Alejandro Carlos “Alec” Oxenford is an Argentine entrepreneur. He was co-founder of OLX and co-founder of letgo, a classified ads application for mobile devices in the United States.
Raised in Argentina, Oxenford earned a degree in Business Administration from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Argentina and an MBA from Harvard University.
Oxenford is an art collector, focusing on Argentine artists such as Liliana Porter, Eduardo Navarro, Carlos Huffmann, and Martin Legon. His collection includes around 280 pieces. In 2013, he became president of Fundación arteBA, the nonprofit organization that organizes the Latin American art fair arteBA.
He previously worked for Boston Consulting Group and was CEO of DeRemate.com, an online commerce platform in Latin America, which he sold to eBay. The company’s story is included in the book Six Billion Shoppers: The Companies Winning the E-Commerce Boom by Peter Erisman. He also co-founded DineroMail.com.
A 2014 article in Fortune magazine described him as a “kind of rock star CEO” in South America, known for his “uncompromising attitude.”
In a 2015 essay in TechCrunch, Oxenford argued that investment in tech companies in emerging markets was drastically underfunded. A 2014 essay in Recode argued that in the emerging world, instead of being “mobile first,” users were “mobile only,” and companies that failed to build a “fundamentally mobile option” would be displaced by competition.
Oxenford received the CNN Internet Leader Award in 2001 and the Entrepreneur Award in 2003. He was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2006.
OLX
In 2006, Oxenford and Fabrice Grinda co-founded OLX, an online classified ads company operating in 45 countries, with 330 million users and 60 million ads per month. In 2010, most of the company was acquired by the South African group Naspers, and Oxenford remained CEO until 2014. The story of OLX’s founding by Oxenford is told in the 2017 book Los Nuevos Reyes Argentinos by Sebastián Catalano, with a summary in La Nación.
LETGO
Oxenford launched letgo in 2015, with co-founders Jordi Castello and Enrique Linares, as a smartphone-focused marketplace for buying and selling used goods in the United States; it reached 75 million downloads in 2017. In September 2015, he raised $100 million in funding to support the Naspers-backed company, the majority owner of his other company, OLX. Oxenford raised an additional $100 million in 2016 and merged with competitor Wallapop that same year. He raised $175 million more for letgo in February 2017. In September 2017, the company confirmed it had reached a $1 billion valuation. In March 2020, Oxenford joined the board of OfferUp after merging with letgo.