Designer, Investor & Friend Marcos Medina tells us about his journey from a graphic design school to working at startups in Silicon Valley and now moving back to Barcelona.
Bernat Farrero, CEO at itnig and Jordi Romero, CEO at Factorial speak with Marcos Medina about his own personal story, how he grew as a Designer and his perspective on different startups and working life. Listen to our podcast on Youtube, iTunes or iVoox.
“Right out of the professional design school, a professor ‘hired’ me as I knew about Macromedia flash, at a small local company close to home at the beginning of 2000. 15 years ago that’s where I met Pau Ramon, CTO at Factorial, we worked on Websites in Flash — something that today is hard to imagine.”
Marcos then moves from Barcelona to Galicia for love and after having gained a few years of work experience, sets out to work freelance. Through Codegram and other clients, he gets to know Redbooth, at that point still called Teambox. “Teambox is a project management tool, a software to manage projects with your team, all working for the same goal. Instead of back and forth emails one team can use one workspace and organize their different contributions around a goal or task. All of the conversations where going on in a task — combining project management, action driven context with social parts of water cooler talk.“
“After three years at Redbooth, and a move back to Barcelona, I start not to feel as at ease as I felt at the beginning. We arrive at the point where the founder leaves, the team changes and I upload my CV by chance to bridge program, a program I found through Twitter. This is where Asana reaches out to me.”
Asana at that time was a direct competitor to Redbooth, funded in Silicon Valley, by one of the Facebook co-founders and another Product centered co-founder, himself ex Googler.
At the beginning I started the recruitment process out of curiosity, to see what they do in terms of design, what their team looks like but the thing got serious.
Learn more about his work at Asana, what the day to day was like and what he as a designer was set out to achieve: “Four years at Asana, starting out with a more fresh vision, with lots of information from the competitor which I could not reveal until the non-disclosure expired. Working at Asana was being part of a big family, lots of friendship, social life with employees. Healthy food, free yoga, a budget for each person to set up their ‘office’ — that was a new approach for me.”
Listen to our podcast to learn more about Marcos Medina’s journey and his perspective design and the difference on working in the Silicon Valley and in Barcelona. Learn more in this Podcast in Spanish on our Youtube channel, listen to it on iTunes or enjoy it through iVoox and subscribe to our newsletter to stay always up to date.