Pod Insights The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch 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 About this episode 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 Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Harry Stebbings? Welcome back. This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now for the episode today, we feature one of the great entrepreneurs of the last two decades. He scaled his business from an idea at business school to a $78 billion market cap company today, operating in 18 countries with 32,000 employees by the end of this year. What a journey. And so with that, I'm thrilled to welcome Marcos Galperin, founder and CEO at Mercado Libre, one of Latam's most successful companies with a business that today includes everything from commerce to payments to logistics. And I'd also want to say a huge thank you to Mickey at Ribbit for the introduction and also to Nico at Kazek for some great question suggestions today. A real team effort there. But before we move into the show today, Mercury is building full stack banking for startups,
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2:08 Harry Stebbings? But don't take my word for it. Just ask. High-growth companies like Gusto, Chime, Earnin, and Hims all trusting Terminal with their remote teams. You can find out more today at terminal.io. That is enough from me, though, and now I'm so excited to hand over to Marcos Galperin, founder and CEO at Mercado Libre.
2:30 Speaker 01 You have now arrived at your destination.
2:33 Harry Stebbings? Marcos, it is such a joy to have you on the show today. I've heard so many great things from our mutual friend Mickey at Rubit, so thank you so much for joining me today.
2:40 Speaker 02 Thank you, Harry. It's a pleasure to be here.
2:43 Harry Stebbings? I would love to start though with a little bit of context, because obviously Ricardo Libre is one of the breakaway success stories of last time. You're one of the most prominent entrepreneurs of the region, but it's all got to start somewhere. So what was that founding aha moment for you? I believe it was way back in 1999.
2:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, actually probably 1998. It was the crazy dot com days and I was doing my MBA at Stanford and having lots of discussions with friends regarding the possibilities that the internet would bring to Latin America and also venting frustrations because there really weren't many applications running on the internet in Latin America. And basically, the company that I had to go back to work with got acquired, so I decided that I was going to create an application on the internet and run it in Latin America.
3:28 Harry Stebbings? When you look back now, I'd love to start on your role as CEO, because it changes so much over time. And when I spoke to Mickey, he said especially to focus on this. And so let's start with today. How would you describe your management style today, Marcos?
3:42 Speaker 02 I would say I like to lead through the example. So I would say that's one of my guiding principles. I have an amazing team. Most of them have been working with me from the first day. And we have also brought new people over and they have worked themselves up to high positions. So it's a combination of old timers and new people that have come in. But I like to rely a lot in my team and I like to have fun working with them, enjoy our time that we spend together. And now it's mostly virtually, but we work a lot, but we also have a good time.
4:14 Harry Stebbings? Marcos, one thing you'll learn about me is I have a schedule and I tend to go off schedule very quickly. I'd love to dive in on the element there of kind of talent retention. I have a lot of people on the show say talent is often destined for a certain stage. People are destined for the early stage, the late stage, and then the public market stage. Do you agree with that? And what lessons do you have in terms of people's ability to move with the growth of the company?
4:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, I don't agree with that. I think there are different people. Maybe there are people that are only for one stage of the company. And I've been with many entrepreneurs that say, you know, I like to start companies and once they grow after so many employees, I'd rather start a new company or go somewhere else. But there are other people that can grow perfectly well with the companies. As you know, you have very famous founders in the Bay Area that have done that. I have done that, my team, a lot of the people in my team have done that. So I believe that it depends on each person's personality. You can grow and adapt as a company grows and adapts. Or you might like to work with very small companies and that's fine.
5:18 Harry Stebbings? Speaking of that kind of growth and that adaptation from you, the leader, it's an interesting transition to make when you think about the early days from founder to now CEO of this incredible public company. What were the biggest challenges for you in making that transition from founder, doing everything in the early days, to now being a real figurehead of a public company and many thousands of employees?
5:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, definitely I have had to adapt. Probably in the early days and for the first several years, my role was much more operational and really roll my sleeves up and do things myself because otherwise things were not getting done. Obviously now my role is much more strategic, it's not operational and it's not so much on the day to day. In terms of understanding the industry trends, the technology trends, and how these trends will impact our company and our business, I think they remain the same. And it has always been trying to understand which is the right direction to take the company and then to try and build a great team and motivate that team to take us to that direction.
6:19 Harry Stebbings? I mean, speaking of that right direction, obviously there's the implicit decision-making required to decide on that direction itself. I'm interested specifically on decision-making and risk. How do you evaluate your relationship to risk today, do you think?
6:32 Speaker 02 Well, I think one of the things I love about MercadoLibre and my job is that I still feel like it's day one. So I think that my relationship with risk hasn't changed that much. I still believe, even though we have built an amazing company that is very large with a lot of resources. Both financial resources, but also in terms of, for example, we have a technology team of almost eight thousand people and this year we're going to end up with thirty thousand employees. So with many resources, I still think that we are facing huge risks slash huge opportunities, right? Because we are still creating markets that are very, very early stage, both in e-commerce and in fintech. I think we're just scratching the surface.
7:14 Speaker 02 So I believe that we still have a lot of growth ahead, as much growth as we had twenty-two years ago when we started. And that growth is obviously tied to risks, regulatory risks, industry risks, innovation risks, platform risks, all sorts of risks that we faced then, and I think we still face now.
7:32 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask, in determining where you spend your time and resources, Jeff Bezos has often talked about the two-door versus one-way door in terms of decision-making. How do you determine and prioritize your decision-making when it comes to resources and time for you?
7:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, I spend a lot of time, as I was saying earlier, trying to understand the industry trends and technology trends, and then trying to interpret how those trends will impact our business. Therefore, I also spend a lot of time trying to understand our business, how we are doing, because we operate in many countries and in two industries that are complementary but are different, like e-commerce and the financial services. So that's where I spend most of the time. And then I spend, in terms of which type of decisions I get involved, I would say I like to get involved in the decisions that I believe are transcendental for the company. But I also get involved sometimes in decisions
8:26 Speaker 02 that are maybe routine or day-to-day. So I wouldn't say I only focus in the one-way decision-making process. I keep my options open and I participate in both. In some instances, I might believe that in some area of our company, I want to participate in very micro decision-makings. And in other areas of the companies, I might not participate in any decisions for a while, because I think that things are going well and that the team is doing a great job, and that there are no major changes in the industry or in our business that require my attention.
8:58 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask, do you have to watch the weight of your words now? And what I mean by that is when you weigh in with your opinion or your thoughts on a topic, on an internal discussion or debate, they have a lot of weight and gravitas to them. Do you have to counterbalance that to ensure that people don't just say yes to your words?
9:16 Speaker 02 Well, definitely, when you're a founder CEO, there is a lot of weight to the opinions that one has. But I believe that if you work with a great team, I believe founder CEOs are also very prone to working with teams that are able to contradict and argue against one's opinions. Otherwise, it gets very boring and otherwise it's unlikely that you will be successful in the long term. And I have a team that actually I have a harder time implementing the decisions when they are mine than when they are others, because there's a lot of discussions, open discussions. And everybody understands in MercadoLibre that when we get something right, it's never because of someone had the idea. And similarly, when we get something wrong, it's also not because it was his or her's idea.
10:01 Speaker 02 So at the end of the day, it's a discussion, it's a process of having the discussions that is very rich. And that process is pretty independent from who had the original idea.
10:11 Harry Stebbings? How do you prevent people from feeling fear on the accountability of decisions going wrong? It's often the hardest thing, which is like, especially in larger companies, people don't want to take the risk with a bold idea because of the magnitude of it going wrong. How do you prevent people from feeling that fear and give them an environment of safety?
10:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. We try to create an environment where people are not afraid of making decisions and taking risks. That's why we try to foster entrepreneurship all the time within MercadoLibre. And as I was saying before, when we get it right, we try not to make the person who brought the original idea the hero. And when we get it wrong, similarly, we don't try to create that person as a villain. I think it's mostly focusing on the process and the discussions. And then we are very, very persevering when an idea initially, it's very unlikely that we do something and right away we get it right and it's a home run. It's almost never been like that in Latin America. I always say that's one of the big differences. Differences between the stories that you read about the big success cases in Silicon Valley and us.
11:13 Speaker 02 We never had that hockey stick growth moment until maybe now with Covid. But we were always growing at thirty to forty percent for twenty years. But we never grew seven hundred percent from one year to the next. And that is because for many reasons, but always we were required to iterate behind every idea. So we are very persevering, but we also like not to be starborn. So at some point, something that hasn't worked that well for two, three, four iterations. Maybe this is not the right idea and let's drop it. But let's 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.
11:54 Harry Stebbings? I mean, that's what I was going to ask you actually, you know, as I was listening to you when I was running today. Stanford Graduate Business School and you said about the power of resilience and persistence in particular. And that's my question, which is like, absolutely, you have the vision and the mission and you pursue it. But at what point do you realise that actually that iteration, that idea is no longer worth pursuing? How do you know when is the time to cut and try something else?
12:18 Speaker 02 Oh, that's a great idea. Sometimes you are forced to do it because obviously every year you need to allocate resources and you have a certain number of resources. Unfortunately, every year we have much more ideas that we think are great ideas than the resources available. Even though we are growing the resources every year. And sometimes you look at the ideas that you are not going to be able to allocate resources to. And you say, you know, I've been trying this idea for three, four years and this is enough. I'm not willing to let these other ideas off the list to continue pursuing this one. And that's typically what happens. There's other ideas that deserve the resources and that maybe for one year or two years you have postponed those ideas. And at some point in time, you say, okay, not any longer.
13:02 Harry Stebbings? It was interesting you saying about the hockey stick growth there. Because another element you talked about in the Stanford Business School talk was how you have this kind of great early days with Mercado Libre in certain respects. And then there was quite a grey patch very quickly, actually, with the crash. How did the crash and operating through that? How did that impact your operating mentality moving forwards? And how did it change how you think about running the company?
13:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think the crash had a big impact on us. I don't know which crash we are referring to because we went through two crashes. First, the dot com bubble crash that came in the middle of our second round fundraising. Because we had signed the term sheet for our second round, but we hadn't closed the round. And the weeks that went between the signing of the term sheet and the closing of the documents were a nightmare for us. Because the crash happened right in the middle and it created a lot of tension between the investors and us. And we had to renegotiate many terms and it was very painful. And then after we did our IPO, but actually in the middle of the roadshow, it was when the financial crisis happened, actually. When Bear Stearns went bankrupt, actually the day that we IPOed in August of two thousand and seven.
14:07 Speaker 02 That same day was the first time since nine eleven 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. That was the day we priced our IPO. So it was traumatic. And initially I was priced at eighteen, initially our stock went all the way up to eighty. But a few months later, as the financial crisis intensified, it came all the way down to eight dollars. So it was quite painful.
14:37 Harry Stebbings? How do you maintain your composure when you're seeing, exactly as you said that, you know, supranational organisations intervening in liquidity situations on the day when your company is being priced? How do you maintain your composure and just stay on course?
14:52 Speaker 02 Well, we've always liked to focus on the real aspects of the business, you know. And the financials come and go, the markets on a daily, weekly or sometimes monthly basis, they are very volatile. But we have always stayed focused on our key operating metrics and we have always seen our new users going up, transactions going up, different products that we launch starting to gain traction. And those are the things that we really focus on. You know, whether it's the stock price or the market indexes, we try to really not focus on those too much. So that helps to keep the composure. When you see that the KPIs continue to evolve well despite the market fluctuations, it gives you confidence that you're doing the right thing and that you just have to stay focused and continue executing.
15:36 Harry Stebbings? And when you look back at the two crashes now with the hindsight that you have, what lessons do you think you drew from them in terms of how you lead MercadoLibre?
15:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think those crises have had a big impact on our culture, but I also believe that we had that culture that enabled us to succeed in that environment, whereas some of our competitors were more short-term focused, were more inclined to build something to sell, more inclined to hire people that are after the hype than after really building a sustaining and successful organization. We've always wanted to create a company that could prove that you can build an amazing organization from Latin America and that we could innovate and have a world-class execution and a world-class product. And I think that, as we were saying before, when you're focused on those things, market crashes and financial
16:26 Speaker 02 crises are not that big of a deal. You try to focus on the real thing. So I think that actually those crashes, when you look at it with hindsight, I think they were helpful for us because they, as they say, you know, when the tide goes away, you see who's been swimming naked. And I think that 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.
16:54 Harry Stebbings? Listen, I totally agree, and I love that in terms of the quote, in terms of showing who's naked. I do, I do have to ask it because I heard you speak before about the early days. You had quite a few competitors in the space, Aromate being probably one of the most significant. My question to you is like, especially today, when there are many companies in exactly the same space chasing the same opportunity, who are getting heavily funded. How do you advise founders when it comes to taking funding when the rest of their competitors are taking a lot of funding?
17:21 Speaker 02 I think that it's a balance. Obviously, you want to be well-funded, but obviously you want to minimize dilution as much as you can. And you want to focus yourself and your company and your team in building the best product. So. When everybody else is just spending like crazy, that doesn't necessarily mean that you need to do the same. You need to spend whatever is necessary to build the best possible product. And therefore, you need to raise the money that you require for that. And anything beyond that will increase your dilution and you will start spending much more because simply there is more to be spent, which is probably not the right strategy. So obviously, when the money is easy to access, I would go ahead and access
18:04 Speaker 02 because sometimes the market's shut down and you don't want to be raising money in those periods. But you don't want to overdo it either.
18:10 Harry Stebbings? In terms of like how aware you are of your competition. Some people say, row your own race, keep your head down and focus on your company. In other cases, people say, hey, you've got to be very aware of who's doing what around you. How do you think about observing competition and the right way to do it?
18:27 Speaker 02 You know, we like to play our game. We like to play our game. We like to understand what are our strengths and what are our weaknesses and what are our opportunities. Obviously, we look at our competition as much as we look at our industry and adjacent industries. But more to understand the things that are going on and the features or the products that we like. But we don't play the game based on what our competition is doing. And that's why we have built something that is pretty unique. Because if you look at what we have, the combination of different platforms from our own shops. If you want our own version of Shopify, to our own version of PayPal, to our own marketplace. It's something that is pretty unique. There's nobody that has done it like that.
19:08 Speaker 02 Maybe the combination of Alibaba and financial put together, but they are not together. Going back to your question, I think we like to, obviously, we look at our competition closely. But we also look at the industries, technology in general closely. And mainly, we focus on ourselves and playing our game and executing our plan. That's what we like to do. And I think that's the best way to be in this industry for many decades. We have been here for 22 years and we aspire to be here for many more decades ahead. And when you look at in the last 22 years, had we focused on the competition, our main competitors have changed so many times that it was. Would have been the wrong strategy and I'm sure in the next decades, our main competitor is gonna again change many times.
19:51 Speaker 02 So what has remained constant is there's a lot of change, there's a lot of innovation, there's a lot of growth. And we have a great company, we have a great team and we need to allocate our resources, financial and human resources in the best way to capture the opportunities that we have, regardless of what our competitor at certain point in time is doing or not.
20:12 Harry Stebbings? Before we kind of extrapolate and discuss the region, I do have to ask, you mentioned kind of obviously building the PayPal for the region with MercadoPago. It's been incredible to see the growth of that over the last few years. It was actually Eric at Monarchies who asked, what's your vision for that product and just how big it could be, both internally but also externally for the region?
20:31 Speaker 02 No, I think MercadoPago is already very big, but I think the potential for MercadoPago in the in the next two, three decades is just beyond my imagination because what is happening right now, it's like everything is compounding. MercadoPago is very large and it's doing really well. But fintech in generally is gaining traction in the region and I would say in the western world. And then you have DeFi coming along. So you have these three things that are exponentially, they work together. And I think they create so many opportunities that is very exciting to think about all the things that are going on. But more importantly, all the things that I think will happen in the next two decades.
21:09 Harry Stebbings? Final session that I do wanna touch on is more broadly on the region itself. And you know, I've heard you say that in terms of stereotypes on the region, all the stereotypes are true. If we unpack just the main one, the main one that I get is the volatility inherent within the region, be it political or kind of currency based. How do you think about this and to what extent do you think it holds back the ecosystem?
21:29 Speaker 02 Well, it certainly holds back the ecosystem because so much volatility makes it harder to create long lasting companies. I think it tends to give the entrepreneurs shorter term horizon in the way that you've gone through so many crises that if you have an offer to sell, maybe take the offer because who knows what can happen in the coming years. I think it makes it harder to retain top talent in the region. I think it makes it harder to create all the infrastructure that you need to create an ecosystem like the one you have in Silicon Valley, right? You need great entrepreneurs, you also need great educational institutions, you also need great infrastructure for wifi or 5G or whatever.
22:11 Speaker 02 You also need VCs, you also need angel investors, you also need companies like Y Combinator. So you need all this infrastructure to create this machine of one successful startup after the other. And those things are much harder to build when you have high inflation or political crisis or recessions or very strong swings in the economic directions that a country takes from one year to the next. So definitely it has an impact. Having said that, I think that the talent that you find in the region, the people that are able to succeed in this environment tend to be incredibly resilient and very talented.
22:50 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask a personal one and you can tell me if it's too personal? Were you ever tempted to sell and what was that decision making? Every great company has a chance to sell.
22:58 Speaker 02 Certainly, certainly. No, we had several occasions when we entertained that possibility. From the very early days, the first one was in 2001. I think we had like six million dollars of revenues and we declined an offer for 230 million dollars, which valuation was probably an incredibly rich offer. But we thought, you know, that we were gonna build this amazing company that was gonna be the largest in Latin America and we didn't want to sell at that time. 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 MercadoLibre 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
23:43 Speaker 02 and we thought it was going to be much easier to build those things with eBay slash PayPal's support. But that didn't happen, so we went and we did our IPO and the financial shareholders that had invested in 2001 initially to sell to eBay exited through the IPO and we've been independent since then.
24:01 Harry Stebbings? I mean, that's incredible. I was told to actually ask about Lake Como when it came to eBay. Can you tell me about that story?
24:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, you know, we were almost like an eBay subsidiary in those years because we provided monthly information to eBay. And there was a best practice sharing agreement and we had an amazing relationship. And there was a retreat in Lake Como, I think it was, I don't know, two thousand and three, two thousand and four, I can't remember. It was still in those days, I think eBay's media category was bigger than Amazon's GMV. So eBay was really, in those days, like Amazon plus Google. And I think it was the days when they were interested in having a larger share of MercadoLibre and we were not that interested in becoming a part of eBay. And yeah, since Lake Como, unfortunately, things for eBay didn't go that well. I think that for us, it was also a lecture as with respect to how fast things change in this industry
24:53 Speaker 02 and how you need to focus on the long term and how sometimes you need to develop completely new skills to be successful. And that's one of the reasons why we have, like five years ago, decided to go into logistics, for example. And we had no idea how to do logistics. We were a software firm, you know, a technology firm. And now we are having thousands of people working in warehouses and managing packages. And we have become experts at doing logistics in Latin America. But we understood that this was a capability that we needed to develop to be successful in the next decades. Otherwise, we were not going to be able to compete successfully. And we have developed it and it has also given us tremendous confidence. Because once you understand that as an organization, you are able to put together your resources
25:38 Speaker 02 and learn a completely new skill and you're able to do it at scale. And you're able to do it while your competitor is doing it at scale and you are able to do it as well or even better than they are. And it gives you a lot of confidence that as an organization, you can take risks and learn new skills and implement them at scale. And that is something that is fascinating to see.
25:59 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask, with your now ownership of logistics in the masterful way that you do, my question is like, how important do you think it is to own the vertical chain of value in every business rather than the horizontal? You invest today. Now, obviously, you have such a prominent vertical ownership from the products themselves and the marketplaces, but also the logistics, which traditionally you wouldn't normally do. How important is that?
26:22 Speaker 02 That's a great question. It's probably the answer is very long, but trying to summarize it, I think it depends on the stage of the implementation of the business you are in. For example, in fintech, you know, we started doing payments and now we are an acquirer. We just got our acquiring license. We also got in Brazil the license to be a financial institution. So we're able to finance ourselves with bank deposits. We are also now issuing our own credit card. So you start integrating vertically, one way and the other, basically to try and reduce costs and transfer those savings to your user. So initially you start in in one layer of the stack,
27:01 Speaker 02 but once you have become very successful in that layer, it's very likely that you will want to integrate one way and maybe the other way, as we're doing in fintech, because you need to become more efficient. There's a lot of competition and you need to pass on those savings to your customers.
27:17 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask a final question? And it is again a personal one, but I'm I'm always intrigued, especially when I speak to public markets founders, which is, you know, with the scaling of the company, you also have a scaling personal wells. How do you think about your own relationship to money today as it changes over time, as I'm sure it has done?
27:32 Speaker 02 Fortunately, I think that that hasn't changed with me at all. I think it helps to live where I live and to be surrounded by the people that I have always been surrounded with. So obviously I live with more comfort than what I did in the past, but my day to day life is exactly the same as my neighbors and my kids live, exactly the same as the kids that go to school with them. And I think in that sense, living in Latin America helps to keep you very grounded.
27:58 Harry Stebbings? I would love to dive into a quick fire on this. I say a short statement, Marcos, and then you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?
28:05 Speaker 02 Sure, sure.
28:06 Harry Stebbings? So what's your favorite book and why?
28:08 Speaker 02 So most of the time I'm reading daily news, not so much books. To be honest, I read maybe a book a year or maybe two, because I just have to spend so much time understanding what is going. Going on in our business and the things that are coming, what is going to come, etcetera, right? So right now, if you ask me, I'm spending most of my time learning about crypto and DeFi than anything else. Having said that, if I would have to pick my favorite book, I would say it's two, Build to Last and Good to Great. I really enjoyed those books. I read them over a decade ago. It was more in the times when we were building MercadoLibre, the early days of MercadoLibre, so probably early 2000.
28:48 Speaker 02 And they had a big influence in me and I think in the way I tried to build MercadoLibre.
28:54 Harry Stebbings? What's the hardest element of your role with MercadoLibre today?
28:58 Speaker 02 I would say where I'm spending a lot of my energy is understanding what's the best way for me to transition out of MercadoLibre and have MercadoLibre continue to execute as well as it has executed in the last 22 years for the next 22 years. So I believe you know, I'm going to be 50 this year. At some point in time, I will want to take a different role. And I think in the technology companies, founders, CEO, transitions are hard. And that's one of the hardest part of my role today is understanding how I transition out of my role without this having a negative impact in the company.
29:33 Harry Stebbings? Which three traits would you most like your children to adopt?
29:37 Speaker 02 I would love my children to be very persevering. I would like them to be risk takers. But above all, I would like them to understand that they need to enjoy the ride, that there's never an end destination that is the one that provides you happiness, that you need to enjoy life every day and basically that life is a trip, it's a voyage and then you need to enjoy that trip.
29:59 Harry Stebbings? Which leader do you look up to personally and why?
30:03 Speaker 02 So I would say in our industry and in our era, I obviously look up to Bezos and to Elon Musk a lot because of how they like to take risks and how long-term oriented they are and how much value they have created and the amazing organizations they have created. Historical leaders, I'm a bit skeptical because sometimes the way they get portrayed, maybe it's not exactly the way they were. Definitely Churchill is someone I admire a lot, but I'm not sure if, had I lived in the days that he Was there, I wouldn't be that big of an admirer. And then, yeah, today in terms of politics, et cetera, I think we have a deficit in terms of great leaders.
30:40 Harry Stebbings? Totally agree with you there. I come from the country of Boris Johnson, so I agree with you. I do want to finish though on the most important really, which is what does the next five years hold for you? And what would the next chapter of success be?
30:53 Speaker 02 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 MercadoLibre with the same entrepreneurial spirit that it has today. The same combination of risk-taking and persevering that we have today. I mainly tried to see that we would maintain our culture without me being there in the day-to-day of the business.
31:21 Harry Stebbings? Listen, this has been such a joy to do. I can't thank you enough for putting up with my very, very wayward questions. I know they weren't a tool what I sent over, but you were fantastic. And so thank you so much for joining me today.
31:31 Speaker 02 My pleasure, Harry. Thanks for the conversation and I hope you have a very nice day.
31:36 Harry Stebbings? I mean, just such an incredible journey and I want to say a huge thank you to Marcos for taking the time today to share it with us. If you'd like to see more from us behind the scenes, of course you can, on the site at the20minutevc.com. As always, I so appreciate all your support, but before we leave you today. Mercury is building full-stack banking for startups, applying under 10 minutes from anywhere for FDIC insured bank accounts, physical and virtual debit cards, domestic and international wires, and integrations with Gusto, Stripe, QuickBooks, Plaid, basically every other tool your startup uses. They also offer unusual features like API access, custom team management, and their newly launched Mercury Treasury, a cash management product for high-growth startups. They'll even help you build your startup with Mercury Raise, a program to connect you to Silicon Valley's top investors.
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33:05 Harry Stebbings? and owning the end-to-end processes from hiring to onboarding to remote teams integration. Terminal delivers the product-building powerhouse your business needs to grow. From workspaces to on-the-ground support, they take the guesswork out of remote team management so that you can really thrive. But don't take my word for it. Just ask. High-growth companies like Gusto, Chime, Earnin and Hims, all trusting Terminal with their remote teams. You can find out more today at terminal.io. As always, I so appreciate all your support and I cannot wait to bring you a fantastic next episode.
Previous 20VC: David Tisch on Why Ownership in Venture Does Not Matter, His Biggest Investing Misses and Hits and How His Investing Style Changed as a Result & 3 Core Reasons VCs Pass That Do Not Make Sense Next 20VC: Qualtrics Founder, Ryan Smith on The 2 Hour Decision Whether To Sell Qualtrics for $8Bn in Cash, Why Tying Your Identity To Your Company Will Never Make You Happy and His Relationship To Risk, Wealth and Responsibility as a Result Page updated October 25, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
