An American Man in Barcelona

During a networking evening, I met the host who told me they ran a magazine, an import-export business and an M&A fund. In trying to understand why the person in front of me was qualified to run these ventures – I asked them what they did beforehand. When they tell you they raised $700million to buy a struggling Nigerian company and sold it for a tidy profit, you’re impressed but you don’t quite feel like your question has been answered. So, you prod again, but what did you do before raising $700million – were you a banker? Not really, the reply comes, but they did once lead a team of 150 engineers at Nasdaq. Ahhh so you’re an engineer? No! The reply comes again – but they did once found a bank!

It all starts at the beginning

As with all other human beings. Our host turned out to be heavily influenced by those he had around him in his earliest years: “monkey see monkey do”. As a boy, our host would have to wait until 12am to have dinner with his father – a Mexican immigrant making his way in America who’d leave the house before 6am. His older brother bought a petrol pump when he was 18 years old and when the oil markets crashed – he suddenly had more money than he knew what to do with.

Between Friday, Saturday and Sunday – at only 12 years old – our host would walk 1 mile to his brother’s petrol station and wipe down windows, fill up cars and scrub the floor for 12 hours a day. And he loved every second of it. Why? Because he got to be with his hero: his older brother Carlos.

And in being around his brother he picked up, by that powerful method of osmosis, the ability to work extremely hard. Both Charlie Munger and Warren Buffet, billionaire founders of Berkshire Hathway, had similar hard work schooling early in their careers. They both worked for Warren’s uncle, Jimmy Buffet, who would impose upon them 12 hour shifts with little breaks and a relentless insistence on excellence.

Here, our host learnt not only how to work hard, but also that opportunity should be sized when it’s presented to you: even if you feel you’re not ready for it! And once you’ve learnt how to work hard once – the human body has a miraculous ability to repeat such feats.

An American Education

Whilst growing up, our host had an inkling of what he wanted to do: study medicine and become a doctor. However, he felt apprehension at the responsibility of making decisions over other people’s lives, and instead he followed his brother’s encouragement to go to business school.

At Wharton, our host learnt that “the human body could really get used to a lot.” He studied a full-time business course, served as a paramedic and even found time to run a bank! The style of teaching at Wharton was very hands on: they were insistent on preparing you for the real world. Accordingly, they taught some valuable life skills such as how to sell and how to build actual businesses. Our host and his roommate had to launch a bank as part of a project, and they ended up actually running it. Alongside this, our host couldn’t let go of the guilt he felt for not pursing medicine: so when the opportunity arose to be a paramedic, he felt morally obliged to take it up.

Whilst balancing a full-time education alongside 2 full-time projects may not have been good for one’s long-term health. They certainly prepared our host to do well in the real world. Firstly, the roommate he ran the bank with is the same person he runs his M&A fund with today. Secondly, he honed a penchant for hard work that led to a meteoric rise through the rest of his career. And finally, because he was successful at doing things he wasn’t quite yet ready for, he further learnt the importance of risk-taking.

Leaving behind good coin

After business school, our host went to New York where he was making hundreds of thousands of dollars, being chauffeured around in limousines and eating the fanciest dinners for simply shuffling numbers on a screen. Whilst the money was good, he felt he needed a change and explored careers abroad: looking at Tokyo or Shanghai. However, he met a Spanish women and instead of travelling to the far east he found himself in Barcelona.

As a Mexican Citizen in Barcelona, our host was actually an illegal immigrant. Being an illegal immigrant, the big institutions weren’t going to give him a job, so he had to find other ways to survive. One such way was running Pirate networks. Pirate networks are systems of computers and programs that use resources without permission. This is like getting a subscription to Netflix without paying for it, except the application is not just a streaming service but storage space, computational power and commercial computer programs.

One of these pirate networks was a Church making an awful lot of money selling bibles. This church was about to be bought by a large cooperate entity who had recently opened up shop in Barcelona. That entity was Deloitte. Now, Deloitte, being the prudent organization they are, had strict procedures and requirements meaning they wouldn’t be able to buy this church’s biblical business unless they had all the right personnel in place. One such personnel was the head of IT, who happened to be our main character. Our host recognised the might of Deloitte and was delighted when, without checking his papers, they hired him into their organisation. Deloitte never asked whether he was illegal, and he never told them – but his risk-taking in running pirate networks granted him the good fortune of joining an American institution in Spain.

An American in a Spanish Company

At Deloitte, our host brought with him his work ethic and appetite for risk. He would work extremely hard and had no issue trying something new: he knew he could be turned out at any second so he was determined to prove his worth. Such an attitude meant he was given the keys to the castle: both figuratively and literally. He was granted CIO status in just a few years, an illegal immigrant being amongst the directors of a well-established, risk-averse company came only through relentless hard work: he would turn up at 6am every day and not leave until well past 10. The next hardest working person would turn up at 10 and leave at 6. Accordingly, our host had to have the keys: he needed them to get in, but he also deserved them as he ploughed his route to his position as an executive.

After this stint in Spain, our host had the opportunity to lead a team of 150 software engineers at Nasdaq. He was surprised: he had never studied software engineering, nor had he ever been a software engineer himself. How did he end up there? He simply did the work before he was qualified. Just like being employed at 12 whilst his peers were still playing games, and running a bank whilst his peers were still studying; and at 26 years old, our host recognised that there was nothing stopping him from being an executive and leading a team who knew more than him: he just had to put the work in and be willing to accept the risk.

Finally, being in Spain brought another unforeseen opportunity: that of Spanish intel. You see Barcelona is a melting pot of multi-culturalism, and if you keep talking to people, you can end up learning quite a lot. Our host would pay attention to those who were humble, practical and very much lost in the details – for it was those people one could trust to be telling the truth. In listening, our host came across opportunities: such as the misappreciation of a struggling Nigerian company, the viability of an import-export business and the value of advertising to Americans in Spain. As through the rest of his life, our host sized these opportunities: making millions in purchasing the publicly listed company, making 40% returns every 90 days running his import-export business and hosting events, networking and sharing his story by running his American magazine.