and starts getting proper attention.
Linda: [00:14:13] First of all, when Peter and I co-founded Endeavor, we wanted local actors as well, and I knew Woods Staton, of Arcos Dorados, McDonald's, through my Ashoka work. And he said he'd be supportive, but we needed to get some other people. And we found out about Eduardo Elztain, who at that point, was the largest real estate owner because of his work with George Soros. So, I got a ten-minute meeting with Eduardo in his office, and this was on Friday. So, he was getting ready to go to, you know, Shabbat. So, I knew I really only had 10 minutes and 5 minutes into my pitch about Endeavor, you know, this organization that would support entrepreneurs. And he says, okay, I get it. You want an intro to George Soros? I'll see what I can do. And I said, no, Eduardo, I want your time, your passion, and $200,000. And so, he turns to his right hand guy, Oscar, and says, “esta chica está loca”. I said, you know Eduardo, “estoy decepcionada”, I'm really disappointed here. This, from the guy who famously walked into George Soros´s office and walked out with a $10 million check? You're lucky I only asked you for $200,000. And so, he leaves the room and I thought, oh, my God, I've literally so offended him, that he's left the room. He won't even see me out. It's like worse than being kicked out, he leaves. And I don't know what to do. Oscar sitting. I'm like, do I just get up and slink out? And he walks back in with his check book and writes the $200,000 check on the spot. And to this day, he'll say was the best check he ever wrote. So that was the story, my “chica loca”, you know, come to fruition.
Linda: [00:15:59] And then we had to go prove there were entrepreneurs, right? So, the first story that gets me to that's the precursor to Marcos and Hernán is that, well, there are two. Carlos Rosencrantz, who I had worked with, through the Nino years, says, oh, I have these two students, Andy and Santi, and they are starting something, it's like the Staples of Latin America. I don't know, they seem kind of I, you know, like big dreamers. Maybe you can take a look. So, we selected Andy and Santi as some of our first Endeavor Entrepreneurs. We had to tell them they had 0% equity. This is what happened. Founders had no equity in their own companies, so we had to help them renegotiate that. But then Andy says to me, well, you know what? You want some other, you know, crazy kids. Talk to this kid Wences. Wences grew up on a sheep farm in Patagonia and had this idea for the E-Trade of Latin America, he said. And Andy said, 34 investors have turned him down, including Santi and myself. Even we think that this is just too much. Staples is one thing. E-Trade will never work in Latin America, and Wences, you know, grew up in the sheep farm. Not going to happen, but why don't you talk to him? And we, just anyone who's met Wences, knows, I mean, today Wences has sold more Bitcoin to more, you know, founders, including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman and he can sell anyone, anything. And he sold us on this idea. Of course, there should be the E-Trade of Latin America. Of course, you're the guy to do this, even though was him, his two sisters and his best friend, Constancio, in this like, little office with like paint peeling from the ceilings. But we believed him. We selected him as an Endeavor Entrepreneur. And eighteen months later, he sold Patagon.com for $750 million dollars. This was after we'd gotten helped him get his first round of venture capital and a chief operating officer. And Wences ended up marrying my assistant. So, I always say, Wences got the full-service Endeavor. Suddenly, news of Santander buying Patagon.com created that, you know, aha moment, for so many other people. And people from, not only Argentina, but Chile and Mexico and Uruguay, sort of saying, hey, if Wences can do it, so can I.
Federico: [00:18:30] Endeavor started scaling to the Endeavor of today with Marcos and Hernán. But the first interview with Linda was terrible. Terrible. It is actually Becky, Linda's sister, that insists and they get a second chance.
Linda: [00:18:45] So I met Marcos and Hernán, in 1999, they had just graduated from Stanford. They were in their first office. Marcos´ cousin, I believe, was the CTO. And I met them in the cafeteria of this little operation. And I had also just met the De Remate guys from Harvard. And everyone was talking about how there was the Harvard group and there was the Stanford group, right? And Peter had gone to HBS, I had gone to Harvard undergrad. People assumed we were going to the Harvard group. Anda my sister, who was down in Argentina helping us out scouting, said, no, no, no, you really want the Stanford guys, trust me. So, I had an interview. We have a whole process to become an Endeavor Entrepreneur. And we do these second opinion reviews after the local teams' put them forward. And the interview went terrible, terribly, because Marcos, almost said nothing. His cousin, the CTO, talked the entire time, and it was all about his childhood as an exchange student in someplace like Indiana. And I thought, if these guys go to pitch Fred Wilson of then Flatiron Partners, they're going to get, you know, they're going to get axed within the first 10 minutes. I said, how can Marcos not tell the cousin, hey, you, you know? So, I walked out of there and I called my sister. I said, I don't know, Becky, I know you like the Stanford guys, but I'm not sure. And to his credit, Marcos and Hernán called me up and they said, we want to do over. Like, we understand that was not good. Can we come to your apartment in Buenos Aires and we will come any time of the day, and we want a second chance because we really think, we want you to hear what we're doing. And I always believed that stalking is an underrated startup strategy. And the fact that they were stalking me, I'm like, okay. And so, I met them then in my little apartment, the fifth-floor apartment, in Austria and Las Heras. And they were fantastic. What struck me was that from the get-go, were two things. Not only were they committed to this idea of helping people in Latin America, you know, buy and sell and transact more easily. And they talked about trust. They talked about how no one trusted the postal system, how no one trusted FedEx, right? And the fact that early on, the buyers and sellers, I remember they told me a story in Buenos Aires of someone wanting to sell a piece of art and they wouldn't ship it. They made themselves go to the café and hand over the, you know, the check and hand over the art, and make sure, you know, it was real, right? And so they talked about wanting not only to ease the transactions, the business, but also to build that trust. So that resonated with me. They also told me that one of their earliest employees was a user who kept giving comments on their early Mercado Libre site and criticisms, and they said, you know what? Your ideas are good. Why don't you come work for us? I was super impressed with that. Talk about customer service. You take someone who's a little critical and you hire them. I thought that was fantastic. And then it was so authentic that Marcos and Hernán wanted to give back and wanted to pay it forward into the ecosystem. And because they had been in Silicon Valley, they heard the same stories I did, of the early founders then becoming funders and mentors. And so really, they seemed to embody the entire spirit of Endeavor. So, I loved them, and I thought not only are they going to be successful business leaders, which I knew, but they're going change this country, I believed. I didn't know they were going to change all of Latin America, which they did, but I knew they were going to change the country. And I wanted to be part of their journey.
Federico: [00:23:13] Marcos is in the bathroom, in total distress, because things went totally sour during a call. He needs to participate in a panel because Linda asked him for his help. Can you bow out and explain? Linda would have understood. But Marcos is Marcos, and he went on stage.
Linda: [00:23:29] Marcos and Hernán came to the selection panel. Everyone loved them. They passed that, of course. And that's good. You have to. It's like you have the one bad interview with it, and then everything else goes great. We sent them to Susan Segal and Fred Wilson of Chase Capital and Flatiron Partners. And of course, they got investment. And Marcos had brought his own investors along the way. And in 2000, I guess, we at Endeavor were holding our first global advisory board with the legendary private equity investor Peter Brock, he was the founding father of international venture capital and private equity, as the founder and CEO of Advent International, and Bill Salmon, the Harvard Business School, you know, entrepreneurial finance professor, that had been one of my mentors, even though as Peter went to HBS and I went to Yale Law School, but Bill had taken me under his wing. So, I called up Marcos and we had 20 other people, including Beto Sicupira, you know, 3G from Brazil and meet all these people. And I said, Marcos, I need you to come and be sort of an example of someone who is on the path to success. And he was about to close this big round, with a big, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to name the name or not, Goldman Sachs, he was about to close this big deal. And I had told him, okay, at a certain point in time, I'm going to turn to you and you're going to just share your Endeavor experience. And he was so cute. He said, I don't want to show, I'm going to give back to Endeavor. And Marcos disappears for like 20 minutes in the bathroom. And I'm thinking, what is going on? So I go, I excuse myself in this big, you know, Advent conference room, I go find Marcos. He's looking a little pale. And I think, Oh my God, he's a little sick. And I said, Are you okay? Are you sure you can do this. He says, no, no, no, I can do this. We go back in. He gives this brilliant, you know, talk about Endeavor and how important it is and how great, you know, Mercado Libre is. We leave the meeting and Marcos says to me, Linda, I have to tell you, my deal just collapsed. And this was the dot.com crash. And the poor guy is such a man of his word that he followed through with the Endeavor, you know, Global Advisory Board meeting, which in the real scheme of things, didn't matter that much when his deal was falling apart. Now, I just thought, once again, what a testament to character and there is story after story like this with Marcos and with Hernán. And then, we were with him just shortly before they went public in, you know one of the last companies to go public in 2008. He always picks interesting time. And Marcos then, joined our Board of Directors in Argentina and together with Guibert and Martin of of Globant and then a whole host of of entrepreneurs, really did what the Endeavor mission set out to do, which is take their own success and reinvest in the community. And the fact that then Hernán and Nico Szekasy ended up starting Kaszek Ventures, which as we know, is one of the most important funds in all of Latin America and one of our biggest co-investors as Endeavor Catalyst. That not only created what we now know is one of the most dense and impactful ecosystems, you know, in the continent, despite the ups and downs of Argentina, right? The tech ecosystem in Argentina and the fact that people who worked at Mercado Libre and Globant have now gone on to fund other and found other companies is incredible, but I think paved the path for the road map for Brazil and Mexico and now places like Turkey and Dubai and Indonesia and now Nigeria. I think they look at what happened over a decade now, two-decade process, that started with Patagon and Mercado Libre. And then Globant, and said, okay, we see how it only takes just a few success stories to create this entire tech ecosystem. And the fact that Marcos is still so humble, the fact that he still is like, it's Day one, and he still works so hard, and he still spends so much time on the board of Endeavor and doing all of these things to give back. I just think we got very lucky, frankly, that one of our earliest stories was not, it's not just about the magnitude of the success, but it's about the quality of these two founders and Marcos and Hernán, and how much they have gone to do what they said they were going to do, which was help create trust and help build an ecosystem. So, I'm truly, more grateful than proud, because I am so grateful for everything they've meant to Endeavor and to me personally.
Federico: [00:28:56] Harvard versus Stanford. Guess who won. But then Amazon sets shop in the Alvear Hotel in Buenos Aires, wanting to steal Mercado Libre's best people. Guess what? Mercado Libre culture prevailed.
Linda: [00:29:11] I remember when we started. When we had that, are we taking the Harvard group or the Stanford Group. But I like the guys from Harvard. I actually think, you know, they're good guys. But I remember being in New York City and seeing a De Remate marketing sign on the busses. I was like, really, they're marketing De Remate in New York City. It was strange. And I called Marcos up and I said, oh, should you be doing this? Have we missed something? And he said, No. He said, For us, it's about execution. We're not spending a dime on marketing. And certainly not in New York. And I remember they went for a nanosecond to Miami, and they said, nope, no market for Miami. We're sticking to Latin America. So, he was so focused on execution, not getting tempted by the newest fad. And I think that's number one. The other thing is, while very calm and, you know, unruffled, there is a backbone of steel. And I think the best example of that is the whole eBay relationship. When eBay had bought, what, 19% of Mercado Libre and I got call after call of eBay wanting to buy Mercado Libre and assumed that was going to be a done deal. And Marcos had other plans. And the fact that Marcos, you know, took it public when eBay was expecting otherwise, was just a testament to, again, not being scared, even though he could have been seen as the underdog. He knew what he had and stuck to his guns and sort of said, we're going to do this. And then, when it became not just eBay, but Amazon and Marcos and I were then on the board together of Globant. And at one of the Globant board meetings, he told a story of Amazon setting up shop at the Alvear Palace Hotel with the only goal of hiring away Mercado Libre employees. And they interviewed, I don't know how many, and I think under five ended up leaving the company. And so, I think that this culture that was created and everything and even then Mercado Pago and the idea that the buyers and sellers couldn't get credit. So how do you solve the problem? I think that Marcos has always been on the lookout for how do you solve the hard problem? How do you focus on the execution? And I think that that is what has distinguished him.
Federico: [00:31:52] Building an ecosystem of trust proved to be the key to the success of Endeavor and the tech ecosystem in Latin America. Trust with a quota of stubbornness and irrational confidence.
Linda: [00:32:04] I feel like we've grown up. All of these entrepreneurs and we have grown up together. And one of the special things, you know, I've gone to Indonesia, which is another it's an incredible tech ecosystem right now, but I've taught, but so many of the funders who are based in Singapore, who come from China are demanding NDAs, non-disclosure agreements. They're demanding non-competes. And it's, there's no trust. And I always say, you know what? Look at Latin America. Look at this spirit of, hey, if you're going to leave and found a new company we'll invest in you, right? The fact that Mercado Libre and Globant invested in Digital House, right, this training company founded by an Endeavor Entrepreneur, Nelson Duboscq, and the fact that they're always open, even when their employees leave, to supporting them. The fact that Marcos blessed, you know, Hernán and Nico, start going out to start Kaszek Ventures. The fact that we've seen Globant supporting companies where Globers have left, to go to Brazil, and instead of cutting them out and trying to undermine those companies. There's been this sense that we can grow the pie, we can grow the ecosystem. It's all better for all of us if we all exist. And so even where there's competition, there's cooperation as well. And I think that is very different than what we've seen in other markets. And I think one of the reasons is that it's so hard. And I think that anyone who can make it in Argentina or anyone who can make it in Latin America has such utmost respect for the other people doing it, that they can't help but feel a sense of camaraderie. And we're all into this together, even if we're competing for those same engineers. And so, that's the thing that I find I want to bottle up and take with me as I go around the world to try to say, this is how you build ecosystems right. Where you recognize that there's something greater than any one person or any one company. And while, yes, there can be healthy competition, that you guys and women are building something bigger together. So, I think when the story is written and I'm proud that Endeavor will play some role in this, you know, it was that these early founders a) paid it forward and became these big bubbles, but b) showed, if you build good cultures, if you have integrity, if you build through trust as well as execution, that you can stand with the giants. And we are all indebted to Marcos in particular, for showing the way as a public company CEO, everyone from Brazil who does this, everyone from Mexico will benefit, because Marcos went first. And Martin Migoya is doing an excellent job as well, but Marcos went first. And Nico and Hernán, this founder to funder model, which I believe is part of the PayPal mafia and so important. The fact that Kaszek has been so founder friendly, the fact that in these small ecosystems everyone wants to be invested by them because they've been operators, they know what it's like and they're on the side of the entrepreneurs that we also can't underestimate the influence of that in the region. But we also try to tell people, you've got to do the founder to the funder model too, and you need what, Kaszek is as important a part of the ecosystem story, in the story of Mercado Libre, I believe.
Federico: [00:36:19] Endeavor has been key to Marcos' success and Marcos' to Endeavor. I have been witness to Marcos' total commitment to expand Endeavor across the region, time after time after time, with so many examples. It is Paying Forward with a Capital P and a capital F. It's Marcos' in Mercado Libre and now Nico and Hernán in Kaszek, playing a key role to be instrumental players in the multiplier effect of pushing entrepreneurs to become scalers. The story of Mercado Libre could not be told without Linda. I'm happy we've had her in our show. I am Federico Eisner, this is Escaladores.