It’s been a while since my last post, and I guess I have a bit of stuff to catch up on. It’s hard to get back into the swing of things. I’m happy that 2007 is over. It was great but tiring. We went from just me and Oriol with little more than a business plan to recruiting and working with a well-trained, international staff. We attended conferences in Budapest, Helsinki, Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich, Madrid, London and Paris. VCs went from being a theory to a likely reality. We did two angel rounds, got money from the Spanish government, launched the website and began planning the revised version of the web.

Whew! I’m tired just thinking about it.

Let’s hope that 2008 is even busier and more tiring! I’ve still got a lot more I have to accomplish!

Anyway, one of the last and most exciting things that I did in December 2008 was fly directly from Paris to Madrid right after Le Web 3 (thanks Loic for commenting on my blog! That was exciting!) to attend the American Chamber of Commerce’s in Spain’s 90th Anniversary. International commerce is cool and all, but the real draw was that Prince Felipe and Princess Leticia of Spain attended the event, and Prince Felipe gave the keynote.

Since I am a cheap entrepreneur, I used my Facebook account to reconnect with old friends who just so happened to be living in Madrid. Paco Polo, now a famed blogger, author and expert on international diplomacy, generously agreed to host me. Through Paco and Facebook, I also had the chance to re-connect with Pep Buades, who I met when I still a lawyer at Freshfields, but who has left the law and now is a banker at HSBC.

But back to the good stuff. Before going, it seemed that most of my female friends were more concerned about my confirming their fascination with royal gossip: “Tell me if Leticia’s really as skinny as everyone says.” (The answer is a resounding yes. She really looks borderline anorexic, and I say this with no ill will towards her. She’s had a tough year. I’m not sure if it’s the stress, the fact that her sister committed suicide or the pressure of being a royal, but that girl needs to eat a cheeseburger and some Doritos.)

Her secret service people — and there were like 20 of them that formed a barricade around her and the Prince even though I ended up less than 1 feet from them in the reception area — prevented me from taking any pictures. They stepped right in front of me when I tried to sneak a paparazzi shot. Luckily, I improvised and took a picture of her half-uneaten dessert instead.

My other impression was that the Prince is actually very tall and very good-looking. That surprised me, since I’m more familiar with the British royals who generally are not in contention to win any beauty awards any time soon. Leticia would be pretty if she weren’t so skinny. Her lack of weight makes her features a bit too extreme and birdlike.

At the dinner, I also made some interesting new contacts. Each table was given a name of a US state or landmark, with “The White House” being the central table at which the Prince and Leticia were seated. I was in Nebraska. Someone asked me at the table if I knew where Nebraska was, and my honest answer was: “I have no freaking clue.” I generally suck at geography, and being stuck at some no-name state/table took away from the overall experience. My goal is to be at least in New York (and hopefully the White House!) when the Chamber hosts its 100th Anniversary.

The other guests at my table were pretty cool, and I was extra happy to bump into a few folks from Barcelona (David Avilés and his girlfriend), who turned out to be friends of Oriol and Sophie and business partners with Jaime Mailet, who’s the current President of the American Chamber of Commerce. It’s such a small world! Everyone was pretty normal, if not a little star struck. It was a good beginning to the Christmas season.

Above I’ve attached some pics of my new friends Victor Alió and his wife Nieves, and below we took a picture with famed flamenco singer Antonio Carmona (not exactly a friend, but he was the entertainment — he sang a few songs to “Leti” and then agreed to take a picture with me and a few of my new friends).

This last picture of me shows me in the tuxedo I wore to the event. It was a black-tie event, so I had no choice.

Next week, Sophie and I will be heading to Paris for Le Web3 and a couple of business meetings. I will be taking my trusty video camera, with the hopes of posting some of the highlights. According to the folks at Le Web3, 1300 people from 40 countries will show up. I can’t wait to see what the party will be like!

Anyway, Loïc Le Meur, France’s best known blogger, video-blogging entrepreneur and organizer of Le Web 3 is now on a major marketing campaign to promote Le Web 3 (and his new project seesmic.com, which is still in alpha). I get daily video updates from him on Facebook about what’s going on at Seesmic, all of the major tech blogs are offering free tickets or discounted tickets to Le Web 3 to spur attendance, and major newspapers like the Financial Times are writing articles about Loïc and Le Web 3.

Watching his commitment to self-promotion is cool, because I’ve gotten some interesting lessons about what we can do to promote nuroa.

Highlights from the FT article:

• Seesmic.com, a video-blogging platform, is Loïc’s fifth start-up, and he moved from Paris to San Francisco, because he thinks that Silicon Valley is the only real destination for entrepreneurs that want to launch global Internet brands. It’s a bit ironic that the person responsible for organising one of Europe’s biggest Internet events firmly believes that the US is the only place to be if you really want to be relevant in the Internet space. But Loïc justifies it by saying that Europe’s 22 languages and geography complicates deal-making, while San Francisco is at the epicentre of deals. In his words: “The way you do partnerships here, everyone’s a block away or 20 minutes away in Palo Alto. If I need to set up a partnership with [micro-blogging service] Twitter, I call them, we have coffee, and two hours later the deal is done. If I were in France, there’s a nine-hour time difference and it’s like you don’t matter.” If even marquee-level European entrepreneurs with direct access to world leaders feel irrelevant if they are not in Silicon Valley, what does that mean for the rest of us?

• On a more optimistic note, Loïc provides his top 10 tips for entrepreneurs. I’ll re-post them here and comment on them in more detail in the future. In general, I’d just say that they are very insightful, but as with most things, much of it is easier said than done.
  1. Don’t wait for a revolutionary idea. It will never happen. Just focus on a simple, exciting, empty space and execute as fast as possible
  2. Share your idea. The more you share, the more you get advice and the more you learn. Meet and talk to your competitors.
  3. Build a community. Use blogging and social software to make sure people hear about you.
  4. Listen to your community. Answer questions and build your product with their feedback.
  5. Gather a great team. Select those with very different skills from you. Look for people who are better than you.
  6. Be the first to recognise a problem. Everyone makes mistakes. Address the issue in public, learn about and correct it.
  7. Don’t spend time on market research. Launch test versions as early as possible. Keep improving the product in the open.
  8. Don’t obsess over spreadsheet business plans. They are not going to turn out as you predict, in any case.
  9. Don’t plan a big marketing effort. It’s much more important and powerful that your community loves the product.
  10. Don’t focus on getting rich. Focus on your users. Money is a consequence of success, not a goal.

Harvard’s alumni magazine, 02138, is generating a lot of attention for an article about Facebook’s creation and the various lawsuits initiated by other Harvard alumni against Mark Zuckerberg. The magazine got a lot of juicy tidbits from protected legal documents that a court clerk accidentally turned over to the article’s author. Facebook quickly put some of its millions to good use and filed legal motions trying to convince a judge to order the magazine to remove references to the protected legal documents, but they’ve apparently lost the motions and the information is still on 02138’s website.

In general, Zuckerberg seems like an aggressive guy with questionable ethics, but I’d aready posted about that. In addition, with all of the negative press surrounding Beacon (Facebook’s overly aggressive advertising system), Zuckerberg is realizing that the media often builds you up only to then tear you down.

In some sense, I feel sorry for Zuckerberg (or as sorry as you can feel for a 24-year-old self-made billionaire). He’s trying to finish puberty while navigating his way in a high-stakes, fast-paced, cut-throat business culture with international media outlets and tech analysts scrutinizing his every move. As one commentator humorously notes: “Maybe 13 year-olds shouldn’t be CEOs.”

But what’s cool about the 02138 article is that they’ve posted online some of the tawdry tibits that Zuckerberg definitely didn’t want anyone to see — they’ve included PDFs of Zuckerberg’s college application, his online journal, his testimony before the Harvard disciplinary committee, his depositions, etc. (Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal notes the irony that Zuckerberg wants to have his private life protected, even as he tries to monetize all of the private details of Facebook’s users via Beacon.). Interesting reading . . .

A few highlights:

• Zuckerberg once handed out business cards that read: “I’m CEO … bitch.”
• He has noted that he prefers Asian women.
• During March 2006 negotiations with Yahoo executives, Zuckerberg refused to meet over a weekend because his girlfriend was in town. “When I’m hanging out with her, I tend not to be that engaged [in work],” he said. (This might not seem like such a big deal in Europe, but it’d be absolutely unheard of in the United States, particularly when an Internet giant like Yahoo is meeting with you because they want to buy your start-up for $1 billion.)
• Zuckerberg owns 20 percent of Facebook, which means that on paper he’s worth $3 billion.
• Zuckerberg learned to code in sixth grade (at about 12 years old), when he got first desktop PC and the book C++ for Dummies.
• As a senior in high school, Zuckerberg and friend Adam D’Angelo designed a music plug-in called Synapse that played songs in patterns based on the user’s listening habits. D’Angelo is now Facebook’s chief technology officer. When tech website Slashdot linked to the plug-in, WinAmp, Microsoft, AOL, and others sought to buy Synapse, but the two friends decided not to sell it at first. Soon it was too late and the big companies were no longer interested. (Let’s hope for his sake that history doesn’t repeat itself!)
• Zuckerberg is really confident in his coding ability, but less so in his design ability. So when he starts a project, he starts first with the design. In his words: “I know I can code well, but I’m not so confident about the design and I know how important that is to the final product, so I always like to get the design out of the way first … I start with a simple design and build pages on top of that.”
• Zuckerberg is well known for programming long hours without eating and with little sleep. He claims that he coded the original Facebook site in just over a week, during Harvard’s exam period.
• As a sophomore at Harvard, where he was a computer science major, Zuckerberg got into trouble when he created a website called “facemash” — a kind of Hot or Not service that put photos of two Harvard students side-by-side and asked users to choose who was hotter. To get the photos, Zuckerberg had hacked into Harvard’s servers and copied pictures from student directories, informally known as facebooks. He admits in his journal that it was a crappy thing to do: “[O]ne thing is certain, and it’s that I’m a jerk for making this site. Oh well. Someone had to do it eventually … ” Harvard’s disciplinary committee (known as the Ad Board) placed Zuckerberg on probation for “improper social behavior.” It was that notoriety that caused the guys at ConnectU (the site that allegedly “inspired” Facebook) to ask him to do the programming for their proposed social networking site.
• Though his parents are affluent (he’s the son of a dentist and a psychiatrist), when Zuckerberg went to Silicon Valley in the summer of 2004 without an internship to seek funding and work on Facebook, his parents paid only for his mobile phone bills and health insurance. He decided to drop out of Harvard at the end of the summer to stay in Silicon Valley (at that point, the company had 250.000 users), funding the company with the rest of the money that his parents had saved up for his college education.
• In Silicon Valley, networking paid a huge initial role in Zuckerberg’s ability to get financing for Facebook. During the summer of 2004, he became friends with Sean Parker, one of the founders of Napster. Parker advised Zuckerberg on how to set up a company and introduced him to VCs. In return, Zuckerberg made him company president. Zuckerberg later forced Parker to step down after he was arrested for cocaine possession. But having Parker on-board helped bring in millions of dollars of venture capital.
• Zuckerberg is also involved in another lawsuit involving Eduardo Saverin, one of the original founders (he owned 30%) who says he was forced out when Zuckerberg incorporated Facebook, diluted Saverin’s stake and became sole director.
• At Harvard, Zuckerberg claimed that money was the least important thing to him when he did a project: “I don’t really like putting a price-tag on the stuff I do,” he told Harvard’s daily newspaper, the Harvard Crimson. “That’s just, like, not the point.”

This guy’s certainly experienced a lot for someone who’s only 24 years old!

The guys from DEMO Germany just sent us the video of our presentation. As I mentioned before, I think that DEMO is an awesome event. They’ve sent us the press clippings, and the event itself received a lot of good buzz. And as importantly, it was a great opportunity for us to meet a lot of German investors and other entrepreneurs, which wouldn’t have been as easy if we hadn’t attended DEMO.

I hate seeing myself on film, so I haven’t actually seen the video, but I lived it, so I guess that’s good enough. I remember thinking that I did a decent job at explaining the pitch without much notes or a Powerpoint presentation, but you can feel free to judge for yourself.

Last night, Henri, Victor and I went to Buda Restaturante to hang out with Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester’s. Buda Restaurante is definitely an interesting place, focused on glamorous, busty blond hostesses and men who can’t help but ogle at them while buying overpriced and under-spiked drinks. And though the event was a bit repetitive given that I’d seen quite a few of the same people just one night before at Open Coffee (like Ollivier, Christian and Gregor) it was still nice to meet another American and to see how the Barcelona tech community is growing in importance and in cohesion.

It seems that everyone loves Barcelona.

And it’s interesting to see how many of Barcelona’s entrepreneurs are foreigners. The Expansión article definitely seems to be spot on in that regard.

I was recently invited to be a speaker at the International Classified Media Association’s general meeting, which was entitled “100% Digital”. I was supposed to represent and explain web 2.0 to traditional print media classified companies. Henri and I took the trip to Amsterdam on Wednesday (i.e., Halloween), missing the puente but looking forward to the famous coffeeshops.

When preparing for the conference, I was expecting a bitter backlash from incensed traditional media types given that my message was: “Promote online or perish! Property search engines like nuroa are the future!”.

Ouch!

Harsh, right?

But the general response was: “Yeah, we know that, so how can we work together? Let’s sit down and consider the possibilities. We are all prepared for co-opetition”.

In general, everyone was very receptive to the message, and in fact, my message was one of the milder ones out there. Some members of the organization said it in far more blunt terms, making sure that members clinging to purely traditional models got a kick in the pants, in case they were still stuck in the 1990s.

And equally as impressive, a bulk of the presentations were “member-to-member”, meaning that current members of the organisation explained to their co-members how they’d updated their sites and what advantages they’d reaped as a result.

I spoke a bit with the CEO of a Dutch vertical search engine and learned abot how classified sites in Estonia, Finland, Russia and the US were working on integrating web 2.0 features. It’s amazing how people in such diverse places are generally doing the same sorts of things.

And there were workshops on usability, SEO, applying classifieds to the mobile world, etc.

In general, not a web 2.0 stone was left unturned.

And you definitely had the sense that the members had formed a close-knit family, facing an adverse situation, but determined to survive. This despite that fact that some of the participants were from “big” companies like Careerbuilder, Schibsted and Trader.

I thought it was a great conference, and I’m happy that they invited me (after reading a comment that I’d left on another post and then reading my blog). I made a lot of great contacts, some of which will likely result in collaborations and/or friendships, and as importantly, I learned a lot about the classifieds industry from people who’ve been working in it for the last 20+ years.

Congrats to Lucie and Shay.

As we say every time we present, our goal is to supplement not supplant Google.

It’s a life-changer, a great technology. And combined with YouTube, the ability to retrieve general information from the web is amazing.

What am I talking about?

Well, at DEMO GERMANY a couple of weeks ago, we were literally face to face with Oliver Samwer, one of the trio of German entrepreneurial brothers with a seemingly golden touch. Oliver gave the keynote, and I was in the backstage area with him before he spoke. Our presentation was right after his speech, so there were only a group of 5 of us plus Oliver in the backstage area.

I listened to his speech and thought that he sounded like a nice guy. I’d only started to hear about the Samwer brothers after the sale of StudiVZ to Holtzbrinck Ventures for €85 million back in January 2007. Plus, I’d just bumped into Michael from StudiVZ at Etre in Budapest, so my interest in both the Samwer Brothers and StudiVZ was piqued. Oliver from Red Herring had also told me a bit about them at ETRE, so when I got back home from DEMO Germany, I decided to see what help Google and YouTube might offer.

A little bit of research on Google showed that they are innate entrepreneurs that sold their first company, Alondo.de (a German marketplace site, like eBay) to eBay for €40+ million about 100 days after they founded the company. They then served as managing directors of eBay Germany, which they made into the most profitable international site of eBay. A few years later, they struck gold again with Jamba, which became the market leader for wireless content such as ringtones, pictures, games and videos for mobile phones in the US and Europe. Verisign acquired Jamba in 2004 for $273 million.

So now the brothers focus on helping to create an ecosystem in which entrepreneurs in Europe can thrive. From what I’ve been able to find out, Alex (the youngest brother) runs a foundation that supports Romanian children that can’t afford an education. And Oliver and Marc focus on mentoring and supporting young entrepreneurs, not just with their money but also with their time.

It’s cool to see this kind of thing. The brothers seem profoundly normal and real, without the ego-tripping that sometimes infects very successful people. They seem like good people who are trying to make a difference after their bit of good fortune (and hard work). Either that, or they are amazing actors.

Take a look for yourself.

Oliver Samwer

Marc Samwer

Whew! It’s been a hectic month, which explains the delay since my last post. We’ve been very busy bees since the launch.

I’ll go item by item.

Right after the launch, we got contacted by various Spanish newspaper groups, which meant that we were travelling a bit within Spain to discuss possible collaborations.

Then we flew to Cologne via Frankfurt to meet with a potential investor.

Then we flew to Munich to attend the Demo Pitch Camp, which was cool because I met a lot of interesting German entrepreneurs. It was a challenge, because the basic rules of Demo are: i) no powerpoints; and ii) you have to do a live demonstration of your product. Given Murphy’s law, the result is that the experience can be nerve-wracking, but I had a lot of fun. It was also the last weekend of Oktoberfest, so I got to see people of all ages, races and sizes dressed up in traditional Bavarian costumes with men in Lederhosen and women in Dirndl. They even wore the costumes to the dance clubs! It made for a trippy experience seeing people dance to Rihanna in lederhosen!

After Pitch Camp, we flew to Budapest for ETRE. Without a doubt, I have to say that ETRE is THE best conference that I ever attended. Everything is over the top, but with good taste. All of the dinners were in fabulous, historic buildings in Budapest that were unbelievably beautiful. And on top of that, important people just sit next to you and chat. Simon Cook of DJFEsprit sat down next to me at lunch and we had a cool conversation about how start-ups should grow, and compared the approaches in the US and in Europe. I sat down on the bus to go the last dinner and decided that I’d be social (sometimes I prefer to just listen to my ubiquitous iPod). It turned out that the guy next to me was a general partner at Northzone Ventures and he’s also on the board of Schibsted, the parent company of Anuntis Segundamano. We met so many “important” people that it was unreal. When we were eating dinner, Michael Brehm, the co-founder and COO of StudiVZ came up and started chatting with us. At first, I had no clue who he was — there was no ego involved. And when he mentioned StudiVZ, I told him that I remember reading that they had just sold their social networking site for almost $100 million. He confirmed that and we chatted a bit about running a German start-up.

In addition to the luck we had just bumping into people, Farley and Oliver were great about introducing us to possibly interesting contacts. Since they know everyone, they just very informally introduced us to a lot of great people that we might not otherwise have had access to. And then when they weren’t available, we discussed European entrepreneurship while getting toasted with the Red Herring interns.

The truth is that everyone was relaxed and fun. Even some of the VCs that we’d seen at other conferences seemed more mellow, as they approached us to ask for updates as to how we’d evolved since the last time we met.

And the last night was a ball. We all danced to R&B and pop music in a small club that the people at Red Herring had rented out via a local promotor. The overzealous promotor also recruited about 20-30 young, blond girls whose only job was to make sure that the male guests had fun. Interesting, because unlike most events, ETRE is one in which spouses are usually taken along. And we’d just come from a black-tie event, so the wives were in formal gowns and the men were in tuxedos. And the female “entertainers” were dressed in cut-off tank tops and tight jeans with knee-high boots. A surreal way to end an amazing event.

From ETRE we flew back to Barcelona to recover over the weekend, and then it was off to Munich again for DEMO. It was also a wonderful event. I don’t think that it got the press coverage that it deserved, but it was a great opportunity to meet all of the major German VCs and media investors in one room. All but one of the ones that we wanted to chat with came to visit our booth. Some very interesting conversations have begun. And Stefan Herbert and his staff ran a great event that was on time. The keynote speech was by Oliver Samwer, which was cool since the Samwer brothers are among the coolest story of serial entrepreneurs that is out there. Three young German brothers who got internships in Silicon Valley, then went back to Germany to create an eBay competitor that was bought only 3 months later by eBay for a bit more than $40 million.

Stefan, the executive director of DEMO, in particular was very cool. He’s someone that I’ll definitely stay in touch with, and I highly recommend the event for anyone looking to break into the German market. And I definitely agree that a presentation without a Powerpoint and with a live demo is much more exciting and informative, both for the speaker and the audience. The challenge is definitely worth it if you do it right.

The only negative part was getting escorted out of the P1 Club, which everyone tells me is the most exclusive club in Munich. I asked for Beyoncé, and when the DJ wouldn’t play it (even though it was a private party and he was being paid supposedly to play what the attendees wanted), I told him that I thought the club sucked. I was promptly escorted out. I didn’t like the club anyway! The drinks were €17.50 a piece!

So now we’re back in Barcelona. We’ve met with a bunch of possible investors. Some interesting things should be happening to us within the next few months, if all goes according to plan. And I’ll be sure to write about it all on this blog.

Next week, it’s off to Amsterdam, where I’ve been invited to give a 30-minute presentation to the attendees of the International Classified Media Association’s conference. My task will be to explain why vertical search could be viewed as an opportunity for traditional classifieds players.

And immediately after we’ll be headed to the Web 2.0 conference in Berlin. I’m looking forward to that. We’ve made a lot of friends in Germany, and quite a few of them will attend the event.

The only disappointing thing about the last few weeks is that we were also supposed to attend the FOWA conference. Ryan invited us to present when he did the Roadshow visit to Barcelona. We were all ready to go. We exchanged emails until the Sunday before the conference, which was then followed by . . . dead silence. The last correspondence had been that they would confirm the details of our presentation (how much time we’d have, what slot we’d present, etc.). When no one responded to our emails, we called all the numbers on his business card and website, but no one would answer our emails or phone calls. About a week after the conference, Ryan sent me a brief email telling me that it was unfortunate that things had turned out as they had, but that he simply hadn’t had the time to get back to us. It’s understandable to a certain extent, but it definitely made me appreciate a lot more the professionalism of the DEMO and Red Herring people. I think it’s not so cool to do a roadshow, invite (without any solicitation on our part) entrepreneurs to present, exchange emails confirming the invitation, and then simply fail to respond.

But that might just be me.

Ollivier has just posted the dates for the next OpenCoffeeClub Barcelona meetings:

• 12 Sept.
• 17 Oct.
• 14 Nov.

The events are held at the Duo Bar (Carrer del Rosselló, 156) at 8PM. If you have any questions, feel free to call Olliver at 620-97-94-92 or email him at ollivier@ojacq.com.

OpenCoffee is part of a larger initiative started by Saul Klein of Index Ventures. The goal is to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow. The first Open Coffee events took place in London, but there are 66 member clubs all over the world, including in Barcelona. And given that the goal is to create an informal space, OpenCoffee is a great networking tool, particularly if your goal is to launch internationally. You can visit the OpenCoffeeClub in Paris or Berlin, for example, and feel like you are part of a larger, entrepreneurial family.

It’s a great idea. Oriol and I went to the OpenCoffee event in London after Essential Web, and we met Saul, other entrepreneurs and a few VCs. We met some investors that we’d met at events like Red Herring, and some even proposed new oppportunities to us. We’ve also been to a few of the OpenCoffee events in Barcelona, and when the air conditioning is working ;), it’s a great place to meet other entrepreneurs and even a few analysts from VCs such as La Caixa and High-Growth.

It’s a great supplement to First Tuesday:

• First Tuesday is usually more focused on a speaker; OpenCoffee is usually more focused on informal networking.
• First Tuesday tends to attract a lot of Spanish entrepreneurs, and Spanish is the language of choice; OpenCoffee tends to attract more expats, and English tends to be the language of choice.
• First Tuesday’s main advantage is that it has a bigger publicity machine, so it can attract more high-profile speakers and tends to have better turnout that usually includes most of Barcelona’s better-known entrepreneurs. It’s where we met Albert Armengol for the first time. It’s main disadvantage is that its events are centered around well-known personalities in the Barcelona Internet community, so it might be intimidating for brand-new start-ups.
• OpenCoffee is a recent initiative so it’s publicity machine is not as potent. But it still has a pretty good turnout, and it’s not as personality driven, which means that Ollivier invites all of the entrepreneurs to send in their logos, which will be displayed during the course of the event. In other words, each entrepreneur has a potential spotlight, even if he or she is not so well-known in the Spanish Internet community.

I think that both events are valuable, and I attend them both.

Thanks to Carlos and to Ollivier for organizing these events. Networking is essential for entrepreneurs, as who you know is often almost as important as what you know.

It seems that the only way to become really rich is to build a monopoly and convert that monopoly into other monopolies. I guess it sounds kind of simple when you say it out loud, but it’s the key insight into the Wall Street Journal’s profile of “Mexico’s Mr. Monopoly”, Carlos Slim. Some monopolies are bought (particularly in “developing” countries like Russia and Mexico) and others are arguably made. Slim’s monopolies appear to be a combination of the two methods.

A few facts from the Wall Street Journal:

• The 67-year-old tycoon controls more than 200 companies in telecommunications, cigarettes, construction, mining, bicycles, soft-drinks, airlines, hotels, railways, banking and printing.
• His companies make up more than 1/3 of the value of Mexico’s leading stock market index
• His fortune represents 7% of the country’s annual economic output. (At his height, John D. Rockefeller’s wealth was equal to 2.5% of U.S. gross domestic product.)
• His fortune has grown faster than any in the world during the past two years, rising by more than $20 billion to about $60 billion currently (Bill Gates is worth about $56 billion).
• This is the first time that the world’s richest person has come from the “developing” world since Forbes started tracking the wealthy outside the U.S. in the 1990s.

A lot of Slim’s fortune appears to have come from a nice bit of networking. Knowing the right people seems to be a key ingredient of becoming really successful, and that’s true in any country and probably throughout human history. In Slim’s case, he was obviously a very intelligent and talented guy, but his rise in power seems connected to the rise of Carlos Salinas in 1988. Salinas was trained at Harvard and was intent on modernizing Mexico. He and Slim became friends in the mid-1980s, and Salinas often promoted Slim as the country’s best and most intelligent young businessperson. Under Salinas, hundreds of government companies were sold in auctions, including companies that constitute the core of Mr. Slim’s current wealth. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Slim won many of these bids, leading some to suggest that he won them due to his connections.

It seems pretty much the same story as the Russian oligarchs that now own half of London.

And much like in Russia, the key question in Mexico is whether the government will be able to control the oligarchs that they have helped to create and who might become more powerful than the State itself.

It’s interesting to see how democracy, money and networking intertwine to create undemocratic and inegalitarian icons.

Say what you will about the US, but I think that the Google guys and Bill Gates made their billions in a lot more transparent way that was related more to innovation and less to “enchufes” (contacts) and unjust privatization initiatives. In the US, we don’t mind that people are rich. That’s apparently the goal of life and the basis of our individual and collective self-worth. Money is power. But we expect that people should earn their money to the greatest degree possible (let’s not be naive, there’s always some element of luck and contacts). It may be idealistic and in some cases hypocritical (look at the Clinton and Bush political dynasties), but that’s what we prefer.

Developing countries seem to transfer wealth from the state to friends of the state.

The same thing happens in the US — look at George Bush, Dick Cheney, Halliburton and lobbyists in general. But I think that the key differences are of scale and transparency. And, as Bill Gates found out, any threat of a monopoly gets attacked by the full power of the state and put under intense scrutiny to make sure that the public doesn’t end up subsidizing the rich any more than necessary.

The desired transfer of wealth is from rich to poor, not vice versa. And even America’s business oligarchs recognise it. Hence, the Gates Foundation and Warren Buffet’s donation to the Gates Foundation.

On the other hand, I think that a lot of Spanish companies are in no danger of becoming monopolies anytime soon. The focus on quality of life over material wealth definitely has a downside. Indeed, one way not to make a lot of money — and maybe to get run out of business — is to expect your customers to adapt to your preferences, whether we’re talking about online or offline commerce. That’s what I found out today, when I went to my gym and found that they now have “August hours”, which means that they open later (at 10AM) and close earlier (9:15PM) during the week, and are completely closed during the weekend.

But wait a minute: Don’t most people work out before work, after work and on weekends? Who works out during normal working hours during the week? Do people no longer need to go the gym because it’s August?

I must have missed the memo.

Taking into account that the typical Spanish workday begins between 9 and 10 AM, and ends between 7 and 8PM, this schedule makes absolutely no sense, except for the fact that the owner wants to enjoy the nice weather. She’s apparently not alone — I’d say that half of the shops and restaurants in Barcelona are closed, even though this is “high season” for tourists. But I don’t see the owner’s vacation schedule should inconvenience me if I have to continue paying the full gym dues during the month of August.

In the US, the customer is always right.

In Spain, it’s more like: The customer? Who cares?

Time to look for a new gym.