Federico E. Alatorre

IESE Business School

“Entrepreneur building brands that help people think and feel better. Amateur Taco Sommelier.”

Hometown: Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico

Fun fact about yourself: I’ve run five marathons. Two of them during the MBA.

Undergraduate School and Degree: Tec de Monterrey, Industrial Engineering Major, Organizational Systems Minor.

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? Founder and CEO of two companies: Empowermind and GlutenYES!

Where did you intern during the summer of 2025? Transcend Partners, a global technology M&A firm based in Barcelona.

Where will you be working after graduation? I plan to stay in Europe and scale my e-commerce brands internationally.

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School:  As co-president of the IESE Startup and Entrepreneurship Club, I co-organized Founders Day, our flagship annual event connecting entrepreneurs, alumni and investors with the IESE community. In the first year, I served as a club director with a focus on mentorship and building the Founders Day program from the ground up.

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? Getting on Shark Tank Mexico during my first year. I was preparing for national television while going through the hardest semester of the program, running two companies across a seven-hour time difference, and training for two marathons at the same time. I had to be extremely disciplined about where I put my time & energy. Pulling it off was the clearest proof I have that the MBA genuinely changes the way you operate.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? It might sound strange, but my former students. Since before the pandemic, and for almost three years, I taught IB Business and Management at a Tec de Monterrey high school. It was their first business class ever. I watched them go from zero to understanding a P&L. Some launched ventures. Others found jobs overseas. I’ve kept mentoring a few of them after they graduated, and honestly, now I’m learning more from them (especially on AI).

As an entrepreneur, I’m chronically unsatisfied with my own work. There’s always more to build, more to fix, more to do. I rarely stop to feel proud of what I’ve done. But when I see my former students, something different happens. I didn’t build what they’re building. I’m just a small brick in their castle. That’s the achievement that stays with me.

Why did you choose this business school? I wanted the most international environment possible. To be around people who see the world differently than I do. In a world that’s ever more connected, the best way to understand the zeitgeist is to get completely immersed in it. IESE offers the widest variety of nationalities and backgrounds I’ve ever seen in one room, and those different perspectives get pushed even further through the case method.

I chose IESE because I wanted to build a global brand. Understanding how a problem I’m facing in my business back in México has already been solved in India, Japan, Brazil, Nigeria, China or Colombia has been genuinely eye-opening.

Who was your favorite MBA professor? Jan Simon. He teaches the Search Fund class, and what made a difference was how he brought the full arc of a deal into the classroom. Not just the term sheet. The whole process:

Raising the fund, sourcing companies to acquire, running proper diligence, negotiating with founders – who’ve spent 30 years building their life’s work and then convincing them that selling their company to you — a stranger with an MBA & a spreadsheet — is the right decision.

Most professors give you frameworks. Jan gave you perspective. And he held a high bar: he wanted to know what you would actually do, not what the textbook says. I read his book before the MBA started and then got the full experience inside his classroom. Those two were very different experiences.

What was your favorite course as an MBA? Managing SMEs was my favorite class. Not only because of the course content and professor, but the whole vibe was different. Through the case method, I was able to learn from peers on how to better manage a small and medium-sized business. It was a breath of fresh air after cases from multinationals and big corporations, which are great for learning frameworks, but this content felt more tactical for my own reality.

Every course teaches you one tool. This one made you use all of them at the same time: leadership, finance, tech, operations, marketing, HR, M&A and legal. You had to think about the business as a whole, not just one function. It was the most practical course I took. I filled pages with notes and applied them that same day after class.

Looking back over your MBA experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently and why? I would have protected more evenings for spontaneous time with classmates. Running a business with a 7-8-hour difference during the MBA meant my nights were usually for meetings or “emergency” calls, not beers with the section.

That said, I have no real regrets. I left no stone unturned in every space I committed to.

What was the most impactful case study you had in business school and what was the biggest lesson you learned from it? The Genuinus case in Marketing II. I thought I knew my numbers but the class exercise made me go back and recalculate the LTV and CAC numbers for my own businesses. I realized I had been way too conservative with acquisition spend. The case completely changed how I thought about digital marketing and customer acquisition growth.

What did you love most about your business school’s town? I’ll try not to spoil the secret too badly. But…Beach in 20 minutes. Skiing in two hours. Food that makes you rethink what you thought was good food. Architecture that makes you stop mid-sentence and look up to take pictures you’ll never upload (and never delete).

But what stayed with me most was the rhythm. Barcelona operates at a pace that forces you to be present. Walking to a meeting while eating a sandwich? Unheard of. People sit down for meals and stay an hour after the plate is cleared. After years of treating every minute as something to optimize, that pace was a recalibration I didn’t know I needed. I realized the importance of being present in the space you’re in… and that rest is not the opposite of productivity.

What business leader do you admire most? A decade before the concept arrived on the continent, there was a business leader giving free healthcare, education, and mortgages to everyone in his organization. That business leader was Eugenio Garza Sada.

He transformed the way I think about capitalism and the impact that companies can have in society as a large positive force for good. He used his businesses to fuel his philanthropic tendencies, opening universities, hospitals, and foundations across the state of Nuevo León.

After a decade of giving his workers free healthcare, the federal government followed his leadership and installed a similar system nationwide, giving all Mexican workers government-paid healthcare.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? IESE pushed us to use AI in our work from the beginning. Personally, I used Claude and n8n to automate a lot of the operational tasks of running two e-commerce companies while in school. That freed up hours I redirected toward studying and being present in class. I also used NotebookLM to go through case material and connect ideas across subjects.

The biggest insight: Consciousness is a spectrum, the Singularity is here…

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? Devyangana Sagar. She was organizing Founder’s Day, hosting the IESE Spotlight podcast, and giving her own TED Talk all at the same time. She’s one of those people who doesn’t just have ideas. She actually executes them. What I admire most is that she never seemed overwhelmed. She just showed up and delivered, every single time.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list? The first one is to experience an IPO, whether my own company or someone else’s. The full process: due diligence, book building, roadshow and the opening bell. I think it’s one of those experiences that fundamentally changes how you understand markets, capital and what it actually means to build something from zero.

The second one is to launch a pre-seed and seed fund in Latin America. Access to early-stage capital in the region is still one of the biggest barriers for entrepreneurs. After learning how to scale my own ventures internationally, I want to use that experience to help the next generation of Latin American founders do the same, just faster and with better tools than I had.

What made this student such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2026?

“Since his arrival at IESE, Federico has consistently stood out among an already exceptional group of students. Beyond his evident academic talent, what truly distinguishes him is his humility, thoughtful approach and genuine commitment to contributing to the community around him.

Federico has also played a key role in fostering the entrepreneurial spirit within the MBA community. He was instrumental in the launch and implementation of Founders Day, an initiative designed to bring together entrepreneurs, alumni, and investors to share insights and experiences around building and scaling ventures. In addition, through his active involvement in the Entrepreneurship Club, Federico has helped organize and promote a variety of activities aimed at encouraging innovation, collaboration and engagement with the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Beyond his academic and leadership contributions, Federico is an exemplary peer, someone who cares deeply about others and consistently demonstrates responsibility, generosity and teamwork. He has successfully balanced the demanding academic rigor of the IESE MBA program with a strong dedication to supporting his classmates and enriching the broader community.

We are very proud to have Federico as part of the IESE community and I am confident he will continue to make a meaningful impact wherever his career takes him.”

Maria Angeles Losa
Executive Director, MBA Program
IESE Business School

“I had the pleasure of being Federico’s mentor from day one of his MBA and believe him to be an invaluable member of his team, his section, and the MBA program as a whole. He brings a lot of energy, combined with intellectual sharpness, which is particularly well-suited to the type of questions and issues we want to tackle at IESE. Throughout our interactions, I saw Federico grow. This included him pitching on Mexico’s Shark Tank on TV just a few months into the program, and taking a leadership role as president of the IESE Startup and Entrepreneurship Club in year two.

This leadership role also reflects Federico’s strengths in working with people and classmates, which I had the pleasure of observing in ABP (first year) and Entrepreneurial Finance (2nd year). He is very willing to share his experiences, and his entrepreneurial mindset helps peers step out of their comfort zone and think outside the box. On more than one occasion, Federico pushed us to contemplate options that we had not previously considered. Throughout those class interactions, I realized that Federico has a great passion for learning and constantly applies new knowledge to his business or creates future opportunities.  I also admired him for balancing the demands of the IESE MBA while running a company.

Federico has been an outstanding contributor to the Class of 2026. He has enriched the learning experience for his professors and classmates. I am very eager to see many future opportunities Federico will create and to know he will make a significant contribution to the thriving of the IESE community.”

Thomas Maximilian Klueter
Professor of Entrepreneurship and Analysis of Business Problems 
IESE Business School

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