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Forbes
a day ago
- Business
- Forbes
Sebastian Mejia: The Soul Of Enduring Companies
The visionary behind Rappi and now Tako, is building the operating system for the Pan American century. Sebastian Mejia Photo by Fadil Berisha, Courtesy of Sebastian Mejia What are the qualities of enduring companies, enterprises that can survive technology's creative destruction and the waves of progress that disrupt industries? Sebastian Mejia knows what it takes. Mejia is a co-founder of Rappi, an app that provides both delivery services and a local commerce ecosystem throughout Latin America. H also launched Tako in 2023 in Brazil as a workforce management AI System of Intelligence (SOI – more on that later). With Mejia's new venture, Zeal8 , he is planning to start or acquire high quality enterprises. Mejia's great strength has been in finding important market niches once resistant to digitization, such as groceries and food delivery, or payroll, that amass large amounts of user data that can be leveraged in other businesses uses, in a manner that compounds the value created. Mejia, who I interviewed recently in Santa Monica as well as over zoom, is very soulful, intense, and passionate about what it takes to launch a great business as well as his own criteria that make companies successful and enduring. In person, he looks more like a student backpacking his way around the world than the co-founder of a multi-billion dollar enterprise. As a founder, Mejia stands out as well-traveled, well-read, with a strong background in both economics and coding. He is a lifelong learner (always studying the trajectories of successful companies and business models), always reading several books (histories, fiction, business biographies), a music fan, and is a person who thinks deeply about business systems, technology, and what makes companies great. He thinks both micro, obsessing about the complexity his businesses must tackle; and macro, mapping out global futures for his companies and for Latin America itself. Mejia grew up in Cali, Colombia, a culturally rich city that is a center for salsa music and was also Colombia's sport capital. His father, who died when Mejia was in university, was 'larger than life,' a very outgoing and energetic businessman; and his mother, still living, also was an entrepreneur who started a popular magazine at the intersection of culture and business as well as launching a thriving show with salsa and circus artists. They divorced when he was a child. Mejia describes a happy childhood, always tinkering and creating. 'I l00000000000000000000000000oved physics, I loved math, I loved sports, and I loved music.' While his father was living in Spain, Mejia enrolled at Esade in Barcelona where he learned 'hardcore math, microeconomics, and coding inn Java.' As an immigrant Mejia felt like an outsider which also gave him 'the feeling of being an underdog and wanting to succeed… along with wanting to stand up for himself.' In the summer, he started a business selling iPods with custom-created playlists and also sold cold beverages on the beach which he describes as 'my first education in market dynamics.' After his father's sudden death, his mother wanted Mejia to return to Colombia. Instead, he remained in Spain to study economics at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid where he first investigated how innovation can wreak what Joseph Schumpeter called 'creative destruction' on a market, and how technology can drive 'waves of progress' disrupting industries and ways of doing things. 'That was a very, very important lesson for me,' he told me. 'I learned how entrepreneurs and innovation are the driving forces.' Mejia graduated in 2008 as the economic collapse was spreading through Spain, with youth unemployment reaching near 50%. He then spent six months working at a resort in Turkey learning about customer experience before embarking for New York, where he arrived in February 2009 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn in the middle of winter. In New York, Mejia worked at a variety of jobs including for a PR Agency, for a company that analyzed film production tax and rebate incentives, and then for a small private equity firm founded by some Guggenheim partners, through which Mejia met a German technology company hoping to make inroads in the US, B2B, He convinced them to hire him as their 'one-man Swiss Army Knife.' Following these experiences, Mejia decided to start his first software company. He realized that the largest category in retail, groceries, was 'the most underdeveloped category in e-commerce.' No one had really devised a great way for supermarkets to have their customers shop online. To develop the software, Mejia partnered with a friend in Colombia who was building a software studio company, which turned out to be a way to get closer to the engineering and coding talent in Latin America. They created an online, mobile first, shopping experience that was like going down the aisles of a supermarket and choosing products for your basket; and which they offered to white-label for companies. Among Mejia's first investors was Chris Burch (one of the founders of Guggenheim Partners who I profiled here). 'And until today, Chris is a very, very close friend of mine,' Mejia said, 'and we've done a lot of business together and investments together. He's someone that I love and respect a lot, and [that] has a very unique mind.' At one point, Mejia and his partner got an inquiry from India. Mejia assumed it was someone wanting to pirate their software. Instead, it turned out to be a legitimate approach from Reliance, which was then leading the largest investment in history to build Jio, a company to connect billions of people to the internet and to products and services. Three weeks later, Mejia and his partner were on their way to Mumbai. He was all in. 'I was blown away by that ambition,' Mejia said. 'And my immediate next question [was]: What if you apply the same idea back to Latin America?' Logo for Rappi Courtesy of Rappi and Sebastian Mejia In 2015, along with two partners, Simon Borrero and Felipe Villamarin, Mejia launched Rappi, a consumer app offering groceries, restaurants and other products. This was not a business that was top-down but rather built with passion from the ground up and that pivoted to meet its customers' needs. It caught fire and began to expand exponentially. Rappi attracted capital from SoftBank, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and participated in Y Combinator. Rappi became Latin America's 'everything app.' Over the last decade, Rappi has grown to be an incubator for mobile first Latin American companies, a source of income for couriers of all sorts, a financial and banking platform, as well as having a philanthropic arm. In 2021, the company had a valuation of $5.25 Billion. Recently, Mejía stepped away from Rappi. He is now focused on building enduring, high-quality companies like Tako, while continuing to invest—but in a more concentrated and operationally involved way, including buying into or backing companies he can help shape directly. 'I know how to invest and I know how to allocate resources,' Mejía said. 'But at the core, I'm a builder. I know how to build teams, build products, sell, think in systems and remove bottlenecks.' Mejia believes that one of the most important aspects of a great company is their focus on exceptional technical / engineering talent. In building companies, he feels it is critical to give employees a mission, to give them purpose, to create a great place to work, filled with peers who are outstanding, because, Mejia says 'that's what any talented individual wants: to work with someone special.' Doing so makes a company more than an algorithm-driven enterprise. It becomes a place with soul that people feel part of – employees and customers alike. In company founders, he is looking for resilience, which he believes is essential to creating truly transformative and innovative products. Doing so is hard, so Mejia believes you need motivated mission critical founders who are crazy enough to want to be part of a team that is solving a unique problem. And who are goal-oriented to the point of disagreeableness. Mejia describes AI as a new paradigm. 'Everything changed.' Mejia said. 'How companies are built, how products get built, what great talent looks like to embrace this technology. You need to be a lifelong learner, be able to reinvent yourself and look for companies that leverage this technology and also have traits of defensibility.' logo for Tako Courtesy of Tako and Sebastian Mejia Tako, Mejia's recent venture, which launched in Brazil in 2023, takes advantage of Brazil's unique digital infrastructure. There is an old saying that most companies' most valuable asset, their people, goes home every night. Employees are the largest cost of many businesses. Software companies, from Oracle to Salesforce, to Microsoft's Nimble, are all what is called 'CRM's Customer Relationship Managers. Tako's payroll-related database is a sort of 'ERM' – an employee relationship manager. The people Tako services are its greatest commodity. According to Mejia, Brazil has 'some of the best fintechs on the planet,' as well as 'the most forward thinking central bank on the planet.' Brazil's laws are dense, dynamic, and enforced— making digital mastery and deployment of all the requirements a complex dataset to process. However, Mejia told me, ' If you can build a system that works in Brazil, you can build one that works anywhere.' However, Mejia believes that 'to endure, companies must be systems—not just features. Mission is more powerful than momentum.' Mejia describes Tako as 'a system of intelligence,' which is built on three pillars: Applications, which are deterministic software (for example a program that can organize a company's payroll). The second is a database of customer (or employee) information. Added to that is other available information about the individuals (that are public or which they offer up). And the third pillar is using AI to process information and complete the mission of the software. On that foundation new services and uses are engineered, Mejia said, while 'using the AI to develop predictive information that informs the customization and offerings to the individual or corporate user.' Tako. powered by large language models that integrate legal logic, regulations, and real-time company data, allows small and midsize businesses to stay compliant without building a large back office and provides large enterprises with the ability to manage complex payroll and people operations Backed by Ribbit Capital, a16z (Andreesen Horowitz), and long-term builders, Tako has already processed hundreds of millions in payroll, saving Brazilian companies time, money, while remaining in compliance with Brazil's myriad rules and regulations. But, in the end, it is a people-driven business. Tako has its roots in Brazil, but Mejía is a global citizen who now resides in the US and his ambitions are global. Mejia envisions a Panamerican awakening—a cross-continental coalition of talent, infrastructure, and entrepreneurship that can compete with China, defend digital sovereignty, and export innovation—not just commodities. 'A hundred percent of Mexico's telecom infrastructure is Huawei,' Mejía warns. 'The Chinese aren't coming—they're already here. If we don't build enduring platforms, someone else will. It's time to build bridges among us.' And do so with high quality companies that endure. That is the soul of Mejia's vision.
Reuters
07-05-2025
- Reuters
Lawsuits test Airbnb's alleged liability in carbon monoxide deaths
May 7 (Reuters) - Sebastian Mejia died in the shower of an Airbnb rental in Brazil in 2022, the alleged victim, opens new tab of carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty water heater. A Fulbright scholar, the 24-year-old Florida native was studying the country's indigenous communities. That same year, an American woman staying at an Airbnb (ABNB.O), opens new tab in Croatia allegedly shared his fate, as did a trio of American tourists at an Airbnb in Mexico City, a man on a work trip to San Luis Potosí, Mexico, and a Loyola Marymount graduate student at an Airbnb in Guadalajara in late 2021, court records show. None of the properties was equipped with detectors that would have alerted occupants to the odorless, colorless gas, the victims' families' allege in a series of wrongful death lawsuits against Airbnb. As the cases make their way through the courts, they raise questions about the reach of Airbnb's arbitration agreement and whether the short-term rental platform has a duty to protect its users from harm caused by third parties at properties it says it 'does not own, have a right to access, or control.' To find otherwise, Airbnb argues in court papers, opens new tab, would 'radically expand tort liability.' A spokesperson for the publicly traded San Francisco-based company, which reported more than $11 billion in revenue last year, said in a statement that there 'have been over 2 billion guest arrivals on Airbnb, and incidents are exceptionally rare.' The spokesperson added that Airbnb has given away more than 280,000 free combined smoke and carbon monoxide detectors to hosts. On Thursday, Airbnb lawyers from O'Melveny & Myers will face off at a hearing in San Francisco Superior Court against counsel for the widow of José Peñaloza Herrera to argue that the claims fail as a matter of law and should be dismissed. Herrera, a Mexican citizen, had been on a work trip to install machinery at an automotive plant when he died of carbon monoxide poisoning while sleeping in a room that contained a gas-powered water heater and other appliances, according to the complaint. Pedro Echarte, a partner at the Florida-based Haggard Law Firm who represents plaintiff Yessica Garcia Cardenas, argued in court papers, opens new tab that there have been at least 19 deaths due to carbon monoxide poisoning at Airbnb rentals abroad since 2013. Airbnb did not respond to my requests to confirm that number, which Echarte told me is based on news reports of the deaths. By the time Herrera died in December 2022, the company should have known it was a 'systemic problem,' Echarte said, especially at properties in Central and South America, where fuel-burning water heaters that can emit carbon monoxide are more common. Airbnb was 'on notice of repeated incidents of its guests dying' from the gas, he argued, but 'inadequately responded to the danger.' To be clear, carbon monoxide poisoning doesn't just happen at Airbnbs. For example, the teenage son of former New York Yankees outfielder Brett Gardner died of carbon monoxide poisoning in March while staying at a five-star hotel in Costa Rica, authorities determined last month. Assigning liability, however, can be far murkier when travelers rent from a third-party host. The big question: What duty – if any – does Airbnb owe its customers to keep them safe? After a carbon monoxide death of a Canadian tourist in Taiwan, plaintiffs alleged that Airbnb in a 2014 blog post (available here, opens new tab on the internet archive the Way Back Machine) stated it would 'require all Airbnb hosts to confirm that they have (carbon monoxide detection) devices installed in their listing.' That apparently didn't happen, given the subsequent lawsuits. When I asked Airbnb why, the spokesperson didn't provide an explanation. However, if a guest now books a listing where the host doesn't report having a carbon monoxide detector, Airbnb flags it in the booking confirmation, along with a recommendation, opens new tab to bring a portable detector. (You can buy one starting around $25.) Plaintiffs lawyers argue Airbnb should have reasonably foreseen there would be subsequent deaths by carbon monoxide poisoning at properties without the alarms — and should be held liable for negligence and premises liability as a result. 'The tragedy is that these deaths were so easily avoidable,' said James Ferraro, who along with partner Jose Becerra represents Rosa Martinez, whose son Sebastian Mejia died in Brazil. In suing Airbnb, Martinez alleges, opens new tab not just wrongful death — the only cause of action in Echarte's case — but also asserts broader claims including fraud, negligence and breach of fiduciary duty. She also seeks injunctive relief to force Airbnb to remove all active listings without carbon monoxide alarms. Airbnb initially asserted the entire case was subject to arbitration based on its terms of service. On appeal, it eventually withdrew its argument that the wrongful death claims were within the scope of the agreement. In March, the First Appellate District Court in San Francisco split the case, sending the portion seeking survivor benefits — relief for claims such as fraud that would have belonged to Mejia and passed to his successors in interest — to arbitration. However, the court ruled, opens new tab the wrongful death claims could be tried in court, as could the claim for public injunctive relief. Left unanswered: What if there are inconsistent rulings in the two forums? Last fall, a federal judge in San Francisco faced a similar dilemma in a lawsuit, opens new tab involving Monique Woods, the Airbnb guest who died in Croatia. U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney sent the successor-in-interest claims to arbitration and stayed the wrongful death claims. Chesney also noted that plaintiff Cindy Woods, the victim's mother, created an Airbnb account in 2013 and agreed to arbitrate all disputes. To conserve judicial resources and ensure consistency, the judge put the arbitration first. 'Here, the outcome of the wrongful death claims will depend upon the arbitrator's decision as to the viability of the survival claims,' she wrote, opens new tab. That's because the arbitrator will make findings on the same primary issues, such as what duties Airbnb owes its customers and whether the breach of any such duty was a proximate cause of injury. Of course, that also means the arbitrator is empowered to decide if the wrongful death claims can move forward, even if the claims themselves won't be arbitrated.
