Read the averages, not the headlines
The Spanish VC report for 2026 is out and the headlines are singing: investment is up. Applause. Champagne. Everyone happy.
Now apply first principles. What is a round, really? Capital going into a company. What is an average? The sum divided by the number of deals. If two rounds move 400M and the rest of the market is doing small rounds, the average shoots up and hides the fact that the median founder is having a harder time than ever.
The operational play: when you see a market headline, ask yourself three things before making a business decision.
Is it the mean or the median? The mean lies, the median tells the truth. If you can't find it, assume the worst.
How many deals account for 80% of the volume? If it's 3, the market is broken and you're competing in the long tail.
What is venture debt doing? If it's growing the way it is now, equity is either expensive or gone. Translation: funds don't want to dilute alongside you, so they lend and cover themselves.
Actionable conclusion? If you're raising in the next 6 months: raise less, dilute less, and build the case for your next round to be about metrics, not narrative. Nobody with judgement is buying the 2021 narrative any more.
What I learned
This week I got a hire wrong.
I brought someone in on a CV and a gut feeling after two conversations. Senior, experienced, everything added up on paper. Three weeks in it was clear it wasn't going to work. Not on capability, on fit. And the cost isn't just the salary, it's the team's time, the energy, the decisions that never got made because we were busy managing this.
The lesson isn't new, but this time it genuinely hurt: hiring fast is the most expensive way to save time. And when you're a founder you have a huge bias towards believing your intuition makes up for the process. It doesn't.
From now on: a paid two-week trial with a real deliverable before any permanent contract. If the person doesn't want that, I already have my answer. If they do, we both know what we're getting into.
It cost me a quarter to learn. It's yours for free.
On the radar
- GUT Madrid hires two senior profiles for Marketing and Martech. The agencies doing best right now are the ones mixing creativity with a tech stack, not the ones picking a side.
- Glovo and Holaluz call for Barcelona to be Europe's number one tech hub. Nice headline, but as long as stock option taxes stay where they are, the best engineers keep leaving for London.
- A new index measuring connected entrepreneurial ecosystems across 50 Spanish provinces. Meanwhile, the median founder still can't cover their social security payments for the first 18 months. Indices are lovely; facts would be nice too.
- A series on the personal brands of leaders, from Nadella to Holmes. When you build a personal brand and you have a team, your brand stops being yours. Either you accept that or you don't play this game.
The actionable advice
Today, close the laptop for 20 minutes and write down by hand (yes, by hand) the 3 things that move the needle most in your business this week. Just 3. Now look at last week's calendar. How many real hours did you give those 3 things? If the answer is less than 50% of your time, you have a focus problem, not a capability problem. Most founders don't fail from doing too little, they fail from doing plenty of what doesn't matter.
Behind VIVIO
A real number from VIVIO this week: 60% of the brands that try us come because someone recommended us privately, not because of our marketing.
I find that fascinating and uncomfortable at the same time. Fascinating because it means the product works and people talk about it. Uncomfortable because it means all the money and hours we pour into pure acquisition have an infinitely worse ROI than looking after the customers we already have.
Decision of the week: we're cutting 30% of the paid budget and putting it into a serious referral programme, with tracking and a real reward. If word of mouth is already happening on its own, we're going to pour fuel on it instead of wrestling with LinkedIn Ads.
Sometimes the best growth strategy is to look at what already works and stop fighting what doesn't.
This is a version of what I send every week, unfiltered, in my newsletter "Eso no fue suerte". If you want the rest, subscribe for free.