Building an Internet of Things Platform Company from Zaragoza, Spain: Alicia Asin, CEO of Libelium (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: This is not unusual. First time entrepreneurs start with very vague ideas with what they’re going to do. When I started my first company, I was a graduate student at MIT and I wanted to be an entrepreneur but I didn’t have a good idea about what I was going to do. Can you talk us through the process of how you navigated your way? Once you started, what happened? What did you do? How did you get your bearing?

Alicia Asin: We started thinking about doing projects in wireless sensor networks.

Sramana Mitra: These would be custom projects? You would do contract software development?

Alicia Asin: Yes. We thought about being a solutions provider. From the very beginning, we had a very clear vision that we wanted to be a global company. We thought that, from a scalability point of view, being a solutions provider and working project by project would be very difficult to scale because you need to supervise the installation and give post-sales support. We were not big enough to be able to face that. Second, we would be competing with systems integrators and you cannot compete with an IBM.

Instead, we thought about generating value for those companies. There was an easy way to scale because it’s easier for you to scale their manufacturing process especially if you’re outsourcing. Then you would be adding value to those big players. Instead of becoming an enemy for them, you could be an ally. Those were the two things that guided us.

Sramana Mitra: You decided to do manufacturing for these wireless sensor companies?

Alicia Asin: Not exactly a manufacturing company but providing them with a hardware platform. We are a product company and we’ve been evolving from the concept. We are still selling wireless sensor devices but when we started, we were calling ourselves a hardware company. Then we realized that we were not only providing pieces of hardware but also the API for building wireless sensor networks. Now, we see ourselves as the glue for all the items in the Internet of Things (IoT)—from wireless devices, sensors to even third-party cloud software. We are thinking of ourselves more like an ecosystem company that is offering an ecosystem for the IoT.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you start?

Alicia Asin: November 2006.

Sramana Mitra: November 2006, if I remember, was not a time when Internet of Things was in the consciousness of the mainstream. What was the situation like in Spain that you gravitated towards this?

Alicia Asin: It’s been an evolution in the market. There’s a little bit of hype as well driven by the big players but I think that we’ve been contributing to really expand the concept of IoT, at least a small portion of that. We’ve been in this market from the very beginning and we’ve seen it growing. Spain is the European Silicon Valley regarding IoT and Smart cities. Because of the crisis and the social changes that we are seeing in Spain, we are seeing more incubators and more entrepreneurs. Definitely, the IoT is attracting a lot of entrepreneurs. That is creating a very interesting ecosystem in the country.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building an Internet of Things Platform Company from Zaragoza, Spain: Alicia Asin, CEO of Libelium
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