With a prestigious portfolio of cover shoots and projects to her name, she was preparing to take the next step by going freelance. But then one day in late 2007, she gave it all up.

Reetu Gupta hadn’t slept at all. Covid-19 – recently declared a pandemic – was creating intense uncertainty the world over. Occupancy at her family’s chain of hotels across Canada, of which she was the CEO, was in freefall. However, it wasn’t the unprecedented business turmoil that was keeping her awake, as she explained in an early-morning phone call with her younger brother. All that Reetu could think about was how the pandemic was going to affect others, recalls Suraj Gupta.

She kept saying how there were already so many people suffering in the world, even before the health crisis hit. With things deteriorating so fast, she said we had to think of ways to help. I wasn’t at all surprised by her reaction; trying to assist others and make the world better is just her mentality.

I think it’s something like less than one third of family businesses that make it from the first to the second generation and half of those don’t make it to the third generation, says Adriana Cisneros. I’m the third generation in our business, so I really hope I’m going to be one of those that survives. Who knows, I might completely mess up, but hopefully not.

Messing up seems a rather unlikely prospect going by Adriana’s record to date. The company is in robust health under her leadership. She has recently returned from a whistle-stop tour of Central and South America, where Cisneros Interactive has become the sole reseller of Facebook in nine countries, the only nations on earth where the social media giant will not manage its own sales.

Facebook chose to work through Cisneros Interactive because it already has the region’s most advanced advertising network. I started Cisneros Interactive, our digital division four years ago, says Adriana.

Our aim from the outset has been to create the largest advertising network in Latin America and also the smartest. When we began, others were trying to do similar things, but in a very country-specific way. No one really dared to do it pan-regionally. I used the same architecture to build the business that my father did when he brought satellite television to Latin America three decades ago.