Tag Archives: entrepreneurship

Tetuan Valley for Dummies: Notes from the playbook

Posted by Katelyn on 16/05/2012 None comments

This except is from the “Tetuan Valley for Dummies” Playbook. To download a free copy of the playbook click here.

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.

Want more? Download a free copy of “Tetuan Valley for Dummies” here.

Last Month in Spain – April

Posted by Julie on 16/05/2012 None comments

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… for who?!

Posted by Katelyn on 04/05/2012 None comments

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

Heaven, Hell and Spanish Entrepreneurship

Posted by Incentivalia on 24/04/2012 None comments

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.

That Damn Pain

Posted by Will on 23/04/2012 3 comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2012 Spring Edition. This post is from the Fandomain team (@), formed by Carmen Bermejo.

When you start to hang around these entrepreneurs/start ups circles you get use to hear some terms, like “minimum viable product”, “pain” or “pivot”. After a while they sound so familiar that you think that you know what they mean. But sometimes, if you are lucky, you have a nice conversation with someone who really knows what all that is about and you realize how much you still got to learn.

That happened to me last week talking to Mario López de Ávila the organizer of the Agile Entrepreneurshipgroup and I think that the knowledge that I gathered could be useful to some of you too.

These questions seem simple enough when you read them like some interesting academic knowledge, but to honestly confront your project with them it’s a whole different history.

Find the pain. Seems easy enough. Right? Yet I realized I was doing it backwards. I had this cool idea so when people told me I have to explain the pain in my presentation I tried to find something that justified that product. But what I should been doing is to find a real pain, the bigger the better, and build around it.
Do people know that they have that problem? If they don’t, making them see it is going to be a project on is own. It’s going to take a lot of effort and sometimes a lot of money. Probably not the best idea.
How is the problem being solved? If there is a pain, then there is a solution. Most of the times it’s a bad one, but people always find a way to get by. Identify what your potential users are doing to avoid that problem.
Are you able to improve that solution? How? Here is where you great idea come to play.
Can you make money with that? The most important question yet the most difficult. Can you create a sustainable business out of this? You could have the best solution in the world for the worst pain ever, but is there someone that is going to pay for it? It could be the people that need the solution or others, like when you put ads on your website.
Is it worth it? Is the amount of money you could make more that what it will cost to build and maintain that solution? Is the money that will be left after paying all of this enough to compensate for the effort and dedication that you are going to invest?

What I found myself thinking while answering these questions was: “I have this cool idea that people are going to love. I’m sure they’ll use it even if it’s not related to any pain.” But then I realized that that was just me defending my baby.