Fernando Espuelas - Career

Career

In 1988, Espuelas was hired out of college 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 Ponds. 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.

"It was really unbelievable-I went from being an account executive in New York to being the managing director of a company and director of a big client's business. That was really incredible!... The experience would have taken me five years to accumulate in New York, and I was able to gather it in six months." Espuelas said to Latino Leaders. "My businesses were 35 percent of the profits for the whole company it was just a tremendous growth experience. "

With all the years he spent in the US, Espuelas found himself needing to relearn Spanish. "This was very challenging, but after two and a half years I was able to regain my proficiency in the language. The funny thing was that it actually helped business; the executives there loved the fact that I sounded like a gringo!" Another amusing fact: Espuelas had to lie about his age, because "I looked so young!"

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 (Spanish) and AT&T Ola (in Portuguese), 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.

It was the first venture capital ever invested in a Latin Internet company. Over the next four years, the company raised over $500 million in investments, including capital from Chase Manhattan Bank, GE Capital, Ebay, the Hearst Corporation, Intel Capital, NBC and David Rockefeller.

According to the New York City Investment Fund, "... spoke about the impact, similar to that of economic integration on European nations, that his business would have unifying Latin American people separated by national borders. A board member interrupted him. It was David Rockefeller, retired head of Chase Manhattan, brother of Nelson, and a longtime pillar-the pillar-of corporate involvement in New York City life. Rockefeller wanted to hear more. He invited Espuelas to his office."

"It was the most exciting thing in my life", says the entrepreneur. He recalls how the meeting went: "I didn't close the sale with him until I showed him a map of Latin America without any borders. He said, 'Oh, that's good.'" Rockefeller and the Fund became investors in StarMedia, which moved its headquarters from Connecticut to the city and quickly grew to more than 700 employees worldwide. Espuelas tells this story at a reception that New York's corporate elite was throwing for Rockefeller's 86th birthday. He introduces Rockefeller as his "shareholder, partner, and inspiration."

"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.

"You must have Latinos as part of your core strategy if you are looking for growth", 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.