Rappi is the largest technology company that has been created in our country. Why aren't there more? When I was growing up, I believed I could be a very big company in Bogotá and maybe if I did very well I would go to Cali, but no further. No, you are a little Colombian, [music] you cannot make a regional thing. An investor was going to invest in Rappi and told me, 'Look, there are no Latin global companies.' Rappi is the largest technology company that has been created in our country. I think it's the largest company that has been created this century in our country. Right?
Maybe. Yes. You are very big, but it's very difficult to make a very big company. Why aren't there more? What have we done differently?
Why aren't there more? What have we done differently? Because what you say is unfortunate, but it's true, there aren't many more big companies that have come out in the last 10, 20 years in Colombia. So, what have we done differently? And we try to really discern what truly moved the needle. Things that I truly believe we have done differently. The first, I start with the most obvious, but the ones people do the least. The first, we would not have been able to create Rappi working normally.
Working normal hours, working with normal intensity, working with normal obsession. When we were starting Rappi, at least the first four or five years of Rappi, we breathed Rappi. Rappi was not a company. Rappi was a cult, a church. On Friday at 11 at night, people weren't working because they had to be working. We were eating pizza and working on a Friday at 11 at night, a bunch of young people who would have loved to go out partying, but that was our hangout, you know? That's where we wanted to be, and because we were all crazy. And I told my wife, 'I love to say that we did this because I also had the obvious luck, and I keep saying it, of having a bunch of crazy people around me. If you are taking a shower on a Sunday and you are not thinking about 10 things about your company, you are not going to make something truly great. Period.'
If you put together a work group where the priority is not that mission, that's not a company, it's not a job. One wants to leave work quickly to go live, right? Change. Here this was our life or is our life. That mindset doesn't happen by itself, it happens if truly, or at least in my case it happened, if you truly create a movement, and to create a movement you have to convince people of that movement, and you don't convince anyone if you don't deeply believe it. So, one is that obsession, another is that your company has to be a cult, and that's not just said by the idiot from Rappi, that's said by Jim Collins. If you haven't read the books, if you haven't read them, I have to alert you, you surely read them, but if you haven't read Jim Collins' books, read all the [__] books of Jim Collins.
Start there. It's that Freddy, you have to read, you have to read. [laughter] So, Jim Collins, Jim Collins did a couple of very cool things that I read late and when I read it I said, 'It was [__] lucky that we did this intuitively.' But Jim Collins ultimately does a study of the last 30 years of which companies have truly been successful and have remained successful and what they did differently, a bunch of things that we haven't done, but also a bunch of things that we have. And one of those that Jim Collins says is companies that have such a particular culture that when someone arrives, it becomes their home and their family, or they spit it out. They are not companies where everyone can work. And it cost me a lot to create a culture because our culture, they used to tell us, 'Ah, those [__] make people work very hard, they are slave drivers and whatever.' No, no, it's not the best culture, it's our culture. And so in interviews, I stopped selling to people. I started scaring people, and that worked very well for me. I said, 'Are you sure you want to get into this madness?' and that way I selected the kind of crazy people who want to come and do the same madness, but you have to have a cult-like culture.
Aníbal from the Platzi engineering team, our executive, once wrote a post that said, 'Why not work at Platzi?' And his goal was to scare people with the level of obsessive culture that we have. Cool, cool. Hey, tell me, tell me a beautiful memory of a day from the early days of Rappi that you carry in your heart, a very, very beautiful one.
The one that is beautiful for me, right? I think the most... I'm going to tell you two cool stories, one useful, one cool. So, the useful one. We worked 8 months on the Rappi app. We were in love with the idea. Rappi launched as just a small neighborhood store, delivery from a neighborhood store, nothing else. It had nothing else. It had a text field where you could order any crap. We launched, we had always worked in B2B, we launched this consumer app, we worked 8 months with long nights, very hard, etc. We launched and we believed that downloads would start coming any moment, right? And obviously six downloads came. I think your aunt helped me, a couple of friends, no one else, right? We worked like crazy, the whole team, it was a team of about 30 people. Monday nothing happened, Tuesday some Facebook Ads didn't convert, Wednesday nothing happened, Thursday nothing happened. I didn't know what to tell my team, I put them to work on books and stuff, but it was like, 'Fuck, why did we work and nothing happened.' Friday I arrived at the office, first thing. Ladies and gentlemen, close your computers, we're going to the street. And everyone thought we were going offside, right? And we went to the street. Ah, imagine that, right? Bogotá 9 in the morning. And what I asked everyone is, take out the app, approach a stranger, and sell this thing to them, and we're going to understand why the hell people aren't downloading this. And so one would approach someone, and that someone thought you were going to steal their phone. So that someone would go like, 'Who wants to be Rappi?' What a cool floor. And you start and we say, look, we said what the app did, right? Look, you could have, they can send you something from a neighborhood store, and people were like, 'Ah, okay, okay.' Zero engagement. And then in that suffering of needing someone to give me something, we started saying, 'Well, no, but we also have a text field where you can order other things.' And we threw out things and nothing, until we told someone, 'You can order a beer.' And that changed the person's face. Aha. How so? Order beer for delivery. That didn't exist. Yes, you can order it, come on, give me. And so on. Then another day we said, well, it's very hard to approach empty-handed. Let's buy some donuts and give donuts for downloads. And that worked, not as a marketing strategy, but it really worked to achieve product-market fit, to understand what people wanted. But the underlying lesson here is, you've heard a thousand times talk to users and whatever. Yes, yes. No, you have to feel the pain of rejection. If you don't feel the pain of rejection and you are not able to overcome that rejection, your market research will be very superficial and you will ask people who won't be so critical. So, that's a beautiful story because Rappi is what it is. Thanks to having had the courage to go and receive a world of horrible rejections, from a world of strangers, and to stay true to ourselves. We worked 8 months on something that people don't even want, so we better listen to the user, and that's why Rappi, that's one, then I'll tell you the other one that's more of an anecdote for the end.
So, do you want to continue with your points? Let's continue with the points because the underlying question is important. How do we build enormous companies in Latin America? Yes. And why doesn't it happen more often? And why doesn't it happen more often?
