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Jaime Novoa: From writing tech news to writing checks

Even though Jaime now is working on the VC side of the table, he assured me that he doesn’t wear a suit every day.

There’s not a lot of information in English about the Spanish startup ecosystem out there, but there is one person that has dedicated half a decade to covering tech and startups in Spain and that’s Jaime Novoa.

He recently went from writing stories about startups to writing checks as a part of the K Fund team.

Even though he’s not chasing breaking tech news anymore, he’s still doing a lot of the same work:

When I was a journalist I tried to find interesting companies before anyone knew about them, and that’s something I still do today at K Fund.

But there’s also a lot of obvious differences:

The biggest change is the amount of information that startups share with me now, compared to before. When you’re a journalist companies doesn’t share much with you, and they often don’t tell you the truth. But as a potential investor, they have to open their books and show you everything, and that’s pretty amazing.

Surprising

Even though Jaime has been known as a well-informed person in tech circles, being a VC opened his eyes to a different kind of information flow:

As a VC I was surprised to know how little I knew about the companies I was covering as a journalist.

And that makes him respect the journalists writing about startups and technology ever more than before:

I usually defend journalists writing critical articles about startups, because from the outside it’s very hard to know what’s the truth and have good data points. That’s why so many publications only write about funding rounds because that’s the one thing both investors and companies actually share.

A failed business

Even though Jaime succeeded in making Novobrief into one of the main sources of breaking startups news in Spain, creating a sustainable company was harder than he though:

I totally failed with making Novobrief into a business, but I see now that I should have been monetizing from day one. My idea was to build a brand first, and then make money, but that was my biggest mistake.

He adds that the blog is actually making him more money today, than back when he was doing it full-time.

The world of venture capital is new, but not rocket science according to Jaime, which explains that the things he needed to learn were the different stages of how an investment work, certain metrics and legal issues.

It’s a great time to be in venture capital in Spain, and that’s because it’s a great time for startups in general in the country. The ecosystem is growing tremendously and will continue to change and grow the next years for sure.

He always envisioned himself continuing to work as a journalist.

I never ever thought that I would be working in a VC firm, neither to work for a startup, I always thought that I would go on to work as a journalist. But Iñaki Arrola approached me and said they were looking for someone with my profile for K Fund, and for me, it was plainly the right time to do something different.

Bullshit detector

Many say journalists make good VC’s because they’re good at asking the right questions and seeing through founders attempt to paint a better picture of their company than what’s the truth. Jaime agrees:

I think journalists build up a bullshit detector, and that is helpful also as a VC.

These days he sees between 5–10 companies per week, mostly in Spain, but also outside the country.

Looking back to when he started writing around 6–7 years ago, he can with certainty say that the community of founders and tech companies has matured a lot.

There are so many things going on these days, in the whole country, not only in Madrid and Barcelona. These days Barcelona has the most momentum, but that can change overnight. I don’t spend time thinking about which city performs best, I think it’s a childish mindset.

B2B SaaS

What Jaime however does think about is young tech companies, and even though he doesn’t like trying to guess what kind of verticals or industries that will do well the next years, he has his thoughts:

I really like the B2B SaaS vertical and although I’m not a good at predicting, I think that Spain will foster more of these great B2B SaaS companies going forward.

And if you’re missing breaking startup news from Novobrief, Jaime is not here to comfort you:

I’m not planning on working as a journalist anytime soon. I have my full focus on K Fund and I have so much left to learn in this industry.

But there’s one thing he does miss about his old career:

There’s something special about the adrenaline you get by breaking news before anyone else, I do miss that thrill sometimes. If journalism is in your blood, you’ll write some way or another, and I’m happy to be able to write on the K Fund blog these days.

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How Typeform is scaling their culture in hyper-growth

When your startup consists of you and your co-founder, it’s not that hard to shape the culture. Even though Typeform started with two co-founders , it has grown and in the last 18 months from 30 to 150 employees, and they have no intention to stop growing.

So how are they keeping a healthy culture? It’s not a poster on a wall, we live it, says co-CEO and co-founder Robert Munoz:

Our company culture is a product of what kind of workplace I, David (co-founder) and the first employees wanted to create when we started Typeform. We didn’t have a master plan to define our culture but we knew that a total focus on product, people and creating a collaborative place to work made sense.

Product & People first

Traditionally SaaS companies are all about product in the beginning. Robert and David have always been searching for the balance where product meets people:

We know that if we invest in both our talent and in our product at the same level, revenues will come along with it.

Typeform’s co-founders and co-CEO’s David Okuniev and Robert Muñoz.

That’s why they have created three pillars to put people and product as top priorities:

  • Business to take the market
  • Innovation to be ahead of the curve
  • Culture to create a great work environment

He explains that scaling culture has become more and more important with growth, as the company has been going through three different stages most startups face.

We started at (1) product phase, where it’s all about building the best fucking product. Then moved into a (2) service phase where it was all about giving our acquired users the best service possible. Now we’re at the (3)organizational stage, where building a well functioning business with different teams and functions. Here’s the focus on scaling culture maybe the most important key.

At a time when good work culture is uber important, the founders acknowledges that they’re facing challenging times as they grew from 50 to 150 employees in one year.

The magic number — 150

Oxford evolutionary psychology professor Robin Dunbar created a theory that humans only can maintain personalized relationships with 150 people, so it’s not without reason Robert says they’ve been struggling a bit with communication lately:

We are very aware that we’re crossing this magic line. Decision making based on consensus is not as effective as before and spreading information across the organization is a new challenge, so we need to add more structure in place.

The main challenge with adding structure, according to Robert, is to be efficient as an organization without killing creativity and the startup feeling.

The last year we’ve been focusing on redefining our vision, product mission and values, as this is a big part of creating alignment and improving communication and decision making.

Creating values is hard, especially if it needs to resonate with a lot people. So a while back the Typeform people sat down to draw out their company values.

First, me and my co-founder David met with the creative/content team and some other people to write a list of values that we thought made sense for our day to day. Then we published and announced the values to the company and we realized that some of the values didn’t resonate and that some others were confusing.

They needed a value revolution.

We decided to scrutinize the values with every team of the company and we realized that if you want people living the values, it’s better to make them participate so they feel more engaged and you don’t end up just hanging your values on a wall.

At the end, they threw away their first values and came together with the whole company up with a list of seven values that randomly formed the acronym: CHEF PIE.

Lunch roulette

Another key element when growing fast is making sure everyone get to know each other, no matter how big the team gets, says Robert:

Something we really focus on when growing fast is keeping founders and managers approachable, this is super important, and we are experimenting with several ways of making this happen easier.

One of the experiments is a Slack bot that matches random people for coffee breaks and lunches, so everyone gets to know each other better, also all the managers.

It’s actually been a real success. I love having coffee with people from the office I don’t know that well.

The Typeform barception.

When you walk into the Typeform office in Barcelona, the first thing meeting you is the barception (bar + reception) with free drinks and coffee served by the barceptionist. There’s also free healthy lunches, more benefits than your average day can handle, and a big lofty office.

You would think that even for a company that have raised $15 million in venture capital, this kind of spending would be over the top. Robert thinks the opposite:

Somebody told me that you’ll never over-invest in people. I don’t think investing heavily in culture is expensive at all, at least in our industry. Luckily we have investors that believe in that mentality as well.

Inclusion

The co-founders Robert and David along with the management team is learning as they go in terms of growing a huge, fast-moving organization. To succeed in their mission to make their product a little more human, there’s one element they need to do perfectly.

We need to include our teams as much as we can in the shaping of our culture, and continue to spend a lot of time, effort and resources on making people challenged, happy and at home.

As they’re planning on growing the team substantially the next two years, and with an additional office opening in the US soon, the ultimate test for Typeform lies ahead of them:

As we scale the culture of the company can change a little bit, but we don’t need to freak out about that, it’s like any person’s personality, it changes. However, we want to keep building an awesome place to work. A place where people can be themselves, be heard, innovate, and do big things together.

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Learning the Design to Code process

Even if you’e not a designer and never used design software before, you can still release products that do the job and are well designed.

The following steps I’ll guide you through can be divided into three parts:

  • Planning
  • Designing
  • Coding

It’s far from a complete UX process, but it will allow you to take your own design and make it come alive.

1. Plan it

In your initial phase of planning you need to know your goal, and what you want to achieve with your project.

When you know for what purpose you’e building your app or your product for, you need to know who’s using it.

You should think of your audience in three different ways.

>Who: Demographics, age, gender, profession, etc.

>Where: In what setting they will use your product in.

>What: The kind of device they’re using your product on.

Take this information and let it influence your decision as you design.

The next step is to do at basic flowchart, in other words see how the user goes through your product, step by step, instead of just hard-coding it.

When you make a flowchart you avoid making mistakes that forces you to go back and do big changes. An example of a flowchart I’ve used in Quipu is pictured under to give you a rough idea, but if you want to dig into it — here’s a video explaining the process using Sketch.

It’s extremely important to have a thorough plan for whatever product you’re designing. It will save you time and effort for sure.

The last part of the planning, is to define a functional definition of each page in your product. It’s a document that will be your documentation or knowledge base about what each screen does, what it shows, and what routes and actions are possible to take from there.

So if you’re building an app, you should have a page with the following information for each interface:

Name of the view (or the module) –> The purpose of the page –> Full information –> Partial information –> List information –> Routes/actions.

If you did your flowchart correctly, the documentation will be heavily dependent on that Flow Chart.

2. Design it

The most important thing as a fresh designer or working on a project you’ve coded yourself, is to use established patterns.

There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel again.

A place where you can find questions and answers for most issues are ux.stackexchange.com. It’s similar to stackoverflow.com, just for design, and we know how important that is to most designers, so don’t be afraid to seek inspiration and help from more experienced people.

Then start on your wire-framing. Translate your flow and functional definition to a low-fidelity screen that contain everything but the design finish. In other words, focus on getting all the routes, actions, buttons and content right before making it look nice.

One of the most important thing of the design process, is to design it like you would code it. I recommend using Sketch, but use whatever software you’re comfortable with, like Illustrator or Photoshop.

Design as you would code it simply means using non-filled transparent containers to imitate containers and wrappers. Also use naming conventions for layers and groups just as you would use while coding your components.

The last thing I want to mention in terms of design, is to use Atomic Design principles which is a way of designing interfaces that extends to what we’ve been covering in the “Design as you would code it” part above.

It talks about structuring your design, and define it into atoms (colors, fonts, shapes) and form molecules by using them (buttons, inputs, lists etc..), to finally do organisms. An organism then becomes a template For example, A navigation bar that has a menu, a search bar and a logo (few molecules).

Foto: http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/atomic-web-design/

3. Code it

As a designer I will not teach code, most of you probably are more talented coders than I am, so I’ll just mention the software you should use to help you get all the CSS styles you will ever need.

Zeplin.io is a software that takes Sketch Designs, exports CSS styles and gives you all the sizes, margins, paddings, borders you need in order to translate your design to code and not loose the quality and level of detail you worked so hard on.

Zeplin.io is in my opinion the best way to translate design to code.

If you followed the atomic design, and designing as you would code it, then this process is simple, quick and with minimum errors.

I can honestly say that in Quipu where I do the design, this is the most time-saving tool I’ve ever come across. It drastically reduced both cost and time spent on getting the looks of our apps and website translated to all browsers.

Also read:

https://blog.itnig.net/why-ux-ui-designs-should-be-aimed-at-zombies-1968d72b0472

This post was written by media manager at itnig, Sindre Hopland, based on the presentation by lead designer at Quipu, Kamil Jura.

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How to boost diversity in the Spanish startup ecosystem

We wanted to use the March edition of our monthly video podcast to put focus on the brilliant women founders in our startup ecosystem. Luckily we have many to choose from in Barcelona, so we invited business angel and co-founder and CEO of B-Wom Helena Torras, co-founder of Geenapp Gina Tostand CEO and co-founder of Eelp! Nina Alastruey to discuss the status for women in tech in 2017, with a special focus on Spain and Barcelona.

Helena Torras is the co-founder and CEO of B-Wom as well as being an experienced business angel and director of Fund Of Funds.

Being a women is an advantage

Torras explains that being an entrepreneur, and being a woman in startups has changed a lot the last ten years. However, a decade ago, she always felt that being a woman was an advantage:

I was the only one, so when I went an event or a meeting, people remembered me. Ten years ago, all investors and entrepreneurs were men, that has changed with time, but I always saw being a women as an advantage.

Alastruey has a different approach that what it means being a woman in tech in 2017:

I think it’s super tough and very difficult. I remember being in an investor meeting with my previous startup in Silicon Valley, and one of the investors asked me what I did at the company. I said I was the CEO, and he was super surprised, he thought I worked with marketing, that’s the general conception.

Tost which founded Geenapp four years ago, said it wasn’t easy becoming an entrepreneurs, but that other women in the startup community, made it much easier:

Compared to Helena and Nina I don’t have that much experience, but when I started out it was easier because I had a network of great women entrepreneurs from Barcelona around me, and that empowered me to work even harder.

The power of diverse teams

All three entrepreneurs believe the startup ecosystem is the perfect place for women interesting in tech to start their career.

Alastruey puts it like this:

Women are incredible as they’re able to multi-task in a different way than men are capable of. For a startup that needs everyone to take responsibility, this is a skill that is in demand.

Tost, founded Geenapp together with Javier Casares and Jaime Ferre:

I have a very diverse team, and from the beginning I was always the multitasker, doing everything, and I think that’s why my more experienced team-members liked me. We started working together almost five years ago, and we’ve know raised a kid that’s kind of big.

Gina Tost co-founded Geenapp with her founders almost five years ago. The company links app creators and users is one of the Spain’s most successful SaaS startups.

Torras has invested in many different types of teams, but she says one thing is clear:

It’s not about having only women or having only men, all studies show that diverse teams perform better than non-diverse startups. It’s all about finding the right balance of talent, and I think a diverse team is the best way to go.

CEO and co-founder of Eelp!, Nina Alastruey think it’s extremely tough to be a women entrepreneur in 2017.

Need to prioritize networking

Even though Torras has never seen being a women as a negative thing in the startup community, she does have some advice to up-and-coming entrepreneurs:

Some founders think it’s enough to do well during working hours, but I think you need to go out and network and meet people. It’s a key to building trust with investors and other entrepreneurs.

Alastruey says there’s still challenges also in these areas, and that women founders often are kept out of the networking circle because a lot of it happens in an environment mostly reserved for men:

You rarely see investors who are men inviting a women founder to play golf, and it’s not as normal to go out with your investors and have a beer if you’re a woman as if you’re a man.

Torras disagrees:

I do all the same things as any other man would do, investor or entrepreneur.

Support each other

Tost doesn’t think there’s a clear path to making the startup ecosystem more diverse:

There’s no list of things we should get done to become a more diverse tech hub, it boils down to supporting each other as women in tech and working really hard for what you want to achieve.

Also Torras thinks supporting each other’s progress is more important than anything else:

I always believed in seeing opportunities, before challenges. I like to stay positive and focus on the positive things that are happening in the space of women in tech in Spain.

She continues:

If you are involved in the startup ecosystem, and you show ambition and the right vision, I think being a women is more and more becoming an advantage.

Torras explains that there’s big things going on, and that she can’t reveal exactly what yet, but that it will benefit women in tech in Barcelona and Spain is for sure.

To get the full discussion, take a look at the video in the top.

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2017 — The year eSports really goes mainstream

In stadiums meant for physical sports are thousands of fans gathered to see their idols play more virtual kinds of games. Foto: Bago Games

In 2016 reports showed that over one billion people are aware of eSports the industry brought in around one billion dollars the same year. Both analysts and experts see 2017 as a year this growth continues, and that in a fast pace, as this will be the year eSports goes mainstream.

Pol Ruiz is the co-founder and CEO of Playfulbet, one of the biggest social betting platforms in Europe with over seven million users. They were one of the first startups that saw the eSports wave coming:

I have to say that eSports have evolved a lot since we started Playfulbet four years ago. At the time we were the only ones offering betting on eSports (though not with real money). Today all the betting sites lets you bet on eSports and it’s growing rapidly month over month.

Pol Ruiz, CEO and co-founder of Playfulbet.

Talking about sports, the only thing growing faster than eSports itself, is betting on eSports. According to the market analyst SuperData the eSports market will be worth 1.8 billion by the end of 2018. The sum is small compared to the betting market says Pol:

What many analysts doesn’t take account for is the betting industry around eSports which is also growing exponentially, and is anticipated to generate around $20 billion in turnover by 2020.

https://upscri.be/285782-2

Gamers are more loyal than football supporters

Stadiums used for traditional sports, are filling up with energetic audiences hungry for eSports live tournaments. It’s important to note that there are several key differences between the normal sports fan and the eSports enthusiasts.

The things that are special with eSports fans is that they support, interact and are much active than normal sports fans. They identify themselves with the game in a bigger degree than with other sports fans, and this makes the eSports sector both so interesting and valuable.

Pol and his team at Playfulbet are monitoring both sports sectors, and see trends emerging.

The industry is exploding, and especially after many traditional football and basketball teams got associated with the online sports games, and even formed professional eSports teams.

Mainstream means money

Until now eSports has been associated with one particular kind of demography, but that is changing rapidly, according to Pol:

As traditional TV and mass media companies are entering, this is becoming a mainstream thing. In Spain there’s TV channels dedicated to eSports and Mediapro is covering the LVP (the national eSports league in Spain).

He continues:

As most experts predict, the eSports sector will continue to grow fast the next couple of years, particularly with the entry of mainstream brands and additional famous profiles from the traditional sports world.

Also read:

https://blog.itnig.net/how-playfulbet-grew-to-400k-followers-on-facebook-and-300k-on-twitter-c207cb286559

Focused on eSports because no one else did

To strengthen their focus on eSports, Pol and Playfulbet is adding more gaming streams to the platform:

we’re integrating streaming of eSport matches so you can follow the games you’ve been betting on without leaving the platform, and you can also chat with your community watching the same games. But there’s still much more to be done for the eSports community using the platform.

Playfulbet moved over the offering bets on eSports fairly early because of one main reason:

We added eSports mostly because no one else did it, so for us it was a competitive advantage. We’re still not more focused on eSports with respect to other sports, but we’re working on offering even more content and functionality in this niche.

This post was written by media manager itnig Sindre Hopland.