I just spent a week in NYC. What the city did vis a vis crime reduction between the 80s and 90s it did vis a vis start ups between the 00s and the 10s. It’s a whole new tech scene here. And it’s very new. I remember when I invested in the first round of [...]

One of the most frequent questions I get from journalists during interviews is “how do you have time to do everything you do? You run Fon, you are an active angel investor in so many companies, you teach at IE, speak at conferences, run your foundation, and on top of that you have a wife, [...]

The kind of intelligence that you need to succeed in business goes mostly undetected at school. Its a sense of leadership and strategy that is not what teachers reward. Entrepreneurs tend to antagonize teachers, they are in class wishing they were in charge and teachers hate that. That’s why so many drop out or do [...]

This was surprising, I was speaking at a conference in Zurich and somebody from the audience came up with this video of Mark Zuckerberg and I in 2008. That was superkind of this person, to shoot this video I mean. You can see how Mark Zuckerberg was going around the world promoting Facebook, this was [...]

Today, 21 European early-stage VC firms released a standard term sheet they will use as guideline for their future investments (actually they released 2 term sheets – one for “general use” and another designed to facilitate the EIS tax relief for investments in small private companies). Both docs were drafted for the UK market, but [...]

Good news for my friend and CEO of Acens José Cerdán, good news for the Spanish start-up scene in general: Acens has just announced that it was acquired by Telefónica for a rumored €80 million. Acens was founded in 1997 and provides cloud hosting and housing services for more than 100k business customers and operates large [...]

A couple of weeks ago, Telefónica announced the launch of Wayra, a program that will support the creation of high-tech IT companies in Latin America and Spain. Basically, Wayra is a business incubator, although it wants to be more than that and calls itself a business “accelerator”. (Future) entrepreneurs can submit their projects, even if [...]

Today I came accross the question of why aren’t many very smart people rich. And while blunt, I am sure many smart people who are not financially successful have asked themselves that question. Especially if smart is defined as having performed very well at school which is how most people find out they are very [...]

So far this is just an idea.  Indeed it is a dream that I had last night complemented with some dosage of reality added a few minutes as I woke up.  So the whole concept is very fresh on this Sunday morning.  I call it the Fon bikes and I call the Fon bicycles the [...]

I am not a friend of Mark Zuckerberg. Still I spent enough time with him in private and public to say that in my opinion, The Social Network is an accurate, though not factual representation, of who Mark Zuckerberg is. Yes the movie is a caricature but sometimes caricatures do capture the essence of a [...]