Starmedia
 |
|
|
Type of site
|
Latin Internet |
|---|---|
| Owner |
Fernando Espuelas, First CEO & co-Founder Jack Chen, co-Founder, Giuliano Stiglitz, CEO |
| Website | www |
| Alexa rank | 6,657 |
| Launched | 1996 |
| Current status | active |
StarMedia (stylized as starMedia) is a leading Latin Internet brand, co-founded in August 1996 by Fernando Espuelas and Jack Chen as the first pan-regional Internet portal for Spanish and Portuguese speaking audiences. During the dot.com boom of the 1990s, StarMedia became an iconic company when it raised the first dollar of venture capital for a Latin Internet company, and then did the first IPO in the sector, while becoming one of the top 10 biggest sites on the Internet, measured by audience, and the only one not in English.
Under Espuelas' leadership, StarMedia launched a massive marketing effort to attract the very first Internet users, advertisers and e-commerce companies across the Latin world. Called the "Espuelas Effect" by leading Brazilian news weekly Exame, StarMedia was the catalyst for the Internet industry throughout Latin America. While Espuelas was CEO, Starmedia was the leading Latin portal, serving over 25 million Spanish and Portuguese speakers every month across the Latin world.
In total, StarMedia raised over $500 million in a series of private and public offerings, reaching a market capitalization of over $3.8 billion at its peak. According to the Harvard Business School CaseStarMedia: Launching a Latin American Revolution, by 1999 StarMedia was the Latin American market leader. StarMedia is now owned by France Telecom subsidiary Orange, serving "more than 24 million" Hispanic Internet users per month, according to company statements in 2008.
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 4 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.
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Wikipedia