These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2012 Spring Edition. This post is from the Incentivalia team, formed by Jorge Bestard and Magd Kudama.
Everytime I help or advise one of my fellow startups, I sometimes get a question which to this day shocks me… “What do you want in return?” People have a hard time understanding my answer “Nothing”.
The best way to understand what we have learnt in Tetuan Valley I feel is best expressed through the “Allegory of the long spoons” which can be found in the Bible. It goes something like this:
A man spoke with the Lord about heaven and hell. The Lord said to the man, “Come, I will show you hell.”
They entered a room where a group of people sat around a huge pot of stew. Everyone was famished, desperate and starving. Each held a spoon that reached the pot, but each spoon had a handle so much longer than their own arm that it could not be used to get the stew into their own mouths. The suffering was terrible.
“Come, now I will show you heaven,” the Lord said after a while. They entered another room, identical to the first — the pot of stew, the group of people, the same long-handled spoons. But there everyone was happy and well-nourished. “I don’t understand,” said the man. “Why are they happy here when they were miserable in the other room and everything was the same?”
The Lord smiled,“Ah, it is simple,” he said. “Here they have learned to feed each other.”
...the soldier next to you, makes you stronger
Spain is going through hell right now. Greed, deceptive business practices, speculation etc. have haunted Spain for the last decade, and the results are obvious: Spain is on the verge of disaster. We’re in hell right now and we can stay here, or we can fight our way back.
The allegory of the long spoons,shows us that either we die as individuals or we succeed as a group. That is a message that more entrepreneurs in Spain each day are living by. Entrepreneurs are helping eachother out in a society that does not understand them, with government that bashes them with absurd laws, and with the huge uncertainty and mental anguish that characterizes our practice. Little by little, with these collaborative efforts, we are Starting up Spain, and creating an atmosphere of creativity, productivity and talent much needed today.
. Thankfully, our first group of graduates proved to be up to the challenge, taking advantage of all the different elements of the day.
