Alec Oxenford

Alec Oxenford, born in 1969, is an Argentine-born serial internet entrepreneur, investor and art lover. He is known as one of the first Latin American internet entrepreneurs having co-founded the global online classifieds platform OLX.com, the online auctions web site DeRemate.com and the payments platform DineroMail.com. Oxenford is currently CEO of OLX which was partly acquired by the South African media group NASPERS. Oxenford also serves as the president of arteBA, the annual contemporary art fair in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Early life
College and Business School
Oxenford finished high school at St. Andrew's Scots School in Buenos Aires, and graduated from Universidad Católica Argentina as BA in business administration in 1993. Oxenford graduated as MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School, class 1997.
Career
Early career
While still at university, Oxenford started working as an intern at Grupo Bemberg in Argentina (the company that used to own “Quilmes” beer at that time). During the internship he worked at the Human Resources department of the company. After graduating, he joined the Madrid Office of the global consulting firm Boston Consulting Group where he developed several projects both for Europe and Latin America.
DeRemate
While at his MBA at Harvard, Oxenford noticed the internet boom taking place in the United States and started researching about the most promising business models to replicate in Latin America. In 1999, two years after graduating from Harvard Business School Oxenford decided to launch a platform similar to eBay for Latin America in partnering with five of his Harvard class mates from various Latin American countries. DeRemate was launched on August 31., 1999 and managed to raise capital from Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, eQuest, TPG, SLI, and Terra Networks.
OLX
After selling his stake in DeRemate to an eBay affiliate in 2005, Oxenford joined forces with the French entrepreneur Fabrice Grinda (one of the initial investors in DeRemate) to start a new project in 2006. Grinda, who had sold Zingy (a mobile media company) around the same time in which Oxenford left DeRemate, was a specialist in online marketplaces and had an unused 3 letter domain in his portfolio. The domain, OLX.com, had been acquired by Fabrice for his first startup (the french auction site Aucland) but later he decided not to use it because there was a very popular competitor called QXL in United Kingdom whose brand sounded very similar to the brand OLX. Both Oxenford and Grinda studied different business opportunities to start their new venture and decided to replicate the Craigslist model on a global basis. OLX was launched in 2006 with an initial investment of $500,000 from the two founders. Then, with the site running, the company raised capital in three different rounds bringing a total of $28,5 million in investments by Bessemer Venture Partners, Founders Fund, DN Capital, General Catalyst Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners. OLX faced strong growth in different countries including Brazil, India, Argentina, Mexico, Portugal, and Pakistan, and in 2010 the company was partly acquired by South African media group NASPERS in a deal that valued OLX at 210 million dollars. All the financial investors where acquired by Naspers at this point. Today the company is managed by Oxenford from OLX HQs in Buenos Aires.

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