Retail History | Mercado Libre — Less Than Ten People in the Minus-One Garage at Tronador 4890

People treat Mercado Libre as a Montevideo holding company that always ran Latin American checkout and Mercado Pago from a Nasdaq ticker.

The first book was a Stanford MBA project parked under a family building in Saavedra.

On 2 August 1999 Marcos Galperin and fewer than ten colleagues switched the site on from the underground garage of Panamericana Plaza at Tronador 4890, a lot his family already owned.

The rooms had no windows.

A later hire who came from a Puerto Madero river view called his father that night and said he thought he had made a mistake.

Galperin had written the plan at Stanford after a JPMorgan fixed-income desk and a capital-markets post at YPF.

John Muse of HM Capital put in early money.

A November 1999 round raised 7.6 million dollars.

A May 2000 round raised 46.7 million dollars from JPMorgan Partners, Flatiron, Goldman Sachs, GE Capital, and Banco Santander.

The first day listed about a thousand items.

Neighbors in 1999 told him Latin Americans would not buy over a telephone line.

eBay took a 19.5 percent stake in September 2001 and sold it in 2016.

Mercado Pago followed in 2003 because cards and cash-on-delivery could not close the loop the listings opened.

The company listed on Nasdaq in 2007.

The first floor is still a parking deck.

Two blocks away a converted lamp factory later held the Argentine campus.

The legal parent now sits in Montevideo.

The garage address did not move.

Photo: neighborhood view of Saavedra and northern Buenos Aires, via Wikimedia Commons.