Tag Archives: beruby

@StartSpain #AngelSchool: 101 Investing in Internet Startups (Powered by @Zoomry)

Posted by admin on 14/02/2012 None comments

Howdy friends!

Nast Marrero, here! Last week we launched Startup Spain‘s first program: the Angel School. Our take is: it’s been a great beginning for Startup Spain. We had more than 60 attendees of which more than 2/3 were potential investors.

This is an unusually large display of interest in the Spanish investment arena, where most events see no more than 20 or some participants maximum. Mentoring Angel Investors to better navigate their deal analysis is a keystone in fostering ITC startups in Spain. The program was a real marathon: 10+ hours of training (don´t worry we let them stop for lunch ;) . Thankfully, our first group of graduates proved to be up to the challenge, taking advantage of all the different elements of the day.

Missing from the program were the typical made-up miracle cures and formulas. We strived to keep the content practical, following the Tetuan Valley Way with hands-on exercises and significant mentors’ experiences

The event was hosted @ the awesome facilities of Madrid International Lab and kicked off by Iñaki Ortega, Director of Madrid Emprende, and one of the main forces behind Startup Spain. In his opening speech, Iñaki brought up the importance of joining private and public efforts to facilitate and develop entrepreneurial activity, and the key role those efforts will play in the long-run global competitiveness of Spain.

Two roundtables with rockstar speakers cherry-topped the program: one from Investors already Angel Investing and another from Entrepreneurs. Each of them gave invaluable insights on what it is they look for, value, and ask during an early stage investment.

The investors’ roundtable was moderated by our very own Alex Barrera (co-founder of Tetuan Valley & CEO of Press42), and formed by:

On the other corner, moderated by Ricardo Fernandez (director of Step One Spain), the entrepreneurs’ roundtable formed by:

Both roundtables aimed to give participants a overview of the ecosystem, showcasing startups from their seed stage through founders that have already made an exit, with similar ranges of experiences coming from the Angel investors, from managers that were just launching their first investment through those who have been in the game for a while.

Given the success and the of the program and the importance we place on such event to foster investment culture we’re already iterating on the feedback from the first event to run a LEGENDARY second edition of Startup Spain Angel School on March 22nd. Wanna get your tickets? Check here!

We had the pleasure of following all the twitter interactions of the event through Zoomry, now in it´s beta stage. The product is awesome and if you check #AngelSchool Social Media @ AngelSchool.Zoomry.com… You can see for yourself they’re up to something big!

You might want to check the slides of our presentations in our slideshare or check the pictures in our flickr group.

Thank you for reading… Bestest!

Startups In Spain – Today: @beruby_es

Posted by jmcobian on 23/01/2012 1 comments

These series of guest posts are written based off of interviews done with entrepreneurs in Spain, as part of an initiative to bring awareness about the Startup Spain movement. Today we interview Miguel Acosta, Partner & CEO at beruby

Company: BeRuby
Founded: 2008
URL: http://beruby.com
Twitter: @beruby_es
City: Madrid
Founders:

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Miguel Acosta

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Nieves Perez

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Samuel Arenas

BeRuby is (i) having a virtual desktop with your favourite sites in one place (“the cloud”concept), (ii) saving money through your daily online activity (when you shop, visit sites, register, see videos, etc), and (iii) creating a community of users that shop (social shopping).


Who is behind this project? Who are the team members?

The project has had many shareholders and people who have helped the company during the past four years.  The co-founders that still work in beruby are Samuel Arenas, Nieves Perez and Miguel Acosta.

We all had known each other for many years and, at one point, decided to create beruby as we thought there was a market opportunity.  Nieves left her job at Telefonica and started the company, Miguel joined the following year (after being at Ask.com and Yahoo) and Samuel Arenas one year later (after being at Ask.com and Páginas Amarillas).

 

How did you came up with the idea? What is the story behind it?

It would be cool to say that it came one night in a bar… unfortunately the story is not so glamorous:

After many years working with internet companies we were seeing that the most valuable players in the sector were the users (which is kind of obvious).  The second most valuable players were the advertisers. And in the middle, there were lots of intermediaries.

A typical transaction would take place as follows:

(i) user searches for a product

(ii) search engines send the user to a content page

(iii) content page would have links from an affiliation network

(iv) the affiliation network link would take the user to the shop

For every intermediary there was a margin. Taking this into account, the idea behind beruby was to create a page for the users where they could start their internet experience (a “homepage”) and to give them the chance to go to the merchant directly, sharing with them the commissions the advertiser was willing to pay.

These simple ideas took us several months.

 

How do you envision the future of your business and what are the key challenges and questions that your market niche is facing?

E-commerce is definitely growing and we think that, given the opportunity, anyone would be happy to save money from each online transaction they make.

Our biggest challenge?  Earning money on the Internet has a negative connotation.  To overcome this, our strategy is to be open and offer transparent communication (for example: who we are, our address, our terms and conditions, etc) but it is definitely not easy when you are talking about giving out money online.

 

What is your status as of today or, in other words, what are you guys up to these days?

Our focus right now is on international expansion (we just launched Mexico), redesigning the page (we don’t know why but it seems that we always need a more modern version) and grabbing the attention of new advertisers and users.

 

What is the single most important barrier you have had to face in order to start this venture in Spain and how did you overcome it?

The most important barrier is funding… there seems to be a lot of seed capital but, once you reach a certain size, you are in the middle of a desert (too big for most local Spanish investors and too little for strong international investors).  Our strategy to overcome this phase (we are still in the middle of it) is to achieve breakeven and subsidize our growth with our revenues.

 

A word of advice to other entrepreneurs…

Hire slow and fire fast (this, by the way, is easy to say buy very hard to execute).

 

Parting thoughts…

The hardest part in a startup is that you wake up one morning, and you feel great about the day, and you think, “We’re kicking ass.” And then you wake up the next morning, and you think “We’re dead.” And literally nothing’s changed

Joe Krauss (Cofounder, Excite)