Roberto Souviron and the value of leaving the queue

Some business ideas arrive wearing a tie. This one arrived at the end of a queue. In 1998, Roberto “Roby” Souviron was studying for an MBA at Duke University. Back in Buenos Aires for the holidays, he went to a travel agency to buy a return ticket. After more than half an hour with little progress, he left. Buying the ticket online offered an escape, although getting it issued in Argentina introduced another round of bureaucracy. Even the shortcut had a queue attached.

The irritation contained a business proposition: bring the online travel agency model already operating in the United States to Argentina. It was an ordinary customer problem, pleasantly free of grand declarations. Someone wanted to go somewhere. The process was making that unnecessarily difficult. Souviron would spend the next part of his life helping build a company around the distance between those two facts.

01An MBA, a modem, a way home

He had studied business administration at Universidad de San Andrés, then worked in consulting at Price Waterhouse and in business strategy at Telecom. His training gave him ways to examine a business before he had one of his own. Duke added an American vantage point on the internet economy. A travel purchase that still involved waiting at a desk in Buenos Aires could already begin on a computer elsewhere. The difference was visible to anyone who happened to live between those worlds.

There was a personal reason to notice. While studying in North Carolina, Souviron missed his girlfriend in Argentina and wanted to travel back more often. He was buying tickets online while fellow students crowded the university travel agency around vacation time. The geography of a relationship supplied a practical education in distribution. Long-distance romance has inspired poetry, improbable telephone bills and, in this case, a closer look at the booking process.

His father, Roberto Carlos, had been a senior executive in the meat industry. Souviron grew up observing someone who made consequential decisions inside established businesses. He wanted a business of his own. The attraction of the MBA included a sensible fallback: if the entrepreneurial project failed, he would still have a qualification that could help him find work. There was ambition here, with a spare set of keys.

Despegar took shape in 1999 with Martín Rastellino, Christian Vilate, Mariano Fiori and Alejandro Tamer among the founding group. Each of those five put in $15,000. Their connections came from different stretches of life rather than a single tourism apprenticeship. Souviron was assembling people around an opportunity they could see, in a trade they would have to learn. The company was incorporated on August 3; the website went live on December 11.

02The less glamorous art of staying open

An internet business founded in 1999 had unusually good timing for attracting excitement and unusually bad timing for relying on it. The technology bubble burst. The September 11 attacks battered travel. Argentina had its own economic upheaval. Looking back in 2023, Souviron described how close the company came to failure in 2003. His explanation for surviving emphasized austerity. Keeping expenses under control gave the business time to benefit as competitors disappeared.

That account puts an unromantic activity near the center of the story: preserving room to continue. A booking platform needs customers, technology and suppliers, but it also needs to be around when someone comes back to book another trip. The company that lived through the downturn could serve demand that less durable competitors had left behind. Survival acquired commercial value, one ordinary transaction at a time.

The public image matched that preference for function. In a 2016 interview, Souviron wore a black company T-shirt with a prominent D. Asked whether the letter stood for Diego Maradona, God or Despegar, he supplied the corporate answer. The exchange was brief; the wardrobe did most of the talking. He was discussing sales growth and plans for a New York listing in the uniform of someone who had come to talk about the business.

“Make it work”

Roberto Souviron’s self-described specialty on LinkedIn

His LinkedIn profile offers a similarly economical description of his specialties: “Make it work.” A colleague’s public recommendation describes someone who worked as an equal with people throughout the company, trusted staff and encouraged questions. That is another person’s assessment, rather than an inventory of virtues supplied by the subject. It gives the three-word description a little texture: making things work involved other people being able to speak.

03A company can take off after its founder steps away

In February 2017, Damián Scokin became chief executive. Souviron’s 18-year stretch in the role had ended before Despegar’s September stock-market debut. The ordering matters. A company’s founding, its years of operation and its arrival on an exchange can look like one continuous personal triumph when compressed into a sentence. Here, another executive was already running the business when the shares began trading.

The offering put a public price on years of less photogenic work. Despegar sold roughly 12.7 million shares at $26, raising about $332 million. The figures belong to the company’s financing history. For Souviron, they also marked how far the original booking problem had traveled: from a customer’s impatience to a business that public-market investors could buy a piece of. The queue had become a ticker symbol.

The business continued changing hands and chapters. On May 15, 2025, Prosus and Despegar announced completion of the acquisition at $19.50 a share. The deal brought the travel company into a broader Latin American portfolio spanning several kinds of online commerce. Scokin spoke for Despegar as CEO. Souviron’s place in that announcement was historical: he had helped start the institution now joining a different corporate family.

His current professional identity includes founding Win Win Ventures, the affiliation listed by Endeavor Argentina and on his LinkedIn profile. Endeavor also lists him on its national board, alongside entrepreneurs from businesses including Mercado Libre, Globant and Kaszek. The connections place him within a continuing Argentine business network. They also make the next part of his story harder to describe as simple retirement.

04The classroom was already on the itinerary

In 2006, well before leaving Despegar, Souviron co-founded a nonprofit primary and secondary school in Tigre. He later helped establish Argentinos por la Educación in 2017 and became its first president. Amundsen followed as another school project. His 2018 Konex recognition recorded both the commercial career and his educational work. The two had overlapped for years, even if the stock-market chapter attracted the easier headlines.

The school in Las Tunas had a specific premise: see whether better learning could be achieved with resources comparable to those allocated per pupil in state education. The ambition extended beyond opening a single institution. In his work on Amundsen, Souviron explored how technology and the efficiencies of a network might support good schooling at lower cost. It was the kind of question that makes an operator reach for a spreadsheet, then discover how much the spreadsheet must account for.

He carried a habit from online commerce into the debate. Before changing a web page at Despegar, a team could test whether the proposed version actually improved results. In education, he argued in 2018, decisions too often rested on opinion without a dependable way to evaluate the outcome. He wanted infrastructure for experimentation and rigorous measurement. The attraction was practical: an appealing idea should have to demonstrate what it does for a student.

In a separate discussion about data, he described a repeated process of doing, measuring, adjusting and trying again. The point was to remain open to an idea and willing to discard it when results failed to cooperate. Applied to schools, that approach asks awkward but useful questions. Which change helped? Who benefited? Would it work in another classroom? An answer has to survive more than the enthusiasm of the person proposing it.

05More seats, a different destination

In 2024, Souviron and Jorge Chrestia formally created Fundación Estudiar es Mejor, building on their earlier educational projects. Its work supports schools including María de Guadalupe in Las Tunas and Garín, and Tesla in the Rosario area. Construction, classroom equipment and teacher development sit alongside the larger aim of expanding access. These are tangible things to organize: rooms, materials, people and the money needed to keep them working together.

The foundation’s current campaigns include building 12 additional classrooms for Tesla and creating places for 400 more students. Another project concerns a new school in Moreno. The unit of expansion is easy to understand: a place for a child who would otherwise face a shortage of places. Growth, in this setting, can be counted in desks before it becomes an abstract claim about opportunity.

By September 2025, Souviron was still talking about the difficulty of adapting. “Lo más difícil de emprender es aprender a cambiar,” he said: the hardest part of entrepreneurship is learning to change. His own work offers a fairly literal reading of the line. He had moved from operating a travel company to investing, building educational institutions and supporting an organization that examines how a school system performs.

There is a connection between the passenger at the travel agency and the school founder, although the problems differ in almost every practical respect. Both begin with access to something that already exists for someone else. A convenient way to book a flight. A school that gives a child room to learn. Souviron’s career keeps returning to the work required to make those possibilities available to more people. Leaving the queue was the easy part. Making room for others has taken considerably longer.