Endeavor

IGNACIO VIDAGUREN Argentina, IMS During the first 33 years of my life I felt that if I set myself a goal, I had to give my best and I was going to achieve that goal. It all looked like a linear equation. Facts had pretty much supported my way of thinking: I was born in a small town in Argentina called Tandil, I set my sights into moving to Buenos Aires for College to study Business Administration and managed to be Magna-Cum-Laude and Valedictorian at what was the best Business School of Argentina: Argentine Catholic University. Then, I wanted to get a great job where I could learn a lot and eventually would help me go to the US to get an MBA. I got my first serious job at McKinsey at a time when Argentina was the fastest growing and most promising economy in the world and I learnt a ton. There, I met a few Stanford MBAs and felt that it was the place where I wanted to go to Business School. I prepared myself and managed to get accepted to Stanford, where I met great people and had an amazing experience. At Stanford, I met Marcos Galperin and when he started MercadoLibre, I quit McKinsey and joined him to build a very successful internet company in Latam. While I was doing that, something shocked my world and the believes that had driven me that far: my oldest daughter Alexia was diagnosed with a rare type of leukemia when she was 10 months old. Together with my wife, we supported Alexia in her fight against cancer for 3 years hoping that doing our best was going to achieve the goal: a cure for her. However, despite having her undergo two cord blood marrow transplants, moving twice to Duke Hospital in the US and living in a hospital room for almost 10 months, Alexia passed when she was almost 4 years old. According to my prior principles, it would have been obvious that I had failed miserably. However, Alexia taught me that success in the important things in life are not determined by who gets the winning score at the end or who is appointed as the "winner", it's the experience that takes you there and what you leave as a legacy in the process. For my wife Ursula and me, we lost Alexia but managed to continue building our family and now have 3 more beautiful and healthy children. In the meantime, I stayed at MercadoLibre for almost 11 years in leaderships positions and took part in building it into a great success, including taking it public. Eight years ago, I felt that it was time to switch to have a different experience, build a different business and take another journey. Then I joined my friend Gaston Taratuta and helped him build our current business: IMS Internet Media Services. We've grown the company to be $200M+ in revenues in 2018, profitable, operating across 30 countries in Latin America, Europe and Asia. We are in a quest to build a truly global company that helps successful digital, mobile platforms (ie. Twitter, Spotify, Linkedin, Snapchat, Twitch, Waze, Vevo, EA, etc) monetize their product in emerging and frontier markets, where they will never have the scale to operate by themselves. If I could spend the rest of my life solving one problem, it would be how to help people discover their own formula for "Success" and help them find their right, individual balance to lead a fulfilling journey in this life and building a legacy. I am relentless in my pursuit of that formula and that balance, while trying hard to build a legacy and to enjoy my journey.

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