StarMedia ran a web portal for Latin America out of offices in New York. Its sites spoke Spanish and Portuguese, and they offered news, email, chat and search to a region where few people were online yet. On its first day of trading in May 1999, the stock jumped from $15 to about $26. Within a week it closed above $61. Investors were paying up for a continent of users who had not logged on yet.

Two Founders, One Continent

Fernando Espuelas and Jack Chen founded StarMedia in 1996. Their bet was simple. Americans had Yahoo, AOL and Excite, and Latin America had nothing like them built for its own languages. StarMedia set out to be the first stop for Spanish and Portuguese speakers going online. It raised venture money, sold ads across the region, and spent hard to win users before the American giants arrived. Speed mattered more to the founders than profit.

Trouble in Mexico

StarMedia priced its offering at $15 a share in May 1999 and listed on Nasdaq. Less than a year later the dot-com crash began. In November 2001 the company said its results for 2000 and 2001 could not be trusted, because two Mexican subsidiaries had booked revenue they had not earned. Nasdaq delisted the stock in February 2002. StarMedia sold its portal to the Spanish company eresMas for about $8 million and filed for bankruptcy in December 2003.

Cover: Praÿa Rodriguez, near Rio de Janeiro, plate one from Paysages, volume 1 of Voyage pittoresque dans le Brésil, Louis Jules Frederic Villeneuve. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for palms over a bay near Rio (a home page for Latin America).