AI-generated summary
In October’s “Coffee with Entrepreneurs,” Jorge Dobón, founder and CEO of Demium, shared insights from his extensive experience in creating nearly 200 startups. Demium is a unique incubator that focuses on identifying talented individuals with entrepreneurial potential rather than just existing teams or ideas. Through initiatives like the AllStartup Weekend hackathon, Demium selects promising entrepreneurs for a six-month incubation program, providing resources, mentorship, and investor access to help launch successful companies. Jorge’s journey began early, founding a company at 18, and was shaped by learning from the first Spanish venture builder, Sonar Ventures. His philosophy emphasizes resilience, learning from failure, and the importance of a strong team over just having a good idea.
Jorge highlighted key entrepreneurial insights: an entrepreneur is defined by problem-solving ability, execution, leadership with empathy, and resilience. Success depends on a talented team and targeting large markets, while common failures stem from small markets, lack of ambition or speed, and insufficient funding. He stressed the growing ambition among entrepreneurs aiming for unicorn status and shared examples of resilience, such as Voicemod’s turnaround after pivoting markets. Jorge is optimistic about Spanish startups’ internationalization and foresees continued ecosystem growth, with many startups evolving into scaleups and going public. His advice to entrepreneurs is to take risks boldly, learn quickly from failure, and recognize that entrepreneurship enhances professional value in any career.
At the October coffee with entrepreneurs, Jorge Dobón, founder of Demium, told us how to combine the best talent with global business opportunities to create new companies from scratch in his incubator.
At the “Coffee with Entrepreneurs” in October we had Jorge Dobón, founder and CEO of Demium, who has participated in the creation of almost 200 startups!
“Coffee with Entrepreneurs” is the initiative of the Bankinter Innovation Foundation that brings you closer to leaders in the entrepreneurial ecosystem to learn first-hand about their experience and trajectory.
In October we had the participation of Jorge Dobón, founder and CEO of Demium, an incubator that combines the best local talent with global commercial opportunities to create new companies from scratch. In his chat with José Carlos Huerta, our head of Startup Analysis, Jorge told us about Demium’s unique model and how he came up with the idea of setting up this startup that helps startups.
Jorge has the entrepreneurial gene in his veins and at just 18 years old and without having finished his degree, he set up a company to export Spanish products to China.
He learned about the world of startups through the first Venture Builder to be created in Spain, Sonar Ventures, and is very grateful to Álvaro Cuesta, its CEO, for everything he learned from him and, above all, for destigmatizing failure. Jorge turned failure into his strength and decided to help startups succeed by setting up a startup incubator.
In addition to the typical ingredients of all incubators – pool of people and resources, physical spaces, access to methodologies, advice from mentors and access to investors – they are characterized by having a model focused on talent, that is, it is a model where they do not look for already created teams or entrepreneurs with ideas, but also and above all, talents with the entrepreneurial gene.
Through their AllStartup Weekend hackathon , they select entrepreneurs who are invited to participate in their 6-month incubation program.
One of Demium’s first success stories has been that of Landbot, a startup also participated in the Venture Capital program, which joins forces between the Bankinter Innovation Foundation and Bankinter Venture Capital.
In addition, Jorge has just set up Think Bigger Capital, a venture capital manager that already has 50 million euros to invest and focused on Pre-Seed and Seed stages. That is, with the same philosophy that Demium set up: to help create successful companies with the most talented entrepreneurs in the world.
Below, we summarize some of the reflections of the many that Jorge has shared with us:
1.- Dismantling clichés: An entrepreneur does not have to be someone who has a good idea. An entrepreneur is characterized by:
- Find solutions to problems.
- He is able to execute a plan.
- He is capable of leading and “messing up” everyone – EMPATHY.
- They have resilience and, therefore, a lot of tolerance for frustration.
2.- Ideas: To obtain a good idea, the ideation process must be reflective and apply a methodology. It is an iterative and artisanal process. Many times, the idea can come from professionals in a particular industry.
3.- Two key factors for the success of a startup: The human team and targeting a large enough market. Jorge, paraphrasing Simon Sinek, the well-known English writer and motivator, reminds us that we should invest in people, not ideas. “A good idea is often destroyed by a bad team and a good team can always improve a bad idea.”
4.- Some keys to failures: there is really no fixed pattern here, because there are countless things that can go wrong. In any case, Jorge points out:
- Targeting a market that is too small
- Lack of ambition.
- Lack of speed.
- Lack of funding at the right time.
5.- Ambition: The level of ambition of entrepreneurs has been increasing in recent years, and we find cases of entrepreneurs who have not wanted to sell their companies because they have the ambition and desire to turn them into unicorns (very high-growth companies that can have a value of more than 1,000 million dollars).
6.- Resilience: illustrating the need for resilience, Jorge tells us about the case of Voicemod, where after going through 5 years of hardships, without managing to scale or make the company profitable, the brothers Jaime, Juan and Fernando Bosch, pivoted the market to which they directed their voice modulator, towards the video game industry, and have managed to go from being almost in bankruptcy, to be more than 120 people, and to have the company valued at more than 100 million euros.
7.- Facing the challenge of internationalization, as a pending issue for Spanish startups. Jorge is optimistic from his own experience, having successfully opened offices in Portugal, Ukraine and Poland. It is about highlighting talent and management skills and the creation of ecosystems in markets that have not yet emerged.
8.- Looking to the future: In the last nine years, the entire life cycle of startups has become very professionalized and the ecosystem will continue to grow at a good pace. The next big challenge is for many more startups to become scaleups and for them to grow to become companies with valuations above 1,000 million euros. This is a challenge that the Bankinter Innovation Foundation is addressing through the Scaleup Spain Network programme, together with Endeavor and Wayra. The next big challenge as a sector is for these companies to go public. Jorge predicts that in 3 to 5 years we will see very interesting things going public.
9.- A piece of advice for an entrepreneur: Take the plunge and take the risk. Since it is possible for it to fail, it would be best if it fails quickly and cheaply. Jorge thinks that the experience of entrepreneurship, whether successful or not, is an enrichment of the curriculum that will be increasingly valued by the corporate world, precisely because of the characteristics that I pointed out above that an entrepreneur has. If you are an entrepreneur, your value as a professional will grow.
We invite you to see Café con Jorge, because it provides many ideas and data and transmits the enthusiasm and passion of a born entrepreneur.
