Building an Internet of Things Platform Company from Zaragoza, Spain: Alicia Asin, CEO of Libelium (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: So all the selling that you do around the world is done through your Spanish operation. You sell on the phone and web.

Alicia Asin: Yes, most of the sales are direct sales due to inquiries through our websites. This year, we started opening distribution channels. Now, we have existing distributors covering most of the European territory, Singapore, China, Japan, South Korea, India, New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, and US as well. This list is growing every month.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. I think I’ve got your story. Is there anything else you want to share?

Alicia Asin: If it’s for an entrepreneur audience, I would like to talk about the importance of the culture in the company. When you are a startup, you need to offer something else for people to join your project. That’s something that we’ve been trying to do. We always say that we don’t have engineers. We have Spartans. Today, we had the Christmas Toast. We had a fire in April and all our warehouse was burnt out and we lost a lot. I was in the US when I received the call. In just 24 hours, we were up and running again. We were working in a very small premise because the one that we had was burnt out. We decided to move to a new location.

In October, we moved to a huge building in our city taking advantage of the cheap rates for building in Spain. It’s a two-storey building with a lot of space for growing. I could see that everyone was excited. We made it possible because there’s nothing that can stop us. The fact that we are growing by 30% this year after the fire and moving to a new location speaks for the kind of people we have inside.

Sramana Mitra: One of the best things about having a company in a place that is not in a talent war is that you can create a long-term thinking culture, which is very difficult to do when you’re working in a place like Silicon Valley where people are jumping all the time and there’s tremendous talent war. Anybody in any job is getting so many offers all the time and so many calls from recruiters because it’s a very active job market and a very talent war market. The advantage with your situation is that you don’t have to deal with that, which I think is an enormous advantage. There are disadvantages but on the talent side and on building a long-term focused culture, it is a tremendous advantage.

Alicia Asin: I agree with that.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. Thank you for your time.