Founder Mythos
The Rails Under Latin American Commerce
We decided to go into logistics, and we had no idea how to do logistics. But we understood that this was a capability that we needed to develop to be successful in the next decades.
When the infrastructure a market needs does not exist, waiting for someone else to build it is the slow way to lose.
MercadoLibre built its own logistics and payments because the rails were the moat, not the marketplace on top.
I was very frustrated because I had to come back to Latin America, and there was nothing. So I was convinced this was going to work really, really well in Latin America.
He started in 1999 from a Buenos Aires garage, betting the internet would matter to a region everyone else was ignoring.
The absence of infrastructure was not a reason to stay out. It was the reason to build.
You start integrating vertically one way and the other, basically to try and reduce costs and transfer those savings to your user.
Vertical integration was not empire-building. It was a way to make the service cheaper for the person using it.
Payments, logistics and credit stacked on one another so each layer lowered the cost of the next.