Being in the right place

Three weeks ago I spent ten days in San Francisco. I went to run our CTO Circle gathering, but I also got to spend time with Exponential, thanks to Guli, and with SOTI, thanks to Marcos.

It was one of the most intense stretches I have lived. Something came up in almost every conversation: “It is just easier in SF.” I used to push back on that. The market is global, you can build from anywhere, and talent is distributed. All of that is still true.

However, ten days in San Francisco opened more doors for me than a year in Barcelona. Through Exponential alone I got to meet Adeyemi Ajao from Base10, Mar Hershenson from Pear, Martin Casado from a16z, Anna Piñol from NFX, Gadi Borovich from Antigravity, the founders of Krea and HappyRobot, and founders from about twenty other companies. That is not a normal month for me.

1. The flywheel between capital and companies. The best funds in the world are there, so the most ambitious, fastest-growing and craziest companies tend to be there too, and each one keeps pulling the other.

2. Mindset. Selling is easier: people do not haggle, they have far less price aversion, and they tell you what is actually blocking them. Crazy is allowed: you can say the most ambitious version of your idea out loud. The ambition operates on another scale.

3. Density. Almost everyone is a founder, an investor, or one degree from both. Whatever you are looking for, someone in the room already has it.

Mar from Pear VC put it best: if you want to work at the frontier of something, you move to where that something is happening. Nobody finds it strange when an athlete moves to a high-performance centre. Right now, for building an AI/SaaS company, San Francisco is that centre.

I hope we build that same ecosystem in Spain. It has improved a lot, especially in Madrid and Barcelona, but it is still not comparable. That is why I like Exponential’s mission: take top Spanish technical talent to SF so they can copy everything, then bring that culture, ambition and capital back to Spain.