I’m Ivan Landabaso, VC at JME.vc, surfer and combat sports practitioner. Welcome to Startup Riders, your bi-weekly startup caffeine ☕

Summary | TL;DR

• 🚀MIT says you got no excuse: The 20-year-old Entrepreneur is a lie.

• 🚫The Rise of No-Code: Tools to go from idea to launch without coding.

• 🤝 Spain’s Investor Database: Who to talk to when raising money in Spain.

• 🗺️ Spain’s Incubator Map: Where to find support in Spain.

• 💵 Recent Deals: RevenueCat, Voovio, Lana, Wygers, ProntoPiso, and more.

• 🦄 Startup Jobs: A list of startup jobs from recently funded Spanish companies.

• 💭Thinking or Reading: Stanford’s Symbolic Systems’ Bible.

Check out the Community Group to meet fellow riders and share your experience 🤙

🚀 MIT: The 20 year old Entrepreneur is a lie (Article)

42 years old - is the average age of entrepreneurs who’ve started companies and gone on to hire at least one employee.

Media can distort reality - our collective consciousness has been led to believe that you need to be “young” to launch a successful venture. Yet, data from MIT Sloan professor Pierre Azoulay and PhD student Daniel Kim shows something very different:

Turns out experience does bear fruit. Even the GOAT’s had experience under their belts before becoming stars:

🚫The Rise of No-Code

Now that we’ve established you are not too old to startup - lets attack usual suspect #2:

But I can't code 😢!

You are in luck.

Here’s a personally vetted list of no-code tools to launch an MVP with examples of some stuff I’ve launched (to prove it can be done relatively easily):

• ShareTribe - Marketplace Builder. I built a Surfboard Marketplace in 1 hour.

• Glide - App Builder. Works with Google Sheets. I built an App for Martial Arts.

• Shopify - eCommerce Website Builder. Explored this for a Combat Sports page.

• Webflow - Blog / Website Builder . Explored it to build my site, dumped for Wix.

• Wix - Blog / Website / Database Builder. Built startupriders.io.

• Sheet2Site - Job Board / Website / Other. Explored for my site, dumped for Wix.

• There’s many more, I’ll keep you posted as they come / find value in them.

And here’s a great Infographic of the no-code landscape by Thibault Bernard.

🤝 Spain’s Investor Database

If you are ready to roll, here’s an updated list of all investors in Spain (across investment stages). If you are looking for feedback and/or money, you can shoot them a note. Otherwise feel free to post in the Spanish Startup Riders Community group and we’ll dissect your project 😉.

Quick Snapshot:

🗺️ Spain’s Incubator Map

After reviewing the available literature / data, it wasn’t clear to me where the “best-place” to launch a startup is in Spain. Of course, this will vary widely depending on which factors matter to you.

My hope is that surfacing incubator / accelerator hubs and the verticals their support can help entrepreneurs make a more informed decision. Here’s a quick visual:

Here’s the breakdown by supported vertical:

And here’s the link to the database where you can filter by location, sector and more + quick snapshot:

💵 Recent Deals

• RevenueCat - $15 million led by Index Ventures.

• Voovio Technologies - raised €15 million from Moira Capital.

• Movo - €13 million from Delivery Hero, Seaya Ventures and others.

• Lana - $12.5 million from Base10, Cathay an other investors.

• ProntoPiso - €1.6 million from existing shareholders.

• Wygers - €620,000 through Fellow Funders.

• Rokubun - €550,000 via The Crowd Angel.

• Methinks - undisclosed funding from Nina Capital.

• SimpleCloud - undisclosed funding from Conexo Ventures.

🦄 Startup Jobs

Here’s a quick list of recently funded startup jobs in Spain (this will grow soon):

• Sales / Account Manager (Remote) - RevenueCat

• IT Technician (San Sebastián) - Voovio Technologies

• Backend Dev (Madrid) - Lana

• Site Reliability Engineer (Madrid) - Lana

• Commercial Director (Barcelona) - Methinks

• Regulatory Affairs Specialist (Barcelona) - Methinks

• General Application (Madrid) - Wygers

• General Application [info@rokubun.cat] (Barcelona) - Rokubun

• General Application [message them on Linkedin] (Madrid) - SimpleCloud

Feel free to contact me with job listings.

💭Thinking or Reading

Stanford’s Symbolic Systems’ Bible - GEB

Also known as “Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid” by Douglas Hofstadter

This was recommended to me by a good friend and co-worker who studied Symbolic systems at Stanford. This was their unofficial Textbook.

If you want to get your 🧠 blown, go down the rabbit hole. In a nutshell, it explores how animate beings can come out of inanimate objects. The answer? Strange Loops. The book will take you to some pretty crazy places were these “Strange Loops” seem to appear over-and-over again - across Mathematics (Gödel), Art (Escher), and Music (Back). See if you can grasp the concept of a “Strange Loop” from Escher’s art below.

If you find this interesting, please consider sharing with your friends. I’d also love to get your thoughts and feedback on Twitter. Until the next one! 😃

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