Monday – Day 62 – Talking to High School Students
The highlight of the day was doing my TEDx talk to the 250 high schoolers at Benjamin Franklin International School. On this day, I officially became an international speaker. It went really well. I had to take some time over the weekend to review and practice the speech because just like anything if you don’t use it, you lose it.
Tuesday – Day 63 – Meeting with Barcelona Activa
As part of my focus to learn more about the local entrepreneur community, I was introduced to Guifre, one of the team members at Barcelona Activa, which is a public startup incubator. It houses 3 floors of companies from a plant based food company called Food For Tomorrow that is growing like hotcakes, to digital marketing agencies.
As I walked through the space, seeing all the companies doing their thing in their glass offices, I could not help but think it looked no different than the US. Maybe that was naive to think it would feel different or less than somehow. It was super energizing to see all these companies trying to make the next big thing.
The most important part of going there was all that I learned from Guifre when I sat down with him to chat. I will share them here in hopes it helps the right person someday on a future google search.
A great resource for expats who want to learn about the startup and tech scene is called Barcinno. It’s name actually comes from a Roman military outpost called Barcino. In fact they are hosting an event this weekend, on October 26th, for expats called Barcelona International Community Day. I may just head down there for a few.
He also let me know about a legal tech accelerator program run by a leading law firm in Spain called Cuatracasas. This Acelera is the first of it’s kind lead by a law firm. I will certainly be reaching out to them.
He said the Founder Institute is very active in Barcelona. That could be a potential good opportunity for me to either mentor or speak to those involved on mindset and growing a business. Finally, two other accelerators he said are worth reaching out to are Connector and SeedRocket.
Wednesday – Day 64 – Speaking at the Middle School
On Monday, I spoke to BFIS high school students, today I spoke to the middle schoolers and the big treat was it was in front of all of my kids and Kelli came too. On Monday, I did my TEDx talk, but for the middle schoolers I thought it would be too much, so I focused on chapter 1 of The Fast Forward Mindset. I shared some personal stories about the phrase “Good Thing, Bad Thing, Who Knows.” I kept it to 10 minutes and it can be found here.
At night, we went out with new friends who just came back from a 10 trip with their kids to Madagascar. Seeing their photos and hearing their stories about helping people in the small villages, it was no doubt life changing for them. We ended up going to Taktika Berri which is a pinchos bar, and the whole meal was small tapas served on pieces of bread which is very popular throughout the region. It was delicious and felt very authentic.
