In 1999, 19 of Marcos Galperin's 20 Stanford classmates didn't think Mercado Libre would work. In 2025, the company booked $28.9 billion in revenue.

What it is: a playbook drawn from Galperin's 2024 interview in EY and La Nación's "Hacedores que Inspiran" series, plus two Mercado Libre decks you can download at the end.

Why it matters: Mercado Libre is one of the few companies that survived the dot-com crash, outgrew eBay's shadow and built a fintech from inside a marketplace, all from Latin America.

What you'll learn: six moves you can copy this quarter, each backed by a number from the company's own slides.

Below is the full breakdown. Quotes from Galperin are translated from Spanish.

Inside you'll find:

1. Rehearse 150 Times, Then Engineer Your 15 Minutes

2. Write the Business Model Into the Plan on Day One

3. When Your Market Is Dying, Trade Equity for Survival

4. Be Willing to Look Worse in Order to Win

5. Disrupt Yourself Before Someone Else Does

6. Your Mercado Libre Founder Toolkit

Most founders think the big pitch happens in a meeting room. Galperin's happened in a car.

In March 1999, two months before graduating from Stanford, he sat next to a stranger in class who introduced himself as "John Doe." It was Warren Buffett, and Galperin missed the chance to pitch him. His professor, Jack McDonald, told him not to worry: Buffett wasn't investing in Latin America, but John Muse, who was coming to the next class, was.

Galperin and two classmates volunteered to drive Muse back to his private jet. He had rehearsed the pitch 150 times, but his classmates kept talking. So he deliberately took a wrong turn. "In the US, you take the wrong exit and it's 15 minutes to get back on track," he said. "With that, I managed to tell him everything."

At the airport, Muse got on the plane, came back down and told him over the engine noise: "Let me know when you launch. I want to invest." Muse went on to join JP Morgan and Flatiron in Mercado Libre's $7.6 million seed round, according to The Generalist.

→ The opportunity is where the crowd disagrees with you, and you have done the homework to be right.

Galperin is explicit about it: "If I'm very convinced, the more people tell me no, the more energy it gives me, because that's where the opportunity is." He splits success as "50% stomach and 50% effort," and he means informed intuition: "I don't have the intuition of whether red or black comes up at the casino. That one is useless."

The most telling detail is that luck shows up in his story too. At one point Mercado Libre agreed to be sold, and the deal died only because the buyer backed out. Preparation is what lets you survive long enough for luck to matter.

Mercado Pago was not a pivot. It was on page one.