This episode of the Bits, Bytes and Business is a conversation with Mateo Bervejillo, CEO of Xseed and author of Back to Basics. Bhairav and Mateo dig into the parts of leadership that rarely get taught explicitly: how to transition from individual contributor to leader, how to take over a team that didn’t choose you, and what actually keeps people motivated once the title changes.
What You Will Learn From Listening
Why a legal or risk-averse mindset can quietly work against entrepreneurial ambition
How losing the fear of rejection changed the trajectory of Mateo’s career
The difference between inheriting a team and building one, and why rushing either is the biggest mistake leaders make
Why “alignment of incentives” matters more than authority when earning a new team’s trust
How to hire for cultural and organisational-stage fit, not just technical skill
The hardest transition in scaling a business: moving from doing the work yourself to achieving results through others
Why organisational politics are a normal human dynamic rather than something to eliminate
The myths of leadership, including why position alone doesn’t earn respect or extra effort from a team
How to actually measure whether you’re succeeding as a leader
Why building a network outside your current job is one of the most underrated career moves
Memorable Quotes
On rejection: the “no” is a given going in, so the only real outcome you’re risking is a “yes.”
On leading a team you didn’t choose: it’s not what you say that earns trust, it’s how consistently you show up every day.
On scaling: the moment someone told him she was tired of hearing his voice on client calls and wanted to hear his team instead, was the moment he realised how badly he was failing at delegation.
On leadership myths: you’re effectively on camera all the time, and the small things, how you treat a server at lunch, matter more than people think.
On measuring success as a leader: if someone leaves and you didn’t see it coming, that’s on you; if you saw it coming and helped them go, that’s a different story.
Summary
Mateo Bervejillo’s path to leadership didn’t start in tech. He trained as an attorney in Uruguay, then moved into outsourcing, running procurement, legal, and accounts payable functions for PwC’s US operations before taking on a much larger vendor management role at Altisource, where he led teams across Uruguay, India, and the US. When his employer asked him to relocate to a city he didn’t want to live in, on the condition that he first fire his existing team, he refused, and set in motion the chain of events that eventually pushed him into entrepreneurship.
That pivot came from a single conversation with a friend who told him the “no” is a given, so asking only ever risks a “yes.”
The conversation moves through the four pillars of Mateo’s book, Back to Basics: managing your boss, managing yourself, managing your team, and managing sideways through organisational politics. They cover the practical difference between inheriting a team and building one from scratch, how to hire for the right stage of a company rather than just technical skill, and why so many leaders stumble when they have to let go of doing the work themselves in order to scale.
The back half of the episode turns to the myths of leadership: the assumption that professional distance builds respect, when in reality it’s consistency and small daily choices that earn trust. If you’re navigating a leadership transition, whether you’ve just inherited a team or are building one for the first time, this episode is worth your time.
