Issue link: http://endeavor.uberflip.com/i/971013
JUAN DOMINGUEZ Spain, Adglow I was born 50 years ago in Spain, where I still live. Two very strong forces have tried to pull me apart since childhood. Each force was embodied by one of my parents, and because of them my life was blurry but full of possibilities. My mother was a writer, rooted in creativity, non-conformity, emotion over reason, and a removed, literary and magical view of the world. I wanted so badly to be a writer, to create stories. My father was an entrepreneur and politician, and viewed the world with an engineer's eyes. Numbers, reason and Newton reigned supreme. He influenced me to want to design cars and cranes, control inputs and predict outputs and measure failures and successes. Two things were obvious, even when I was ten: they wouldn't last long as a couple, and some kind of compromise had to be found. How could I be creative while dealing with numbers? So I read, and read and then read some more. Through reading, I found a calling: if I started a business I could create my own stories and turn them into reality whilst dealing with producing a material result that could be measured, improved and even sold.. So after a few years of ordinary work, I went on to create my first proper company in 1999, an online travel agency, then to become one of the founders of an internet portal and sell it for a lot of money in the crazy times before the Dotcom crash of 2001, and remain there for another six years. Armed with this experience, I began a new company, Adglow, which is now a relevant social media advertising company, with over 250 employees in 17 countries, partnerships with Facebook, Amazon, Twitter et al and clients that include all the large advertising agency groups and many of the best known advertisers in the world, for whom we develop optimization and campaign management software, and run successful digital ad campaigns. And now, as a side project, I have co-founded a television production company that will start shooting its first TV series with one of the main VOD platforms (yes, that one!) after summer, thus allowing me to be part of a company that works with writers. I strongly believe that humanity is currently mutating to a different thing, more mental than physical, and I believe that one of the biggest challenges there is to solve is what are we going to do with our lives when work is no longer our main occupation. How do we become useful to ourselves and to others? How can we continue to learn and adapt? These are the questions that keep me awake at night. I believe that our lives will become even more virtual than they were for the reading child that I was, and I want to be a part of this future. I still read at least two hours everyday, and my parents split happily when I was eleven.