The Spanish Zuckerbergs

There is a widely held — but mistaken — belief in Spain that the country has been left at the starting gate in the high-tech stakes. Over the last 15 years Spain has produced dozens of highly successful internet entrepreneurs, who came up with innovative ideas in the late 1990s that turned them into multi-millionaires. And snapping at their heels are dozens of other disruptive thinkers who have created web-based businesses.

Social Point is a Barcelona-based company that creates games for Facebook. Set up in 2008, the site already receives around 30 million visits a month, and is available in several different languages. Andrés Bou and Horacio Martos, Social Point’s founders, began the company with no start-up investment or office, instead working from home, unable to hire graphic designers. After turning over 300,000 euros in their first year, that figure rose to three million euros in 2011, and they are forecasting 11 million euros for 2012. The pace of change has been fast. “Last year there were 14 of us; this year there are 100 of us. We are recruiting around three or four people a week,” says Bou. Social Point is now the fifth-most-popular game on Facebook, and has attracted investment to the tune of 8.4 million euros.

Pau García-Milá, also from Catalonia, was 17 when he set up desktop cloud company EyeOS in 2005. The firm now provides server infrastructure for IBM customers. The company employs several dozen people, and was chosen last year by Gartner as one of the five “coolest” information technology management sales companies.

Bilbao-based Anboto has carved out a niche for itself in the language interface field, going beyond voice-activated applications to create a web customer service and e-commerce technology based on semantics and natural language processing. Founded in 2009 by a then-27-year-old Xabier Uribe-Etxeberria, the company now has affiliates in the United States.

Eduardo Manchón and Joaquín Cuenca set up Panoramio, a geo-located photograph website, in 2005 when they were both aged 28. Two years later, Google bought the company.

Tomás Diago is one of Spain’s internet pioneers. He set up Softonic in 1997, aged 22. His idea was to “create a Spanish language software download site: the only one in existence at the time was in English.” Fifteen years later, Softonic is now the leading portal in its field, with 130 million users, of whom 10 million are in Spain. Last year it turned over 45 million euros, declaring a profit of 25 million.

The reason for Spain’s plethora of internet start-ups, says Borja Mascarell of Deloitte, is “an economic crisis that has robbed many young people of the prospect of a career.” That may be true to some extent, but many of the current generation of high-tech entrepreneurs left well-paid jobs with good prospects to set up their own businesses. Joel Santirso, a 28-year-old engineer from the Basque Country, left his job as an auditor at Banco Santander to set up Workmunity, a website for jobseekers and employers. “I remember looking at the employment websites,” he says, “and seeing that most of them were obsolete, so I saw the opportunity to create something new by mixing the idea of InfoJobs and networking sites such as LinkedIn.”

Javier Pérez Tenessa had worked for McKinsey and Netscape before deciding to set up Odigeo in 2010, when he was 30. Two years later, Odigeo is Europe’s top travel site with an annual turnover of four billion euros.

Similarly, Jesús Encinar left his job, aged 29, as a consultant in Silicon Valley, where he had settled after completing an MBA at Harvard Business School. He says the idea to set up Idealista.com, now Spain’s leading property site, came from his time in the United States, where his experience of renting an apartment proved much easier than in Spain.

Luis Pérez del Val abandoned his career at investment bank Bankers Trust to set up Bodaclick when he was 26, in 2010. Bodaclick is now among the world’s most popular sites dedicated to arranging weddings. The company makes its money from advertising, and has sites dedicated to the Spanish, Polish, Brazilian and Mexican markets.

The common link between Spain’s internet entrepreneurs is that all of them were still in their twenties, and some in their teens, when they set up their businesses. And while many already had a background in IT, many, such as climbing enthusiast Carlos Barrabés, who set up mountaineering portal Barrabés, had no knowledge of computers. But he, like his peers, had grown up in an internet world.

Tomás Diago of Softonic says the secret of success is staying young: “This is a sector where nobody likes to get old and feel that they are out of touch. The secret of success is to have a young workforce and a participative culture that allows ideas to flow freely.”