Part I
Section 1. The Origin of Tetuan Valley

It is difficult to imagine it now, but back in 2009 there weren’t many events or meetups in Madrid for entrepreneurs, far less when specifically talking about tech entrepreneurs. It was quite a lonesome, non-collaborative and non-supportive environment in which the few people that dared to try to start up were constantly being discouraged and mocked by even their closest friends and family members…

….Small numbers of entrepreneurs translated into a small number of events. In one of the few events there was at this time, Iniciador, Tetuan Valley was born. Luis Rivera and Bernardo de Tomás, the founders of Okuri Ventures, both regularly attended this monthly event. At Iniciador, an entrepreneur gives a keynote talk and afterwards the attendees go to a nearby pub to grab a beer and network amongst each other. The event often missed its target in that most of the attendees weren’t entrepreneurs, but people trying to sell services and “miraculous” courses to the few entrepreneurs that were there.

Bernardo and Luis found it very off-putting that, given the status of the already small and weak ecosystem, there were people trying to charge entrepreneurs thousands of Euros for things like outsourcing their product development or teaching them how to build a 150-page business plan filled with invented, untested hypotheses. All these offers were filled with false promises to give entrepreneurs more users, clients, or, the ultimate “big-sell,” better access to funding.

Amongst the crowd, Luis found a familiar face; a former high-school peer, Alejandro Barrera. Alex was a computer scientist that had just come back from a year at the University of California-Berkeley, studying and falling in love with Silicon Valley, the startup world and entrepreneurship in general. While catching up, sharing a few beers, hearing Alex’s Silicon Valley stories, moaning about the local Spanish ecosystem and criticizing all the “fame and front-page photo seekers,” one thing was clear: criticizing and blaming others was not productive; they needed to do something about it.

These series of posts are a compilation of what has happened in the spanish startupsphere within and outside our borders. As part of our efforts to promote Startup Spain movement, we want to increase the exposure of the our startup ecosystem. If you want to contribute, please do not hesitate to ping us on Twitter @startspainwith any news you want us to feature here. Thank You!

If you want to learn more about what has happened lately in Spain, you can read last month’s post HERE.

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For most people, April in Spain has been mainly famous for its concerning news regarding its national public debt risk premium, the “rapid” implementation of several austerity measures by the central government and the TWO different hunting accidents in TWO different occasions by TWO different members of the Royal Family (One of them, being the King of Spain himself). Yet, in the startupsphere, we don’t have much time for supra-national economical mumbo jumbo, political smoke-screens or outrageous (and quite karmic) gossip about our Royal Family. We have more important things to do!!

If you want to keep reading this post, click HERE.

If you want to know all about these great spanish entrepreneurs and want to be updated on the evolution of the Spanish startup ecosystem, you can Follow us on Twitter @StartSpain, Like us on Facebookand/or Subscribe to our NewsLetter

If you feel that we have left out of this update any important deal that is worth mentioning or you have any feedback regarding these series of blogposts, please let us know in the comments section below. We would gladly update the post with your inputs as fast as we can.

Stay tuned for next month’s update!

Tetuan Valley is pleased to be collaborating again in 2012 with the fine folks from Startup 2.0. This years startup contest is on Gaming to give fledging game developers the opportunity to compete.  Have a project?

The Steps are:

1. Submit your game from May 14th to 30th.

2. Facebook users vote for the best 20 games from May 14th to 30th.

3. On June 5th, 5 finalists will be selected by the Jury.

4. The 5 finalists present their projects at the Nonick Conference on June 15th.

Last year more than 250 people attended the final presentation event!

If you´re a European Game Developer, and think you have what it takes, don´t miss this opportunity

Want more information? Find all the details here.

Startup Spain and Tetuan Valley are excited to announce the addition of their latest supporting organization, UpStartUp, The Startup Talent Marketplace.

UpStartUp is a meeting point for startups and startup talent. At UpStartUp startups post job offers, and the talent posts their profiles. Weekly emails and offers are sent according to the preferences in order to show users the updates appropriate for their needs.

It is also a a great way to stay up to date and connected to what’s happening in the world of startups.

This offer is brought, at a discount, by mentor Jose Miguel Herrero. Members of the Tetuan Valley Community receive a 100% discount on any job offers published in May and 90% for any published in June

At some point, all entrepreneurs need to grow their talent pool or search for new opportunities, UpStartUp will make sure you don´t miss any!

The Tetuan Valley team has gone and written a book. Yep, thats right, we´re all authors now.

Who´s it for?
Anyone who might be interested in running a similar program, or knowing how we created Tetuan Valley.
It´s also for our alumni, to celebrate all their amazing hard work

Why´d you write it?
We want to find other people interested in promoting entrepreneurship, both in Spain and around the world. We want to help these people learn from our experiences, get their feedback, and maybe find partners or allies in unexpected places.

How do I get my hands on a copy?
1. Click on the “Pay with a Tweet” buttons you see on the TetuanValley.com/Playbook or Startupspain.com/startupschool/ pages. Or this one:

2. Tweet about it when the window pops up
3. The download will automatically show up for the Playbook

Why Pay with a Tweet?
We want EVERYONE to know about this, and the more we tweet the more likely that is to happen.

And if I want to do more?
In addition, we are accepting donations to support the continuation and growth of Tetuan Valley. If you´re interested, you can donate here

Need more cowbell?
The playbook will shortly be available on 24symbols.com

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2012 Spring Edition. This post is from the Airsign team, formed by Miguel Páramo

Lets try to motivate a bit with this one. You can think about this being motivational bullshit, maybe it is. I just want to give a reason to explain why I wrote this:

Every day there are tons of projects gaining users (or clients) at a high rate. In many cases those projects don’t have a solid business model or well determined pain behind them. So, what is the key of their success? Answering this question is actually very complex and the reasons may be different in every situation. But there is something they all have in common: Marketing, simple calculus and inertia. Elementary maths.

Lets see then:

Yeah, you have your very well located pain, you have your strong and solid strategies and all of the resources needed to launch your startup and become one of those lucky self-employed badasses. But have you ever though about the scope of your market? What is it then potentially? 100K? 20M?

Nowadays all of us have big opportunities on the global technological market. Never in history was it easier to create something and deploy it worldwide, operating into a market with not just 1M but 100M to 1B of potential clients/users. If your idea seems to be targetting an environment with lower that 100M of those buddy… seriously, you can consider opening your market wider. If you are aiming very high, in a pessimistic case, you are going to catch just a sadly 0.0005% of your market (5 clients of every 10k). That is when elementary maths steps in and gives us about 50k clients. If you look at the Long Tail model, that means that those initial numbers are expected to increase just by inertia, without even appliying marketing strategies. This is validated knowledge. However, don’t expect to keep those clients easily depending on your product. A snowball/waterfall effect can happen on that cycle. With perseverance, marketing (important) and some luck on your side, you can expect 100k users the first year. Not bad at all.

You shouldn´t try to make effort on closed markets but maybe because altruism. Think globally and let the simple math and the inertia to be on your side. Think that nowadays the amount of users you have is, despite what some investors say, one of the objective measures that is directly proportional to the value of your system. Depending on your project, you should try to attract users first while still maintaining the platform. Maybe one day you can apply several different revenue models that your users wouldn´t have paid for before. These are long term strategies, and are against many of the lessons we have been taught. It´s risky and hard, but remember, this is happening every day.

Sadly, it is the end of our 6th edition of Startup School, but as Cobi said, it is not a goodbye!

Yesterday we celebrated the graduation of the great teams of the Tetuan Valley Startup School, and their entrance in the bigger Spanish community of entrepreneurs. We are very proud of both their endurance and their work; in 6 weeks they have given all of their energy to create a project with short deadlines and high expectations. Also, we wanted to welcome them to our large alumni community (which now totals over 200!) with the symbol of our beautiful orange t-shirts:

However, this party would not have been what it was without our guest speaker Iñaki Arrola, founder of VitaminaK, who made a great speech about the relationship between an entrepreneur and his business angel. Also, he very nicely shared with us his own experience of being cheated by an entrepreneur, and I think everybody felt relieved to know that even people as successful as he have known failure. If we had to take one piece of advice from his presentation? Be honest!

Later, our teams pitched their projects and presented their Demos. And let me tell you… it was amazing! We don’t know what the future holds, but I think that these 6 weeks brought us more than anyone could have imagined. Now all these teams are leaving with new knowledge, experience and a lot of friends and we are beyond glad to have been a part of what got them to where they are now.

More complete information about the teams is available here.

Finally, we want to thank all the guests who came and we hope you all had a great time!

See you for the next chapter of Tetuan Valley Startup School, and meanwhile, you can follow us on Twitter @Startspain, “Like” our Facebook Page, or sign up for our Newsletter.

Dear tetuanees, we are happy to inform you that La Red Innova is coming out with a great new edition this year and as they are one of the best tech conferences in Spain, we’re glad to join them once more as one of their supporting organizations. This year, La Red Innova is back to startup the community again, so make sure to book your tickets for: 14th – 15th June 2012 at the Circo Price. Check out for more info and get your discount codes here.

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2012 Spring Edition. This post is from the www.mituyuu.com team, formed by Carolina Rojas, Chandini Jeswani and Ángela M. Rojas

With the current economic crisis, people losing their jobs, a growing distrust in banks and institutions, people began to search for new forms to collaborate between each other and try make business out of the conventional manners.

What began in the early XXl century with a photographer trying to sell her work, filmmakers trying to produce their movies, developers looking for a way to create new features, share and maintain their applications, ends in an important tendency; nowadays, there exists a successful way to share work among professionals (Crowdsourcing, see video here) and the platforms to find investment for any kind of project (Crowdfunding). Like governments or NGO´s find helpful donations in the crowd, people also hungry for investment or for investing in new projects finally find a cool way to do it.

So what do you need? Just an idea. Post it on a crowdfunding platform, get funded and of course make your idea a reality.This is definitely a good way in which startups can face investing problems.

Crowdfunding has also become a business; these companies work as intermediates between projects and investors charging a fee over the investment. Is some kind of primitive bank. But the impòrtant thing is that people have here a good opportunity to collaborate collectively whether as a philanthropic donation, some kind of loan with negotiable interest rates or an investment which involves a some participation in the project as a return.

85% of the crowdfunding platforms are in North America and Europe (some famous platforms are kickstarter, Indiegogo, startsomegood or crowdcube).  Here in Spain you can find a total of 13 platfoms where you can share your big idea and find investment. So, startupers, when friends, family and fools investment option became extinct, you can have your chance in crowdfunding. Here are some Spanish platforms:
Partizipia, Verkami, Lanzanos, Fandyu, Volanda, Injoinet, Kreandu, Goteo, Seedquick.

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2012 Spring Edition. This post is from the holoholo team, formed by Jay Hum, Gonzalo Calle and Joaquín Grech

Since becoming a member of the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2012 Spring Edition, which started on March 7, we have pitched at least once, sometimes twice a week. In addition to the formal three, five, or seven minute pitches to professors, mentors, entrepreneurs and potential investors, we have given spontaneous one minute elevator pitches to people we’ve run into or just happened to meet at various networking events. We have also recorded a pitch and posted it online as part of the application process to some accelerator/incubator programs.

Before each pitch, we spent at least a couple of hours refining the slide deck, rehearsing the presentation, and preparing answers for the Q&A session. After each pitch, we received a lot of feedback from various sources. Some feedback was positive, which was good because it validated that we were on the right path and the audience understood our product. Some feedback was negative, which was also good because we then knew that we had a gap to fill or had to describe something more clearly. Finally, some feedback was contradictory, which is not good because it leaves us wondering which direction should we take in the pitch and/or product. There is nothing worse than hearing from someone that he/she clearly sees the product/market fit and the huge upside, and then turning to someone else and seeing a confused look on his/her face.

Yesterday morning, we had a 15-minute meeting with an individual from the US who has been on both sides of the table. He has been an entrepreneur and is now a Managing General Partner and Managing Director for two venture capital funds. After we gave him the elevator pitch, he said: “Right, so it’s like a combination of X and Y, but with Z.” He immediately got the concept and said that he really like the idea. Since he understood the product so quickly, the rest of the meeting was used to discuss customer acquisition strategy and costs.

Contrast this to yesterday afternoon, when we had a five-minute pitch to a VC from Israel. After given the same pitch that has been refined over the past month and a half, the VC started the Q&A session with “I don’t get what your product is or what you are trying to do.” Something you never want to hear from a VC! Needless to say, we were shocked and taken back by this feedback, which was completely unexpected.

The more you talk to people about your idea and the more you pitch, the more feedback and opinions you are going to get. It is always much easier to criticize and knock something down than it is to build something of value that lasts. Net net, there comes a point where you have to ignore all the noise, focus on the core of you idea and product, and stay on target.