Building a Secondary Ticketing Business From Spain: Ander Michelena, CEO of Ticketbis (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s step back. What I’m trying to trace here is more of a case study of the entrepreneur’s journey. What was the first thing that you did when you launched the company? It sounds like you were able to convince investors. What kind of investors were these?

Ander Michelena: The good thing about my previous job in investment banking and my partner’s job in private wealth was that we knew quite a good number of people who had created their own companies and had considerable wealth. Once we quit, we started contacting these people that my partner had connections with. We were quite surprised because everybody was quite interested. The first round was quite easy. We didn’t raise too much. It was $400,000. That’s the first thing we started looking at.

Parallel to that, we started putting in some money. One of the good things about investment banking is we are quite well-paid. We hired some programmers and started creating the website. The company was created in July 2009. From March 2009, we were already developing the website. As soon as we raised the round, our focus was on hiring the first team focusing on the IT side. It was important because neither me and my partner are IT-based. We only knew finance when we started the company. We didn’t know about the Internet. We needed to hire the talent to complement ourselves.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you located?

Ander Michelena: We are located in two places. We started the company in Bilbao. That’s where we both are from. As soon as we started using international talent, we opened a second office in Madrid. That’s actually our biggest office right now. We have almost 200 people down in Madrid. We hire people from Latin American and Asia. We needed that.

Sramana Mitra: Was building that kind of a team in Madrid hard to do or was it something that came naturally?

Ander Michelena: It’s actually not that hard to do in Madrid. The good thing about Spain is a lot of people want to live here. It’s the most touristic place in Europe and there are a lot of foreign students who come to Spain. It hasn’t been that hard to find international talent. The great thing right now is that price for labor is quite low because of the financial crisis. You can compare it to Silicon Valley where an engineer is starting at $100,000. You can get one here for $25,000. It’s great to start a business here.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a Secondary Ticketing Business From Spain: Ander Michelena, CEO of Ticketbis
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