Agustín Gómez, founder of Wallapop: "My great function was begging for money"

One calculates that to speak with the president of Wallapop it may not be necessary to resort to the six degrees of separation but that to contact someone like that, more than one intermediary will be needed. Well no. A WhatsApp message to his phone was enough and the answer was an invitation to have breakfast the next day. Agustín Gómez receives us at his house, in the Poblenou neighborhood of Barcelona. He could live uptown, in a luxurious house surrounded by security, send his children to an elite school, and have a media company or a secretary manage his public appearances. The logical thing would be to resemble the majority of millionaires, what happens is that he does not want to.

His story is that of the American dream in the boy version of L'Hospitalet who at the age of 17 already left home. He worked in a video surveillance company to be able to pay for his Telecommunications degree. He started it in Barcelona and finished it in Switzerland, with savings that were only enough for a week and without mastering either English or French. Later he was in other countries, including France and the United States, hired in various technology consultancies. His mother was happy because the boy was one of those who wore a suit and tie, but he was looking for something else. Going over it with what he would end up being his partner, David Muñoz, they thought of a business that would be the closest thing to creating a neighborhood market on the internet. They had the idea but not the money.

-He hadn't had a head and he was without a penny in the bank. I put the 30,000 euros that I managed to collect. Money marked our time and we calculated how to reach six months of life. I used to go with my little cousin, who didn't charge anything, for the markets to take pictures. In Catalonia we said that we were an initiative of the Generalitat and in Madrid that we were one of the Government. Thus, by chipping stone, we prepared the first inventory for the whole of Spain. Meanwhile, David and a couple of others dedicated themselves to programming the application.

–The day the iOS application came out, the Apple one, ranked number one in Spain. I guess they weren't expecting it.

– We freak out in colors. We recruited a guy who had almost no sleep for two weeks to get the Android version out. In less than fifteen days we got two million users. We were in my hideout in Gràcia, with the screen showing the statistics in real time, and it was spectacular.

The "zulo" was their flat and the office, the table where they worked. He says that they had no idea of ​​marketing and that all they did was apply the common sense of the grandmother.

-I have radical tendencies and the DNA of the company was very radical. Inspired by Che Guevara our mantra was 'victory or death'. If we die, we're going to die big time. We didn't want to be zombies. We launched the app and spent the last 10,000 euros we had left on marketing in two days. We started looking for dough, my great function in Wallapop was begging for money and it was immediately seen that this was a rocket.

– Without television would they have succeeded so much?

Yes, but it would have been slower. Television was an accelerator. Again we pull common sense. What did people see? The TV. We went to look for Atresmedia and we offered them something that is done a lot now but didn't exist then. We asked them to give us spare spaces. The crap advertising inventory of televisions was perfect for Wallapop. Secondary programs, strange schedules… All the time we were lucky enough to do things that nobody did at the time. For example, no one was spending their entire budget on mobile channels. At that time all digital companies invested in the web.

Do you remember the first ad?

-Sure! He appeared on the Campos program at 10 in the morning. We were in a Chinese bar and we had a spectacular party. Going out on TV was very symbolic.

–The day a washing machine and a Fiat appeared for sale on Wallapop, they knew they had achieved it, but it took them five years to start making money. Why did it cost so much?

“Because we had decided not to make money. We prioritize growth over monetization. In just one year we were leaders and we could have monetized. We internationalized the company in just seven months. We launch England, France and Mexico at the same time. He was going to ask me for money from England and with hospital common sense he told me, 'nobody knows me there, I speak English badly, they're not going to pay any damn attention to me, but if I put Wallapop as number 1 in England, you'll see how the venture capital companies that I am going to ask for money will listen to me'. It was a very emotional thing.

-In France they learned that it is better to spend capital than not to put the necessary money and end up losing everything. Five million were left there. He assures that everything he did rationally went wrong.

-When you start to measure, to be afraid because there are many millions, that's when you make a mistake. The intuition that we had applied in Spain was correct.

-The lesson helped them not to make mistakes in the calculations to make the great leap. Was the United States the best and I don't know if it was the worst?

–The United States was very beautiful and at the same time bittersweet. It was the goal. At that time it was very symbolic that a Spanish company would succeed there. I was very excited to innovate from here and launch it there. They bought us very quickly. There was a lot of competition. The first six months we were leaders but a great monster came, Naspers, one of those that many people do not know, and at that moment the investors realized the risk they were assuming. I understand them because they were with a guy from L'Hospitalet, who for them was as if he were from Swaziland. In fact, some were not sure if he was Mexican or Spanish and sometimes he even made a joke of telling them that he was asking for pesos and not dollars. Naspers launched LetGo, which was a copy of Wallapop, and with capital that was inhuman. Look how the battle was that we invested so much in television that we inflated it. The consequence was that we were wearing ourselves out. First we merged and in the end they ended up buying us. I got very sad. Challenges have always moved me, it was my gasoline, and not being able to continue in the United States was the first step to leaving.

–They bought the North American subsidiary for 189 million dollars in the summer of 2018 and a year later, in September 2019, the investors chose Rob Cassedy to replace him as CEO of the company. He left the management of Ebay Kleinanzeigen in Berlin to come to Barcelona. What happened?

"It was a combination of several things. My personal fatigue, a very clear misalignment with investors, and because it was good for the company. I could no longer give him what he was looking for. I am the worst manager in the universe, I am crazy, I know how to do many other things, for example, organize the company, but for what I wanted to do I was not in line with the investors. That's what Rob was and is perfect for. The transition has been fantastic.

– Is it because he was a professional?

-Yes. What the venture capital investor in the fund is looking for is security. It is a very strange dance. He is looking for something innovative, very risky, but once he has put up the money what he wants is security. There are entrepreneurs who evolve towards the role of manager, but that was not my case. I like to create new things, other challenges, and in certain stages of a company it is not what is needed.

Wallapop has a community of 15 million users in Spain. In the jargon of startups, it is a 'unicorn' because its valuation, as confirmed by Gómez, exceeds 1,000 million dollars. The workforce is 200 workers and behind the name that Agustín and his partner invented after making various combinations without any specific criteria are investment funds such as Korelya Capital, Accel Partners, original investor of Facebook and other technological giants, and a few plus.

–Can a company like this survive without investors?

–Marketing is a necessary evil when you have a product that is going to the final consumer. Making yourself known is very expensive. It seems that everything is viral but that has happened very few times, with Facebook and YouTube and when there was not as much competition as now. Nowadays it is very difficult to launch something to the final consumer without the backing of funds.

Are these types of funds a necessary evil?

-What is bad is that technology companies are not able to expand in another way or understand that maybe we should not do it so fast or see that sometimes competing is absurd. If there are three models, why do two have to die and only one win? The way of doing business is I win, you lose. Perhaps if we understood that if I win and you win, we all win, maybe things could be done in a healthier way.

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— Ementes Technologies Tue Jun 30 06:33:47 +0000 2020

He ceased to be the CEO of the company and became its president, a position more representative than executive. He sums it up by comparing himself to Di Stéfano. Leaving the adrenaline of a position like the one he had, having been the soul of Wallapop, is not just a professional change, no matter how much money you have.

-The first year I had a very clear feeling of financial freedom. I talked to my wife and told her, what do we do? Do we go around the world? But the truth is that what he wanted was to spend that time reflecting on life. Take advantage of this moment of pause, digest the entire previous stage, and think about it professionally. I took it very seriously, I even signed up for a Philosophy degree. Sitting with oneself on the sofa to reflect is very fucked up. It's uncomfortable to think about who you are and what you want to do. In the end I ended up cycling a lot. And life was very good to me again and gave me cancer.

–I guess you are clear that this last sentence makes a big impact when you listen to it.

-After having passed it I feel like this. Cancer was the motivation I needed to understand who I was and what I wanted to do. I don't call it illness but motivation. It was stage four Hodgkin's lymphoma, that is, very advanced.

Cancer caught him at the age of 39, being an 'old man', as he sums it up when he remembers it. He considers that he allowed him to get to know himself better and learn a lesson.

-My big mistake is that I was looking for love in the wrong way. I wondered where I got my motivation to get into so many chickens, live with so much tension, without knowing exactly what I was looking for. He thought it was glory, the epic of achieving a feat. And I understood that no. I realized that I was confused and that I had been looking for what I already had next to me. Each one has its context. I came from a very humble family in L'Hospitalet, my grandparents raised me because my parents didn't pay much attention to me. But every time he did something exceptional there was a reaction. For example, Joventut de Badalona signed me and then my father came to the games. There I thought, if I do cool things, they love me. I understand this now with 40 years, but it is something that was engraved in me.

He adds that the things that bother him the most about the people he loves the most are his lessons. One of the ones he doesn't forget is the day he walked years ago with his father, when he had already triumphed with Wallapop, he let go: “Do you know the one who really hit him? The one on Facebook”.

-With so much money can you continue to be a normal guy?

-Totally. radically. If you are an asshole and have a lot of money, you will surely become a super asshole. I have much more money than I would have imagined in my life, but since I never looked for it, we chose to continue living a normal life. I have a good flat, but that is not a wild excess. Many people who make pasta go upstairs, to the upper area, but I have nothing to do there, I'm not that kind. Everything is lawful. If the illusion of your life is to have a Ferrari and you have the money, buy it. Don't do it to prove your status. I bought a super bike, a Ferrari bike. The best, because that was my illusion.

-He often repeats that he has a classism towards the top and that he always transmitted it to his collaborators.

-Yes, I have an upper class classism, that is, upwards. I have always fled, sometimes in a childish way, from the posture of startups, it is something that resonates with me because it trivializes it a lot. Ours was 90% luck and 10% hard work, but that has no merit because anyone would have done it. Our merit was not limiting ourselves. The model did not exist on the entire planet Earth and what we did was think about the world. You don't have to be very smart, you just have to be smart enough. Wallapop's team was very suburban. He signed people without pedigree but with many capacities. I liked that they were from Cuenca, Logroño, no business schools. Always people like me. We laughed a lot at ourselves, at our success. We trivialized it and we were aware that we were lucky. I used to get very angry when the marketing people went to the Mobile soirees. He forbade it.

-Was it so they wouldn't deify themselves?

Yes, it seemed unworthy to gloat over your success. Any indication that I detected in my team of wanting to be cool I took it very badly. This has helped us a lot to keep our feet on the ground. It has helped us to have some offices in the Clot neighbourhood, outside of the ecosystem that enchants you. Being normal shielded us.

–They will persecute you to invest in startups.

-Yes a lot.

–And does it?

-Do not.

-Why?

I invest for love. I don't have a strategy. Now I'm helping a guy with a project, I don't know if it will work for him or not, but because I've connected with him. I don't know how to invest, nor do I like it.

In his last 'chemo' session, in the midst of a pandemic, he had a rush of energy. A group of company workers got together to launch a solidarity platform. It didn't quite work but his purpose now is to continue down that path.

I want to use my little talent to help others. It sounds naive, but I want to do it in a very professional way. The people who ask for help are in an extreme situation, they are the most vulnerable and it is stigmatic. I think people are essentially good but we don't have the channels to help effectively. Many of us are satisfied with giving the money to the NGO but what it costs is to get involved personally and that the best thing about helping is also how it comforts you. It would be about creating an effective tool to help us.

– Do you follow the policy?

-Yes a lot. When I listen to Ser in the morning it is as if it were my Save Me Deluxe.

Said like that, I don't know if it's good or bad.

-It is bad. You see that tension on both sides. Politicians hold the fate and well-being of many people in their hands. We deserve to put their egos somewhere else and sit down and talk in an argumentative way. The least that can be asked of a politician is the real and authentic intention of understanding with the rest. Someone has to turn this around. That is why what the candidate for Más Madrid has done has seemed good to me, who has talked about practical things, has lowered the tension and has moved away from the Save me Deluxe that was about communism or freedom.

The last thing she has bought in Wallapop is a motorcycle helmet. The first thing was the Playmobil pirate ship, a thorn in his childhood because he couldn't have it as a child. A colleague from the company gave it to him and it is in a window at the Wallapop headquarters, in those offices that are far from the startup incubators whose epicenter is the 22@ district. Far from design, in the Clot neighborhood, above an elevator company, on a street that nobody knows, as its founder likes to remember.