Pamela Meneguetti – Nuvemshop

In her career, Pamela Meneguetti has worked with clients like Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo and Amazon in private practice. She has served as Uber’s head of litigation for Brazil. And she’s contributed to Brazil’s laws governing the internet.

Now she’s tackling a new challenge. As general counsel of Nuvemshop (or Tiendanube in Spanish-speaking countries), Meneguetti has built the legal and compliance team and is guiding the company through acquisitions and the rollout of new products and services. Nuvemshop helps small- to medium-sized merchants set up and manage their online stores.

Pamela Meneguetti | General Counsel | Nuvemshop

Meneguetti says she wasn’t looking to leave Uber when the Argentine company, valued at $3.1 billion in 2021, came knocking, but Nuvemshop offered her tempting terms.

“I was the first lawyer in the company, and for me this was really interesting, an opportunity that you don’t see often,” she says.

She got to create the company’s policies and internal processes, such as how it reviews contracts and other technical, legal procedures, as well as more general guidelines, like how to keep and organize documents. Moreover, Meneguetti has been building close relationships with other departments to achieve more efficient processes.

“All the challenges—I could stay here forever,” she says.

Putting a premium on logistics

One of Meneguetti’s first projects after arriving at the company in 2021 and building the legal department was supporting the acquisition of Mandaê, a logistics startup.

As an e-commerce business, Nuvemshop gives merchants the tools to create their own websites and connects them with third-party logistics and payments providers. By acquiring Mandaê, Nuvemshop was able to offer the logistics services itself.

But the acquisition came with a challenge: Nuvemshop suddenly needed to manage a physical operation for the first time. Mandaê operates using a cross-docking system where its software selects the best route for each delivery.

“The idea of this acquisition was to increase our value proposition,” Meneguetti says. “So, for example, before we acquired this company, our merchants would be able to integrate only with other logistics solutions, but with this acquisition, we kind of internalized that for them.”

Meneguetti led the acquisition, handling due diligence, reviewing documents about the company, negotiating terms and purchase agreements and then drafting the deal. She also managed the integration once the deal was completed in 2021. Despite having worked with corporate matters in private practice, this was the first M&A transaction she ever led.

“Our challenges as a company were just getting started when we closed the transaction,” Meneguetti says. “Even before closing, we started team integration efforts and quickly got to know the new line of business, as logistics will play a key role in our strategy in the future.”

Catering with payment solutions

With logistics taken care of, Meneguetti helped Nuvemshop roll out its own payment solution last year in Argentina. The solution, Pago Nube, is made available in partnership with the payment service company D-Local.

Nuvemshop can now offer merchants that use its websites competitive rates to process their payment transactions with a variety of payment methods. According to Meneguetti, this helps Nuvemshop obtain new sources of income.

She’s now looking to expand the company’s use of Pago Nube to Mexico. This requires tailoring the solution to local regulations and negotiating terms with Nuvemshop’s financial partners.

A significant portion of the company’s merchant base in Brazil already uses the local solution, called Nuvem Pago, as their payment solution, Meneguetti says.

“We bet a lot on financial services because we truly believe they are relevant to our customers,” she says. “We are just getting started and we hope to add several other financial solutions to our portfolio to empower and motivate all entrepreneurs to make their dreams take flight.”

Building up her skillset

As if operations in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico weren’t enough to manage, Nuvemshop is now expanding into Colombia. Meneguetti is tasked with creating Nuvemshop’s legal entities in the country, deciding on the corporate structure considering local regulations. She also must learn the local labor and employment laws to help determine what benefits to offer employees.

It’s a lot to juggle, but Meneguetti has the expertise to pull it off. A 2007 graduate of Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, she got her master’s from the same institution in 2014 with a focus on constitutional law. However, she started her legal career in 2004, joining Pinheiro Neto Advogados as a legal intern and working her way up to senior associate attorney by 2015.

From there, Meneguetti moved to Uber, joining the rideshare behemoth as its head of litigation for Brazil in 2018. She handled all regulatory and litigation matters for the company in Brazil until the opportunity to join Nuvemshop arose in 2021.

Now focused on planning out her upcoming year—reviewing the company’s business plan, preparing legal objectives and key results and anticipating the legal demands that will result from its 2023 priorities—Meneguetti enjoys being a generalist, handling a broad range of legal concerns and still learning on the job.

“Before Nuvemshop, I was a litigator,” she says. “So, I was working on very specific things. Now, I see pretty much everything. For me, it’s very exciting. Every minute there’s something new.”

View this feature in the Vanguard Spring I 2023 Edition here.