Founder and CEO at Idilio
Gabriela Tafur
Stanford MBA, lawyer, TV Host (1.5M Followers), Caracol TV, Univision, Forbes 30U30.
Questions & Answers
What's the story behind your company?
After several years in the media industry – first as on-air talent and later in corporate strategy – I started to feel like I was building a career in an industry that wasn’t evolving with how people actually consume content. During my MBA at Stanford, I went back home to Colombia over Thanksgiving and had a moment that changed everything. I was sitting in a nail salon and noticed that many of the nail artists were glued to their phones watching fast, vertical Chinese micro-dramas. That’s when it clicked. Entertainment wasn’t dying – distribution had changed. And there was a massive gap: hundreds of millions of Spanish-speaking users, deeply familiar with serialized storytelling through telenovelas, but no platform built for how they now consume content. That realization became the foundation for Idilio.
How is your team uniquely positioned to solve the problem you're tackling?
Our team sits at the intersection of content, technology, and audience in a way that is rare in the media industry. I spent several years as on-air talent and later in corporate strategy, which gave me a deep understanding of both how content is created and how the industry operates. My co-founder brings strong technical and product experience, with a background in building and scaling technology-driven companies. Together, we’re combining creative intuition with data-driven decision-making. More broadly, our team is intentionally structured to reflect where the industry is going – not where it’s been. We’re building with engineers, data scientists, and content creators working closely together, allowing us to iterate quickly on both storytelling and product.
Why are you excited about your company/product?
What excites me most is that we’re building something that feels inevitable. It’s a product people genuinely love, in a format that matches how they already consume content, for an audience that’s been underserved for a long time. When all of that clicks at once, it feels like we’re not forcing something new – we’re unlocking something that was already there and that no one else in LatAm was brave enough to build.
