 So welcome, this is our cloud funding panel. So we've gathered an awesome panel, and it's a small crowd, so I'm going to pick out names. And I get the questions. So let me just introduce the panel. These are all Barcelona-based, either VC communities or founders of their own startups. So how many are startup founders here looking for money? No one. Aspiring founders. Aspiring founders? Looking for advice. Looking for advice. How awesome. OK, so let me introduce the panel first. I have Guillem Sage. He's the Investant Manager at Nata Capital. They're the same ones that invested in Abaco, which is like a cloud management startup, and others that I can show you. I have Alex Maloff. He's the Managing Director and Head of Growth for Harbor Space. Harbor Dot Space or Harbor Space? I mean, it's Harbor Dot Space, but I mean, we're called Harbor Space. OK, Harbor Space. I'm going to give you a few minutes to talk about each of your areas, but I'll just kind of get everybody started. Scott Macen, he's the founder of Barcelona. So if you read up on the startup scene about Barcelona, that's how I figured out this thing. I had not ever been to Barcelona. And Scott, he's like all the editors and all the articles about all the cool startup scene. That's from Scott's company. And I met Carlos, actually. Something's wrong with my laptop. Hold on once again. Oops, almost snuck that away. I met Carlos. He's the person who's responsible for startup grind in Barcelona. He's also the founder of Liam. OK. So my name is Susan Wu. I'm the Director of Technical Marketing for MetaCura. So MetaCura is a 50-person startup. We are based in Switzerland. We have engineering offices in Tokyo, Barcelona, and San Francisco. We're a network virtualization overlay company. And we're the certified neutron plug-in for networking. So with that, I'm going to let each of the panelists talk more about the areas. And then I have some prepared questions as well. And then I'm going to let everybody ask their questions since it's a small crowd. Guillem, do you want to start, Susan? So my name is Guillem Sagué. I'm, as she said, Investment Manager at Nauta Capital. Nauta Capital is an international VC fund with roots in Barcelona. That's where we started. But we're currently in Barcelona, in London, and Boston. We have offices in various locations. And invest approximately one third of our funds from each of those locations. What we usually tend to look for are what we call companies that are capital efficient. This doesn't have to do with how much the founders earn. That's not the point. The point is how much money we think the companies will need to become something important in their industry. And we tend to find those companies mostly in the B2B software space. We started 12 years ago doing basically on-premise software. And now, obviously, all our companies are in the cloud. So my name is Alex. And Harvard.space. .space is actually a TLD. I need to explain it, because people would .com and end up at NASA. So we are actually a university based here in Barcelona. We are hyper-focused on tech education, very high level, because we run a data science program, cybersecurity program, and computer science programs developed together. We're, say, like Spursky Labs and Yandex Data Factory. So they're very, very high level, hard to get in. I'd like to think we are in tech space, because we're changing a lot about how universities operate in terms of approach to education. And in addition to that, we also run a lot of initiatives. Like we have a conference on data science. And coming up in February, we are running a bootcamp here in Barcelona to prepare teams for ACMICPC competition. And that's essentially the foundation of what we're doing right now. Scott? Great. My name is Scott Macon. I'm a US expat, now based here in Barcelona. But originally from Boston, and I spent some time in Boulder, Colorado, as well as LA and San Diego. I'm involved in a number of projects here, mostly around digital marketing, and specifically with B2B startups. But one of our more popular projects is Barcelona, which is an international tech platform focused on Barcelona's startup and innovation communities. And what we've kind of become over the last few years is a de facto landing zone for any non-Spanish speakers around the world that have some sort of professional business interest in Barcelona. So we kind of become like a two-way communication channel between Barcelona Tech and the global business community. And my name is Carlos. And on the one hand, I organize events at IGM, so to help companies connect with their stakeholders in a personal way. And as Susan mentioned, I'm co-director at the startup brand Barcelona Chapter, which is a global community of entrepreneurs to connect, inspire, and educate them. Basically, we work on a local level and help people connect within the community and with the international communities. So recently, Barcelona has named a new Silicon Valley. I stole the slide. But look at all the investments across the areas. And the funding amounts weren't small, like up to 30 million. Is that euros? It's still very, very significant. And then I saw the investments were all across the board, whether it's enterprise software, cloud management, some SaaS companies as well. So look into your crystal ball. What's the hot stuff and what's not hot so that we don't tune our companies to what's not getting invested? There's a view in the Silicon Valley. They actually invest in things that are so early, like five years ahead. So they're investing in AR, VR. And I don't think there's a whole lot of commercial applications. But what's the scene in Europe? What's the scene in Barcelona? Any? Go ahead. Yeah. So what we've seen in the last couple of years is kind of a fintech bubble. You start seeing fintech companies popping up from everywhere. Many of them do not do anything different than what the others are doing. So that's what happened in the past and probably is going to slow down. And so what I think that the next logical step is that the intro tech companies pop up. So I expect that in 2017, we'll see a lot of investments in companies doing insurance technology. Did you say insurance? Insurance technology. Oh, OK. So that's like what we see like the next hot stuff. Is that Barcelona, Spain, or is that all of Europe in general? I think all in Europe, but usually in Spain, you tend to be six to 12 months after Silicon Valley and then maybe six months after London. So you can kind of see what's happening there and then you know what's going to happen here. So it's easy to say. There's your crystal ball. Just look at Silicon Valley. Yeah. I didn't have to say. I think it is happening quite like that. But I think there's just a difference in the Barcelona VCs, though I noticed. So some of them are taking firms from Europe and then taking them to the US. So a bunch of, and I saw that with French nationals. So they would actually not start the company in France and they would immediately take it and headquarter in US. Is that what's happening in the Spain scene or they're keeping the companies in Spain? Fortunately, we're moving into keeping the companies in Spain. When I first came here, it was very much the place Barcelona is a great place to build your team, build your prototypes, test, test, test, try and find product market fit. And the second you need to raise money, go to London, go to Silicon Valley, go to New York and raise a big round outside of Spain. In the past couple years, two to three years, we've seen a number of larger, more kind of traditional series A type investments happening here in Spain. Spanish companies kind of plant in their flag and say, no, we're not leaving. We're going to build here despite some of the Spanish bureaucracy and challenges that that imposes. As far as the crystal ball thing, and this isn't just Barcelona or even Silicon or even Europe, although we're seeing it here, is I think AI startups are having, that's the trend we're seeing across the board is a lot of projects trying to automate things with deep learning and machine learning and artificial intelligence projects that can automate a specific sector and niche industry. I think those will be a big wave here in the next couple years as well. However, regarding what you mentioned about companies moving or being moved to the US, I think that we still have the mindset of that if you want to go big, really big, you need to go to Silicon Valley. And it's something that you can still feel on the ecosystem here in Barcelona. Alex? Well, this kind of insurance technology, I mean, that's been happening for the past several months, if not a year already, because we've seen some kind of accelerators verticalize and go in insurance tech in the US and in Europe, most of them being run out of either Germany or London or going to the US. So that's probably happening. Fintech mostly played out, I think, at this point in time. I'm not a big believer in blockchain. I mean, a lot of these stuff, kind of if we're using Gartner stuff for each other, kind of hype cycle and need to essentially, you know, a few years to stabilize. I mean, because there's a lot of experimentation, but it's not clear where things are going and we need to reach kind of deployment phase where it's actually something interesting that's gonna build on top of this. Barcelona, Spain, sector-wise, the strengths here in terms of companies that we've been here, I mean, we have this wonderful chart, but we're talking mostly kind of e-commerce and fashion. And that's where most of the money went into and that's where we've seen some of the bigger exits. And Europe-wide probably B2B software. And that's kind of, I think, European strength because a lot of specifics about the size of the markets, the fragmentation of the markets in terms of the funds that can be raised here. And generally speaking, Europe is still kind of, in my opinion, not very optimistic. It's still, for example, behind the US. Especially when we're talking follow-on funding at series A, series B, or say, crowdfunding. Statistically, we're looking at what companies need to have been founded back in 2008, 2009, 2010 to be raising kind of AB rounds around now. So it's, and the size of the rounds is generally smaller. So the good thing is that the kind of the foundations for good ecosystem are happening. So I mean, there is more money, kind of Europe-wide and Spain as well. Although, I mean, it's in a lot of good ways. I mean, we have governments getting into this. Biggest investors like France is the French government. In Germany, it's the Hightech Gründerfunz, which is also very government-funded. Here in Spain, I think Kasia Capital Risk, which is also essentially redistributing a lot of public funds. So there's more money to go around. There's obviously a lot of talented people. And we have seen a lot of exits and from like these companies and others, that are, you know, it's people that have experience that are coming back, staying here, and kind of sharing their experience, mentoring new founders, mentoring new startups. So, and that's kind of the third factor, but we're still behind like the US. And I mean, if we're talking Asia, it's a completely different world. Yeah, we raise our money from Japan. We all, almost all of our rounds. Though we have a lot of employees in Barcelona. So there are probably a few aspiring entrepreneurs or people that work at startups. I actually helped out with the funding pitch for my company as well. So what do you look for in a team? Because I met one VC who says, Susan, I meet 1,000 companies a year. I invest in one. So the odds were pretty tough with this particular individual. But what do you look for? There's good engineers worldwide. There's good technologies globally. But what is it about the funding team or founding team? So I think that the main topic is that we look for, and I think many of these look for is excellence. So I think you can describe it as very shortly as excellence. But you wanna look at the entrepreneurs and you wanna see excellence in their background, in the way they interact with customers, in the way they interact with investors. They wanna see excellence or you wanna see excellence in the way they attract talent. And so if you see excellence across the board, then you feel like they might be the right entrepreneurs you wanna back. And in my case, I have a personal exercise that I do to try to find out if I would like to bug the entrepreneurs is that I try to imagine them in a panel like this. And I put mentally all the CEOs of our companies, of our portfolio companies, and I try to put them also in the panel with our current entrepreneurs. Kind of like a smackdown. Yeah, and then exactly, and then I try to find out if they would fit, if they would be at the same level, if they would be part of the group. And so this helps me, but it's a personal exercise. I don't think everybody does this. One question, Guillem. And do you look as well like for that excellence among the interaction of the team, no? Because maybe a team can be individually excellent, but not everyone fits with each other. Yeah, but that's right. This is usually something that they by themselves will sort out. So we as a VC won't tell them who fits within the team. It's something they have to find out themselves and they are, if they are smart and usually are, they will find out. Well, I mean, the dynamics in a team is something that's very challenging to kind of quantify. Having kind of gone through kind of accelerators and accelerators, different companies in kind of past life, the team kind of, it's a feeling. It's something that's important because I have, for example, gone through an Accelerate one point in time and there were like, you know, 10 companies going in and the takeout at the end of the whole thing was really that, I mean, ideas a dime a dozen, but at the end of the process, I could build a super team that will then give them kind of a good idea and they market opportunity, could do whatever they want. But it's not very quantifiable in the sense that, you know, you can't put a number on it. Yeah, I mean, I'm not an investor myself and so when I speak about what to look for in a team, I think you look more at what are some practical ways you can avoid disaster down the road, you know? And as we mentioned, some of the companies in Barcelona have failed simply because of internal dynamics or problems with baggage in the cap table, the equity structure of the company, maybe the shareholders agreement wasn't well defined at the beginning. So you have a lot of kind of very important stakeholders in this startup, not just the founders, sometimes it's early employees, sometimes it's early investors who have a very different idea of success or a very different idea of what the exit plan might be come down the road. So, you know, whereas in the early stages, it's very exciting, you're getting traction, you're raising some money, in Spain there was a time where if you were kind of, you know, I know startups that have 29 different investors, you know, and they've only been around for like two years. It's like, how did that happen? You know, how did you get 29 investors in two years? And all those different parties have a say, you know, and they have a vote or if the board of directors is very kind of mixed and people didn't all come from the tech world, some are restaurant investors, hoteliers, you know, they have a very different idea of growth and success than what maybe a high scale, a high growth startup would typically go through. And so I think making sure for future endeavors, future projects, just laying it out on the table as crystal clear as possible, making sure you're on the same page with your early team through a written and notarized shareholder's agreement, I think is critical, you know, in subsequent years. Yeah, so I want to open up for questions, actually. There were some people looking for advice, startup founders or people figuring out whether they want to work as startup. Do you guys have questions that you want to ask? I'm going to call you for a gentleman in the middle. Did you have your question or you want to wait till we go on the way before and behind you, actually? I'm not specific. What's really happening in the startup space, how do founders, you know, on this, you know, once you read a lot of blog articles, you get to, you know, recognize and appreciate how difficult and challenging it can be to, you know, start a company. So, you know, just, you know, whatever experiences that you guys have had, some of the pain points that you had to go through. Getting funding, obviously, is an important aspect, right? But taking an idea and digging it to a point where you can create a company, how challenging was that for you, perhaps? Yeah, just a paraphrase. It's kind of like related to, you know, what's the best way to approach this investment community going from a concept to, and what point too? Because I actually worked with startup founders and they said that you can either build the product and then you have to build, like you have to completely focus on building and then when you're fundraising, you have to completely focus on fundraising. So what's your advice on how to approach and when, right? I mean, I think in that approach, fundraising can actually be a detractor to your growth because you have to take your eye off the ball for a little bit and you have to go network. So I think the ideal situation would be to always be fundraising, always be networking, always be meeting with investors and potential partners and even your vendors and service providers that you can be partnering with and working with down the road. Just make sure those lines of communication are open so when you actually do need to open a conversation, it's a warm contact, not just a cold call. Like she said, investors are investing in maybe 1% of the projects they see every year, maybe. So you wanna have some sort of rapport with them and that when it comes time to raise money, anticipate that it's gonna take you two to three times longer than you thought. So if you're thinking, okay, I'm gonna give myself 90 days to raise the seed fund or this bridge capital to get me to the next stage, well, it might take you more like six months or nine. And so, if possible, I would definitely say to try and kind of always have one eye on the fundraising. What do you think, yeah? Well, I think that's a very good point but not only for fundraising, I think it's important to always be connected to the community. So I think the best thing you can do is to always go to talk to entrepreneurs, VCs, business angels and so on. And this way, you will always learn how these guys think, how these guys interact with others. And this is something that, as he said, it has to be done always. Even in the company that we backed, we asked the entrepreneurs to continue doing fundraising, not fundraising in the sense that they wanna ask for money but in the sense that they wanna talk to people. And we also asked them to connect with the ecosystem where they are and talk to other entrepreneurs permanently. So I think that's the best thing you can do. Yeah, I cold call every Barcelona base VC, no one returned my call or my email or the contact form, not one. So I was able to connect with Startup Grind and Scott, which got me, Giel, and which got me, Alex. So, and I'm not fundraising, but it actually took a few cycles. What sort of a warm introduction? So in the end, you brought the key point for me, which is like having in mind that everyone or behind everything, there is a person, no? Investors are a person. Your customers are people as well. And like having a relation them and making them aware that you're a person and what are your strengths and what you are doing. That's the key point for when you need it to be able to get that. Alex, you've been Startup founder several times. Any secrets? Yeah, I mean, fundraising is just like one part of it. And for example, in Europe, there's some kind of nuances to fundraising in terms of the metrics that the companies need to meet. And I think that's why we see companies formed in, for example, e-commerce and B2B spaces because that's where you actually can have cash flows at early stage. And whereas BTC markets developing them in Europe, where you're not talking about like homogeneous countries, I mean, everybody's a different language, different market sizes there. And the amount of money needed to be kind of invested before you can actually get to revenue is much higher. So, and that's the kind of specificity of the local market, which is completely different than the US because they're talking 300 million people or I mean, China, which is like one point. I mean, nobody really knows. So, but I mean, fundraising is just part of it. It's a very time-consuming process. What we did in my companies is we had split responsibilities between the founders. So whenever we fundraising, I mean, because it's essentially a full-time job, it's very time-consuming. So if you're in fundraising, like the last three, whatever, six months when you're going through the diligence, you're just on that. I mean, you're completely useless to your company essentially. So that's why it would be important to have a team for somebody who can actually focus on the business. And I mean, just starting a company, it's a lot harder than people think it is. I think it's been glorified. It's become an abode, but I don't think people actually understand what it is. I mean, we pulled the plug on my last company because at some point we sat down and we realized that, I mean, there are some fundamental challenges in terms of technology and infrastructure and in a vertical, which is what's so big. I mean, as a startup, we would essentially have to burn money for the next five years, wait for the deployment phase to kind of complete before we can actually do something meaningful and during the time, we'd still be looking at whatever, 70, 80 hour work weeks, there is always uncertainty and there's this massive opportunity cost in doing startups that people do not realize until they're in it, you know, six, 12 months in and like, that's it, you cannot get out. So you're in it. So I mean, circling back, I mean, you need, and that's where you know, you get a lot of turbulence with investors. That's why it's actually, you want to have investors that are qualified in a sense that they know that they're investing in something that is exceptionally high risk because investing in startups is a very high risk investment vehicle, you know. So and most, you know, VCs do not perform well in terms of like returns because it's a challenging environment. So and bad investor can ruin a startup essentially. Same thing goes for founders, for how you allocate equity, sweat equity, whatever, because roles change. So I mean, just having a cap table that makes sense, everybody overlooks it, especially first time founders, they're like, oh, we're all buddies, we're friends, this is going to be wonderful and we're going to change the world. Yeah. Like six to 12 months down the road, regardless of whether things go well or poorly, in a sense, I mean, you raised around and everybody's like, it's amazing, we're going to change the world even more. Or if things are going poorly and I mean, there's always struggles. I mean, something is always like, it's roller coaster. So there will be friction. So and the best way to get around it is to have an agreement where there are kind of no bad feelings. And so because at the end of the day, you want to be in friends and something that will allow you to be flexible. So in a sense, I mean, founders leave, teammates leave, and I mean, you don't want to have that equity locked up, you want to give people a flexibility and you also need to be able to relocate it to a new team member or to whoever. So it's very, very complex. So I mean, that's the thing I was like, how long is this panel? So because we can run a session on HR, we can run a session on growth and like customer acquisition, which is also very kind of region, sector specific. Some countries kind of in Europe and everything, like we just, I mean, there's that slide that Barcelona is Silicon, New Silicon Valley. I'm like, no, it isn't. So because I mean, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv is Tel Aviv. There are some things and I mean, and Shanghai is Shanghai. So there are some things that will work well in a particular region and aspiring. And I mean, that's what happened in Boston, like in New England, I mean, back in what was it, 70s, 80s, because it was the defense contractors, universities there that had cloakers that allowed a particular ecosystem to develop over there. There were specific conditions in Silicon Valley that allowed this industry to be developed there. They are conditions wise, London for FinTech and Insurance Tech, well, remains to be seen for how long, it's because of specific conditions because it is the financial center. Same thing goes for and trying to force it. I mean, we've seen it's attempted and tried. I don't think it works. I mean, at some point we need to understand that they are market conditions, cultural, whatever they might be that are conductive to certain types of companies to be founded there because there's certain talent available or there's certain social economic dynamics, demographics, whatever it might be. Because I mean, trying to build, I don't know, like Instagram or some very heavily oriented consumer company like, for example, in Barcelona, I mean, I would struggle to justify it without financial backing or something because it's essentially a very small market. Same thing goes for like, I guess I was in Japan recently, it's also very specific market and how it operates and some things work and some things don't. Yeah, so my company is headquarters in Switzerland but it actually started in Japan and in Japan they were eager to put models, the Japanese government is eager to put Japanese startups into the global scene actually and maybe we're like the guinea pig as well because in the Japan market, it's the threshold for IPO is a lot lower. I think it's only 10 million US or something. So it's pretty easy to accomplish 10 million in US and put yourself on the Nikkei stock exchange or something. So that's why I was gonna ask a question about the political scene, right? So does Brexit affect investment? Cause I met a startup founder that had some discussions with a UK VC and it literally fell flat, which is bad luck on his part but does it affect your investments or anything like that or do you see any effect on what's happening? For us it's zero, zero effect. We have a team in London and we're gonna be investing in London forever regardless what the politicians say because politics does not really affect much the performance of startups in the end. First they are mobile, they can go anywhere they want. Software is everywhere and nowhere. So before the Brexit, England was an attractive market. After the Brexit, it's still gonna be an attractive market. Yeah, I think there was an initial shock when that news broke and I think just in general business people, investors of any kind, they kind of don't like uncertainty. They don't like, that's something that will have kind of a knee-jerk reaction. So we definitely saw that. We also saw a couple of cities lining up trying to take over the Fintech Capital Award. Berlin was actually hiring buses to drive around London and say, keep calm and move your startup to Berlin. And I know Frankfurt's making a play. Amsterdam might be a natural place for it to be a Fintech capital. Obviously Barcelona had a nice ride up in Financial Times last week. I don't know if you saw that but Financial Times covered Barcelona as a possible Fintech capital. This week it was Madrid doing some PR. So, I think some of the cities are trying to scrape some of the juicy benefits from that. But I think in the end startups are adaptable and depending on your situation and the industry you're performing in, it's gonna more or less affect it specific to your case. So we have a lot of employees, engineers in Barcelona because there's a good university network. And I think even the Docker guys were hiring out of their old school epitech. And so do you see that as an advantage for European startups? And I had hired some people from Eastern Europe as well. Is that an advantage? Is like the more effective use of labor, keep your costs down? Or what are the tips for startup founders? I would say that cost of course is an advantage and especially in a city like Barcelona that compared to the rest of Europe is pretty affordable. But I would say more, no? Barcelona is a place that everyone or 99% of the people likes, probably Alex and Scott can answer in a while. They came here and did their business here but everyone or most of the people like to be here. So if you base your company here or you have an office with engineers here, it's easy to convince them. You're probably with the same salary tell someone to go to Stockholm or to Barcelona. I think that 90% of the people could choose a city like this one. So a good quality of life is something very important, like farther than the costs itself. Maybe now you can let us know why you came here. Certainly quality of life had a major factor in choosing Barcelona. It also has a great group of MBA and business programs. So there's definitely talent coming out the years. Every year is graduating 100,000 students or at least engineering students, PhDs, MBAs. They're coming from all around the world to Barcelona to study. Hopefully we can retain some of that talent here in Barcelona unfortunately due to some strict visa laws and restrictions that they tend to leave. Also the salaries low, that's good from a perspective of a founder but it's bad from a perspective of an employee. So there's loyalty, there's churn, there's the retainment. You're gonna lose, if you're paying bottom level salaries you're gonna lose your best talent because they're gonna eventually leave you for a higher paying job. So we would like to actually see the bar raise a little bit there, especially if a Facebook or a Google were to open offices here, they would just snatch the top cream of the crop, 10%, and come over work for us, kind of like King.com did when they came. But in general on a more philosophical, global economic vision we're heading into, we're going towards a gig economy. We're moving towards a freelance economy. We're moving towards everything as a service economy. So as we move that way and as people can kind of work from anywhere and technology allows us to be very remote and geographically agnostic, I think Barcelona is only gonna get more popular because if you think about, as a founder perspective, you're gonna spend the next five to 10 years easy in your next venture. So you have to start thinking like, where do I want to raise my kids? Where do I want to have a family? Where do I want to live the next five to 10 years? And I think that the minute you don't need to be in London to do your project, you don't need to be in Silicon Valley, I think Barcelona becomes very, very attractive. And I think we're moving more and more in that direction. I mean, Barcelona is, I mean, it's a wonderful city. I mean, we have amazing weather, like 300 and something days of sunshine, but I'm not sure the attendees managed to experience because it was cloudy and raining. So, and I mean, the quality of life is very good. There are some wonderful universities in the city. I mean, we started a university here and we're actually bringing talent from Eastern Europe to teach and transform. So that's something to keep in mind. So it's a great city. So, I mean, there's still a lot of work to be done. I mean, let's not kind of fool ourselves. So the foundation is good. I mean, I prefer like Barcelona to San Francisco. So because you can't swim in the ocean. So, you know, and, but I mean, Gerem said, I mean, you know, startups don't care about the government. I tend in some ways to disagree with that because like in a highly regulated industries, okay? Regulation plays a tremendous role because I've been on the sidelines of kind of number 26 when they were trying to get their licenses done in Germany and it was a nightmare. So, I mean, but that's going back to, you know, environment being much more conductive to certain types of businesses. So, and if you're in a regulated environment, which would be, you know, anything medical related insurance, tech or something like that. I mean, you have to play by the rules and you can't just, you know, run and be innovative. I mean, that whole thing about, you know, move fast and break things. I mean, that is, I mean, you can be shut down overnight essentially. And if you are at a point where you have X number of employees, you have some fixed cost and you're shut down by the government, while you're litigating, which also costs money, I mean, you just might run out of money, as simple as that. So, I lost my train of thought over there. So, but I mean, no, Barcelona is wonderful. There's, it's a great foundation with, I mean, I'd like to see much more companies here. And I'd like, I mean, there's been a lot of talk from the government about changing your regulation, making it easier to set up companies here, hire employees, et cetera. And there is a problem with retaining a lot of the talent that comes here to study universities, because a lot of those people still go back. So, and that needs to come from the government. So they make it easy for these people who have graduated with an engineering degree from somewhere to stay in Barcelona, to work in a company in Barcelona. Because if they go back to, I don't know, wherever they live in the world, I'm in great. So, because Barcelona is, I think, the second kind of in terms of number of students' destinations of popularity by student destination in the world after London, like as a city. So, I mean, there's a lot of people coming here to study. So, just not a lot of people staying. Were, was there some questions out in the audience? No, I wanted to add something like, regarding what you mentioned regarding governments and their paper, of course, in Europe, they have a much bigger role than in USA, and luckily, I would say. But talking about Barcelona, specifically, I think that the city council is doing a great job in this sense, because they're like doing a lot of things, but not trying to do them on their own, but supporting the private sector that all these initiatives that are coming out in Barcelona and these startups, and supporting them and not just trying to do their thing and with their vision. Still, there's a long way to go and talking about the things of barriers. We have the example of Cantocs, that is a super successful company from Barcelona, but they actually had to found to the company London, because otherwise, probably they couldn't be legal yet if they had waited to be allowed to operate from here. So you're talking about Skyscanner, right? Sorry? Skyscanner? Well, that was Cantocs, but Skyscanner was in, I think, the Scottish company. Oh, I thought Skyscanner was Barcelona. They have a big dev team here, but I think the headquarters are in Skala. I see. So I think that Cantocs is an interesting example because all fit, not all fit the companies, but most of the companies that are VC backed in the fintech space are willing to be international. So then it's not about caring about what one government says, but caring about what all the government say and everyone has its own opinion. So in the end, they say, you know what, fuck, I will go out and if they don't, if they shut us down, then we'll go to the next country. And that's what they do. That's what happened with Cantocs and what's gonna happen with blah blah car, what happened with Uber and so it works. So there's a saying in the Silicon Valley, something like annual recovering, oh, I said misspoke, monthly recurring revenue, they're talking about like two million US dollars per month. Is that the same bar in Barcelona or Spain? If it's lower, I'm gonna move my company over here. Because Storm Ventures that used to do this panel, Jason Lemke talks about two, because they've gotten used to all these, they've gotten spoiled basically by these, you know, these home runs, right? They're looking for like two million monthly recurring revenue. And frankly, if you had two million monthly recurring revenue, that means you need 10x the pipeline. That means you have a $20 million pipeline every month. I don't know of anyone that can do that. And so what's the bar in Barcelona, money-wise? Yeah, I think it depends very much on the stage. So some we see is investing certain stages and they have different bars. It depends on the industry to some extent because monthly recurring revenue is for software, but in case of transactional or e-commerce business, it's a bit different. I don't think anybody in Spain has a bar at two million MRR, because this is probably a bar that is from maybe or four VCs like Accel or Index that are in London and come from time to time to Barcelona to invest. Because you don't have many companies reaching these levels per year, so. There was a question here. Yeah, entrepreneur in Europe sometimes seems to some of us that you're being a small company even before a game starts because of the huge domestic market that the US has. And you start off with a potential market of 320 million. And if you're unlucky, you start in Estonia, you start off with 350,000. And you might be a bit more lucky if you're in England or Germany. How do you guys look at that challenge for European startups into small companies operating internationally with domestic prices? You may want to start off with the international market. It was good, yeah. Well, I think Estonia has done it pretty well, right? Despite being a small market, because they have a couple of very big companies, so I would challenge this. I'm not sure that having all your customers in the US makes it easier for you than having them, some of them in Spain, some of them in France, some of them in Italy. I know the language is a barrier, but to some extent, all the customers speak English. At least. I wish you could. Plus you get your taxes, you know. Well, the main thing is you get a good client, a good client in a whole different dimension than getting your client in the States, revenue-wise. I don't really agree. I think most of our companies grow from Spain, then go to Europe, and then go to the US. And they don't find big differences between the kind of customers they find in Europe, in different countries, or in the US. So I think to some extent, the kind of customers that our startups have are very international, have been to some extent in many different countries. So I would say that startups live probably in a different level than the hyper-local level that some companies in different countries might be. And especially because of being able to sell it from as a service, hosted in the cloud, you have very low friction to selling anywhere in the world. So I'm pretty optimistic about Europe. And I don't feel it's too fragmented or too small for growing startups. Yeah, Alex, did you have an opinion? And I'll take a question right after that. I have an opinion. I always have an opinion. So my opinion is that having a large starting market is obviously an advantage. Selling even BTB SaaS in Europe to different countries, even if you're in the cloud, they are friction points. Because for example, you cannot sell something in German in English. You need to localize it to German. Otherwise, I mean, they will not buy it. And in Germany is kind of the Europe's largest market. So I also find that sales cycles and the sales process in the US, or just like in the English accent world, is different. And I find it faster in terms of at least from experience of like two to three SaaS companies. I find it faster, much easier to close deals, slightly different ticket sizes. Well, again, it depends on the vertical sector and everything, but it's easier to convert an American customer than it would be to convert an European customer similarly. And there is also specificity in selling in certain regions in terms of even developing a sales force. Because again, it may not matter as much when you're, say, at a freemium self-service sign-up process. But once you start to move up into like mid-market enterprise, it's like you need to develop inside sales. That means local knowledge, team on the ground. And you also, like in, I don't know if it's still the case, I haven't sold anything in France in ages, like regulation about having to establish a company in a team there and just run a lot of this stuff. At some point, you're like, really? For a whatever, 60, 70 million market? So, and yeah, so, and then you kind of, it does help a lot. Because again, there is the story of the name of the Barcelona company that was Hotel Tonight before Hotel Tonight was a thing, has been forgotten. But I mean, they started in Barcelona. They had the idea first. And then Hotel Tonight started much later in the U.S. But by the time that the local company died, Hotel Tonight was on their E-round. So, which was in the space of two, three years. I mean, that's like an outlier example, but it does help. So there's a question there, and then I'll let the panelists do some closing thoughts. Just really quick, do you all have engineering backgrounds? That's question number one. And question number two, if I were to move to Barcelona tomorrow, how would you advise me to connect with these ecosystems of startups and VC? I do not have an engineering background. The question number one. Question number two, Barcelona is very open and inclusive in general. It's a very international city. It's a very transient city. People are constantly coming and going for business or otherwise. I think the best and fastest way to get involved in the local tech and startup community is to be a part of it. And to go to events and to network your ass off. And within a few months of really going to the meetups, finding your kind of people, Barcelona is an outlier when it comes to meetup groups. I'm sure you're all familiar with meetup.com. Barcelona has, I think, the leading market for meetups in all of Europe. And it's in Barcelona, it's larger than all of Spain meetups combined, just in Barcelona. Meetup is one of our clients. That's how I know that. And so they are fascinated by Barcelona. They don't understand. They're trying to mimic Barcelona's rapid adoption of meetup to the rest of Europe. And for us, that works as a super fast end because you can find your group of people and the subjects you want to learn about it, be a part of, and get in and become an organizer, become just a collaborator and just go to these events. Within a couple of weeks or months, you're going to start seeing the same faces, meeting the same people. Everybody in Barcelona is about one degree removed from each other. We've all met before. Even though we don't work together or anything, it's a kind of a little cozy ecosystem. And it's growing rapidly. There's a lot of hype around it right now. And as Carlos said, the city's done a great job to brand itself as this innovation capital, this smart city world capital, the mobile world capital, the IoT is here right now. I mean, they've done a great job kind of branding it as an overall great place to start companies. I think you just kind of get involved. Yeah, so with that, I'm going to let each of the panelists give some closing thoughts, advice for aspiring entrepreneurs or people who want to work in Barcelona. So Guillaume, you can go first. OK, so just answering also your question. The first thing I think you could do is to sign up for his group, for Carlos's group, because it's very, very popular. And you can find a lot of people there involved in the ecosystem. And in general, for any entrepreneur going to found his company in Barcelona, I think I would repeat the same thing that I mentioned before, which goes in line with his thought. And it's a very open community. You can come here and talk to everybody. So use this, because people are going to give you advice and you're going to learn a lot from many different players in the ecosystem. And I will explain to you how things work. And it's pretty transparent and accessible. So this would be my advice. But cold calling didn't work for me. Maybe one point. I, myself, accept every LinkedIn invitation just by default. And actually, when I get one LinkedIn invitation and they want to talk, then usually they have a call. So you could have tried that. I wasn't smart enough. I used the web page. So I think many people are just open here. Alex, any advice, closing advice, before they pull us off? No, I mean, Barcelona is a wonderful city. It's gotten much more international over the course of the last decade or, say, 15 years. I think the most recent statistics is about 17% of people living in the city are expats from somewhere else compared to, I think, it was like 1% to 2% in 2000s. So the ecosystem is growing. So there are VCs. There are wonderful startups. There is a lot of talent. There are universities. The weather is wonderful. The food is amazing. And the wine is even better. So I think it would be even better if more people actually moved here and kind of lived the dream and tried to make it the best place that it can be. Scott, real quick. Yeah, I mean, on a general note, I'm like, relentlessly focused on your product and on your value proposition and your target, your clients, your users, right? And by doing that, you're gonna refine your pitch, your value to your benefit to the people you're trying to serve with your startup, with your idea. And then what you also do is you get better at communicating that to people. And the more people you talk to, the better you get. And the better you get, the more people know how to help you. So when you can explain what you're doing in one or two sentences and what you're looking for in one brief sentence, people know how to help you. And as a second, they know how to help you, you're top of mind. And so when they meet somebody who you might be looking for, they already have you crystal clear in their mind of who they can connect you with. And I think that's kind of just a general thing with your projects. You can do this now while you're working in other jobs on the side. A lot of the best startups come from side projects from things people tinkering on the weekends and the evenings and building things one of Barcelona's best companies, Red Booth, started as a side project. And that's the end for us. Sorry. Carlos, one more, I thought, and then that's it. I'd like to say, I think that all the factors that we mentioned about Barcelona and Europe like relate somehow to people, no talent, life quality, good wine. So in the end, if you put the focus on people, that's a way to succeed. Because people will be your customers, your team are people. So Barcelona is a city where you can find good people. So thank you, I want to thank the panelists. We wanted to showcase the VCs and the investment community and the startup community in Barcelona because it's unlikely Opensack will ever, we don't repeat cities. So thank you, it's kind of a once in a lifetime thing. And enjoy Barcelona. And thanks for attending.