Marcos Galperin

Argentina, e-commerce. Galperin started MercadoLibre in 1999 and spread it across 18 Latin American countries, each with its own payment habits and inflation. The answer was to build the plumbing itself: Mercado Pago for buyers without cards, its own logistics network where postal services were unreliable, and pricing that could be adjusted country by country. He handed the chief executive role to a successor and became executive chairman.