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.