“I was very enthusiastic about what I thought the internet was going to do to the world.”
MARCOS GALPERIN, CEO, MERCADOLIBRE
WHEN MARCOS GALPERIN started online marketplace MercadoLibre in a parking garage, he wasn’t trying to evoke the origin stories of U.S. tech companies like Hewlett-Packard and Apple. In Buenos Aires in 1999, the garage of his father’s leather company was just the best option for fast broadband internet. “It was a building with terrible offices, but at least we had good connectivity,” he says.
But like his Big Tech brethren, Galperin spun gold from the dingiest of spaces. Today, Galperin is one of the wealthiest men in Latin America, with an estimated net worth of over $7 billion thanks to MercadoLibre’s astronomical growth. The company, now based in Uruguay, started as a clone of eBay but today is known as the Amazon of Latin America. The e-commerce site sold over $11 billion in goods in the third quarter of 2023, a nearly 60%
