Above: Christian Hernandez. Photo credit: Graham Flack. 

SIME MIA is a digital business conference supported by Knight Foundation. Below, Camila Souza, co-founder of pFunk Media and PR manager of SIME MIA, interviews Christian Hernandez, one of the speakers for the event, which will be held at the New World Center in Miami Beach on Dec. 3-4.

SIME MIA will bring together some of the world’s most innovative technologists, media executives and venture capitalists to share and build new ideas in the digital space. The event is a partnership between SIME, an industry institution in Europe, and MIA Collective, with support provided by Knight Foundation.

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“Technology and art collide in Miami the week of Art Basel” on KnightBlog

Christian Hernandez is a managing partner at White Star Capital, an investor in early-stage technology companies. He previously led Facebook’s Business Development, Platform and Gaming Partnerships groups in Europe. We asked Hernandez a few questions about his view on the current state of the investment landscape for early-stage companies.

You recently left Facebook to dedicate yourself to full-time investing in early-stage technology companies through White Star Capital. You have investments in companies like mxHero in the United States, Busbud in Canada and others in Europe. As an investor, what do you look for in a startup?

C.H.: White Star is the brand under which my partner, Eric Martineau-Fortin, and I have been investing … as angels for some time. We have built up a portfolio of 21 investments across the two continents and seven countries.

As an investor, the common themes we always look for are:

• The strength and ambition of the founders: Do they have global ambitions and is the market they are going after big enough? In seed-stage companies so much will depend on the strength of the founding team, as it is highly likely that the business will evolve a few times as it determines product-market fit and growth strategies.
• Does the team have the technical chops to pull their vision off? If I was starting a consumer technology company today, my initial team would consist of an amazing designer who can build a delightful user experience, followed by a back-end engineer who can build a data structure and architecture that enables the company to deeply understand user behavior, and finally a front-end engineer who can connect both.
• Does the founder understand the seismic shifts in technology and the evolution of platforms such as Facebook, Apple and Android represent; the deep integration of a social layer across web and mobile; and the amount of data and insight that is now accessible to understand (and influence) user behavior?

In your previous role, you led Facebook’s international business expansion to Europe. What were some of the challenges you faced when tapping a new market?

C.H.: As Facebook grew internationally it had three audiences it wanted to engage with and grow: users, advertisers and developers. Our user growth strategy was masterfully run by a group of data-centric hackers based in California and select countries around the world. They would actively test and try different techniques to determine what could lead to greater user adoption in each country. In some cases, the same technique worked in every country; in others you had to adapt to cultural norms and competitive dynamics.

I spent most of my time at Facebook focused on the growth of developers and media companies leveraging the Facebook platform to scale globally. I was keen to prove to my colleagues in the U.S. (and to the market) that European startups could be global contenders. You now look at the ecosystem and you see amazing success stories coming out of Europe: King in gaming (now the biggest gaming company on Facebook); Spotify and Deezer in music; Skyscanner in travel (which just raised money from Sequoia at an $800M valuation).

For companies looking to scale their product and businesses internationally, what advice do you have for them?

C.H.: Take advantage of the digital distribution channels available for customer acquisition (be that the billion Android phones across the world or the billion-plus Facebook users; be smart about where you really need to place employees (not everyone needs to have a presence in different geographies to win there); and be smart about how you use customer insight and data to drive greater engagement, viral distribution of your product and eventually monetization.

You were born in El Salvador and grew up in various countries in Latin America. We’ve seen Latin American countries taking the lead in creating vibrant entrepreneurial hubs (Brazil, Chile and Colombia). How do you envision the rest of the region’s tech community growth? Where do you think people should be turning an eye towards?

C.H.: As an investor, and as a supporter of entrepreneurship, I strongly believe that there are amazing entrepreneurs to be found anywhere in the world. The key, however, is whether that entrepreneur finds herself in an environment where she can appropriately find and hire a strong technical team to build out a company that can compete worldwide. That environment comes about through a combination of university programs that graduate strong developers, an investor ecosystem of angels that support new companies in the critical early phase, and a cultural support for risk-taking that allows an entrepreneur to leap into the unknown.

It is exciting to see Latin American entrepreneurs start to succeed: From the team at OLX who built a global marketplace out of Argentina, to Peixe Urbano in Brazil, to Open English in Venezuela/United States, and Yellow Pepper in Miami but with a very strong presence in various Latin American countries. Combine that with emerging incubators across the region including the Telefonica Wayra initiative, 500 Startups in Mexico and LAB Miami. The momentum has shifted and I am excited to see what Latin American entrepreneurs will do in the years ahead.

One of the many advantages Miami has as a technology hub is its geographical location.  What role do you envision Miami will play as various Latin American technology communities continue to grow?

C.H.: The LAB Miami effort and the upcoming SIME conference are two great initiatives by the Miami startup and investor community to energize the local ecosystem … to place Miami on the map. The vibrancy I heard from entrepreneur pitches at LAB was the same as I hear from entrepreneurs in coffeeshops in Berlin or incubators in London. They had global ambitions, a passionate belief in the market they were addressing and the necessary level of delusion to believe that they can pull it off. Miami has always been a natural hub for Latin America across financial services, travel and other sectors. It should benefit from that same status for technology startups!

From your experience in working in established entrepreneurial communities with larger investment opportunities, such as London and Berlin, what advice do you have for those seeking and looking for investment here in Miami?

C.H.: A lot of people talk about Berlin as the next Silicon Valley. It’s not there yet … but it certainly has some key ingredients: a number of entrepreneurs who had significant exits and have then reinvested into the ecosystem as angels and mentors; a hip and vibrant city where young people want to move to; technical talent from local German universities but also from Eastern Europe and other contingent markets.

To scale though, Miami will need to have a few high-profile companies to truly capture investor interest. It is simply seen as proof that the ecosystem is real and that there are returns to be made. New York just hit that inflection point in the last couple of years with the success of companies like Betaworks, Tumblr and Gilt; London has companies like King, Net-a-Porter and Moshi; Stockholm put itself on the map with the likes of Spotify, Tradedoubler and Klarna; Berlin with Zalando, Wooga and XING.