Martín Varsavsky

Founder, Jazztel, Ya.com, FON, Spain

Martin Varsavsky is an Argentine/Spanish entrepreneur, founder of seven companies in the past 20 years. His first venture into the world of telecom, was founded in 1990. This company is best known for inventing call back and building the first pan European fiber optic network ahead of liberalization.

His best-known ventures were founded during the last decade. In 1998 he started Jazztel Telecomunicaciones  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’s current venture is FON, an innovative WiFi start up founded in February 2006 and headquartered in Madrid, Spain, with some 100 employees located around the world. FON’s mission is to make WiFi universal and free by creating a unified global community of members who share WiFi. The FON Community already has close to 700,000 members and has become the world’s largest WiFi community.

He manages the Varsavsky Foundation and is best known as founder of two large educational projects in Latin America, Educ.ar (Argentina) and EducarChile  (Chile) and the Safe Democracy Foundation.