Mentored episode 2: Yunas Reguero

Mentored is a Facebook Live Series, where parallel18 visiting mentors share their knowledge, experiences and advice. Watch Live every Friday at 10 a.m.
Yunas Reguero is part of the Product Marketing for Commerce and Payment team at Facebook. He’s the second guest mentor and the first Puerto Rican in P18’s Mentored.
On his beginnings
I was born in Carolina, Puerto Rico. I decided to go to a small college in the U.S., where I studied Economics and Finance. I was very involved in management consulting, which I did for three, four years. It was then when I realized I did not want to be a partner in a consulting firm. I wanted to work at place that was using technology to disrupt. It didn’t matter what industry: logistics, marketing, payment…that’s when I made the transition to Square, the payment company. I worked in business operations, where we analyzed everything that was needed to help scale the business: the sales team, the marketing team, partnerships for global expansion. All kinds of analysis to create efficient processes so that the company can continues to grow.
What I realized then was that I wanted to help in the strategy of a company or product. The few ways you can do that is through a startup, where you define it or through a product-driven technology company. That’s where I made my transition to Facebook, working with everything related to payment and commerce on their five applications (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger and Oculus). Any commerce interaction, my team will be helping create that experience, from payment, transaction, international expansion and more.
On the similarities between a big company and a small startup
Everybody on the company is aligned in what we have to do today to move the metric forward. That means that if the engineering team has an idea for a new product, they’ll ask themselves “is that moving our metric forward?”, and if the answer is no, they won’t invest time or resources. We cannot be this big and be slow because then other companies, like the ones in parallel, would swoop in and disrupt.
That’s why there’s an obsession with moving fast, thinking always about the metrics. It’s the same way that startups operate. What [Facebook] has accomplished is a feeling that power is not centralized, which means that those closer to the problem can make decisions without being involved in bureaucracy. If we are closer to the issue, we understand the risks, how it aligns with the metrics; and if we see that the risks are low and we should do it, then the decision is to do it.
It’s an iterative mentality, we have to create the product, launch and learn. Many of the products I’m working right now, Facebook has never done before and we have to enter in the market and move quickly to win.
In Facebook, we have to make product decisions in a scrappy way, we have to create the mental and physical framework to evaluate and measure variables and make educated decisions. What I want the startups to understand is that, even though I work for a company like Facebook, I do not have a research or data scientist waiting for requests.
We have an internal saying: Growth is oxygen.
And if you’re not growing, if you don’t make the metrics you promised, the company will take away the product, it’ll be over.
On his research and metrics tools
In my analysis, what we want to understand is the order of magnitude of a certain product and understand where we have to move directionally, not specifically. We have to do it in under a week. What I usually do is google research studies, public studies about the market, the industry, the possible countries. I look at our competitors’ website to compare and see how they have thought out their business.
We create data models to say “this is the size of this opportunity for this reason, these are the variable that we should compare for these reasons.” It’s a conversation with the product managers, where I present my educated decision. Maybe there are certain variables that I haven’t considered or vice versa. We have that conversation to evolve the product and evolve the actual decision. It’s a very quick process.
On understanding the variables of expansion
You have to think about different variables to evaluate when you’re trying to make this decision. You have to ask “How big is the opportunity?” I know that the market sizing process can be scary and hard to understand. I want to demystify that process. It is an educated decision with data to back it up
Evaluate things like how big is that market, how does [the product or service] fits in that market, what type of coordination you need to make with your team. If you go to country like Brazil, 40% of the population pays through a method called Boleto. The seller emails a barcode, you take that barcode to the bank, they scan it, that alerts the seller, then the seller side of the process starts. Versus the U.S. where the penetration of credit cards is incredible. That changes the entire experience. And if you go to another country, like Mexico, how do you incorporate cash on delivery, which is what made über scale in Mexico.
Look at all those variables I mentioned to understand the cost benefit of the opportunity. If it takes me six months of engineering work but the opportunity is 10 times bigger than another one that takes four months…maybe it is worthy trade off because it will give you an advantage, a learning experience, a larger market that you’ll be able to capitalize.
On not dwelling in knowing the exact numbers
There’s something I’ve learned at Facebook: “It’s better to be directionally correct and fast than accurately wrong and slow.”
That means that it’s better to have some direction that’s relatively correct than to sit down and study something for three, four, five, six weeks more just to get a decimal that’s probably wrong anyway because it is an estimate. There is no data. You’re making assumptions based on what you understand from what you have spoken with your mentors. It’s not worth it to spend more time making the decision. It is better to know you’re directionally correct, make the decision and start there. You start to improve your product from the launch, when you expand and as you scale.
An example of how to analyze with no available data
It all depends. For example, with eCommerce. You quantify the market size through the amount of transactions you’d have. I found a website that had the total spent in online sales and offline sales. Well, I only need online, let’s say it’s $2billion. Then I found another database that said that 15% of the sales are done online. Well, you take both numbers and you get an estimate of how much is spent online.
Well, that number still won’t tell me much because I’m a payment company and what I need is the amount of transactions. How do I change that number to transactions? Well, I find the average order value in the U.S. is $100. If I take into consideration the money exchange, the country’s GDP, you notice that it will not be the same amount. Maybe it’s just an average of $15. You use that number and divide by the transaction size. It will be a wrong number, but you’ll have an idea. That’s my process to understand that type of market sizing.
Everybody is going to give you an opinion based on their experiences. What I say to my mentees is “I’m telling you this through the lens of Square and Facebook that is Yunas.” You have to understand the logic of what I’m explaining and apply it your way to your business because it is different, your circumstances are different. You have to take a little bit of each person to make your decisions that adds value to you to continue growing your company.
Recommended reading and listening
Podcast: NPR’s How I Built This, where they interview the founders of great, big companies.
Book: Marcus Aurelius’ Meditation. It’s a book for people working with high stress, pressure, like in the startup and technology world. It helped me be more centered and concentrate on what I can control instead of those things I cannot control.
You can rewatch (in Spanish) this Mentored episode here.
*Translated and edited for the blog
