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Interview
5 April 2015 2.00 h

Instilling a digital mindset

Didac Lee Each Monday at 6.30pm, El Punt Avui TV airs Going native, the series in which Neil interviews prominent Catalans in English.
Give us a gen­eral overview of your busi­nesses.
I am a dig­i­tal en­tre­pre­neur. My group is made up of nine soft­ware and e-com­merce com­pa­nies, em­ploy­ing 400 peo­ple with a turnover of 40 mil­lion.
Is busi­ness easy here?
Busi­ness is com­pli­cated every­where. But peo­ple here are open-minded and busi­ness-dri­ven. In my ex­pe­ri­ence, Cat­alo­nia is a great place to start your busi­ness, es­pe­cially if your busi­ness is based on the new econ­omy.
What is it that makes it a good place to do busi­ness?
The great thing about dig­i­tal busi­nesses is that you can set up your busi­ness any­where. A place like Cat­alo­nia has good con­nec­tions to other coun­tries and there is a good bal­ance be­tween work and per­sonal life. It also eas­ier to at­tract tal­ent. If we want to make an offer to an en­gi­neer from abroad, we bring him to Barcelona. Cat­alo­nia is a good place to live and raise a fam­ily.
Where else do you do busi­ness?
In Ar­gentina, Mex­ico, China, the US, and other coun­tries. It al­lows me to travel a lot, and Cat­alo­nia is the best place for that be­cause you are in the mid­dle, be­tween Sil­i­con Val­ley and China, for ex­am­ple. In the new econ­omy, all com­pa­nies work as if part of a net­work. So, your de­vel­op­ment de­part­ment might be lo­cated in Ar­gentina, but you can man­age your op­er­a­tion from Barcelona, and then sell to Brazil or the US, for in­stance. That's the great thing about the new econ­omy.
How has the cri­sis af­fected things?
The cri­sis af­fects every­one but it af­fects the new econ­omy less, be­cause it is a fast-grow­ing econ­omy. All my friends in the in­dus­try have con­tin­ued to grow dur­ing the past few years. Per­haps with­out the cri­sis the growth might have been greater but even with the cri­sis we have con­tin­ued to grow.
You also lend your ex­per­tise to FC Barcelona.
I'm the board mem­ber in charge of the dig­i­tal area. FC Barcelona is a global brand with fans all over the world. We have around 400 mil­lion fans and the only way to en­gage with all of them is through dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy. So what the club asks of me is to use tech­nol­ogy, so­cial net­works, web­sites, mo­bile apps, and so on, to gather the global au­di­ence and en­gage them. At the mo­ment FC Barcelona is num­ber one in so­cial net­works, Face­book, In­sta­gram, and so on.
How long have you done that?
Four and a half years. When I started we had a very old web­site and the club did not have a dig­i­tal mind­set. What I feel most proud of is putting dig­i­tal into the club's DNA. Every bit of con­tent we now pro­duce, in every area of the club, is dig­i­talised. I feel proud and it is an ho­n­our.
Was it hard to change the club's think­ing?
That was the chal­lenge. With a start-up it's easy be­cause with 10 of you, all you do is say that from now on we are going to do this and every­body does it. But in a large cor­po­ra­tion with lots of areas, chang­ing the mind­set and ways of work­ing is harder.
How did you man­age that?
I'm very per­sis­tent, but the key thing is not to cre­ate a dig­i­tal area with lots of peo­ple but to im­plant dig­i­tal work­ers in all areas. The dig­i­tal de­part­ment might be 10 peo­ple, but we have 40 oth­ers around the club's areas. If you have peo­ple work­ing in your de­part­ment and you are di­rectly man­ag­ing this dig­i­tal re­source, it be­comes part of every­day work.
What's your next chal­lenge?
The first chal­lenge was to dig­i­talise all our con­tent and prod­ucts, such as pro­duc­ing web­sites, and we now have nine local web­sites. I mean the Chi­nese web­site, for ex­am­ple, is not a trans­la­tion of the Cata­lan one, it's its own thing. Then we look for an au­di­ence for those local web­sites, and we cur­rently have some 160 mil­lion fol­low­ers on var­i­ous net­works. And the third phase is to mon­e­tise it all. From the point of view of the fans, the next chal­lenge is to en­sure they get in­ter­est­ing con­tent. Nor­mally the club's con­tent is very in­sti­tu­tional but we are try­ing to pro­duce en­ter­tain­ing and en­gag­ing con­tent. We are not a tra­di­tional en­ter­tain­ment com­pany, like Dis­ney, but our rev­enue streams are sim­i­lar: they have Dis­ney­land we have Cap Nou, they pro­duce car­toons and we have our TV rights, they sell mer­chan­dis­ing and so do we, they have Mickey Mouse and we have Leo Messi.
Fi­nally, what is the se­cret of your suc­cess?
There's no se­cret; just work 20 hours a day and you'll achieve it. If you put a lot of time into some­thing you are pas­sion­ate about, suc­cess is likely. I am no ge­nius, I am not es­pe­cially tal­ented, I have av­er­age in­tel­li­gence, but I work a lot. It must be some­thing to do with the mix of Chi­nese and Cata­lan cul­tures, both have a rep­u­ta­tion for hard work.
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