Alec Oxenford, born and brought up in Argentina, is an entrepreneur and a technology enthusiast, who has the credits for the establishing the foundation of some multi-billion projects. The native of Argentina, Oxenford completed his graduation in Business Administration from the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina, and later, joined Harvard University to pursue a master’s degree in the same stream.
Career
As soon as Oxenford completed his education, he started working at Boston Consulting Group. After working for six long years with the same company, Oxenford gained more skills and experience and founded DeRemate, an online consumer-to-consumer trading platform in Latin America, that was later acquired by eBay in 2005.
The time he was successfully running DeRemate, he also co-founded DineroMail.com, a popular payment platform in Latin America, in March 2003 and was associated with the same till December 2010.
Founding OLX
In 2006, Oxenford joined his hands with a French native and angel investor, Fabrice Grinda, to co-found another internet-based platform, as a Craigslist alternative for the world outside of the United States, OLX, a free classified for advertisements. Both were assigned the position of the CEO of the company. The idea was new, and there were not many supporters for the same. But, Oxenford and his partner were quite confident about it. The two came to the conclusion that first, they must test their portal in a native place or a developing country, to properly endorse its services. Hence, they first launched OLX for the people of Argentina, and then in a country overseas, i.e., India.
With good marketing techniques, it became popular in India in no time as a platform to online sell the second-hand items, and the goods that were no more required. Currently, OLX operates in 45 countries, with 330 million users and 60 million listings a month, becoming the largest online classified ads company.
In 2006, OLX acquired Mundoanuncio.com, another classified site to target the Hispanic market, and also invested in a Chinese classifieds site Edeng.cn, in 2007. It also started a partnership with Friendster, in 2008, and social network Hi5, in 2009. The website was modified with the social network widgets, improved search, Ajax-based editors, interactive maps, and mobile versions, with the addition of Web 2.0″ features to it, in 2008.
In 2010, the South African group Naspers acquired OLX, Oxenford remaining CEO through 2014, and Grinda remaining CEO until 2013.
In 2014, Oxenford left OLX and started working on his next project. In 2015, he co-founded another online buying and selling platform, this time especially for the mobile marketplace, named letgo. In the year 2017, the annual revenue of letgo was $375 million and confirmed for the first time that the company had a $1 billion valuation.
Personal Life
Oxenford has been an art lover and has collected various art pieces from around the world. He is also in writing and has spoken at Jóvenes Líderes in 2010, the Web 2.0 Conference in 2015, Red Innova in the years 2014, 2015, and 2016, Art Basel in 2016, and ArteBa in 2017. He was elected as the Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum (2006-2011) and also received the CNN Internet Leader Award in 2001 and the Entrepreneur Award in 2003.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.