About this episode

Stelleo Tolda discusses the rise of MercadoLibre and its strategies for success in a competitive market.

Stelleo Tolda co-founded MercadoLibre in 1999 and ran Brazil for 25 years — building the $100B company into Latin America’s most valuable publicly traded business. In this TJC Operators series premiere, Stelleo unpacks how MercadoLibre outlasted 80 competitors, declared war on Amazon, scaled logistics from 8% to 95% in-house, and architected a three-year succession that actually stuck. We cover how MercadoLibre outlasted 80 competitors while charging the highest fees in the market, the dot-com crash survival playbook and what scarcity forces you to do right, why MercadoLibre declared war on Amazon and what happened in that war room, the 2010 technology bet of throwing away everything and rebuilding from scratch, the adjacency principle that turned one marketplace into payments, logistics, credit, and advertising, why MercadoLibre chose to build versus buy at every inflection point, investing in logistics CapEx as a public company and how to bring Wall Street along, the Champions League analogy for competing against the world’s best, how MercadoLibre codified its culture at scale, the succession playbook from advisor to board member to gone, what great board members actually do…

People in this episode

Host: Olga Maslikhova

Guest: Stelleo Tolda

Topics covered

• entrepreneurship
• business strategy
• logistics
• market competition
• company culture
• technology innovation
• Latin America

Keywords

• MercadoLibre
• Stelleo Tolda
• business strategy
• logistics
• Amazon
• entrepreneurship
• Latin America
• company culture
• technology

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: MercadoLibre, Amazon

Books & works: The J Curve Insider

Places: Brazil, Latin America

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