Issue link: http://endeavor.uberflip.com/i/88132
3 PART ONE: A GLOBAL MOVEMENT EMERGES INC. MAGAZINE RECENTLY labeled Argentina one of the toughest business climates on earth. During the last decade, the country experienced a severe economic crisis. Investor confidence plummeted, unemployment soared to 25 percent, and Argentines began withdrawing large sums of money from banks, exchanging pesos for dollars. Despite the shaky economy, the tech sector in Argentina has experienced amazing growth. Home-grown superstar companies including MercadoLibre (meli) and Globant have sprouted up next to international names like Yahoo, Facebook, and Google, which in 2007 opened its third international office in Buenos Aires. So, how did a country that seemed to do every- thing wrong create such a thriving tech sector? One major contributing factor was Endeavor, which, led by a group of enlightened local business leaders and four American entrepre- neurs — Linda Rottenberg, Peter Kellner, Jason Green and Gary Mueller — launched in Buenos Aires in 1997. The founders believed that connections among entrepreneurs create the game-changing ideas upon which hotbeds of entrepreneurship like Silicon Valley depend. And they were among the first to believe that high- impact entrepreneurship could take root around the world, even during economic crises. "It's always at a time of crisis that the best entrepreneurial ideas crop up," Endeavor Co-Founder & ceo Linda Rottenberg said, citing Argentina as a perfect example of how a culture of entrepreneurship can flourish in challenging conditions. In the late 90's, Buenos Aires's fledgling tech sector became the first laboratory for Endeavor's vision of high-impact entrepreneurship, METRIC The Endeavor story so far is made up of connections among people and organizations around the world. Find out about some of them — and their results — along the bottom of these pages. 10X as many employees and children of Endeavor Entrepreneur companies in Argentina have access to private healthcare (compared to the national average)