Fernando Espuelas
Fernando Espuelas is an American entrepreneur, author, and journalist.
Espuelas is one of the pioneers of the consumer Internet. He is the co-founder and first CEO of Starmedia, the first pan-Latin Internet portal, launched in 1996 and now part of Orange, France Telecom's Internet services company.
By the year 2000, Starmedia was the world's leading Latin portal, serving over 25 million Spanish and Portuguese speakers every month across Latin markets in America and Europe, making it one of the top sites by audience size in the world.
Espuelas is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute.
Espuelas has been part of the "power-list" of such diverse media as The Hollywood Reporter ''The Industry Standard, Latino Leaders Magazine, Red Herring Magazine, Silicon Alley Reporter, Hispanic Business Magazine, CNN, Upside Magazine, and Hispanic Magazine. Espuelas was also named "Immigrant of the Day" by Immigration Daily in 2008.
Espuelas was the co-founder and Chairman of the StarMedia Foundation which, in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank and Microsoft, built technology training schools in poor neighborhoods in Brazil, Colombia and Uruguay. Espuelas served on the board of directors of the Educational Broadcasting Corporation, operators of PBS' New York flagship television station Thirteen and sister station WLIW, as well as on the Board of Trustees of Connecticut College. In 2009, Espuelas became a spokesman for the Los Angeles Parent's Union, also known as Parent Revolution, a non-profit group that seeks to reform public education across the United States. In 2010, Espuelas was elected to the Board of Directors of Parent Revolution.
In 2008, Espuelas created Radio Espuelas, a daily bilingual talkshow broadcast on the Univision Radio Network.
Espuelas also writes for the Huffington Post, The Hill'', and CNN and is a frequent commentator on television, such as CBS News, radio on Univision and NPR, as well in print across the world.
Biography
He was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, Espuelas and his mother escaped political and economic turmoil, arriving in the U.S. in 1976 with just $100.Espuelas attended Greenwich High School, graduating in 1984. At Greenwich High, Espuelas was the President of the Debate Team, the Connecticut State Champion debater in 1982, and the Chairman of the Political Action Club. Espuelas hosted the local Public-access television cable TV show "The Bottom Line with Fernando Espuelas", interviewing Greenwich personalities.
Espuelas worked a series of jobs while going to junior high and high school: gardener, gas station attendant, Woolworth's clerk, restaurant worker; movie usher; newspaper delivery boy, messenger, Chinese food delivery person, pet shop cleaner, baby sitter, electronics board assembler in an electronic church organ manufacturing company, clerk at a soda fountain; greeting card salesman, and as an intern at Philip Morris' headquarters in New York.
In 1988, Espuelas graduated "with distinction" from Connecticut College with a degree in history. While at Connecticut College, Espuelas was first Managing Editor, then Editor-in-Chief and eventually Publisher of the college's newspaper, The College Voice and its associated publications. Espuelas also served as the President of Branford House, as well as on several college-wide faculty-student-administration committees, including the College's Education Committee. He was later elected to the board of trustees of Connecticut College.
Career
In 1988, Espuelas was hired as an assistant account executive by Wunderman Worldwide, a division of the Young & Rubicam advertising agency. While at Wunderman, Espuelas worked on the American Express, General Foods Gevalia and Weight Watchers accounts. After a year at Wunderman, he became an account executive at Interpublic Group of Companies's Lowe & Partners to work on the agency's Citibank Visa account. In 1991, Espuelas returned to South America to work at Ogilvy & Mather's Argentine operations. In Argentina, Espuelas was the founding Managing Director of Ogilvy & Mather Direct. Starting with one account, Espuelas led the company to be O&M Argentina's single largest source of profit by the second year of operations. After two months in Argentina, Espuelas was additionally named head of the company's Unilever account, responsible for a portfolio of global brands such as Dove and Pond's. The Unilever business was one of the most important accounts for O&M in Argentina and across its worldwide network. At the end of 1991, Espuelas was elected to the Board of Directors of Ogilvy & Mather Argentina, at the age of 25.In 1994 AT&T recruited Espuelas to lead the roll-out of the AT&T brand throughout Latin America. Within a year, he was promoted to Managing Director of Marketing Communications for the Latin American and Caribbean region, becoming one of the youngest executives of that rank at the company. While at AT&T, Espuelas conceived and launched AT&T Hola and AT&T Ola, the company's first online service. A combination of news feeds from Reuters, interactive forums, online games and the first search engine that searched in Spanish and Portuguese, AT&T Hola/Ola was positively received by both the media and consumers across Latin America.
In 1996, Espuelas envisioned the portal that would "unite" Latin America: Starmedia. "With the Internet, we're talking about a fundamental shift in the power structure from the institution to the individual," Espuelas said.
After a frustrating year and a half of approaching venture capitalists to invest in his vision, only to have them uniformly refuse, many avowing that Latins "did not like technology" and would never use the Internet, the company went on to raise $2.5 million in 1997.
"They have managed to come up with a pretty big capital raising at the intersection of two of the most volatile investment themes in America: the Internet and Latin America", said Lanny Baker, an analyst of on-line media industry for Salomon Smith Barney in San Francisco."
In 1999, the company went public on the Nasdaq, the first Latin Internet company ever to do so, eventually reaching a market valuation of over $3.8 billion USD at its peak. Starmedia had over 1,200 employees in 18 offices across 12 countries in the Americas and Europe. Today, Starmedia is France Telecom's single largest Internet operation in the world, according to company statements.
Espuelas later launched Voy, a multi-platform media company focused on young Latino consumers. "Among younger, second-generation Hispanics, English is the preferred language, even as they celebrate their Latin backgrounds", reported The New York Sun. "What we wanted to do by launching Voy Music was really take advantage of two dynamics", said Voy Chairman Fernando Espuelas. "The majority of Latinos in this country are bilingual or English dominant, and there are millions of non-Latinos who love Latino music", Espuelas told the Associated Press in 2005.
Espuelas told The New York Sun in 2006. According to The Sun Sentinel, "Voy Music executives say they're tapping a strong market. A study this year by AOL/Roper that found that 55 percent of U.S. Hispanics like to listen to music when online, compared with 41 percent for the general U.S. population. And 37 percent of Latinos had downloaded music, vs. 25 percent for the U.S. population." Voy was named winner of the best "Start-Up Company" award at the Multicultural Media Expo in 2006. In 2007, Forrester Research's study "Hispanic Social Computing Takes-off" ranked Voy's sites as the leading Latin social network pure-play brand in the United States.
Voy also released the award-winning documentary, Favela Rising through its Voy Pictures unit. The film received widespread critical acclaim. Espuelas said at the time of the release, "Favela Rising encapsulates the Voy philosophy of optimism and self-empowerment. The film's message of hope transforms people, motivates and inspires us to action." Telling the true story of one man's struggle against violence and racism to start a social movement for peace, Favela Rising won more than 35 major international awards and was short listed for an Academy Award nomination. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2005 and was seen around the world through the film festival circuit. In 2006 it opened in theaters across the U.S. and Brazil and later made its U.S. television debut on HBO/Cinemax.
Squeezed by the 2008 capital markets crisis and unable to raise additional venture funding, Voy restructured its operations, including lay-offs of staff in the U.S. and Latin America, and put itself up for sale. VOY however did not close transactions with competing buyers and ceased operations. The Deal magazine reported, "Espuelas couldn't have picked a more challenging era in which to launch a media company. The Internet has transformed everything from distribution to consumer behavior. Ironically, Espuelas erred in underestimating the one medium he should have understood 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.
In 2007, Espuelas was named a Henry Crown Fellow.
Espuelas created in 2008 The Fernando Espuelas Show, a drive-time, daily radio talkshow on Univision Radio Los Angeles, the nation's second largest radio market and biggest market for Latino radio. Espuelas hosts and is managing editor of the radio program which is distributed nationally by the Univision Radio Network. Espuelas is also a political analyst and social commentator on television, Internet and in print.
Espuelas was CEO of American Latinos United, a political SuperPac created to drive Latino voting during the 2020 elections. He co-founded American Latinos United with former LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. He was named in 2017 Co-Chairman of Mercury Public Affairs in Washington DC.