Written by Alena Malloy, Part-Time MBA class of 2019
This trip has been even better than I anticipated. I knew that I didn’t have much knowledge about the entrepreneurial sector and my assumptions about it were challenged in the very first meeting.
We started our day with a lecture at ESADE, a Spanish business school that has the main campus about an hour away from Barcelona. ESADE has beautiful, modern buildings set in the green foothills of a quiet suburb of the city. We were taken into a container like structure for our first lecture given by one of the business school professors, Javier Agular.
An energetic man, it was easy to see how he could be an entrepreneur. He explained a portion of his experience, which included several successful business and many failures and gave a lecture on key elements in developing a new business. Professor Agular also detailed his learnings from each, including the importance of a good team.
This struck a chord with me and also continued to be a theme throughout our meetings with other entrepreneurs and organizations. Each one emphasized the critical need for recruitment, having the right fit, the right team, and so forth. One CEO went as far as to say that you may not get funding for your project if you haven’t been friends with your partners for at least a year. And apparently, there have been significant struggles in this sector to find good talent in Barcelona. Each employee was getting several offers every single day, particularly programmers and developers. People are constantly in transition here.
Another piece that has struck me so far this week is how Barcelona itself feels like it is in a start-up phase of its own technological revolution. Each of these companies that we have spoken with have commented on how they are moving faster than the regulations are yet the City is providing grants to them to keep growing. They are creating open spaces, new offices and other investments to make the transition to the new era easier on the city. One CEO commented that they are not quite like Silicon Valley yet where start-ups are the norm, but they are working towards it.
That doesn’t mean that Barcelona is letting go of the past however. Just last night, I walked into a tea shop that looked fairly standard. It was a small storefront on the corner of a building. However, when you went to the bottom floor, you found yourself sitting under lighted archways; the original foundations of the building had been remodeled to fit the needs of this little start-up tea shop.
In many ways, I think that little tea shop is a depiction of what is happening all over this city. The Catalonians are moving towards the future, increasing opportunities and technology, lighting up the way. And yet, making sure they are preserving their heritage and their foundations.
