Mariano Amartino, global director at Wayra, a corporate venturing unit at Spain-based phone operator Telefonica, is a hard man to pin down.
He turned down his first three job offers from Telefonica before finally accepting a role in July 2013 to take charge of Wayra’s operations in Latin America, including its accelerators based in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico.
Launched in 2011 in Latin America and Spain, Wayra also has had a presence in the UK, Germany, Ireland and Czech Republic.
It has received more than 30,000 information and communication technology projects to be accelerated and has invested in more than 480 startups, “becoming one of the largest technology accelerators on earth”, Amartino said.
Telefonica has certainly been happy with its persistence in trying to hire Amartino. In January last year, he was promoted to become global director at Wayra, part of Telefonica OpenFuture, the programme that gathers all the corporate venture capital (CVC) and innovation initiatives within Telefonica, such as Telefonica Ventures.
He said: “These were my first steps into CVC from an operational side. I used to be an entrepreneur.”
Amartino remains owner of Uberbin I/A, a media and internet consulting company in Latin America, and his previous entrepreneurial endeavours include being CEO of Hipertextual and a blog founder at Blogdir.
He said he was attracted to CVC because he had an “absolute confidence in the idea that CVC had much more than just money to pour into the entrepreneurial ecosystem”.
He added: “Besides the financial aspect of Wayra, please keep in mind that we invest in the early stage and we have only been operating for four years. I think the greatest success is the ecosystem creation in countries in which there was no ecosystem at all, or countries where the idea of a corporate venture was to have deep pockets and get into later stage companies. These were ecosystems in which corporates were only eyeing acquisitions.
“We can observe three challenges on these initiatives. One, the corporate challenge of having top management support and take ownership of the project once it took off. Second, we had to convince entrepreneurs that we are not a soulless grey building trying to acquire them in a hostile way. And, third, the inclusion in the VC ecosystem as a hybrid that functions as a CVC and a full fledged, agile accelerator that can add value from the corporation strengths to the entrepreneurs we support.”
Having been finally pinned down in the industry, Amartino is hopeful others will also be open to the opportunities. “I think that the best we can do to help define CVC as an industry is to get closer ties and have an open-innovation spirit. We should foster cooperation between us and be able to attract top external talent from outside the corporation to create stronger innovation and value to the chain.”