Tiago Dalvi and the art of changing his mind

In 2026, Tiago Dalvi closed the business that had helped make his company a unicorn. Olist’s original operation put small retailers inside Brazil’s large online marketplaces. It had attracted investors, built a recognizable company and given its founder a convincing answer to the question of what he did for a living. Then he stopped doing it.

There is an awkward etiquette to entrepreneurship. Founders are expected to believe in their ideas, preferably with enough conviction to make everyone else slightly uncomfortable. Changing your mind requires another kind of confidence. Dalvi has spent much of his working life learning when to do it. His career runs through a shopping mall, handmade goods, supermarket shelves, two American accelerator programs and a software company in Curitiba. The customer’s problem has proved more durable than any particular solution.

That problem is access: how does a small business reach buyers, handle the resulting work and earn enough to keep going? Dalvi first encountered it among Brazilian artisans. Today, it takes him into inventory systems, payments and logistics. Along the way, the person trying to solve it has had to change his own job almost as often as the company changed its product.

A shopkeeper’s education

Dalvi was born in Londrina, in Paraná, and moved to Curitiba at 16. He studied business administration at the Federal University of Paraná. His parents had been entrepreneurs, and their experience with a shopping mall store helped shape his interest in management. Business arrived in his life with consequences attached. A store could offer independence; it could also make mistakes expensive.

University provided another education through its junior enterprise, where students worked on business problems. Later, Aliança Empreendedora brought him into contact with small producers. Muhammad Yunus’s book Banker to the Poor influenced his interest in combining enterprise with social purpose. He was drawn to the possibility that a functioning business could widen someone else’s opportunities.

Solidarium began in 2007 as a shop selling artisans’ products. The appeal was easy to understand: gather work from different makers, give it a place to be seen and let customers buy. A shopping mall already had shoppers. The arrangement appeared to solve a distribution problem with an address.

By 2013, Solidarium’s story had reached Brazilian television. Its online platform allowed makers and small producer groups to offer their goods beyond the physical shop. The early ambition had survived the first format. Putting handmade products in front of customers remained the point, even as the place where that meeting happened changed.

The internet did not abolish arithmetic

Before the online marketplace came distribution through established retailers. Walmart, Renner and Tok&Stok had reach that a young company could not cheaply reproduce. Working with them offered a route to customers who were already shopping. It also exposed the practical demands of supplying another business: systems, deliveries, stock and deadlines.

In 2011, Dalvi joined the Unreasonable Institute. A contemporary film from the program shows him discussing how to expand Solidarium with Unreasonable founder Daniel Epstein. The question was already larger than securing a promising retail relationship. Could the organization support the opportunity it wanted? Selling more would mean being able to deliver more, consistently.

The program brought him into a community of entrepreneurs and mentors, with technology offering another way to reach a wider market. Solidarium became an online marketplace. The shopkeeper was learning to build an internet business. The appeal of removing physical limits was considerable. A website could display more products than a shelf, and a producer did not need to live near a particular mall.

Yet an online catalog still needed customers. In his later explanation of Olist’s origins, Dalvi returned to the difficulty of generating demand. Having products available did not ensure that anyone would find them. The internet had increased the possible audience; reaching that audience remained a job with a bill attached.

By 2014, Solidarium was selected for the ninth batch of 500 Startups. Dalvi traveled to the United States with designer Jonatas Azzolini and programmer André Kiffer. The announcement described four months of mentoring, meetings and work in Silicon Valley. A company formed around Brazilian handmade goods was now examining its future among technology startups.

Borrowing the crowd

Olist, founded in 2015, connected merchants with the marketplaces where buyers were already gathering. Rather than asking every retailer to assemble an audience from scratch, the business helped them sell within established destinations. Dalvi had been circling this idea since his days dealing with large physical retailers. The crowd mattered as much as the storefront.

The early company was compact. Five employees shared a 12-square-meter office in Curitiba, sitting around one table. By February 2020, Olist was preparing a move into a disused shopping center. For someone whose first retail experiment had occupied a mall, the proposed address supplied a pleasing piece of architectural humor. This time, the growing business needed space for the people helping other shops sell.

Dalvi’s account of the marketplace model makes a useful distinction between getting access and getting attention. A merchant might be admitted to a platform and still struggle to stand out. Product information, service and execution therefore became part of the work. Opening the door was only the beginning of a much longer commercial relationship.

In December 2021, a Series E investment round led by Wellington Management brought Olist into the group of companies valued above $1 billion. SoftBank, Valor Capital and other investors also participated. The milestone gave the story a headline with a number in it. The work underneath still involved helping retailers make everyday operations function.

“Hoje a gente serve quem a gente foi no passado.”

Tiago Dalvi, 2022
“Today we serve who we used to be.” Translation from Portuguese.

A founder has to stop doing everything

That sentence gives Dalvi’s work a personal reference point. He understands the customer partly through his own experience as a shopkeeper. In a February 2022 television interview, he described the company as serving businesses across the micro, small and medium-sized range. He also spoke of learning from mistakes and adapting as circumstances changed. His own history supplied plenty of practice.

Adaptation applied to management, too. In an earlier podcast conversation, Dalvi described the founder’s role changing as a company grew from five people to fifteen and then to larger teams. At the beginning he handled sales and investor negotiations himself. Later, he had to coordinate leaders, recruit people and help an organization operate through others. Familiarity with every task could become a limit on how much the company could do.

His more recent writing is unusually concrete about attention. In a 2025 LinkedIn post, he described assigning different days to customers, technology, growth, finance, and people and culture. He had tried attending everything. The result, he wrote, was shallow discussion and limited effectiveness. A calendar became a way to decide where his participation actually helped.

In a separate post, he questioned whether the familiar 80/20 principle was sufficient for exceptional performance. He emphasized attention to product, process and the details that create value for customers. Put alongside his calendar, the position is revealing: choose carefully where to spend time, then examine the chosen work closely. A meeting invitation is a surprisingly poor substitute for a decision.

The product that could be retired

The purchase of Tiny in 2021 supplied the core of Olist’s subsequent direction. Enterprise resource planning software, usually shortened to ERP, handles the machinery behind a retailer’s day: inventory, orders and accounts. Around that core, Olist assembled commerce, payments, credit and logistics services. The old question of reaching buyers widened into the question of running the business that served them.

By September 2026, Dalvi was explaining the closure of the original marketplace operation. He compared the newer Olist to a connected suite of workplace tools for retail. Integration was the argument: several useful services working together could save a merchant from managing the joins between them. It was another revision of what the company should own and what it should help customers accomplish.

In an October 2 interview, Dalvi said Olist had reached breakeven in August and maintained positive performance in September. He also described plans for payment terminals in 2027. Those terminals would bring the company further into physical stores. The founder who had once left a mall shop behind was still working on the problems found behind a counter.

His interest in building an organization now extends beyond the original founder’s desk. In 2025, he discussed board composition and acquisition integration on The J Curve podcast. The questions included how boards should evolve and how newly acquired businesses could retain room to develop. These are different problems from finding a first retail partner, but they demand the same willingness to reconsider an arrangement that once made sense.

Dalvi’s story is often told through changes of business model. Seen from the customer’s side, there is considerable continuity. A maker needs buyers. A retailer needs stock, orders and payments to agree with one another. Someone has to make the connections work. Nearly two decades after Solidarium opened, Dalvi is still pursuing that job, with fewer obligations to the shape of his first answer.