“Give me a year and a half and the connectivity gap [between urban and rural or underdeveloped areas] will disappear,” says Adriana Cisneros, CEO of Cisneros, convinced that the internet should now be understood as a human right, on par with water or electricity. Cisneros discusses her career at a meeting with the Global Shapers of Caracas, the World Economic Forum’s community of under-30 young leaders, and with the Wave Tech Hub, an innovation and coworking space for entrepreneurs on the Caracas Campus building, during one of her rare but increasingly frequent visits to her native Caracas. The head of a conglomerate with more than a century of history—and which for decades shaped Venezuelan culture with the Miss Venezuela pageant, Venevisión’s telenovelas and Super Sábado Sensacional, the Caracas Leones baseball team, and even its ownership of Pepsi and later Coca-Cola—now has her sights set on outer space. “There isn’t a day that I don’t wake up and say: ‘How lucky I am to be part of SpaceMobile!’ The truth is, it still gives me chills,” she confesses about her role on the board of directors of AST SpaceMobile, a Texas-based company founded by Venezuelan engineer Abel Avellán, which seeks to deploy the first mobile broadband satellite network directly connected to phones.
The journey toward the starry sky began in 2017, over an impromptu coffee in Miami. Avellán, a graduate of Simón Bolívar University in Caracas, contacted her while trying to raise—no less—$800 million to finance his idea. “I told him I didn’t have $800 million, nor did I have $400 million, but that I’d love to meet him… and in 15 minutes we became partners,” Cisneros recalls. A signature on a piece of paper allowed the engineer to continue going to the office, and over time, major investors such as Britain’s Vodafone, South Korea’s Samsung, the US’s American Tower, and Japan’s Rakuten joined. The venture they built together stands out from other projects like Starlink: while Elon Musk requires users to install special antennas and equipment, AST’s proposal—which doesn’t seek to provide Wi-Fi service, but rather broadband connectivity—is invisible to the consumer. “You don’t have to download any apps, you don’t have to buy a new phone, or a satellite dish,” says Cisneros, “You simply accept the service [that the partner phone company will offer you] and your cell phone will have global connectivity, even on airplanes.”
The system works thanks to a design as ambitious as it is poetic: minivan-sized satellites that, when released into orbit, unfold like “pieces of origami” to become gigantic antennas, as large as a football field. Satellites, the antennas in space, unfurl —”a very specific word,” says Cisneros— when launched into space “and become the largest structures in space today: self-assembling,” she explains. With around 240 of these satellites orbiting the Earth, AST promises to offer broadband globally.
But for Cisneros, the impact goes beyond technology. Her conviction was born after seeing the delay caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in the Dominican Republic, where the group operates Tropicalia —a hotel development alongside the luxury chain Four Seasons. There, Cisneros explains, children who attended private schools graduated at 18, while those in public schools, without access to connectivity, ended up falling behind until they were 20 or 21. “It was crazy. In the Dominican Republic, children lost two years of school because they didn’t have internet access,” she says. “So, it’s not fair.” That’s why she insists that projects like AST not only democratize the internet but can also transform life in rural or remote communities: “With AST, if you live in the countryside, you won’t have to move to the city,” she says, “With AST, all schools will have the potential to be excellent: not just those in urban centers.”
Countercurrent Innovation
Cisneros has been pushing innovation since taking over the reins of her family conglomerate in 2013—which moved its base of operations from Caracas to Miami in 1999—from her father, Gustavo Cisneros, who passed away in 2023 and consolidated the Cisneros group as a key player in the Latin American media and business landscape. “I was fortunate that when I spoke with my father about leading the group, he committed from the beginning to giving me the space to create the company I wanted to lead for the next 30 or 40 years,” she says. “He knew that if I did it, this would be what I would do for the rest of my life.”
That space of freedom, at just 25 years of age, allowed her to boldly restructure the group into four units: Media, Interactive, Real Estate, and Social Leadership. “I came back with a pretty aggressive proposal for how I would restructure everything, what new units I would create, what units I would shut down—which are probably much harder to shot down than to open, by the way, because there’s a human and emotional issue involved, which is complicated—and he gave me complete freedom to do it,” she explains. “I was able to shed a weight I knew I wouldn’t be able to sustain. I think if I hadn’t done that, I would have had 17 direct reports, and I was only 25. I had no experience. That would have been impossible for me.”
Today, the group maintains brands such as the personal care brand FISA, Venevisión, and Miss Venezuela, but under her leadership, it has also opened up space to diversify into innovation and venture capital. In addition to investing in AST SpaceMobile, Cisneros has become a champion of emerging Venezuelan entrepreneurship. She has invested in startups such as La Wawa, an urban mobility company seeking to digitize public transportation in Caracas, and Urgencias Nueve Once, a private healthcare service that operates under an agile, digital model.
The shift toward technology began almost as a personal experiment. “There was a process where I instilled in myself the idea that ‘we all have to learn again,’” recalls Adriana Cisneros. She traveled throughout Latin America, visited incubators, and co-directed the high-impact entrepreneurship network Endeavor Miami to understand the region’s new digital landscape. From there, a venture was born: setting up a digital advertising network through Cisneros Interactivethat in just a few years grew from an initial investment of $150,000 to annual revenues of $650 million. “My first client was Facebook, which ended up given me the representation for Instagram, WhatsApp, and all of Meta’s companies in countries where they didn’t have offices… and as a trial they gave me Bolivia.” While Argentine competitors rejected what they called “third-rate countries”, Cisneros enthusiastically turned to Bolivia and Paraguay. The move was decisive: “We realized there was enormous potential that no one had realized.”
The experience left its mark on her: not only did it give her a frantic tour of Latin America, traveling week after week on airlines like Boliviana de Aviación to connect impossible itineraries between Asunción, La Paz, or Montevideo, but it also gave her the certainty that small markets concealed great opportunities. In fact, in six months, they became official partners of Meta and in a few years, they opened 14 offices in the region, from Guatemala, Panama, and the Dominican Republic to Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia. Eventually, the company ended up being sold to Entravision, a public company in California, for a multiple until then “unheard of in Latin America,” says Cisneros. “I thought the opportunity [to be in a public company] was great because we have always been a sort of hyper-private group and I thought the experience of reporting to a public board was going to be interesting for my growth,” she explains, “I realized after about a year that I didn’t want to continue in that role for two more years. Culturally, there wasn’t a good fit. The work dynamic was very complicated. So, I did an excellent job, I managed to speed up my departure by a full year, they paid me everything they owed us for the third year, and six months after we left, the company collapsed because Facebook changed the partners model.”
Cisneros’s keen eye for finding advantages in looking where no one else wanted to look later extended to the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Although she told Spain’s El País a year ago that she didn’t want to invest in AI until she understood its impact on daily life, Cisneros says she’s already learned. “I ended up becoming a more important partner in Bunker DB and The Electric Factory because of that,” she says of her partnership with Uruguayan entrepreneur Avedis Boudakian. Today, within the Cisneros group, she leads several internal task forces that meet weekly to explore practical applications of AI. “We started with the most traditional ones: legal and accounting. These are departments led by very traditional people, but today they’re much more efficient, they hire different profiles, and they understand that repetitive work has disappeared,” she says. “It’s not that we don’t need more accountants and lawyers, we need them with a different skill set, not to do the tedious office work. So that’s been super interesting. And obviously, in the media department, we’re having a lot of fun.”
With her foray into the small economies of South America or her accidental discovery of partners in Uruguay or the Venezuelan diaspora, Cisneros has demonstrated that innovation isn’t necessarily born in traditional centers but in the peripheries that others dismiss. “I think that’s because I’m Venezuelan. I think maybe if I had been American, I wouldn’t have dared to do it,” she says. “I think that when we come from a relatively small country, where we’re always looking for ways to expand, everything seems incredibly interesting to us… That’s a great ability we have to adapt, to know how to read, and to have affection and curiosity for the rest of the world. I think that’s a tremendous advantage of Venezuelans.”
Back to basics
That discovery of new opportunities has even happened with long-standing projects like Venevisión. “Venevisión was the third private television channel founded in the world. In Venezuela, we’ve always been super-ahead in everything,” Cisneros recalls. However, she herself acknowledges that 15 years ago the group had to come clean: broadcast television was in free fall, and there was no way to reverse it. Even so, she says, the family decided to keep the channel on the air as a commitment to Venezuelans. “Although we saw that broadcast television was in decline, and we received several offers to buy the channel, we decided not to sell because that’s not what it was about,” she explains. “I said, OK, that’s not what it’s about, but what is it about? Because it has to be about something.” Thus began the transition to a multiplatform model, experimenting with networks, digital monetization, and new forms of content distribution. If in 1998, Venevisión could generate between $500 and $600 million a year in advertising revenue, today the business has a different scale, but also a different focus. The key was understanding that it was no longer just about television, but about how to connect with audiences on their devices.
The gamble materialized with the launch of Venevisión Play, a streamingapp originally designed for the Venezuelan diaspora. “We initially designed it thinking about how Venezuelans in Chile would go watch [the telenovela] Gata Salvaje and Miss Venezuela,” she says. “What surprised us was the number of people in Venezuela downloading the app. And watching everything, all the time.” The “accident” revealed that it wasn’t just about reconnecting with those who had emigrated, but also about solving a domestic problem regarding the quality of content on broadcast television. “Although the content we produce has been in HD for a long time… the [free-to-air] broadcast in Venezuela isn’t HD because the government hasn’t made that leap. And the signal in general is very deteriorated for all television channels,” she says. “And that’s no longer my problem. Because in HD, on your smart TV, on your phone, or on your tablet, you get the Venevisión signal. We made a sensational quantum leap.”
With the fall of broadcast television, the local surprise for the Cisneros Group has turned out to be personal care company FISA. “It’s one of the Venezuelan companies doing best in the country today,” Adriana says. Its origins, paradoxically, are linked to Miss Venezuela: Gustavo Cisneros bought it in 1972, as the company had the Miss Venezuela license that Cisneros coveted. What began as a forced acquisition, a rare animal in the Cisneros conglomerate, ended up consolidating into a business so well managed that the family decided never to get rid of it. Today, FISA is a robust business, with mass-market brands that Venezuelan consumers can recognize on the shelves of Farmatodo pharmacies: Dermox, Drene, Everynight.
Over the decades, FISA has adapted to the ups and downs of the Venezuelan economy. In the 1980s and 1990s, FISA focused on serving the lower-middle and lower-income segments, offering quality products at affordable prices compared to imported brands. Then giants like P&G arrived, but when they withdrew amid the crisis, FISA remained as a solid and reliable alternative. “When things were good, we had an interesting market,” she says, “and when things get tough, we have a very interesting market because we ended up becoming a brand of excellent quality, which is sometimes the only option for the entire country.” FISA has managed to combine resilience with innovation, incorporating global trends like hyaluronic acid into its products. “We face the challenges everyone tells you about—if it’s not the packaging, it’s the permits; if it’s not the raw materials, it’s something else—but there’s a super-committed team” that keeps the brand present from street markets to large chains like Farmatodo, explains Cisneros.
Just as FISA represents the resilience of mass consumption in Venezuela, Tropicalia –the hotel project that Adriana Cisneros is developing in the Dominican Republic together with Four Seasons– embodies the conglomerate’s international vision: “When I started working with Four Seasons, I had read the book by Issy Sharp, the founder,” she says, “It’s super nice, about corporate culture, but there was one chapter that broke my heart: A Few Bad Apples [about the failed hotels in Venezuela and India]. When I met him [Sharp], I told him: ‘I’m going to make you change the chapter in your book, because that must have a different story.'” Since then, Cisneros has observed each hotel with a magnifying glass, from the electrical outlets to the treatment of the staff, convinced that Tropicalia must set a new standard. The most moving thing, she says, is that in each Four Seasons of the world are approached by Venezuelan managers who started in Caracas, at the Four Seasons extinct from Venezuela, and built an international career from there and today they recognize it with affection: “They tell me: ‘I know it’s not Venezuela, but you are Venezuelan, and I would love to be able to go to Tropicalia.’” Would Cisneros, who is keen to see a Four Seasons in Venezuela again one day, like to see a season of The White Lotus at Tropicalia? “Absolutely!” she says with a laugh.
The discreet resilience of the Venezuelan entrepreneur
In recent years, Cisneros —who sits on the boards of directors of global companies like Mattel, Ford and Parrot Analytics— has also invested in emerging startups in Venezuela like La Wawa and Urgencias Nueve Once, convinced more by the people than by the Excel spreadsheets. “For me, it was the sunshine, the human quality we saw in a challenge like La Wawa. It’s extraordinary; the people are super-hardworking, obviously intelligent, with an interesting product,” she says. “I’m happy with those two investments—which we made more or less at the same time, about eight or nine months apart—and it has made me more connected to Venezuela,” she says. “They’ve been an interesting window into understanding the dynamics of the new generation of entrepreneurs here, all of whom are admirable. The issue of resilience drives me crazy: how they know how to adapt, how they know how to navigate, how they know how to never give up—it’s spectacular. And these are entrepreneurs who could compete globally anywhere.”
She applies that same perspective when talking about female leadership. “The first super-advantage that Venezuelan female entrepreneurs have is that they are Venezuelan, and I mean it,” she says, “they should be aware that this is a superpower.” According to Cisneros, Venezuela—in the 1980s—had, per capita, the largest number of female CEOs in the world. She says they never had to sacrifice their femininity or their family life to run companies. “Here in Venezuela, somehow, everything is always done, and we are always beautiful,” she says with a laugh, contrasting this with the sacrifices or trade-offs she saw in the American model of working women the 1990s. Her advice to Venezuelan female entrepreneurs is clear: travel, connect with networks, and present your identity with confidence. “That is going to resonate a lot [with investors]: that Venezuelan women are not entangled with those things, that they really can achieve everything, that their priorities are work and also family and there is no problem in having those two priorities at the same time,” she says, “Mafe [Vera] from La Wawa has gotten a lot out of Endeavor, precisely because it has given her the opportunity to spend a week with a lot entrepreneurs from the rest of Latin America, where you also meet investors from abroad,” she says.
As sunset falls, Adriana Cisneros is dazzled by the blue-and-yellow macaws crossing the sunset sky above the brick building of Caracas Campus, the former Procter & Gamble headquarters in La Trinidad. She’s also amazed by the promising movement she’s recently noticed in Caracas; an arc over the last thirty years that, she says, deserves a written history someday. “What I see here is that there’s a super interesting movement of people committed to good ideas that simply transcend what’s happening [in Venezuela],” she says. “These are people who already have a global mindset but are totally committed, proud, and happy to be Venezuelan, and I don’t think that was here 10 or 15 years ago. That’s what I feel when I’m here now. And it’s spectacular.”
