The Ledger
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Fanton: LATAM Tech Worker Energy Is 2-3x The European Average
“If you pick somebody in Rappi or iFood or MercadoLibre, the energy and the passion of those people is, in my experience, two, three X is no more of what I see in, in the average here in Europe, right?”
eBay agreed to acquire all of MercadoLibre before walking away
“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 traumat…”
Borrero: Latin America will produce many $100B tech companies
“It has shown that in Latin America, there's going to be a lot of other hundred billion dollar companies”
Claure regrets SoftBank missing major MercadoLibre investment in 2018
“So MercadoLibre, in July, 2018, the value was significantly less, and I didn't push mass enough for us to make an enormous play with MercadoLibre, because I didn't truly understand investing back then.”
Out-of-Touch MercadoLibre Board Members Inspired the Founding of Kaszek
“Part of us being motivated to start Kasek with Hernan was that we had board members at Mercado Libre who were members of the banks or these financial institutions, and they were really great guys and really smart guys and well-intended, but they had no idea of…”
MercadoLibre rejected a $230M buyout offer on $6M revenue in 2001
“The first one was in 2001. I think we had like six million dollars of revenues, and we declined an offer for two hundred and thirty million dollars, which valuation was probably an incredibly rich offer.”
Marcos Galperin expects to step down as MercadoLibre CEO within five years
“So I was saying earlier, I think the next five years and the chapter of success for me would entail maybe transitioning out of my role to, I don't know, to a chairman role or something like that, and being able to see Mercado Libre with the same entrepreneuria…”
MercadoLibre grew 30-40% annually for 20 years without a hockey stick
“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.”
Fanton: Achieved 40x Return On $50K Mercado Libre Investment Over 14 Years
“I remember I bought 1415, 50,000 dollars or something, or I know some number, not a small number, and I kept it and it's 40 times until today.”
Dubugras: Mercado Libre's board never discusses share prices or public markets
“And I haven't heard in the mailing board, one discussion about the markets, one discussion about investors and the share price. It's all Product and strategy. Product and strategy. Product and strategy.”
MercadoLibre had 30% EBITDA margins and zero debt in 2008
“But by the end of that year, we were in great shape. The business was always very solid. Our stock had gone down, but we were making money. We had 30% EBITDA margins. We were doubling our business year over year. We had no debt.”
MercadoLibre IPO'd in 2007 Retaining Half Its 2000 Venture Capital
“We took the company public on Nasdaq in 2007. I was the CFO, so I led the charge there. We did that with half of the capital we had raised in 2000, still in the bank, and we had a very profitable business.”
Failed concepts usually stem from flawed execution rather than bad ideas
“Make sure that we iterate several times before we conclude that it is not the right idea, because often it's a right idea, but it's a wrong implementation or the wrong execution.”
Central banks coordinated a massive liquidity intervention on MercadoLibre's IPO day
“The day that we IPO'd in August of 2007, that same day was the first time since nine 11 that the Federal Reserve, the Japanese Central Bank and the European Central Bank had to intervene in the markets in a coordinated fashion to provide liquidity.”
Successful tech companies must vertically integrate to stay competitive on cost
“Initially you start in one layer of the stack, but once you have become very successful in that layer, it's very likely that you will want to integrate one way or And maybe the other way, as we're doing in fintech, because you need to become more efficient. Th…”
Market crashes eliminate narrative-driven startups and strengthen real executors
“These things, they clear the market of many competitors and of many companies that have a great story, but they are not really delivering, and they actually help the companies that are delivering.”
MercadoLibre will reach 30,000 employees by the end of 2021
“We have a technology team of almost 8000 people, and this year we're going to end up with 30,000 employees.”
Hommels: Lee Fixel Led Tiger Global's Top Emerging Market Deals in His Twenties
“So, when he was at Tiger, so he was in MercadoLibre, he was in Yandex, he was in Flipkart, and it basically, it was A one man show on the plane, starting there was 28, 29.”
MercadoLibre Faced 100 Regional Competitors at Dot-Com Peak
“We had the most extraordinary roller coaster journey with something like a hundred competitors in the region doing exactly what we were doing at the peak of the bubble in early 2000.”
MercadoLibre stock fell 90% post-IPO during 2008 crash
“I think our stock price, we had been public for a few months, went down 90%.”