Martin Varsavsky
Serial Entrepreneur
Martin Varsavsky is an Argentine/Spanish entrepreneur, founder of seven companies over the course of his career. In 1984, while still in college, Varsavsky started his first business, Urban Capital Corporation, one of the early leaders of the loft movement in downtown Manhattan. This was soon followed in 1986 by Medicorp Services, a Canadian biotechnology company, a pioneer in AIDS and PSA testing. His third business, Viatel Ltd., Varsavsky’s first venture into the world of telecom, was founded in 1990. In 1998, he started Jazz Telecomunicaciones (Jazztel), Spain’s second largest publicly traded telecom operator. In 1999 he founded Ya.com, Spain’s third largest internet web site/DSL provider that includes the second largest Spanish language web agency www.viajar.com. Martin Varsavsky’s current venture is Fon. With over 13 million hotspots, Fon is the largest WiFi network in the world.Martin Varsavsky manages the Varsavsky Foundation and is best known as the founder of two large educational projects in Latin America – Educ.ar (Argentina) and EducarChile (Chile), and the Safe Democracy Foundation. Martin was Ambassador at Large of Argentina from 2001 to 2005. He is also on the Board of Trustees of the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation, and is a board member of Instituto de Empresa, Spain’s leading business school, where he taught entrepreneurship for eight years. Since 2012 he teaches entrepreneurship at Columbia University and New York University. In 2014 he joined the Supervisory Board of Axel Springer, the largest media company in Germany.
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