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Billionaires You’Ve Never Heard of #13
How José Neves Built Farfetch, the Amazon of Luxury
José Neves is the founder and CEO of Farfetch, a luxury online marketplace.
Farfetch sells more than 3 500 brands to 10 million visitors in 190 countries each month.
The polymath entrepreneur built several companies before creating the “Amazon of luxury”, valued today at $21.5 billion.
Neves owns 15% of the company, and has a net worth of $3.15 billion.
This is his story.
Big Brain
José Neves was born in Porto, Portugal, in 1974.
He had strong asthma as a boy, so his parents had to move to a coastal city for him.
He was a smart kid.
At 8 years old, he received a ZX Spectrum computer for Christmas. Since there weren’t any games (and nobody to play with), he learned how to code in books and designed them himself.
Besides coding, José enjoyed reading. A self-described geek, he discovered the Tao Te Ching when he was 13 years old and adopted Zen Buddhism as a way of life.
He’s been meditating ever since.
At 18, he went to study economics at the University of Porto and kept on coding on…
