Fernando Espuelas

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Fernando Espuelas (born August 6, 1966) is an American entrepreneur, author, media personality, and philanthropist.Espuelas is one of the Internet's first pioneers.

He is the co-founder (along with Jack Chen) and first CEO of Starmedia, the first pan-Latin Internet portal that was launched in 1996 and now part of Orange, France Telecom's Internet services firm.

Starmedia, the first venture-backed Latin Internet business company and also the first initial public offering (IPO) in the Latin Internet industry, according to the Harvard Business School's case. "StarMedia, the founding of a Latin American Revolution, had sprinted to a substantial advantage in the race to attract Latin American Internet users by the fall of 1999.

The first pan-regional, horizontal portal to attract Spanish- and Portuguese-language speakers on the Internet, with 1.2 billion page views in the third quarter of 1999.

Fernando Espuelas, a thirty-three-year-old StarMedia co-founder, was the toast of "Silicon Alley" and a nationally recognised hero throughout Latin America.

A portrait of him on the front of a newspaper - ripping his shirt open to display the Starmedia brand, like Superman - summed up the company's spirit. "Starmedia was the world's largest Latin portal, hosting over 25 million Spanish and Portuguese speakers every month throughout Latin markets in America and Europe, making it one of the world's largest Latin portals by audience size." Espuelas, a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, predicted that the Internet would bring a "uncontrollable wave of democracy" and give "the freedom of information and communication to the individual, not to institutions." "Estpuelas was named one of "The Country's Top 100 Most Influential Hispanics" by Poder Magazine in 2012.

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Career

Espuelas was hired as an assistant account executive by Wunderman Worldwide, a Young & Rubicam advertising company, in 1988. Espuelas served on the American Express, GEvalia, and Weight Watchers accounts while at Wunderman. After a year at Wunderman, he joined Interpublic Group of Companies' Lowe & Partners to work on the agency's Citibank Visa account.

Espuelas returned to South America in 1991 to work with Ogilvy & Mather's Argentinae operations. Espuelas, Argentina's founding Managing Director of Ogilvy & Mather Direct, was David Espuelas. Espuelas was the company's single biggest source of income in the country's second year of operations, starting with one account. Espuelas was also named head of the company's Unilever account, which was also responsible for a portfolio of international brands, such as Dove and Pond's, after two months in Argentina. The Unilever business in Argentina and around the world was one of O&M's most important accounts for the company. Espuelas was elected to the Board of Directors of Ogilvy & Mather Argentina at the age of 25 at the end of 1991.

"I went from being an account executive in New York to the managing director of a company and the president of a major client's company, it was absolutely amazing." That was really amazing! The journey would have taken me five years to accumulate in New York, but I was able to gather it in six months." To Latino kings, Espuelas were cited. "My businesses made up 35% of the company's total income, and it was just a phenomenal growth experience."

Espuelas discovered he had to learn Spanish during the years he spent in the United States, and he was keen to relinquish his Spanish. "This was difficult, but after two and a half years, I was able to resurrect my language skills." The funny thing was that it actually helped companies; the executives there adored the fact that I sounded like a gringo!" Another amusing fact: Espuelas had to lie about his age because "I looked so young!"

Espuelas, a 1994 AT&T executive, was hired by Espuelas to lead the AT&T brand's roll-out throughout Latin America. He was promoted to Managing Director of Marketing Communications for the Latin American and Caribbean region within a year, becoming one of the youngest executives of the company in that position. While AT&T, Espuelas designed and introduced AT&T Hola (in Spanish) and AT&T Ola (in Portuguese), the company's first online service. Both the media and customers throughout Latin America responded positively to AT&T Hola/Ola's combination of news streams from Reuters, interactive forums, online games, and the first search engine that looked in Spanish and Portuguese.

Espuelas' 1996 design, which Starmedia, designed the portal that would "unite" Latin America. "We're talking about a fundamental change in the power system from the corporate to the individual on the internet," Espuelas said.

After a miserable year and a half of trying to invest in his vision, many of whom stated that Latins "did not like technology" and that never use the internet, the company went on to raise $2.5 million in 1997.

It was the first venture capital invested in a Latin internet firm. The company's capital investments over the next four years have exceeded $500 million, including capital from Chase Manhattan Bank, GE Capital, eBay, the Hearst Corporation, Intel Capital, NBC, and David Rockefeller.

"Espuelas] [...] discussed the possibility of economic integration in Latin American countries, which is similar to that of economic integration, that his company would be divided by national borders." He was accosted by a board member. It was David Rockefeller, the former head of Chase Manhattan, brother of Nelson, and a long-serving pillar of corporate involvement in New York City life. Rockefeller wanted to know more. Espuelas were invited to his office by the President.

"It was the most exciting thing in my life," the entrepreneur says. "I didn't close the sale with him until I handed him a map of Latin America without any borders," he says. "Oh, that's fine," the man said. Rockefeller and the Fund became investors in StarMedia, which expanded its headquarters from Connecticut to the city and quickly expanded to more than 700 workers around the world. Espuelas addresses the occasion at a reception in New York that the corporate elite of Rockefeller's 86th birthday was hosted. Rockefeller introduces him as his "shareholder, partner, and inspiration."

"They've managed to come up with a significant capital increase at the intersection of two of America's most volatile investment topics: the internet and Latin America," Lanny Baker, analyst of Salomon Smith Barney's San Francisco, said.

The company went public on Nasdaq in 1999, becoming the first Latin internet firm to do so, ultimately valuing the company at more than $3.8 billion per year. Starmedia had over 1,200 workers in 18 offices throughout 12 countries in North America and Europe. According to company statements, Starmedia is France Telecom's single largest internet market operation in the world today.

Later, Espuelas unveiled Voy, a multi-platform media company focusing on young Latino customers. "Engagement is the most common language among younger, second-generation Hispanics, even as they celebrate their Latin roots," The New York Sun says. "What we really wanted to do by launching Voy Music was to take advantage of two rhythms," Voy Chairman Fernando Espuelas said. "The majority of Latinos in this region are bilingual or English-speaking, and there are millions of non-Latinos who love Latino music," Espuelas told the Associated Press in 2005.

In 2006, Espuelas told The New York Sun, "You must have Latinos as part of your main goal if you are looking for expansion." According to The Sun Sentinel, "Voy Music executives" are targeting a large audience. According to a survey published this year by AOL/Roper, 56% of Hispanics listen to music when online, relative to 41% for the general population of the United States. Compared to 25 percent for the United States, 37 percent of Latinos had downloaded music, compared to 25 percent for the United States. "Population:" has soared. In 2006, Voy was named winner of the best "Start-Up Company" award at the Multicultural Media Expo. According to Forrester Research's report "Hispanic Social Computing Takes-off" ranked Voy's pages as the country's top Latin social media network pure-play brand.

Through its Voy Pictures unit, Voy also distributed Favela Rising, the award-winning film. The film received a large critical audience. "Favela Rising encapsulates the Voy philosophy of optimism and self-empowerment," Espuelas wrote at the time of the unveiling of the book. The film's message of hope transforms people, inspires, and inspires us to take action. Favela Rising, the true story of one man's struggle against violence and bigotry in order to create a social movement for peace, received more than 35 major international awards and was shortlisted for an Academy Award nomination. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2005 and was seen around the world via the film festival circuit. It opened in theaters across the United States and Brazil in 2006 and then made its U.S. television debut on HBO/Cinemax.

Voy restructured its business, including layoffs of employees in the United States and Latin America, and put it up for purchase as a result of the 2008 capital markets crisis and inability to raise additional venture capital, which was squeezed by the 2008 capital markets crisis. However, VOY did not close deals with prospective clients and ceased operations. According to the Deal magazine, Espuelas could not have chosen a more difficult time to start a media company. Everything from distribution to customer behavior has been changed by the Internet. Espuelas, ironically, underestimated the one medium he should have known best, the internet. It took a middle-of-the-night epiphany to remind him of what he should have known all along: it's the Internet, stupid.

Espuelas was named a Henry Crown Fellow in 2007.

Espuelas were born in 2008. The Fernando Espuelas Show, a drive-time, daily radio talkshow on Univision Radio Los Angeles, the country's second largest radio market and the country's second largest radio market for Latino radio, was launched in 2008. Espuelas hosts and is the managing editor of the radio show, which is distributed nationally by Univision Radio Network. Espuelas has worked as both a political analyst and social commentator on television, internet, and print.

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