Negocios Now

www.negociosnow.com Octubre 2019 5 NegociosNow NegociosNow By David Steinkraus "I f someone had told the younger Jackie what I was going to be doing 10, 15 years later, I never would have believed them," said Jackie Puente. She has a high-profile position as executive director of external affairs for Comcast NBCUniversal Telemundo, and she is an almost-fluent speaker of Russian, which came in han- dy during the company's broad- cast of the Sochi Olympics. She went to American Uni- versity in Washington, D.C., stu- died international economics, spent a year studying in Moscow and worked in the U.S. Trea- sury Department after gradua- tion. Then she worked in the nonprofit world before being hired by Comcast — which had just acquired NBCUniversal — to help enhance the company's partnerships with community organizations. Her role in external affairs "I t's not giving up, not taking the first ten noes, hundred noes, thousand noes to heart, but to keep building and to keep growing" Jackie Puente HELPING PEOPLE LEARN THE DIGITAL WORLD touches many parts of the company's relationship with the Hispanic community. Every day, she and her supplier diversity team are trying to engage and elevate Hispanic-owned busi- nesses in some way, she said. Comcast spends several billion dollars a year for Telemundo, cable operations, and NBCUni- versal, and has a huge number of vendors, she said. What Hispanic businesses need is not very different from what any business needs, she said. They need people who per- severe, who think about a whole market and don't restrict them- selves. Given the demographics of the Hispanic community, it's worthwhile to think about net- works and relationships that will introduce you to people who may be outside of your view, she said. She works with people whom she developed relationships with over several years, she said. These people were turned down but kept coming back as their companies grew. In business you need that flexibility to deve- lop partnerships, networks and different supply chain arrange- ments in order to be part of a larger enterprise solution, she said. "It's not giving up, not taking the first ten noes, hundred noes, thousand noes to heart, but to keep building and to keep growing," Puente said. During her work she beca- me passionate about technolo- gy and the lack of access for various groups of people. Part of her job at Comcast now includes digital privacy, security and lite- racy. Her work covers Comcast's Internet Essentials program that provides high-speed access to lower-income people. Digital literacy education is built into this, she said, such as how to access news from reliable sour- ces, how to find a job and how to enroll children in school pro- grams. The young Hispanic popu- lation has a certain savviness about technology hardware, she said. ( With a median age of 28, Hispanics comprise the youngest of the country's lar- ge racial and ethnic groups.) Yet there is a question whether everyone uses technology tools in the best way — for exam- ple, to get premium access to education and health care, or to expand a business online, she said. More broadly, she said, many people are willing to surrender personal information in exchan- ge for free services. For a Hispa- nic business, or any beginning small business, that "freemium" model is tempting because it's easy and cheap. "We're having this conver- sation (with people) where, if you're not paying for the pro- duct, very likely you are the pro- duct," Puente said. "At the end of the day, the companies benefit off of your data. And how are you capturing either what you're giving away or what's being cap- tured about you?"

• Cover