references
Entrepreneurship: People
UP-TO-DATE
(IE 07) Founder of LetsBonus, CoFounder and CoChairman of Wallapop, ChicPlace and FancyBox. CoFounder and Co-CEO Antai Venture Builder,Chairman Ecommerce&Tech Barcelona
The drive for entrepreneurship
After the success of Letsbonus, Miguel Vicente is still excited about Antai Venture Builder's projects: Wallapop, ChicPlace and FancyBox, his role as a Business Angel and the promotion of local entrepreneurship as president of Ecommerce&TechBarcelona.
“After considering different alternatives, I decided to set up Antai, a Company Builder that creates companies from scratch and helps them to grow them quickly. We co-founded Wallapop, a pure mobile company with a totally disruptive business model for selling second hand items: we launched in October 2013 and within 12 months we had 5 million downloads, spectacular growth. Wallapop has majority shareholders which include members of the ESADE BAN and is already present in Spain, France, Portugal and England, and we are studying opportunities in Latin America and the United States. At Antai we identify segments where we think there is an opportunity, and this is how we also created ChicPlace and FancyBox”.
Miguel combines being an entrepreneur with the role of Business Angel: he is a partner of Conector Startup Accelerator that carries out mentoring; and is head of eCommerce & Tech Barcelona, an association of more than 200 companies in the digital, internet and mobile sector in Barcelona, with the support of Barcelona Activa. It has been an academic partner of ESADE since December 2014. “Now I am very excited about my current projects and I don't feel like doing anything else; I combine the challenges of new companies with more established ones and is great fun. Also, at Antai we want to create 10 more companies over the next three years”.
Passion
Entrepreneurship is not an easy thing and you can't think you're going to get rich capacity for suffering ... We are living a historic moment in the digital revolution and there are many opportunities to create great companies in an imaginative way without large resources. You also have to be really committed to your project if you want others to believe and invest in you; and work with cohesive teams with complementary skills. I like to make an analogy to the film The Matrix, in the scene where Morpheus tells Neo about "the two pills": the blue, guaranteeing you a more or less a good job in a multinational, with a salary that makes ends meet, paid holidays, etc., and then the red pill, which will make you suffer a lot, you won't know if you'll get to the end of the month, you'll have to sacrifice and give up everything including weekends and holidays, etc., but you'll also be the master of your own destiny.
APRIL--JUNE 2015