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Tomás Silva
I grew up in São Paulo and studied engineering at USP, but I never worked as an engineer. My first job was at VTEX, a Brazilian e-commerce platform, where I joined in 2016 as employee number ~80. VTEX was building what would eventually become Latin America's largest commerce platform, and I had a front-row seat to the mechanics of platform growth in a market where the playbook hadn't been written yet.
At VTEX, I worked on the marketplace module, the feature that lets brands sell through each other's storefronts. This was my introduction to the economics of two-sided markets, and it ruined me for any other kind of product work. Marketplace dynamics are the most intellectually interesting problem in tech. Every decision creates second-order effects. Subsidize one side too much and you get adverse selection. Charge too early and the supply side leaves. Build too many tools for sellers and you overwhelm them. Build too few and they outgrow you.
In 2020, I moved to iFood, Brazil's dominant food delivery platform (think DoorDash, but bigger in its market). I led product for the restaurant supply side: onboarding, menu management, pricing tools, and the analytics dashboard that restaurants used to optimize their operations. iFood had 300,000+ restaurant partners, and the challenge was building products that worked for both a fine-dining restaurant in Jardins and a corner açaí shop in the favelas. Same app, radically different users, radically different needs.
The most important thing I learned at iFood: in marketplaces, the supply side is the product. Most marketplace founders obsess over consumer acquisition because it's more glamorous. But the quality, diversity, and reliability of supply is what determines whether consumers stay. We proved this empirically: a 10% improvement in restaurant quality scores drove a 23% increase in order frequency. No amount of consumer marketing could match that.
I left iFood in 2023 and spent a year advising marketplace startups across Latin America. I kept seeing the same mistakes: founders who'd read the "Lenny's Newsletter" playbook for US marketplaces and tried to apply it to markets with different infrastructure, different payment behavior, and different trust dynamics.
I joined Signal to write about marketplace strategy with the specificity and regional nuance that's missing from most coverage. Latin America has some of the most interesting marketplace businesses in the world, and nobody's writing about them in English with any depth.
I live in Vila Madalena, São Paulo. I surf on weekends, I'm an amateur photographer, and I have an unhealthy fascination with logistics networks.
Experience
- Product Lead (Supply), iFood
- Early employee, VTEX
- Engineering, Universidade de São Paulo