eBay agreed to acquire all of MercadoLibre before walking away
Marcos Galperin · 20VC: MercadoLibre Founder Marcos Galperin on Optimising Decision-Making, Effective Resource Allocation, Growth vs Profitability, Fundraising Strategies and more on the Journey To Build a $72Bn Market Cap Company · May 7, 2021 · at 23:23
Marcos Galperin is the founder and CEO of MercadoLibre. He discusses how eBay, which owned 20% of MercadoLibre, agreed to buy the remaining 80% but backed out prior to closing.
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“Later on, at a much higher valuation, we did agree To sell. This was with eBay. At the time, eBay was a 20% owner of Mercado Libre, and they wanted to acquire the remaining 80%. And then, after we had agreed, they decided to walk away, which was pretty traumatic for us, because we still needed to build many things for us to become successful, and we thought it was going to be much easier to build those things with eBay slash PayPal support.”
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“We never had that hockey stick growth moment until maybe now with COVID. But we were always growing at 30 to 40% for 20 years, but we never grew 700% from one year to the next.”
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“I think eBay's media category was bigger than Amazon's GMV. So eBay was really in those days like Amazon plus Google.”
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