Money changes everything: Ten leadership lessons from my summers of rugby.
The last three years of high school hit differently. My dad had AIDS and had to move away to seek treatment. Suddenly, my mom had to go back to teaching college classes. Money was tight. My family was deeply wounded. My home was chaotic. Then, my great-grandmother, whom I loved so much, got sick and finally died in front of my eyes. In the next few months, I would visit my dad once a month in the hospital to bring him money, and I would see how they extracted a green liquid from the spine of a beautiful nineteen-year-old boy, how a murderer who stabbed someone on the streets was the person who lovingly took care of my dad, and how some of the prostitutes under care would escape the hospital to work and spread the disease. It was 1993 and I was fifteen.
In a pattern that has followed me all of my life, I tried to shoulder as many responsibilities as I could. I completely took care of myself. I helped raise my brother. I started tutoring and gave the proceeds to my mom to help with our expenses. I also rearranged my life: I dropped out of art school and and out of music school and threw myself into sports. I started with track and field, then volleyball, then swimming. It felt good to start from zero and it felt great to be exhausted. I spent every single minute of free time swimming and running. My track coach begged me to focus on running so I could compete in nationals in the 800-meter event, but in the water I couldn’t hear the whispers that followed me around. In the water I could cry, and I could clear my head.
In Argentina, popular girls play field hockey and popular boys play rugby. The national teams (las Leonas and los Pumas) are amazing. In my club, these are the biggest sports. Some of the players go on to the national team. In 1993, the fittest athletes in the club, by far, were on the track team. In our team we had national champions, Pan-American champions, Olympians. The rugby coach of the young rugby divisions (Under16, U17, U18, U19), was wise to this, and decided he would like his players to train with us in the pre-season that year. If you’ve never practiced sports, pre-season training comes after about a month of “vacation” and it’s four to six weeks of intense training and physical conditioning.
So the coaches got together and came up with a plan. They paired a few rugbiers who had specific needs with some athletes who could help them meet those needs. I got paired with a number seven, or openside-flanker. All his teammates made fun of him for being paired with a girl and a newbie. He needed to improve his running form and increase his stamina. He thought he would have it easy. What he didn’t know is that my energy is boundless and that I’m stronger than I seem. The first day of training together, I planned what I thought would be a 1-hour session: a “light” 3.5 km jog under the 11am summer sun as a warmup, arriving at El Plumazo (a super nice branch of the club, that features cascading pools, a rugby field and tennis courts), where we would do running drills focusing on technique, take a dip in the pool for fun, and then run back to the city. I was ready to run, in an Arena bikini and men’s cotton boxer shorts (they are lighter than regular cotton shorts and more comfortable for running in the heat). He showed up in full rugby gear and a bag complete with towel and snacks. I advised him to leave the bag behind. “Nonsense! This way you’ll be able to keep up.” Reader, one person couldn’t keep up, and it wasn’t me. I made it in about 15 minutes. It took him about half an hour to make it to Plumazo, and he was dead on arrival.
From then on, he took our training seriously, and we became fast friends. He joined the track team. We trained together every day. I helped him pick presents for his girlfriend. He helped me get a date with my crush, one of his teammates. Eventually, amidst my disdain, he would teach me to play, and to love, rugby. I think one year earlier, before my world was turned upside down, before everything I knew about what’s good and what’s bad and what’s principled was brought into question, my contempt for the bro-ey rugby culture would have been a hurdle too high to transcend. But I had been humbled, and I was open to being proven wrong.
The 90’s were great years for rugby. I was obsessed with Jonah Lomu. I was in love with Mike Catt. I was a huge Agustín Pichot fan. They were also pivotal years for rugby: in 1995 the IRB moved from a strict amateur sport to being open to professional play. Also in this period, women’s rugby became more widely accepted.
I would like to clarify that in this article, when I talk about “rugby”, I mean men’s rugby union, or men’s rugby fifteen. Back then, in my little town, rugby was still a men’s sport, and union was the rule of the land.
Rugby taught me lessons that completely changed the way I understand life, and some of those lessons still ring true today. Money changes everything. Every body has a place on the team. Live or die, it’s your choice. And when the chips fall, even in a battle of muscles and sweat, and sinews and bones, sweet poetry can win the war.
1. Form overcomes matter.
My rugby training started with a few sessions of touch rugby, just for fun. No tackling, just touching your opponent. At one point, some of the older players took me under their wing and showed me how to improve my passing, kicking, and tackling. Because I was 110 lbs, and they were 180+ lbs, I was at an obvious disadvantage. But I practiced and perfected my moves for hours, and eventually got pretty good, and was able to tackle even some of the bigger guys.
Startups are in a similar position. You don’t have the muscle and weight of sheer resources and employee count, but you can have hard focus and perfect just one thing until you are undeniably good. This has been the path of countless startups: Slack, YouTube, Waze, Substack.
2. Money changes everything.
In 1995, rugby union was declared by the International Rugby Board an “open” game, meaning players could receive payments and other benefits. Until then, rugby was an amateur game. However, rugby league, fully professional, had been attracting players from rugby union and was a threat. This was a huge deal in the sport. Until then, most players in a national team would have degrees like architect, M.D. or engineer, since they needed to have another career to support themselves. This meant that players with more humble backgrounds — unlike in soccer — were often excluded from playing. It also gave the game a certain idealism that was undeniable: all players were there for the love of the colors and passion for the sport.
Since rugby has gone pro, the pace of the game has changed. Teams now are physically stronger and fitter, and there’s less room for fanciful talent and raw ability. In the same way, when your company raises a good round, you are going pro. Even if it’s just your buddies and you, you will need to hire soon. This is a good time to drop the inside jokes, and create some structures and ground rules. Maybe you’ll be like Whatsapp or Craigslist and remain a small, tight-knit team while growing globally. But chances are that to grow as a company you will have to build a team and let go of some of the things you love about the culture. You don’t want to be Sam Bankman-Fried, using Quickbooks for million-dollar transactions. That kind of thing can land you in jail. If you are proactive, at least you can decide where you want the more polished culture to go.
3. Every body has a place on the team.
One of the things I love about rugby is that it requires a diverse team. Props have to be big and strong because they form, with the hooker, the first row of the scrum. Hookers are traditionally short, stocky and big. The scrum-half (rugby’s quarterback, but please don’t take my word for it, I know nothing about American football) was traditionally “small”, around 5ft 9in tall and lean, though since the professionalization of the sport they have been getting bigger. You get the gist. You need players to be short, and tall, and big, and small, and fast, and strong — there’s more biotype diversity than in any other sport I know of. And you really need them: you can’t play without a specialized hooker, for example. If you don’t have one, you have to concede the game.
I think this concept can really translate to small- and medium-sized startups. I remember the case of a pretty successful mid-size startup in adtech. They had on their team a world class cowboy coder. She could put functional stuff together faster than you can say deploy, and she wrote much of the code that was the core to the business. However, she bridled against a 9’to’5, 5 days a week, 12 months a year type of schedule. So they let her travel the world and do her thing. Whenever she was needed, she would pull all-nighters and work until whatever needed to be done was done. She was essential to the company, and she stayed there for a long time because she was given that flexibility. It was an arrangement that worked for everyone.
It’s a blessing to be a small operation where you can make the best of different types of brilliant people who might not find a fit in a more vanilla, square place. Find where they shine, and find a setup that accommodates their needs and wants and the companies’ needs and goals.
4. All Sevens players can play Fifteen-a-side. Not all Fifteen players can play Sevens.
If you think that rugby might not be your cup of tea, hold on a minute. Look at rugby sevens. Here’s the USA team defeating Ireland. And here’s an impressive victory of Argentina over Fiji. Seven-a-side rugby is fifteen’s littler, faster, funner cousin. It’s insanely enjoyable to play, it’s intensely exciting to watch, it’s easier to engage with. I haven’t watched rugby in years and watching Sevens matches these last few weeks has been super distracting. It’s so compelling, it’s hard to stop watching.
Though the rules for sevens are like the rules of fifteen, there are a few differences. Most significantly, each half lasts 7 minutes (instead of 40 minutes), each team has seven players (instead of fifteen), the scrums consist of one row of three players (instead of three rows of eight players.) This makes the game fast paced and thrilling, and because of that, sevens players are usually backs, and tend to have leaner bodies. Fifteen players need weight and strength to add power to the scrum, among other things, and sevens players need speed and mobility to be competitive. In general, all sevens players can play fifteen, but not all fifteen players can play sevens.
In the same way, most people with a startup background can do great in a corporate environment, but not everyone with a corporate background can excel at a startup. The weird thing is, we behave as if the opposite was true: startups open their doors to corporate peeps all the time, but BigCos don’t know what to do with someone who has mostly startup experience. Steve Jobs talked about this problem with “professional managers” and how they knew how to manage, but they didn’t know how to “do” anything. To excel in a corporate environment you have to learn to navigate corporate politics and go through corporate red tape and processes. Fitting into the structure takes a lot of time and is a big part of the job.
In a startup, building and shipping is the main job, and communication is better when it’s direct and clear. Someone with more corporate experience might struggle to keep up and become a drag on the culture. A startup person, however, can better adapt to a corporate environment. Yes, they might become frustrated with the pace, they might have a hard time when they realize that some people’s only skill is politics or that the product that will take them eighteen months to build is already heading to the chopping block, and theirs is a Sisyphean task. If they can move past the emotional discomfort, they will be a great asset for the org. On the other hand, in the same way that you can’t release a domesticated animal into the wild, a political animal has little to do in a skunkworks shop. They might never feel discomfort, because chances are they don’t even “see” what needs to be done.
5. The “third half” makes a difference.
Traditionally, after the match, all the players from both teams would get together to drink, eat, and party. It doesn’t matter who’s won or lost, or what happened during the match, in the third half everybody celebrates together. Emotions are regulated, tensions subside, and friendships are born. Even though I was never part of a third half, I think it’s one of the most inspiring elements of the sport, the space where true brotherhood is born, and where fair play is consecrated. It has a classical vibe, like something out of ancient Greece. Through the years you learn that you can’t foul and cheat the buddy you’ll share beers with later. Your opponent is also your comrade.
In the same way, I believe conferences should be good for more than networking. I believe fun and creative festival — conferences, like SXSW, or like Burning Man (sort of) are key to innovation. It’s kind of sad that SXSW is the only one of its kind. There’s space for littler events throughout the year where pure business is not the only goal, but there’s also celebration and merry excitement and ideas are cooked and partnerships are born. Organizing such events is my ultimate goal for Privie. I think excitement and possibility and even magic are missing from the conversation. I really want to throw a wonderful party, I wanted to do it when I arrived in SF in 2013 and I want to do it now. Because I think the ecosystem needs it, and we need it, and I need it. And because I can.
6. Cross pollination is a maximizing tool.
The pre-season training I did with the track+rugby mix was a complete success. Rugby players improved their physical condition and techniques. And the track team attracted some of those players into their ranks.
Cross pollination is a standard practice, used to improve the understanding of how different teams work or on what they are doing. Pairing coders together so that they can help each other is a common practice. What doesn’t happen often, and I think should, is having cross pollination as an habitual, planned occurrence through the calendar year. I know it sounds weird, but hear me out. Disdain and misjudgement of what someone else’s job consists of is prevalent and noxious. Working from home is making us sad and isolated. These are big problems that might be solved by having teams that collaborate but not necessarily work together day to day, like a backend team and an analytics team, or a marketing team and a sales team. It might be oblique in terms of productivity, but better understanding each other’s tasks and processes can bring new respect and new ideas on how to improve and innovate. It’s a way to mimic the kind of inspired serendipity that happens in small core teams or well-designed offices. At a time when digging the right hole is more important than digging faster, systematic cross pollination might be the answer.
7. Toxic masculinity is toxic for men.
As I mentioned earlier, the cross pollination of track and rugby during the pre-season resulted in some rugbiers joining the track team. Some of the track athletes were tempted to join rugby too, but eventually they refrained. Rugby, at least in Argentina, is infamous for its cruel hazing rituals to initiate new team members. The apprehension about going through such ordeals was too high a hurdle for most.
In the same way, even though toxic masculinity seems to only affect women, it’s affecting the men on your team, too. You may never know it, because toxic masculinity creates an environment where there’s no space to show your true self or express your true feelings, but in the same way that such a culture stifles and expels women and LGTBQ peeps, it also stifles and expels men who don’t feel reflected by it.
8. Girls can be bro-ey too.
Every summer, in my town of Paraná, we celebrate the National Rugby Sevens tournament.. Those long weekends were an interesting time to be a teenage girl full of hormones. Imagine if every year the Victoria’s Secret fashion show was held in the same little city, and dozens of models inundated the streets, that you, as a 15-year-old boy, are trying to navigate. Something like that, but gorgeous male athletes instead of models, and horny girls instead of horny boys. We would go to the matches, usually held at Plumazo, armed with binoculars. Yes, most of us girls had binoculars to “follow the game.” Except our gaze seldom followed the oval. We had a lot of fun joking around and objectifying men shamelessly. We practically drooled when a particularly hot guy walked by. We flirted and we drew plans to better hunt on Saturday night, when we’d go dancing. As bro-ey as this all might sound, it never resulted in assault, or rape or any kind of violence. I think this is a key difference between men and women. It’s not that women are less lustful or raunchy, but that — either due to different socialization or for lack of opportunity — women don’t push their desires forward beyond what might be appropriate in a situation`.
Fast-forward to today. Most of my conversations with my closest friends, men and women, invariably include roaring laughter, and discussing sex and money. It somehow happens, organically. Of course we also discuss other subjects: anything from raising children, to furthering our careers, even childhood trauma. We end up having deep conversations and strong bonds, maybe despite our insolent chats, maybe because of them. So I understand very well how entertaining and even important these exchanges are.
However, these are private, intimate conversations that happen outside the workplace. Most times, when a woman is turned on by a man, even a co-worker, she doesn’t hurt their careers, or make unwanted advances, or send crotch pics. Not because her feelings are less intense, or because she is virtuous or frigid: she’s just keeping her shit together. We are managing our emotions. We are regulating our response. We are wearing liners in our panties. All of this takes training, forethought, groundwork, and design. It doesn’t happen out of nowhere. It looks like it because we’ve been raised to do these things since we are toddlers. But just as we are trainable, you boys are trainable too. So, please, practice moderation. Meaning, try to keep your shit together. I hear Seneca can help.
9- Poetry is for winners.
The Haka is, to me, one of the most spectacular displays in rugby. It’s a Maori ceremonial dance performed by the All Blacks, New Zealand’s national squad. The All Blacks perform two hakas: the Ka Mate and the Kapa o Pango. Ka Mate is a traditional war haka, Kapa o Pango was composed specifically for the All Blacks.
Ka Mate specifically speaks to my heart. Here are the lyrics for it, with translation.
Ka mate! Ka mate! Ka ora! Ka ora!
I die! I die! I live! I live!
Ka mate! Ka mate! Ka ora! Ka ora!
I die! I die! I live! I live!
Tenei te tangata puhuru huru
This is the hairy man
Nana nei i tiki mai
Who fetched the Sun
Whakawhiti te ra
And caused it to shine again
A upa … ne! ka upa … ne!
One upward step! Another upward step!
A upane kaupane whiti te ra!
An upward step, another.. the Sun shines!!
Hi !!!
This is a war chant, but it’s also a peace chant. Its beauty and its almost cheesy quality are deceiving. It starts by describing a dire situation, certain death; and soon after, the appearance of hope and life. The leader has fulfilled an impossible task: he has conquered battle from seemingly inescapable defeat and he has brought peace. He’s made the sun shine, not just for his side, but for all.
I love that in the duality of Ka Mate and Ka Ora, apparently fated, there’s a choice. It expresses how your true leader, who is your most honest self, can choose, no matter how hard things are, to reach for the impossible, and fetch the Sun and make it shine again. One step at a time, he makes the Sun shine. The simplicity, the beauty, the wisdom and the depth of the Ka Mate are stunning to me. The fierceness with which it is performed is so relevant, because living and transiting through hard situations, while summoning from inside of you not only the power to survive, but also the might to succeed, is the bravest, most daring, most defiant choice you can make. Fueled by these words and by this fire, it makes sense that the All Blacks are the best rugby team of all time.
This kind of poetry has powered progress, innovation, and technology for centuries. The Gettysburg address inspired me as a little kid growing up in Argentina, and it made me proud of the USA, just as it has inspired soldiers to fight, citizens to contribute their best, and countries to pursue democracy. Stuart Brand, and his Whole Earth Catalog inspired millions, like the Homebrew Computer Club, and like Steve Jobs, and like us (if you haven’t noticed, this site borrowed heavily from WEC’s aesthetics and ideals). After all, in Silicon Valley, acquiring the right tools and the right skills is still a subject du jour.
Apple’s Think Different campaign energized a lot of us for decades, a siren song calling us to leave more certain paths in favor of building a new world through technology, art and science. Steve Jobs himself used the power of poetry in every carefully scripted event to get us excited about everything that we could create with iMacs and iBooks and iPhones. And I think Travis Kalanick (my pal!) got us excited and riled up not just for Uber, but also against taxis and the corruption they represent all around the world. As a CEO he’s a great general, but as a speaker he’s a great bard. The way he speaks reminds me a little of Homer’s Iliad: he’s expressive, raw, lyrical, moving. There’s honor and heroism in his convictions. There’s wrath and hubris, too. He inspired his army to achieve unthinkable deeds in five short years through his breathtaking leadership skills but also through his straightforward talent as a troubadour.
But from 2016 to now there’s been silence. There’s no rhyme and there’s no song, and there’s no undeniable leader calling us to achieve the impossible task. There’s nobody to fetch the Sun and make it shine for all. That’s a second reason why I started Privie: to interview founders and showcase them and their companies. I want to learn about what they are working on and about the technology they are using. I want to know about their little rituals and about their creative process. I want to drink their passion, and I want to be inspired.
Hopefully we’ll walk this road together and you’ll be swept off your feet, too.
10- Ka ora: choose to live another day.
In my 20s, every morning, I would ask myself: Ka Mate? Ka Ora? Do I choose death today? Or do I choose life? Each day I chose life, and that question made all the difference. My 20s were the time I looked forward to during my extremely hard childhood: I would go to Law School in the University where my dad taught International Law. He would mentor me and we would have a great time together. But then my dad got sick, and died before I finished high school. The next decade would be like a chaotic wave of misfortunes, with me trying to pursue Law School, and a myriad of deaths, far-fetched adversities, and burdensome expectations forcing me to drop out of college over and over again. Looking back, I can’t believe the sheer amount of shit I went through, mostly on my own, and I can’t believe that I survived. The fact that I am alive today is a miracle. Will I live? Or will I die? It made all the difference, because it made me responsible for my fate, and because it made it a choice, no matter what lay ahead.
You have a choice, too. Because we will die one day, that much we know. And because dying is a given, it’s the easy way out. You might as well choose to be an original, and choose to live, and to be truly alive. The same goes for each big decision in business: Ka Mate? Ka Ora? Are you making the decision that ensures a long life for your company? Or are you making decisions based on fear, pride, social pressure? Sometimes a leap can be foolish, and sometimes it can be the only way through. This question will bring you clarity and hopefully, will make you a little bit wiser.
Today I choose to fetch the Sun and make it shine again. One step up. Another step. One step up. The Sun shines!
