How the Founders Met
Our journey as business partners stems from years of shared experience in the tech industry. It all kicked off in 2007 when Òscar and I, Lluís, first crossed paths at Vueling. Òscar was one of the IT Managers, and I was a Developer at the time.
That first encounter helped us get a sense of each other's working styles and laid the groundwork for a professional relationship built on trust and efficiency.
Parallel Career Paths
After our time at Vueling, Òscar moved on to Splendia as CTO in 2008. Splendia was a platform focused on high-end hotel bookings and was expanding rapidly at the time. I remained at Vueling until 2011, at which point Òscar put forward my name for a role at Splendia, and I ended up going through the selection process as a PHP Developer.
We cracked on with projects for about a year and a half, tackling challenges in a fast-moving tech environment. During this period, I had the opportunity to learn from Òscar’s leadership style, observing how he structured processes and managed teams—insights that would later prove invaluable when I took on leadership roles myself.
Later, in 2011, Òscar was headhunted by Groupalia as CIO. Groupalia was one of the key players in Barcelona’s booming startup ecosystem, specializing in group-buying deals. In 2012, he reached out again, and I joined his team as a Senior PHP Developer. That period was a game changer, we were working with cutting edge technologies and facing some truly complex migration challenges. Once again, working closely with Òscar gave me firsthand exposure to high-level decision-making, operational scaling, and the strategic thinking required to run a growing tech team. This experience played a crucial role in shaping my ability to lead teams effectively in the years to come.
After Groupalia, we went our separate ways professionally. In 2013, Òscar founded his own company, Elinkcat, while in 2014, I dived into a new role at Trovit, a major classified ads aggregator. At Trovit, I started as a Senior PHP Developer and eventually got promoted to Tech Lead of the web team. This was a turning point for me I had to step up my game, nail down new methodologies for me, and fully embrace a results driven culture. It was a great place to pick up best practices and drill down into technical challenges at scale.
Moving into Leadership Roles
After three and a half years at Trovit, in 2017, I weighed up my options and opted for a new challenge as CTO at Social & Beyond, a startup focused on social engagement solutions. This was my first real experience managing not just a tech team but also working directly with stakeholders and the company board. It was a steep learning curve, but it paved the way for what came next.
That experience set me up perfectly for the role of CTO at Exoticca in 2019, a fast-growing travel startup specializing in long haul packages. When I joined, the tech team was just four developers, but over time, we scaled it up to a well balanced team of 60, laying the foundations for sustainable growth and speeding up development cycles.
After four intense years in a hyper growth environment, in 2023, I decided to take a step back and wind down by working as a freelance consultant. Fortunately, the executive team at Exoticca opened doors for me by connecting me with their network, which helped me land my first clients. One of those clients led to another unexpected opportunity, I ended up stepping into the role of CTO at Stay, a company that had grown organically over the years but needed help navigating its next phase of technical challenges and scaling up.
Reconnecting with Òscar and Taking the Leap
While I was building and growing tech teams, Òscar had spent the last decade leading Elinkcat, honing his expertise in entrepreneurship, operations, and business strategy. When we reconnected in 2023, it felt like closing a circle. We weren’t just two former colleagues catching up, we were two professionals with complementary experiences, ready to take on a new challenge together.
The decision to join forces made more and more sense. We both knew we wanted to start a business, so why not do it together? We already had extensive shared experience, in different sectors but primarily in travel, and a solid network of potential clients who could support us through the always challenging early days of a company.
But the big question remained: What kind of company did we want to build? What problem did we want to solve?
Joining forces wasn’t just a logical step—it felt inevitable. We had each grown into leaders in different but aligned fields, and we saw an opportunity to merge our paths to create something with real impact.
That’s exactly what we’ll explore in the next article, how we began shaping our vision and defining the kind of company we wanted to build.
Our goal is to share the entire process of building this company with our community, along with other key topics we’ll open up along the way. That’s why, in these first articles, your support and honest feedback are crucial.
We’re happy to improve anything we can, so we look forward to your thoughts!