By Javier el 19 February 2009
Founded in 2006, Spotify (a combination of spot and identify) just went viral. They received the music website of the year award in the UK, and the New York Times calls them the “iTunes killer”. People can’t stop talking about it in Twitter. We thought it would be interesting to do an interview with Lutz Emmerich, Spotify’s country manager in Spain. Hope you enjoy the interview:
Please present yourself, tell us about your professional career in Internet Business and tell us what is your function in Spotify?
I work now for 12 years in the online Business in different functions like Consultant, Sales Director or Country Manager in several companies like United Internet, Ogilvy, Wanadoo, TradeDoubler, etc. For Spotify I am the Country Manager heading up the local office and responsible for roling out of the marketing and sales strategy in Spain.
Carry on reading »
By Luv el 28 January 2009
Seedcamp, founded by serial entrepreneur Saul Klein is growing and expanding its reach far and wide to support promising entrepreneurs in their quest to launch great businesses. Paris is the venue of the next Mini-Seedcamp on the 24th of February and startups from France, Benelux, Spain and Portugal are invited to apply. 20 seed stage tech startups will be selected to attend an intensive day of presentations, panel discussions and 1-to-1 mentoring sessions with a select group of experienced entrepreneurs, investors, and developers from all over Europe, including Saul himself. Teams have till 9th of February to apply. That’s less than 2 weeks from today.
We thought it would be interesting to ask Reshma Sohoni, CEO of Seedcamp, some difficult questions. Here are the easy answers:
Carry on reading »
By Javier el 8 December 2007
As you might have noticed the attention I have given to it from here, I’ve really liked the idea of iWeekend and I thought that it would be interesting to do an interview with Luv Sayal, founder of the event. Here’s the interview, hope you enjoy it.
1) Tell us how the idea of bringing StartupWeekend to Spain ocurred to you, what was your initial approach, why you thought that an idea like this could succeed in Spain, what distinguishes iWeekend from StartupWeekend?
I read about the first StartupWeekend held in Colorado and got excited by the idea. In those days, I was thinking about how to give virality to a project. An event like this resolves the issue of marketing for a startup, whatever the startup may be. I decided that this experience would be great for me before launching my own startup. It’s like an accelerated lesson in how to start a company. I wanted to live that experience where I live - in Barcelona. The idea was to organize the event in Barcelona at the earliest and so I got in touch with the founder of StartupWeekend but couldn’t reach an agreement with him. I asked the community if it would be better to do it with another name and that’s how iWeekend was born.
The tech community is vibrant in some Spanish cities. I talked to many people and everyone liked the idea. I didn’t think if it would be successful or not. I just did it because I believed in the idea.
iWeekend is the altruistic competition of StartupWeekend. iWeekend is a non-profit initiative and I believe that it’s philosophy is nobler than the philosophy of StartupWeekend. StartupWeekend is a private enterprise, while from the very beginning, I have wanted that iWeekend belong to the community. We have achieved the support of a bank like La Caixa (Spain’s 3rd largest bank) and companies like Sun and Microsoft in the very first event, while StartupWeekend has only achieved the sponsorship of Microsoft once in 12 events. We already have certain advantage over StartupWeekend.
Carry on reading »