Every week we take half an hour to talk just about any topic that crossed our minds during the last days and create a podcast for you (Listen to it in Spanish here and subscribe to our feed). We call it an Open Mic Podcast as we want to invite different people to participate, new ideas to take form and to shed light on various experiences and perspectives on business development.
This week’s Podcast #15 is opened by Masumi with our regular participants Bernat and Jordi, whom you already know. As a special guest today we welcome Ubaldo Huerta and talk about another kind of entrepreneurship, a slow growth that is not VC fueled. Listen to our podcast on Youtube or subscribe to our RSS to be always up to date.
Ubaldo Huerta, a young entrepreneur who learned to program at home thanks to his mother, left Cuba in the beginning of the 90s to San Francisco to live the early years of .com companies. In this new industry everybody was looking for developers, companies growing like mushrooms but also closing again. After a few years in this frenetic environment Ubaldo decides to leave on a sabbatical and — burned-out — wanders through Europe. He arrives in the Raval neighborhood of Barcelona and is mesmerized. Quickly he decides to stay and migrates from the US just as he had years earlier from Cuba. In Barcelona he felt right at home:
“An organized place with ticks of a third world country.”
In Barcelona Ubaldo becomes an entrepreneur out of necessity: “I was earning a lot of money, but in Spain the job market was more complicated as there was no need for software developers at that moment. It was also the time of transition to dedicated servers, when you could get a server for a few dollars and build it up yourself. You could start out, try something without a high investment for infrastructure.”
Ubald started Loquo, a kind of Craigslist, a classified site from his living room. He starts with scraping email addresses from forums, sending out emails to these accounts and commenting on all kinds of threads. He starts out working on his own, with his own resources:
“I prefer to do something with my hands, spend my time writing code even though it might take time, I don’t need to live in the times of venture capital.”
“Everybody should do what he does best. If I had to spend my time raising money, talking to investors, I would go crazy.”
And after a while eBay becomes interested and ends up buying Loquo to expand their own service of auctions. Since then Ubaldo has moved on to many more interesting projects and is now busy with Fonoma.
When I create something I need to connect with my environment.
If you are curious to know what Ubaldo is up to now, go ahead and listen to the full Podcast #15: Youtube — iTunes — RSS