José Neves

Current Company

Farfetch — Founder

Connecting the World's Boutiques

José Neves grew up in Porto, Portugal, surrounded by his family's shoe business, and fell in love with both fashion and technology. After building successful e-commerce businesses in London, he founded Farfetch in 2007 with a vision that seemed impossible at the time: creating a single digital marketplace that would connect independent luxury boutiques around the world to a global customer base, without requiring them to build their own e-commerce infrastructure.

The timing was prescient. As luxury fashion migrated online, small boutiques faced extinction — unable to compete with the digital capabilities of department stores and luxury conglomerates. Farfetch gave them a lifeline, providing technology, logistics, and access to millions of customers in exchange for a commission. By its peak, the platform connected over 1,400 sellers in 50+ countries.

Rise, Reckoning, and Reinvention

Farfetch went public on the NYSE in 2018 and reached a market capitalization of over $25 billion at its peak in 2021, making Neves one of Europe's most celebrated tech founders. But the company struggled with profitability, burning through cash as it expanded into areas beyond its marketplace roots — acquiring New Guards Group, launching a luxury platform business, and attempting to build a full-stack luxury operating system.

The company's financial difficulties led to a crisis in late 2023, culminating in an acquisition by South Korea's Coupang in early 2024. Neves's trajectory — from visionary founder to billionaire to near-collapse — mirrors the broader reckoning in growth-at-all-costs tech, where massive revenue and category leadership proved insufficient without a path to profitability. Yet the platform he built genuinely transformed how independent luxury businesses operate in the digital age.