Linqia Stars are moving to their new office

The Linqia Star Team is growing and growing. After only 8 months of operations we already had to search for more office space.

Just before our first teambuilding exercise and heading off to our first company retreat in the wonderful Hotel ElConvent at Costa Brava, we switched offices via full speed packing and unpacking within two hours. Years ago moving office automatically meant a lot of grief. Huge IT devices, Folders, Papers, Books and a lot of office stationary to be carried around. In our case – since Maria, our CEO, is striving for a paperless office – we could make the speed office move happen by just filling up a quarter of a minivan !

We moved from the district of Gracia 800 meters south to the vibrant heart of Barcelona where Paseig de Gracia, Diagonal and Gran de Gracia meet. We are absolutely happy here and have deeply fallen in love with our new office – which provides us with a sunny balcony, a fully equipped kitchen and very nice new office neighbours. We are based in the international office center GG15 hosting Start Up companies like Parship, Mangotv or Ohmtv. The next round of growth, development and FUN has started!!

Our new address is:

Gran de Gracia 15, 2ª 1º
08012 Barcelona

The making of Linqia's top five values

The vision of our co-founder Christopher Pommerening - a fellow EO member, is for Barcelona to become the entrepreneurial hub for ambitious new startups. Part of this vision included Linqia serving as a case study for how to create the ideal successful company without all the pitfalls and obvious mistakes he's seen time and again.

To kick off this process we invited our team of 9 Linqia Stars to experience a weekend retreat like no other. The aim was to ensure total alignment amongst the team in respect to what Linqia is, why was Linqia created, our company values and our top five priorities.

We invited one of the most talented strategic facilitators JC Duarte to share the weekend in El Convent in the Costa Brava last weekend with our team (Daniela, Andi, Edwina, Christian, Sven, Jean Michelle, Marco and me).

The process of creating the company values is a simple and extraordinary experience. JC asked each team member to share the qualities of a 'Linqia Star' and the qualities of a 'Black Hole'. We shared words which reflected people we'd like to work with (team member, supplier, clients, investor, etc) and people we wouldn't want to work with.



As you can see, it's quite a long list! The process which follows is to ensure that each undesired trait is listed in the desired list (the black words). Once the 'Best Linqia Star' list is finalised, we narrowed down the list grouping similar traits - for example caring, kind and warm could be grouped under the word 'Empathetic'. Narrowing the list to 13 traits and then voted each on our top five.

The outcome? We look for Linqia stars who are Passionate, Team Player, Authentic, Resourceful, Fun and Healthy.

Jeremiah Owyang in Barcelona!

In traditional starfish style the first statement Jeremiah Owyang proclaimed to a small group of people at the Buda Bar in Barcelona last week was "this event is not about me... it's about the community". I asked Jeremiah how he manages to get by with the 1,000's of people he meets, the 100's blog posts, 300 emails plus a day and holding a full time job at Forresters . He answered "I go to sleep around midnight, wake up at 2am, blog for a few hours to keep up with the rest of the world and then get up around 7am".

If there's one thing I've learned about attending years of networking events is to focus on quality conversations rather than saying "hi bye" to everybody. Two people left a notable impression on me. Dan Calladine - Research Director at Isobar for his incredible outlook on life which you can read at his blog. Thanks Dan - now I know who owns the URL www.hop-skip-jump.com . And secondly, Simon McDermott from Attentio who wins the award for asking the best questions. Never give up being inquisitive Lennert - it's the one secret trait that most people neglect.

Read Jeremiah's post for a flavor of what we experienced and how "It’s obvious from the culture in Barcelona that it’s a community of sharing". . Jeremiah is a true catalyst inspires others to take action.