When Linda Rottenberg graduated from Yale Law School in 1993, she knew one thing: She didn't want to practice law. So off to Argentina she went--to work for Ashoka, an organization that supports social entrepreneurs. Tech entrepreneurship was booming in the U.S. But in Argentina? Rottenberg learned that there wasn't even a word for entrepreneur there. "Everybody I was meeting who had big talent aspired to a government job," she says.
There was no venture capital. No role models. No support. That sparked the idea for Endeavor, the New York-based organization Rottenberg launched in 1997 with Peter Kellner, an investor who had witnessed the same lack of advocacy for entrepreneurs during a Harvard Business School trip to China.
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