South Summit in Spain
Exploring entrepreneurial themes in Europe
Over the past years we at Everywhere Ventures have had strong ties to the Spanish ecosystem. From our connectivity with TREA to helping the Spanish ecosystem understand the impact in venture capital of the SVB collapse, to speaking at The Next Web Valencia in 2023, we’re investing in Spain, and more broadly, in Europe.
This week my co-founder Jenny Fielding and I were able to give four talks at South Summit in Madrid, and connect with dozens of startup founders across the Madrid and Barcelona ecosystems. Additionally we were able to host a conversation at ESADE Business School in Barcelona for prominent alumni in venture capital, as well as a Venture Capital Master Class for the IEF professional finance network in Catalunya.
It’s been great to have a longstanding partnership with IE University and Business School around the themes of humanizing technology, and we’re thankful for their involvement and sponsorship of South Summit. They continue to be a leader in Spain around the themes of blending entrepreneurial, business, and culture that creates the dynamism that will generate great companies and returns in this market.
For more thoughts on these themes, here is a great piece written by executives at Telefonica on “Menos Tech y Mas Platon,” my book published by LID Editorial in Spanish. These themes will continue to echo throughout business as AI makes further inroads into rote tasks, and necessitates the up-skilling of labor around uniquely human abilities taught and refined in broad-based educational coursework.
IE Business School Dean Lee Newman and I discussed these themes at South Summit, with some of the key take aways including points made in the book such as:
🔵 Humanities is crucial in business – we need to make sure that we understand how humans work to make the technology work for and with us
🔵 Many VCs like myself won’t back tech startups without seeing great human/soft skills in the founders/leaders
🔵 Philosophy is about navigating in the dark and so is entrepreneurship. Being able to grapple with ambiguity is similar in philosophy and entrepreneurship
🔵 We need to look to AI for human augmentation – in the new world of work we’ll have to embrace the technology and learn to use it to enhance our productivity
🔵 With tech and coding, the barrier to entry is getting lower – for example if you want to learn how to code, you can have an AI coach to help you learn
Check out the book sold globally in 14 versions, and in Spanish under the title “Menos Tech y Mas Platon,” named a Top 10 Business Book in Spain. Thank you to IE Business School Dean Lee Newman for the fantastic conversation on these themes. As we dig deeper into what we call the “Future of Work,” one of the three themes of our Table Stakes Economy thesis, we see these themes as helping identify which tasks within jobs can and will be automated. When we look at themes of “Future of Work” or where AI can actually amplify human skills, it’s in identifying exactly these touch points between the rote tasks that can be automated, and the non-routine tasks that become the purview of humans, and the skills that require broad-based education. These are the conversations that inform how we invest at Everywhere Ventures.
