Novobrief

This just scratches the surface of what could really be. Spain still is in general a hostile country for entrepreneurs with an anti-innovation government famous for awful decisions like: - Regulating heavily crowdfunding rendering it unusable - Eliminating stock options' fiscal incentives [0] - Taxing the sun in order to protect energy lobbies from solar energy. [1] - Trying to get a cut from Google News because they're worth it, pass a law for it, and then trying to retract in only few weeks once they saw the page views metrics go south... etc.. Hopefully things will get better once the current ruling party leaves the government in the upcoming December elections. Hopefully... [0] http://novobrief.com/stock-options-in-spain-startups/ [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2013/08/19/out-of-ideas-a…

As somebody who has been hiring engineers in Barcelona for 2+ years now as founder of NoviCap I can tell you more from an employer POV. (if interested more info about us: https://gist.github.com/noverloop/ec033c20c02cf9e219d2fc97396f2b54) On Madrid vs. Barcelona, the level of english spoken in Madrid is much lower among engineers and I suppose in general. It's also noted that working culture in Madrid is more 'formal' (dress, manners) than Barcelona. An example from Spanish culture is that Madrid refers to catalans as hippies and Catalans to people working in Madrid as 'suits'. As for economic differences Madrid has more headquarters, especially of companies active across LATAM while Barcelona has manufacturing (automotive, industrial,..), tourism (a lot) and about 75% of the countries' startup scene. cfr. https://novobrief.com/barcelona-madrid-startup-ecosystem/ The tech sector in Barcelona is booming with new investments and new funds entering. VC funding used to be relatively inaccessible but all major EU VC's invest in Spain now and it has two great homegrown funds too. There are many bootstrapped companies and some big tech companies have opened engineering offices here. There are plenty of english-speaking conferences and meetups going on and it's easy to meet other engineers. You won't have much problems mixing in as most meetups are in English and engineering teams are often a mix of foreigners and Spaniards. I don't think not speaking spanish will hold you back…

It's an interesting question, and one that has not been quantified yet. However, here are a couple of thougts: - I think there's no doubt that the financial crisis and lack of jobs has led many to start their own companies (tech or not). - Simply starting a business in Spain is not as hard as many portray it to be (it's definitely harder than in the UK, for example), but taxes, lack of stock option plans (most companies here use what's often referred to as phantom options) and, in general a not-entrepreneur-friendly mindset from many in society, can make it hard to grow and scale. That said, many relatively successful startups like CartoDB, Typeform or even peerTransfer and Alienvault follow the m.o. of building engineering teams here and move marketing and sales to the US. - Spain's current government has passed several pro-entrepreneur laws that, in essence, are just PR moves. Except, maybe, the launch of a new and simple entrepreneur visa. [0] - This significant increase in VC financing has yet to reflect the more than €1.5 billion of public money that's being poured into VCs and private equity firms to invest locally, trying to mimic Israel Yozma's. [1] - Barcelona has many interesting public and private initiatives going, and the city's good image all around the world benefits it when it comes to recruiting foreign talent. [2] - It's not all fine and dandy, and there're definitely some hard challenges for the country and startups to tackle over the next few…