Fernando Espuelas

Who is Fernando Espuelas?

Fernando Espuelas is an American entrepreneur, author, media personality and philanthropist.

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. Starmedia was the first venture-capital backed Latin Internet company and also the first initial public offering in the Latin Internet industry.

According to the Harvard Business School case StarMedia: Launching a Latin American Revolution, "by the fall of 1999,StarMedia had sprinted to a sizable lead in the race to acquire Latin American Internet users. Its pan-regional, horizontal portal was the first to target Spanish- and Portuguese-language speakers on the Internet, registering 1.2 billion page views in the third quarter of 1999. Thirty-three-year-old StarMedia co-founder Fernando Espuelas was the toast of "Silicon Alley" and a recognized hero throughout Latin America. A picture of him on the cover of Internet World magazine--ripping his shirt open to show the Starmedia logo, like Superman, summed up the spirit of the company."