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
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2021
⏱️ 34 minutes
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Summary
Marcos Galperin is the Founder and CEO @ MercadoLibre, one of LATAM's most successful companies of the last 2 decades. Today MercadoLibre's market cap exceeds $78Bn and the business includes everything from commerce to payments to logistics. Marcos is widely considered one of the great entrepreneurs of the last 2 decades scaling the business from its founding in 1999 while in business school at Stanford to today, a leader in LATAM operating across 18 countries and plans to end 2021 with over 32,000 employees.
In Today’s Episode with Marcos Galperin You Will Learn:
1.) How Marcos made his way into the world of startups and came up with the idea for MercadoLibre while at Stanford Business School?
2.) Talent Acquisition and Retention: What have been some of Marcos' biggest lessons on what it takes to acquire A* talent? Does Marcos believe individuals can scale across company stages? When is a stretch hire a stretch too far? What has been the secret to Marcos having such a retained leadership team? What works? What does not?
3.) Risk and Decision-Making: How does Marcos evaluate his relationship to risk today? What frameworks does Marcos use to make effective decisions today? How does Marcos think about short term vs long term when it comes to resource allocation? How does Marcos prioritise where he makes decisions vs where he is willing to delegate?
4.) Funding and The Crash: How does Marcos reflect on his biggest lessons from going through 2 crashes with MercadoLibre? How did he change the way he ran the business post crash? How does Marcos advise founders today when big rounds are on offer, take the money or wait? What other components are important to consider in this decision?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Marcos Galperin
Parker’s Favourite Book: Built To Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back. This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, for the episode today, we feature one of the |
| 0:04.4 | great entrepreneurs of the last two decades. He scaled his business from an idea at business school |
| 0:09.1 | to a 78 billion dollar market cap company today, operating in 18 countries with 32,000 employees |
| 0:15.6 | by the end of this year. What a journey, and so with that, I'm thrilled to welcome Marcos Galparin, |
| 0:20.2 | founder and CEO at |
| 0:21.3 | Mercado Libre, one of Latam's most successful companies with a business that today includes |
| 0:26.1 | everything from commerce to payments to logistics. And I'd also want to say a huge thank you |
| 0:30.5 | to Mickey at Ribbitt for the introduction, and also to Nico at Kazek for some great question |
| 0:34.7 | suggestions today, a real team effort there. But before we move |
| 0:37.8 | into the show today, Mercury is building full stack banking for startups, applying under 10 |
| 0:42.5 | minutes from anywhere for FDIC insured bank accounts, physical and virtual debit cards, domestic and |
| 0:47.8 | international wires, and integrations with gusto, stripe, quickbooks, plaid, basically every other |
| 0:52.8 | tool your startup uses. They also offer unusual |
| 0:55.3 | features like API Access, custom team management, and their newly launched Mercury Treasury, |
| 1:00.6 | a cash management product for high-growth startups. They'll even help you build your startup with |
| 1:05.1 | Mercury Rays, a program to connect you to Silicon Valley's top investors, head over to Mercury.com |
| 1:10.5 | forward slash sign up to apply. And speaking of full-stack banking's top investors, head over to Mercury.com forward slash sign up to |
| 1:11.7 | apply. And speaking of full stat banking there with Mercury, I have to say I just love using Angelist's |
| 1:16.5 | fund admin platform to manage my investments. The team and platform at AngelList take care of all my |
| 1:21.7 | back office needs so that I can focus on working with great founders. Leading fund managers have made |
| 1:26.4 | over 10,000 investments into |
| 1:28.2 | 6,000 startups for our Angel List, all online and all in one place, and with recently announced |
... |
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