What this episode is about
María José Gómez-Serranillos has had a front-row seat to twenty years of transformation in Spanish business and technology. As a journalist at Expansión, she has covered everything from the early days of digital platforms to the current wave of AI-driven startups, always from the vantage point of someone who speaks to founders, investors and corporate executives every day. In this episode, she steps to the other side of the microphone to share what that view actually reveals.
The conversation covers three questions that rarely get direct answers. What separates the entrepreneurs who convince investors and partners from the ones who do not? Why are Spain’s largest corporations still not acquiring startups, even as this practice becomes standard across the rest of Europe? And what happens to professional journalism when AI can produce information faster and cheaper than any newsroom?
These are not abstract questions. They shape how companies grow, how capital flows and whether the startup ecosystem retains the value it creates. If your company works with or evaluates early-stage technology, this episode offers a perspective worth hearing.
What separates convincing entrepreneurs from the rest
After interviewing hundreds of founders, María José has distilled four qualities that consistently appear in the entrepreneurs who build something lasting. The first is vocation: entrepreneurship has to come from within, not from a trend or an opportunity. Many founders describe it as an addiction, a pull they cannot resist even after their first project fails. Those who treat it as a career move rarely last through the hard stretches.
The second quality is passion that is visible in person. When you meet a founder face to face and they are talking about something they genuinely believe can change something, that conviction is impossible to fake. Investors, journalists and future employees all pick up on it immediately.
Third is leadership capacity. Not everyone is a good leader, and good founders know whether they are. The ability to convince a team that a half-built product in a competitive market is worth their time requires something beyond a compelling pitch deck.
The fourth quality, and perhaps the most underrated, is complementarity within the founding team. The ventures María José has seen succeed most consistently are those where one founder understands business and growth, another is technically exceptional and a third can sell. When those three capabilities sit in one person, the ceiling tends to be lower. When they sit in a team that trusts each other, it rises.
Why Spanish corporates don’t buy startups
One of the most striking observations in this episode is that María José cannot name a single major acquisition of a Spanish startup by a large Spanish corporation. The exits that have happened, the ones the ecosystem celebrates, have been driven by foreign groups or private equity funds. The talent and innovation stay in Spain, but the value capture often does not.
This contrasts sharply with how corporate-startup relationships work in Germany, France or the Netherlands, where large companies regularly acquire promising startups as a way to bring capabilities in-house quickly. Spain has made progress on open innovation: Repsol, Telefónica and Opciona now run programs that let startups work alongside their teams. But working with a startup and buying it are very different things, and the second step is largely missing.
The Startup Law passed in 2023 was a meaningful step: it defined what a startup is, aligned multiple ministries behind a common framework and signalled that Spain takes this sector seriously as policy. What has not followed yet is a shift in acquisition appetite from the corporate side. If you are on the corporate innovation team and want to make the case internally, this conversation gives you concrete framing.
The future of journalism in an AI world
Juanjo poses the central paradox of the episode: if AI can produce information faster and more cheaply than any journalist, what is the profession for? María José’s answer is immediate: the human layer.
AI can aggregate, summarise and even write, but it cannot call a source, verify a rumour through two independent contacts or decide which of fifty stories from a Monday news cycle actually matters. Those are not just technical limitations. They reflect a different kind of judgment, one built from years of reading the same sector, watching the same people succeed and fail and developing an instinct for what is real.
Cristina adds a counterintuitive point from the opening segment: paradoxically, the more information there is, the more valuable a professional who can separate the important from the noise becomes. The journalist’s role is not to produce more information. It is to reduce the cost of figuring out which information deserves attention. That is as relevant for a corporate innovation team trying to track what startups matter as it is for any other audience.
News from the radar
AI is dismantling the management layer companies built over 3,000 years. Cristina opens with a discussion of a blog post by Jack Dorsey, CEO of Block, which draws on a Sequoia Capital analysis of corporate hierarchy from the Roman Empire through Prussia to modern enterprise. The argument: middle management exists primarily to control the flow of information, and AI is now doing that work. Cristina is sceptical. Block was also laying off around 50 percent of its workforce at the time of the post, and the line between strategic restructuring and AI-washing is harder to read than the headline suggests.
Gore-Tex and Mondragón as alternative models. Juanjo points to W. L. Gore as a company that has long operated without middle management, capping each facility at 100 people and opening a new unit rather than adding hierarchy when a team grows. Mondragón, the Basque cooperative group, offers a different model: co-ownership that aligns incentives across the entire organisation. Both cases suggest the question is not whether AI changes corporate structure, but which of the alternative structures that have always existed will finally make more sense.
Spain’s startup ecosystem is expanding beyond Madrid and Barcelona. María José cites Valencia (Lanzadera, Anges, Draper), the Basque Country with its industrial tech scene, Galicia and Málaga as growing hubs. The diversity is a sign of health. But it also raises the stakes for the open innovation gap: if good startups are being built across the country and large Spanish corporates are still not buying them, the returns from that distributed innovation will continue to flow abroad. Talk to us at Dcycle if you want to understand how sustainability data can help your team evaluate and work with emerging technology partners.