When Marcos Galperín went to Stanford Graduate School of Business in the US, he was an entrepreneurially minded specialist in structuring sophisticated financing deals for YPF, Argentina's then state oil company.

By the time he finished his MBA, Mr Galperín had quit his jobng and launched MercadoLibre (“Free Market”), which he turned into the Ebay of Latin America, hiring classmates to help and using connections fostered while at the business school in California to raise millions of dollars in a matter of months.

The online shopping site is specially tailored to a Latin American audience used to bargaining but reticent about sending money to people they have never seen. It is now the biggest e-commerce network in the region and went public in August last year in a highly successful initial public offering, raising almost $300m. Its shares, trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange, have since more than doubled in price to $43.22 from their $18 debut.

“I could not have done this without the MBA,” Mr Galperín says. “I could perhaps have done something in Argentina – I was very entrepreneurial and I liked the internet from [the] very early days. But the possibility of raising funds, contacting investors, building a network across Latin America would have been impossible in such a short time.”

MercadoLibre's president and chief executive studied for his MBA in the late 1990s and was able to bask in the climate of innovation and technology emanating from Silicon Valley.

“We learnt a lot from that period,” says Nicolás Szekasy, chief finance officer. “The philosophy at Stanford is so focused on entrepreneurship and technology. It had a very significant impact on all of us.”

Mr Galperín recalls how Mike Spence, then dean of Stanford and now a board member of MercadoLibre, exhorted departing students in his graduation speech: “Make sure you're not afraid of doing something where you could fail.”

Mr Galperín took the advice to heart. He spent the last two terms of his MBA in the library, researching the best model for an internet company and drafting a business plan. Still, “in early 1999, people told me ‘you're crazy, this will never work in Latin America'”, he says.

Indeed, Hernán Kazah, a classmate of Mr Galperín's and co-founder of the company, says the market was crowded and competitive: “When we started, there were another 60 online auction companies in the region. Most went out of business.”

Mr Galperín's breakthrough came with the help of Jack McDonald, a Stanford professor in the habit of inviting prominent business people to address students. “I asked if he could put me in touch with people who could be interested in financing my project,” Mr Galperín says.

Prof McDonald went further, asking Mr Galperín to drive a guest lecturer – John Muse, a founder of the private equity firm Hicks Muse Tate & Furst (now known as HM Capital Partners) – to the airport after a class. En route, Mr Galperín outlined his business plan.

“As he [Mr Muse] was going to get on the plane, he stopped and said: ‘I think I want to invest in your venture.'”

That was in March 1999, three months before the end of the MBA programme. Two rounds of institutional financing followed in short succession, the first of which, in October 1999, raised $7.6m, mostly from investors including JPMorgan, Hicks Muse Tate & Furst and Flatiron Fund. The second, in May 2000, raised $46.7m from, among others, Goldman Sachs, Capital Riesgo Internet, GE Capital Equity Investments, JPMorgan and Hicks Muse Tate & Furst.

“When we were deploying the business plan, we used Stanford connections and networks. Today, most of the key executives are [Stanford MBA] postgraduates,” Mr Kazah notes.

The plan was to roll out MercadoLibre quickly in all key regional markets. “Stanford was very useful. In each country, we hired a classmate, such as a Mexican for Mexico and a Brazilian for Brazil. Most were contemporaries,” Mr Galperín says.

Mr Szekasy was not a contemporary, having graduated from Stanford in 1991. After working in the US and Mexico, he returned to Buenos Aires and met Mr Galperín and Mr Kazah through a Stanford network designed to put students about to embark on an MBA in touch with recent graduates.

By 1999, with e-business prospects booming, Mr Szekasy was considering his own internet venture, selling surplus government supplies, such as car fleets, online. “I went to see Marcos and Hernán, who had just gone through their first round of financing. I wanted to seek advice on how they got started, how they contacted investors, how they viewed internet growth in the region,” he says.

“Towards the end of the conversation, Marcos said they were looking for someone with my background and if the project I was thinking of didn't materialise, they'd like to have me join the company . . . though it made much more sense to join MercadoLibre than to try to start another project from scratch and the business model for MercadoLibre was better, more robust than mine.”

Mr Kazah, the company's vice-president and chief operating officer, says MercadoLibre had always had a bold, regional vision. However, what set it apart from competitors such as the Argentine shopping and auction site DeRemate, which was founded by Harvard graduates, was its long-term vision and focus on the product and the technology. It is the region's biggest internet e-commerce platform and owns MercadoPago, the biggest online payment platform.

MercadoLibre has benefited from a five-year commercial alliance with Ebay, which is now a shareholder with an 18.5 per cent stake. The partnership taught MercadoLibre a great deal about the business and about building regional scope.

Mr Galperín says Ebay has gained insights into how to adapt its model to developing countries. Yet, MercadoLibre is no carbon copy of Ebay. Almost 80 per cent of sales are new merchandise and about 90 per cent of products are sold at fixed prices, often through small businesses. There is also a search engine that sorts items by relevance.

MercadoLibre has operations in 12 countries and continues to expand and develop. “We'd like – in a few years – to see MercadoLibre with many more times revenues,” Mr Kazah says.

He does not rule out acquisitions but says that most growth in the future is expected to come from developments to the business. “The biggest lessons we've learnt are that you have to be consistent and patient and focus on the long term,” he says.

当马科斯•加尔佩林(Marcos Galperín)前往美国斯坦福商学院(Stanford Graduate School of Business)求学时，他还只是阿根廷当时的国有油企YPF公司里一位抱有创业想法的专家。他的职责是为公司设计复杂的融资交易结构。

在完成其MBA学业后，加尔佩林辞职创办了“自由市场”(MercadoLibre)，并将它变成了拉美地区的Ebay。他聘用同学们来帮忙，并利用在斯坦福商学院读书时积累的人脉，仅在数月之内，便筹得了数百万美元的资金。

这家在线购物网站专为拉美客户量身定做。拉美人习惯于讨价还价，但不愿付款给素不相识的人。现在，“自由市场”已成为拉美地区最大的电子商务网络，并在去年8月份上市。其首次公开发行(IPO)获得了极大的成功，筹资额将近3亿美元。在纳斯达克(Nasdaq)股票交易所，该公司股价已经上涨了一倍多，从交易首日的18美元涨至43.22美元。

加尔佩林表示：“如果没去读MBA，我就做不了这些事。也许我会在阿根廷做点事——我是很有创业意识的，况且我在很早的时候就喜欢上了互联网。但是，在这么短的时间里筹资、联系投资者、建立一个覆盖整个拉美地区的网络，这种可能性不太高。”

“自由市场“的这位总裁兼首席执行官是在上世纪90年代末期攻读MBA的。当时他可以充分感受到创新的氛围以及硅谷散发出的技术气息。

公司的首席财务官尼古拉斯•塞卡西(Nicolás Szekasy)表示：“我们从那段时期学到了很多东西。斯坦福的哲学极其关注创业精神和科技。这对我们所有人都产生了非常重要的影响。”

加尔佩林回想到，当时斯坦福商学院的院长、现任“自由市场”董事会成员的迈克•斯宾塞(Mike Spence)在毕业演讲时忠告即将离校的学员们：“确定自己不怕去做一些可能会失败的事情。”

加尔佩林将这句忠告牢记心底。在攻读MBA的最后两个学期中，他成天泡在图书馆里研究互联网公司的最佳模式，并着手起草一份商业计划。不过，他表示：“1999年早期，人们还在告诉我：‘你疯了，这在拉丁美洲根本行不通。'”

公司的共同创始人埃尔南•卡札(Hernán Kazah)是加尔佩林的同学。事实上，他认为这个市场非常拥挤，并且充满了竞争。“在我们刚起步时，该地区还有另外60家在线拍卖公司。其中大多数公司现已关闭。”

加尔佩林在杰克•麦克唐纳(Jack McDonald)的帮助下取得了突破。麦克唐纳是斯坦福的一位教授，他经常邀请杰出的商界人士来给学员们演讲。加尔佩林表示：“我问他，能不能让我接触到那些可能有兴趣资助我这项计划的人。”

麦克唐纳教授则提供了更多的帮助，他让加尔佩林在课后驾车送一位客席讲师去机场。这个人就是私人股本公司Hicks Muse Tate & Furst（现为HM Capital Partners）的创建人约翰•缪斯(John Muse)。在路上，加尔佩林大概描述了自己的商业计划。

“他（缪斯）在准备登机时停下来说了一句话：‘我想我愿意投资你的企业。”

那是1999年的3月。3个月后，加尔佩林的MBA学业结束。此后在很短的时间里，加尔佩林又迎来了两轮机构投资。第一轮是在1999年的10月，融资总额为760万美元，多数资金来自于摩根大通(JPMorgan)、Hicks Muse Tate & Furst以及福拉底荣基金(Flatiron Fund)等投资者。第二轮投资是在2000年5月，融资额为4670万美元，来自高盛(Goldman Sachs)、Capital Riesgo Internet、GE Capital Equity Investments、摩根大通以及Hicks Muse Tate & Furst等公司。

卡札表示：“我们在部署业务计划时，利用了在斯坦福的关系和人脉。今天，公司高管多数都是（斯坦福MBA的）毕业生。”

这项计划旨在将“自由市场”迅速推广到所有关键性的地区市场。加尔佩林表示：“斯坦福很有用。我们在每个国家都聘用了斯坦福的同学，例如在墨西哥聘用墨西哥的同学，在巴西聘用巴西的同学。多数人都是同龄人。”

塞卡西则不是同龄人，他于1991年从斯坦福毕业。在美国和墨西哥工作之后，他回到布宜诺斯埃利斯，通过斯坦福的一个网络遇到了加尔佩林和卡札。这个网络旨在让即将开始MBA课程的学员们能与近几届毕业生进行接触。

到1999年，正值电子商务前景繁荣之际，塞卡西在考虑成立自己的互联网公司，在网上销售过剩的政府供给，例如汽车。“我去见马科斯和埃尔南，他们俩刚结束第一轮的融资。我本想寻求他们在启动、联系投资者、以及看待该地区互联网业务增长方面的建议。”

“谈话临近尾声时，马科斯说他们正在物色一位有我这种背景的人，如果我考虑的项目还未落实，他们希望我能加入他们的公司……不过，加盟‘自由市场'比尝试启动另一个新项目要合适得多，‘自由市场'的商业模式比我的更好，也更有活力。”

公司的副总裁兼首席运营官卡札表示，“自由市场”总有一个大胆的地区性愿景。不过，与其它竞争者不同的是，例如哈佛大学(Harvard)毕业生在阿根廷成立的购物及拍卖网站DeRemate，它有一个长期愿景，并且关注于产品和技术。 “自由市场”现已成为该地区最大的互联网电子商务平台，并拥有最大的在线支付平台MercadoPago。

“自由市场”与Ebay的5年商业联盟使其受益。Ebay目前持有它18.5%的股份。这种合作关系让“自由市场”学到了很多有关商业和培养地区性眼界的东西。

加尔佩林表示，Ebay在如何根据发展中国家情况调整其模式方面颇具洞察力。不过，“自由市场”并不是Ebay的复制品。“自由市场”销售的近80%商品都是新产品，约90%的产品经常通过小企业以固定价格销售。此外，网站还有一个根据相关性进行产品分类的搜索引擎。

“自由市场”已在12个国家开展业务，并继续扩张与发展。卡札表示：“我们希望，在几年之内，看到‘自由市场'获得数倍的收入增长。”

他没有排除进行收购的可能性，但他表示未来的增长预计主要来自业务发展。他认为：“我们学到的最大教训是，你必须要始终如一，必须要有耐心，必须要专注于长期。”

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