by DANIEL GROSS
In the late 1990s, starting a nonprofit dedicated to this proposition in Latin America “was a completely strange idea,” says William A. Sahlman, a professor of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School and adviser to Endeavor. Rottenberg, a social-studies major at Harvard and a graduate of Yale Law School, where her interests veered more toward policy than billable hours, had made her way to Latin America in the mid-1990s. Her eureka moment came in Buenos Aires. Riding in a taxi cab with a driver who had a Ph.D. in engineering, she asked why he wasn’t an entrepreneur—back home, engineers were starting dotcoms. He reacted with a quizzical look: “A what?” “It dawned on me that there was no word for entrepreneur in Spanish,” she says.
Rottenberg and Kellner, who met at a conference in the country, saw a gap in the top-heavy Latin American economies. Wealth and capital were confined to large family firms and big corporations. “If you had young, enterprising individuals who wanted to create hundreds of jobs, and thought they could change an industry and generate revenues and needed advice and smart capital, there was nowhere to go,” Rottenberg says.
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