Published in Svenska Dagbladet, 2024-08-03. Translated from Swedish.
From a garage to becoming Latin America’s most important tech company. The Mercado Libre success story sounds like a cliché — but with near-perfect timing, Marcos Galperin has built a company that Silicon Valley cannot touch.
“He is now morbidly obese, a drug addict, has cancer, AIDS and is an alcoholic.” That is how Marcos Galperin describes Argentina’s economy to The Economist. As the founder of the e-commerce platform Mercado Libre — and thereby Argentina’s richest man — he has become someone people listen to. Galperin swings hard with his criticism of left-wing politics and his praise of capitalism.
His position is easy to understand given his background. Capitalism has created enormous wealth for him. His company, Mercado Libre, has become the hub of e-commerce across all of Latin America.
Galperin came from a privileged starting point. His family owned a leather goods empire in Argentina, and for a time he considered becoming a professional rugby player. Combining elite sport with business proved too difficult, and he chose the latter.
In the late 1990s he enrolled at Stanford Graduate School of Business — GSB — in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Like many others who have passed through those doors — among them Reid Hoffman and Kevin Systrom, founders of LinkedIn and Instagram respectively — he spotted a market opportunity. Auction sites like eBay were growing rapidly. Why did nothing like this exist in Latin America?
He sensed a business opportunity. Galperin decided to start a company from a garage — exactly as the founding myth tends to go. The first seed of Mercado Libre was planted.
At the same time, on the American east coast, another would-be entrepreneur had the same idea. Argentine-born Alex Oxenford was studying at rival school Harvard Business School. He moved back home to set up his company, Deremate. Both launched in 1999, and neither knew a deep dotcom crisis was imminent. Oxenford took the fast, aggressive path — heavy venture capital, strong growth, quick execution. Galperin moved more cautiously, focusing on customer loyalty. When the crash came, Oxenford’s model became unsustainable. Risk capital dried up entirely.
After a few years of stagnation Oxenford’s side admitted defeat, and Deremate was sold to Mercado Libre. Dominance was established. It was time to expand.
The e-commerce giant we see today began to take shape. The platform is best described as a blend of Amazon, an online classifieds site, and PayPal all in one. It sells its own products and enables peer-to-peer commerce. Like Amazon, calling it a mere “website” is misleading — it is an ecosystem providing everything from logistics to payments and credit.
In 2007 it was time to scale seriously. Mercado Libre had expanded across Latin America and become a force in e-commerce that no one could ignore. The company decided to go public, listing on the American Nasdaq as the first Latin American company ever to do so.
Here too, timing proved decisive. On the very day of the IPO, what would become a global financial crisis began. Central banks injected liquidity into markets. A few months later Lehman Brothers collapsed. But Galperin managed to fund his company, got a strong start on the exchange, and navigated through the years that followed.
The third and final crisis was the pandemic. Galperin had just made a massive investment in a new logistics system capable of reaching customers across all of Latin America — infrastructure that enables commerce even in parts of the region where people have no bank account. When the pandemic hit, digital commerce became more important than ever. Galperin’s investment paid off immediately.
Today Mercado Libre has a market capitalisation of around $70 billion and is the region’s second-largest company, after an oil company. Galperin has moved the headquarters to Uruguay, but his engagement with Argentina continues. When Javier Milei became president in December 2023, Galperin posted an image on social media of birds breaking free from chains. The caption was short and clear: “free.”
Free trade has made Marcos Galperin personally worth around 63 billion kronor. He is one of the region’s largest employers and expects Mercado Libre to have 76,000 employees this year. Can anything stop them? It does not look that way today — and if history is any guide, timing has always been on Mercado Libre’s side.
