Google, Yahoo, Tuenti, Idealista, Fever, Wallapop. Although it may seem that these companies have nothing to do with each other, the truth is that they all have one thing in common: Bernardo Hernández's influence .
The long career of this Spanish entrepreneur has led him to climb the ranks to reach the top of the technology industry. Silicon Valley already considers him one of its select group of leaders and he moves like a fish in water in the digital field.
His unrivalled business vision and successful professional experience have made him a leading business figure around the world.
The entrepreneur has stopped in our country to participate in the Management benin phone number and Business Summit (MABS 2017), an event organized by Atresmedia, and we wanted to take the opportunity to interview him and learn about his perspective on the present and future of the technology sector.
Thus, although risk is always present when it comes to investing, for Hernández, there are 3 key elements to detect a good business.
"You have to make sure that it solves a problem that affects hundreds of millions of people; it has to have some kind of competitive technical advantage, that is, it uses a technology that allows value to be created in a very efficient way and it has to be done with a robust and strong team," he explains.
These are the premises that Hernández applies when investing in new projects, some of which have flourished in recent years in the Spanish market. In this sense, the investor assures that entrepreneurship represents "a threat" to which traditional companies must respond by adapting in order not to end up disappearing.
"You have to understand what's happening and how it affects what you do," he says.
In the field of innovation, which he defines as "the application of new techniques to old problems that are solved in a different, more effective way and that end up becoming a standard", he highlights the textile, medical and civil engineering sectors as the areas in which there is the most innovation in the Spanish market.
Furthermore, although he acknowledges that this element is not so present in the consumer industry, he is optimistic about the future, assuring that there is room for innovation.
For Hernández, digital marketing has become the “new finance” and, although its importance is evident, concern, confusion and errors are still very present in the sector.
One of the most common mistakes professionals make is “not understanding technically how the tools work and staying at that level of investment, impact and creativity. Digital marketing is much more technical and sophisticated.”
In marketing, data has become a great opportunity but also a headache for professionals due to their limited ability to make good use of it.
How to solve this problem? “By investing in talent and infrastructure. Building algorithms, processes, etc., something that requires investment and time,” explains Hernández.
In this treatment of data, companies must find a balance between their commercial interests and users' demand for privacy.
The key is to understand that you cannot betray your most important asset. Large companies aggregate data and use it to sell advertising, but they know very well that they cannot cross the line of what is unacceptable. I think that battle has long been won, otherwise there would not be 2 billion Facebook users.
Yahoo has not won the battle for innovation in the digital world, having recently been acquired by Verizon and which has been Hernández's workplace for part of his career.