Mercado Libre: The Amazon–PayPal Hybrid That Conquered Latin America

A Founder Who Bet Big on LatAm

When people talk about Mercado Libre, most just think of it as Latin America’s Amazon. But this thing didn’t just pop up out of nowhere. Marcos Galperin built this from the ground up in Argentina—when the idea of e-commerce in the region sounded like a joke to most people.

He started it back at Stanford in the late '90s, pitching it as a localized eBay for Latin America. The idea wasn’t complicated, but the market was. You had low internet penetration, barely any credit card usage, unstable currencies, and almost no logistics network. But Galperin saw the gap and just went for it.

Most investors laughed. Too risky. Too much political and economic uncertainty. But he kept pushing. Cold-called firms. Flew around Latin America trying to raise money with nothing but a deck. Eventually, JPMorgan and eBay came on board. That was the start.

From the beginning, Galperin knew the marketplace wasn’t enough. You can’t just connect buyers and sellers in countries where no one trusts the system, no one can pay reliably, and deliveries don’t show up. So he built the rails himself—Mercado Pago for payments, Envios for logistics, and eventually their own ads platform. Everything in-house.

He wasn’t trying to copy Amazon or PayPal. He had no choice but to become both. No one else was going to build the stuff MELI needed to scale, so they did it themselves.

And he stayed disciplined. When other LatAm startups were burning VC money to chase growth, MELI stayed focused on cash flow and unit economics. That’s why they survived 2001, 2008, Argentina’s chaos, and COVID while others didn’t.

He never tried to go global. He stuck to Latin America. While other CEOs chased attention in the U.S. and Europe, Galperin focused on building trust and infrastructure locally. That’s a big reason MELI has been able to outperform Amazon in key markets like Argentina and Brazil.

Their logistics network today delivers 74% of packages in under 48 hours. That didn’t just happen. That’s the result of a 20-year plan, not some quick win. Same with Mercado Pago. It's not just a checkout button—it’s a full-blown payments ecosystem with QR codes, wallets, credit, and merchant tools all bundled in.

That mindset—build everything from scratch and own the experience—is what separates MELI. Galperin didn’t build a website. He built a system. And now they’re layering everything on top of that: credit, insurance, crypto, even investments. All of it runs through their ecosystem.

He stepped down as CEO in 2020 but still has his hand on the wheel from a strategy standpoint. And the culture he built long-term focused, execution-driven, no hype is still core to how they operate.

Bottom line: This is a guy who saw a huge gap in the market, built everything required to close it, and did it in one of the hardest regions in the world to operate in. MELI didn’t just win in Latin America they built the foundation for others to follow.

That’s the context you need when looking at this company today. It’s a company that created the rails, won the trust, and kept its edge by building what others wouldn’t. MELI is not just an e-commerce company. It’s a self-reinforcing machine of logistics, payments, credit, insurance, and digital advertising—running on infrastructure it built itself and this is why I think it will be a future MAG 7.

The Business Model: A Self-Reinforcing Machine