About Martin Varsavsky

Martin Varsavsky is an Argentine/Spanish entrepreneur, founder of seven companies in the past 20 years.In 1984, while still in college, Martin 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., Martin's 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.MV's best-known ventures were founded during the last decade. In 1998 MV started Jazztel 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. But not all of MV's companies were successful. In 2000 he started Germany's largest ASP, Einsteinet, and the company was sold in 2003 at no return to him or investors.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.FON has raised more than 30M Euro in financing from among others Skype, Google, Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital and BT. These leading Internet and communications companies have shown the industry's support for FON's vision and business model.(source: http://english.martinvarsavsky.net)