Today we had a workshop at IE with Pablo Larguía, serial tech entrepreneur and owner of three theaters in Madrid. Pablo moved to Madrid after selling his venture Bumeran.com, leading job search site in Latin America to Terra / Telefonica in 2000. After staying in the company for compulsory 18 months after the sale, Pablo moved to entertainment industry producing successful movies and theater shows. On top of that, Pablo organizes already third annual conference on tech entrepreneurship La Red Innova. I will focus on two topics in this blog post, advices about tech entrepreneurship from Pablo and how it is to organize a top Spanish Tech Business conference.
Entrepreneurship
Founding a start-up is pretty much like a personal relationship with someone. The start-up is your partner. Therefore, Pablo sees three key qualities in your entrepreneurial attitude:
- You must be proud of what you are doing
- Have a strength to maintain the core value of the business over time and despite pressures
- Have a respect to your team, customers, and competitors
About the business idea itself, Pablo believes that If you need more than one sentence to describe your project, you have a problem. Clearly, simplicity of the idea helps in communication with customers and investors. Also, simple ideas are probably much easier to implement. To be an entrepreneur it is like to be a salesperson 24/7. You must constantly sell your ideas!
Particularly, I liked Pablo’s attitude towards seeing the bigger picture in the business and his impact on a society, typical for Latin American entrepreneurs. Every entrepreneur should have a higher purpose, big idea behind the business that benefits the community. In case of Bumeran.com, the big idea was to increase efficiency of the Latin American job market.
La Red Innova Conference
La Red Innova aims to be an exciting meeting platform for entrepreneurs, investors, and developers. Pablo prepared three streams running in parallel:
- Inspirational speakers
- Technical workshops – on business models, technologies
- Start-up competition
Technical workshop attracts developers, which boosts ticket sales. Start-up competition attracts both entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, which results in self-reinforcing increase in ticket sales. The more entrepreneurs come to the conference, the venture capitalists come and vice versa. Inspirational speakers gives the conference visibility. There is a matchmaking tool behind the conference web site that facilitates networking among participants e.g. linking people with interest into same technology.
However, conference is about creating an energy. Therefore, Pablo also invites stars from the entertainment industry like singer of Ace of Base and other artists to get the fun and glamour factor. Anyway, at the end, people value quality of the conference based on the party at night.
Actually, he invited the artists to talk about the music industry and the disruption that is experiencing... I mean, they didn't go there to sing, but to participate in a pretty interesting roundtable :-)
ReplyDeleteI know, but still presence of th celebrities gives the conference the right glamor :-)
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