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Javier Santiso is the CEO and General Partner of Mundi Ventures www.mundiventures.com, an international 500M VC fund, based in Madrid and with offices in Paris also. He is also the founder of the art and publishing house www.lacamasol.com
He invests in deep tech, climate tech companies, IoT, cyber, AI, industrial internet and also insurtech and fintech in Europe & USA, in Paris, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Madrid, Barcelona, Tel Aviv, New York, Palo Alto, Miami, Singapore, Sao Paolo. He run in the past the tech investments of Khazanah, the US$50 billion Asian sovereign fund, and invested in multi billion tech unicorns like Farfetch (London, a startup exited and listed in the Nasdaq), Skyscanner (Edinburgh, a startup also exited and bought by Ctrip) and others like Auto1 (Berlin, now listed in Francfort).
He is an independent board member of Paris Based listed company FNAC Darty and also a member of the board of Madrid based Prisa, the owner or El Pais, La Ser and Santillana. He invested in a dozen of unicorns included Wefox in Berlin, Bolttech in Singapore, Shift Technology in Paris, Job&Talent in Madrid or Betterfly in Santiago de Chile and seats also in several art and cultural trustees like El Prado Museum, Teatro Real Opera, and Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando.
He is a Young Global Leader (YGL) of the World Economic Forum (Davos), and founder of the Club Mundi, a +750 network of Spanish and Foreign executives both working abroad and in Spanish multinationals or foreigners linkedin with Spain ("los argonautas"). Formerly he has been also managing director at Telefónica where he worked with the current chairman, José María Alvarez Pallete and set up the venture capital fund of funds (Amerigo, 400M Euros), worked on Wayra, the startup accelerators network worldwide and created Talentum, the hackers program.
He founded in the past of Start Up Spain, the leading platform on startups and ventures powered in cooperation with Rafael del Pino Foundation, in total 10 sessions created across several years. He is also interested in the interactions between artificial intelligence and emotional intelligence and plans a Forum where corporate leaders, startups founders and visual artists will be brought together, around art & technology, along also a publications that will question the living world around technologies from the point of view of poets, artists, chefs, etc.
Javier holds both Spanish and French nationalities,. [1] He is a leading economist on emerging markets, startups and venture capitals. He has authored several books (listed below) and papers published in leading referee journals and edited books published by Columbia University Press, Oxford University Press or Routledge. He is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Council on Latin America. In 2011 he was named as one of the most influential iberoamerican thinkers by Foreign Policy. He has been professor at Johns Hopkins University (Washington), Sciences Po (Paris), ESADE Business School (Barcelona) and IE Business School (Madrid).
In 2010, he joined Telefónica International as a Director where he is charge of the strategy and development of Latin American Innovation Funds focused on Venture Capital and Growth Capital. He later became Director of Innovation Funds at Telefónica SA; managing director of Telefónica Europe Chairman's & CEO Office; and managing director of Global Affairs and New Ventures. He also joined ESADE Business School as a Professor of Economics and Vice President of the ESADE Centre on Global Economy and Geopolitics (ESADEgeo). He is also the chair and Founder of the OECD Emerging Markets Network (EmNet), a platform of 50 leading multinationals from OECD and emerging countries (Brazil, India, Russia, China, South Africa) that he created while at the OECD and a member of the Advisory Council of Aspen Institute France.
He started his career in academia as a tenured Research Fellow at Sciences Po Paris and associate professor at SAIS Johns Hopkins University. He has been an emerging markets economist at Crédit Agricole Indosuez. After he became chief economist for emerging markets at BBVA where he developed and led a group of 50 economists spread in 9 different countries. Later he has been the Chief Development Economist and Director of the OECD Development Centre, a policy tank of 95 staff focused on Africa, Asia and Latin American emerging markets. He has been the younger director ever named at the OECD during the past 50 years of the organization.
There he published the African Economic Outlook (AEO), conceived and launched new core products the Latin American Economic Outlook (LEO), the South East Asian Economic Outlook (SAEO) and the Global Development Outlook (GDO) on the Shifting Wealth of Nations. The OECD Development Centre experienced a profound transformation under Javier Santiso leadership, with nearly a tripling of the staff and a doubling of the Governing Board members, with most of the key emerging now full participants (Brazil, India, South Africa, Indonesia, VietNam, Egypt, Colombia, Chile, Turkey, Mexico, Poland, etc.).
Javier Santiso holds several degrees from Sciences Po, France, including a PhD, an MBA from HEC School of Management (France). He finished his doctoral studies at Oxford University where he has been also a research fellow of the St Antony's College. He followed Executive Programs at IESE Business School (Spain) and at Harvard University J.F. Kennedy School (United States). He was a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. He gave lectures and presentations at Columbia University, Harvard University, Oxford University, London Business School, among others, and at annual conferences on emerging markets organized by The Economist (Brazil), The Financial Times (London), Munich Re (Munich), Coface (Paris), Investec Asset Management (Turkey) or Khazanah's sovereign wealth fund annual conference (Malaysia).
Javier Santiso is the author of over 70 articles on emerging markets, venture capital and startups. His most recent published books are: Latin America's Political Economy of the Possible: Beyond Good Revolutionaries and Free Marketeers, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2007; The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Political Economy, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2012; The Decade of the Multilatinas, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013. He publishes regular Opinion Editorials in El País (Spain), Valor Económico (Brazil), and América Economía (Latin America).
He publishes also novels, in 2023 with Gallimard in Paris (Un pas de Deux, around the life of the American painter Edward Hopper. He writes in both French and Spanish. Before in 2021 with La Huerta Grande, in Madrid he published also other novels (Vivir con el corazón; El sabor a sangre no se me quite de la voz). He founded the art & poetry publishing house La Cama Sol www.lacamasol.com that works with writers and poets like Christian Bobin, Pascal Quignard, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Joan Margarit or Pere Gimferrer, and also painters and artists like Lita Cabellut, Etel Adnan, Paula Rego, Soledad Sevilla, Anselm Kiefer, Rachid Koraïchi, Juan Uslé, Rafael Canogar, Miquel Barceló, José Maria Cano, or Jaume Plensa.
The economy of Spain is a highly developed social market economy. It’s the world's 15th largest by nominal GDP and the sixth-largest in Europe. Spain is a member of the European Union and the eurozone, as well as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Trade Organization. In 2021, Spain was the twentieth-largest exporter in the world and the sixteenth-largest importer. Spain is listed 27th in the United Nations Human Development Index and 37th in GDP per capita by the World Bank. Some of the main areas of economic activity are the automotive industry, medical technology, chemicals, shipbuilding, tourism and the textile industry.
Telefónica, S.A. is a Spanish multinational telecommunications company headquartered in Madrid, Spain. It is one of the largest telephone operators and mobile network providers in the world. It provides fixed and mobile telephony, broadband, and subscription television, operating in Europe and the Americas.
The "Miracle of Chile" was a term used by economist Milton Friedman to describe the reorientation of the Chilean economy in the 1980s and the effects of the economic policies applied by a large group of Chilean economists who collectively came to be known as the Chicago Boys, having studied at the University of Chicago where Friedman taught. He said the "Chilean economy did very well, but more importantly, in the end the central government, the military junta, was replaced by a democratic society. So the really important thing about the Chilean business is that free markets did work their way in bringing about a free society." The junta to which Friedman refers was a military government that came to power in a 1973 coup d'état, which came to an end in 1990 after a democratic 1988 plebiscite removed Augusto Pinochet from the presidency.
Esade is an international private educational institution based in Barcelona, Spain. Esade runs two schools of the university, Esade Business School and Esade Law School, as well as a language centre, the Esade Executive Language Center. The school has also formed a strategic alliance with Ramon Llull University in its undergraduate programmes in Law and Business. ESADE is ranked among the world's top business schools and law school programs by the Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes, QS World University Rankings and more.
Fonovisa Records is an American Spanish language record label founded in 1984 by Guillermo Santiso as a subsidiary of Televisa. Its former name before being acquired by Televisa in 1984 was Profono Internacional, which was founded in 1978. Fonovisa mainly produces Mexican style music. It is well known for its signing with artists such as Los Tigres Del Norte, Los Bukis, Los Temerarios, Enrique Iglesias, Lucero and Thalía.
Terra is a Spanish Internet multinational company owned by Telefónica, with headquarters in Spain and offices in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, the United States and Peru. Part of Telefónica Group, Terra operates as a web portal or Internet access provider in the U.S., Spain, and 16 Latin American countries. Founded in 1999 as Terra Networks, S.A., a publicly traded company with Telefónica as its largest shareholder, all outstanding shares were purchased by Telefónica in 2017, making Terra a wholly owned subsidiary.
The Other Side of the Bed a.k.a. The Wrong Side of the Bed is a 2002 Spanish musical comedy film directed by Emilio Martínez Lázaro and written by David Serrano, which stars Ernesto Alterio, Paz Vega, Guillermo Toledo and Natalia Verbeke alongside Alberto San Juan and María Esteve. A box-office hit, it became the highest-grossing Spanish film in the domestic market in 2002.
Jesús Huerta de Soto Ballester is a Spanish economist of the Austrian School. He is a professor in the Department of Applied Economics at King Juan Carlos University of Madrid, Spain and a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute.
Eduard Punset i Casals was a Spanish politician, lawyer, economist, and science popularizer.
Alessandro Magnoli Bocchi, is an Italian economist, investment professional and manager.
Alice Hoffenberg Amsden was a political economist and scholar of state-led economic development. For the last two decades of her career, she was the Barton L. Weller Professor of Political Economy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sebastián Edwards a member of the Edwards family is a Chilean economist, professor, speaker, and consultant. He is currently the Henry Ford II Professor of International Business Economics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). From 1993 until April 1996, he was the Chief Economist for the Latin America and Caribbean Region of the World Bank. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a member of the advisory board of Transnational Research Corporation and co-chairman of the Inter American Seminar on Economics (IASE). He is the Past President of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA), an international professional association of economists with academic interests in Latin America and the Caribbean region. He was a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Kiel Institute of World Economics, Kiel-Germany. He is a member of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's Council of Economic Advisors.
Juan Villalonga Navarro is a Spanish businessman. He was a partner at McKinsey & Company in the 1980s, CEO for Credit Suisse First Boston and Bankers Trust in Spain in the early 1990s, and CEO of Telefónica from 1996 to 2000.
Francisco Javier Garciadiego Dantán is a Mexican historian specialized in the Mexican Revolution who formerly served as president of El Colegio de México. He is a former director-general of the National Institute of Historical Studies on the Mexican Revolutions (INEHRM), has authored several books and holds the 12th seat of the Mexican Academy of History, where he substituted the late Beatriz de la Fuente.
Lourdes S. Casanova is an academic, author and currently a Senior Lecturer of Management at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management and Gail and Rob Cañizares Director of the Emerging Markets Institute. Before her appointment to Johnson School, Casanova was a lecturer in the Strategy Department at INSEAD. She specializes in international business with a focus on Latin America and multinationals from emerging markets. In 2014 and 2015, Lourdes Casanova was appointed as one of the 50 most influential Iberoamerican intellectuals by Esglobal. Also, she is member of the Board of Directors of Boyce Thompson Institute.
Kurt Johnny Burneo Farfán is a Peruvian economist and politician. He served as minister of Economy and Finance under the presidency of Pedro Castillo.
Fandango Latam, previously known as Cinepapaya, is a company selling movie tickets online and through mobile devices. It also provides showtime information and movie related content.
José María Álvarez-Pallete López is a Spanish economist and chief executive officer of Telefónica S.A. since 8 April 2016.
Javier Pérez-Tenessa is a Mexican entrepreneur, businessman, investor, composer and producer based in Barcelona, Spain, who has founded several companies, including publicly traded eDreams and Venture Capital firm 4Founders Capital.
Francisco Benedito Valentín is a Spanish businessman, entrepreneur and public speaker based in Valencia, Spain. He is the founder and current CEO of ClimateTrade, a blockchain-based marketplace for carbon offsetting and the chairman at ClimateCoin, the world's first regulated crypto carbon asset.