Mujeres emprendedoras Archives - ��ý Standout

Scoolinary, a recipe for bringing people together. Success stories

��ý Standout — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 08:04:34 +0000

Five entrepreneurs have turned their passion for gastronomy into Scoolinary, the world’s largest online cooking school. The team is: Vicente Fortea (production director), Maria Parareda (director of content), Martin Caleau (director of technology), Lorena Hidalgo (director of marketing & communication) and Jordi Ber (CEO). All of them are part of ��ý’s School of Founders (SoF).

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It has been said, “Cooking is the alchemy of love.” In 2020, that alchemy came together in the form of Scoolinary, an online cooking school now adding one new course per week to its growing catalog of more than 300 courses, with 6,500 lessons, 550 hours of video and 2,000 recipes and counting.

Scoolinary was conceived in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when half the planet was locked down at home. A lot of people suddenly decided to try their hand at cooking all kinds of new recipes, watching video tutorials online. Remember the global craze for bread baking?

At the time, serial entrepreneur Jordi Ber was looking to create “a purpose-driven, global, scalable project aimed at people accustomed to working with their hands.” In that moment, his business vision found its focus: cooking.

The right ingredients

To turn the idea into reality, Ber knew he needed to gather the right ingredients. He tapped Maria Parareda, founder of Creative Signatures, another startup related to online cooking classes. She joined as content director. Mutual friends put him in touch with Lorena Hidalgo, a skilled marketer and cook, and Vicente Fortea, a chef and gastronomy consultant. They became key members of the team. For tech expertise, Ber recruited a former colleague, Martin Caleau, with whom he had launched in 2009, a platform for finding home tradespeople.

The goal was for “one plus one to equal three,” says Ber. Although each resided in different parts of Spain — Madrid, Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca — the team had no problem organizing themselves remotely.

“We wanted to leverage our individual expertise and backgrounds to cover all the main pillars of the business,” says Parareda. “Although not all of us knew each other personally, our extensive experience in the field allowed us to work well together.”

For financing, they used some of their own savings, but this wouldn’t be enough to create all the quality content they needed. On top of their own funds, they secured investments from business angels and venture capitalists. And they obtained a loan from , the Spanish government body dedicated to supporting entrepreneurial endeavors.

Scaling the business

Scoolinary has amassed 28,000 paying users — a figure in line with the team’s growth expectations to date. Users are able to take their passion for gastronomy to a whole other level under the guidance of chefs who are internationally renowned, Michelin-starred and/or listed in ranking. For example, users can learn to cook shellfish with Spanish chef ; create technically precise dishes and aesthetically beautiful plating with Manhattan-based Australian chef ; or delve into the world of spices with , a specialist in Indian cuisine.

The team’s initial plan was to provide a training tool for the hospitality industry. “But we soon realized there was a great deal of interest from foodies and cooking enthusiasts in general, both from amateurs as well as knowledgeable chefs,” says Hidalgo. Pivoting in this direction has allowed them to achieve continuous growth.

Scoolinary has gone from being available only in Spanish to operating in other languages. “From the beginning, we were clear that we had to be able to internationalize the project,” says Caleau.

Artificial intelligence has been key to their scalability, allowing automatic subtitling and dubbing into other languages. Natural language processing enables AI assistants to answer queries or provide 24-hour assistance.

The power of tech

The pervasiveness of digitalization in society works in their favor. In addition to new AI tools helping to generate content, streaming platforms like Netflix have demonstrated the viability of subscription-based business models. Social media channels like Instagram have made haute cuisine go mainstream, spawning the phrase “phone eats first.”

Ber cites the as an example of “the democratizing power of technology.” Located in the northern region of Spain famous for its gastronomy, BCC is a nonprofit foundation that receives corporate sponsorship so they can offer courses, conferences and collaborate on culinary innovation projects and do research on gastronomy and nutrition. With the addition of an online component, people can now access training from wherever they are for as little as 6 euros a month, as opposed to attending in-person courses costing thousands of euros.

As tech accelerates content production and specialist knowledge becomes more universally available, the curation of content becomes paramount, so they can deliver content that is ever more relevant and accessible to users.

In the medium term, they expect to continue growing in the markets where they are already present, particularly in the Spanish- and English-speaking ones. “We will keep investing in the product, working hand-in-hand with the best to produce more and more content on global cuisine,” says Caleau. They also plan on increasing the experiences they offer, such as awarding qualifications, as they cultivate an ever more culturally diverse community united by cooking.

Learning to be leaders

The five Scoolinary partners are currently participating in the School of Founders, which ��ý launched in 2022 to equip entrepreneurs with the skills, knowledge and mindsets they need to transform their startups into large, purpose-driven companies. For Ber, it’s “an opportunity to improve as leaders, spend time together and grow as a group.” He considers such training to be vital, since “one isn’t born an entrepreneur but it’s something that can be learned.”

Fortea highlights how enriching it has been for him “to learn from other business experiences and discover that other entrepreneurs from diverse sectors have faced many of the same challenges that a project like ours entails.”

The five teammates share a vision of conscious capitalism, as advocated by the School of Founders’ Director . In this sense, they try to amplify the voices of marginalized professionals in the hospitality sector, and they plan to offer scholarships for training. In addition, they donate a percentage of sales to initiatives that mitigate climate change, acknowledging the impact of food production and food waste on the planet. Scoolinary has obtained certification verifying the company is meeting high standards of performance, accountability and transparency.

“We believe the creation of companies and jobs should generate wealth but also make a positive contribution to society,” says Ber. A healthy recipe for doing business today.

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Elena Betés. From dreaming of a different culture to founding Rastreator. Success stories

��ý Standout — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 17:05:32 +0000

Elena Betés is CEO of Dide.org, Vice President of Education at Red Ventures, founder of Rastreator, and holder of an ��ý MBA. She has two children.

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Elena Betés, founder of the insurance comparison platform and broker Rastreator, believes that, in her career, the “failures have been much more important than the successes.”��“The reason for this is that I have learned a lot from them. Above all, I’ve learned how to endure,” she clarifies.��

But something very important happened prior to those failures: she realized that the environment of a major international consulting firm like Arthur Andersen was not for her. She had experienced the glass ceilings��and confirmed that was not her world. “I wanted to live in an environment where I was the one making the rules,” she recalls.

It was at that point that she decided to do an , because she thought that was the best way to learn how to start a business or, at the very least, to clarify her ideas about what it meant to set up a business. Betés’ first company, PuntoSeguro, was created with funds from her friends, family, and classmates from her master’s degree. It was the first online insurance comparison platform and broker created in Spain.

“The business did not scale as quickly as we were expecting and, in addition, I linked it to another identical company that I started in Germany, backed by a European conglomerate, and it went bankrupt,” explains Betés. It was a moment that caused her to reflect and wonder “whether I really wanted to keep trying.”

Once she had decided, however, she changed her mentality. “I stopped being afraid of failing and started to feel as though I didn’t have anything left to lose.”��The way in which other people were betting their money on the projects that she wanted to lead also began to fill her with confidence: the best part was just around the corner.

Founding Rastreator

And then came Rastreator, or rather, Betés founded it, at arguably the most difficult moment. It was 2008, and the international financial crisis was spreading everywhere like a giant tsunami. The British multinational Admiral partnered with her in a venture which, at the start, relied on two major milestones: strong growth in Spain and a technological center in New Delhi, which Betés herself created. Mapfre invested in Rastreator in less than a year.

“It really was the opportunity that we had been looking for,” confirms the director, “to develop a unique culture in which both employees and clients were treated as authentic individuals.”��It wasn’t enough to offer excellent service, or to focus on the consumer. Betés wanted to go one step further.

Based on the success of Rastreator, Admiral entrusted her with the development of similar platforms in the United Kingdom and France, and committed to financing the international expansion of Rastreator, matching the investment that she was able to get from other investors. “I was able to get €20 million, and they contributed another €20 million,” she points out. Later on, in 2020, the platforms that the director had founded and developed were sold for €500 million.��

But not all these ventures were victories. In 2015, Admiral joined forces with Mapfre to move into major markets such as China, Turkey, India and Mexico. “And in all of these markets,” recalls Betés, “we were only really successful in Mexico. China, for example, became one of the failures that I have learned the most from in my career.”

“Failures have been much more important than successes in my career, because I have learned a lot from them. Above all, I’ve learned how to endure.”

Elena Betés, CEO of Dide.org, Vice President of Education at Red Ventures, founder of Rastreator, and ��ý MBA.

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Failure as fuel

Betés believes that failing has been one of her biggest “sources of inspiration.” And these ideas helped her convert her defeats into major drivers to continue moving forward:

1) Failures help me understand the future of the business. They are necessary.

2) Nothing starts or ends with a defeat. The game goes on until you concede.

3) Failures are the challenge life has given me. A challenge that I know I can and will overcome.

4) Defeats only weaken you when you don’t learn from them. Or when you believe you have nothing to learn.

This is real leadership. Real people, sharing valuable experiences and lessons learned from mistakes they’ve made.

A culture of people, for people

Betés recalls that, for her, it was not enough to launch a successful business, or to learn from her mistakes. She was just as passionate about creating a culture that respected “the authenticity of who you really are, promoting a flexible work-life balance, the conviction that obstacles are just challenges that can always be overcome, and the importance of attitude over aptitude.”

When the moment came to launch and expand Rastreator, she knew for sure: “I wanted a culture where we were all obsessed with excellence, and with being the best, but where we also knew why we were doing what we were doing, and everyone was doing it in their own way, not necessarily being uniform.” No one needed to be the same as anyone else, or dress like soldiers, or sleep in a dorm in order to feel like they were part of a winning organization that shared their dreams.

And these dreams came through in a shared culture that not only encouraged talent, but also a very concrete customer concept. And this is where Betés opted to put herself on the front line: “I decided to get stuck in, speaking directly with some of our users, offering them a telephone conversation with the CEO of Rastreator, during which I asked them to tell me what they expected from us and how we could help them more.”

But what about the leadership culture? What example did Betés want to set for her own staff, for the other directors, and for thousands of women beyond her company, whether they were directors or not?

In this sense, Betés has her priorities straight, “demonstrating that you can be both a good mother, although you sometimes miss some first teeth, and a groundbreaking leader of a multinational company that launches successful products onto the market at the same time.”

“The Elon Musk model of sleeping in the office is not only unnecessary in a world where you can work remotely and automate processes, it also isn’t sustainable for anyone,” she adds.

Betés spends her time seeking to find the best way to develop talent. As Vice President of Education at Red Ventures in the United States, she became ever more aware of “the need for diversity in companies,” in addition to the role women play in “making the difference, and creating new worlds and cultures in environments that were, until recently, exclusively male.” Due to her support of this cause, Betés won the International Women’s Entrepreneurial Challenge (IWEC) award in November 2022.

Recently, Betés became CEO of Dide.org, an edtech tool with the mission of becoming a global leader in educational inclusion. The tool detects a child’s strengths and weaknesses, allowing learning problems to be identified in a holistic way and facilitating actions that can be taken according to individual needs.

All these objectives and concerns are shared by ��ý, which has developed a wide range of courses and activities through the Women Win platform to support women like Betés in their personal and professional development and aspirations to lead.

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Women in leadership: How to cultivate women’s power in business

��ý Standout — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 14:02:23 +0000

Today, just 8% of Fortune 500 companies have a female CEO. Nurturing women’s careers is not only the fair and moral thing to do, argues����ý professor��, it is vital for businesses looking to survive in the global, female-led marketplace.

Cultivate the empowerment of women’s leadership

Decades of analysis reveal that certain steps can be taken to bring more women in, harness potential more effectively, and empower women to achieve their full leadership potential.

Here are Chinchilla’s research-based��suggestions for developing women in your company:

1. Acknowledge bias and stereotypes

You might think you treat men and women the same, but chances are you’re not fully aware of your own biases.

Senior executives and managers in particular should examine their own inherent prejudices – we all have them – and identify strategies to combat them.

A key part of this is performance evaluation.

Chinchilla’s research shows that men’s reviews are four times more likely to involve discussion around leadership attributes than women’s.��Men also receive four times as much developmental feedback and twice as much positive feedback as women do.

Chinchilla also points to the so-called��“stereo threat:”��a behavior that sees people underperform through fear of being stereotyped. Being mindful of these and other threats, says Chinchilla, can help drive empathy and inclusion in organizations.

She urges leaders to build a culture of openness in which female employees feel empowered to talk about sources of anxiety.

2. Overcome structural hurdles: tips for success

Quantify how much female talent is moving up the ladder. Many women, Chinchilla says, are trapped in “the frozen middle,” where their leadership potential is not released.

Guarantee gender balance in the hiring process��with clearly defined targets based on your company’s current needs.

Make sure performance standards and evaluation criteria are clear and consistent for everyone.

Conduct��regular payroll audits��to detect any gender-based salary imbalances.

And get more women on your board.��Boards of directors remain massively skewed towards men, with only 33.9 percent female representation. Research shows that the more women there are on the board of a corporation, the smaller its pay gap.

3. Being proactive

Create programs to identify, develop, and promote high-potential female employees.

Get rid of the rigid “corporate ladder” in favor of a more flexible “corporate lattice,” which allows for multiple paths that adapt to individuals and the changing needs of your firm.

Facilitate��work-life balance, not only by offering flextime, telecommuting, and the option of a part-time schedule, but also by making sure employees feel safe to take advantage of these policies.

Confirm that women are being mentored in a targeted way, according to their skills.

Openly encourage women to��break through the “glass ceiling”��(put in place by male-dominated structures that stem from the “old boy network”), and also��the “cement ceiling”��that women impose on themselves. This happens when women downplay their achievements and don’t go after opportunities until they feel 100 percent qualified to do so. Personal coaching sessions are one way to help women out of this “humility trap.”

Let everyone know how serious you are about elevating women. Changes should be spearheaded by the C-suite and framed as a strategic opportunity rather than an ad hoc HR initiative.

4. Get informed and reap the benefits

When companies empower women, they are simultaneously promoting values such as��empathy, flexibility and team unity.

And in so doing, they help drive their bottom line:��“A diverse culture that mirrors its markets tends to do better than homogenous competitors,”��says Chinchilla.

Discover the 13 questions to find out if you are a good leader.

Chinchilla and other��ý professors��are highly committed to studying and promoting diversity, and teaching leaders how to achieve it via��around the world.

One of the initiatives to spread this idea and promote training is the focused program on “Women on Boards of Directors” or the “Women and Leadership” program. Here you have all the information about training programs, initiatives and conferences for women in leadership.

��ý��has developed a wide range of courses and activities through the��Women Win��platform to support women in their personal and professional development and aspirations to lead.

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Elena de Benavides. Promoting innovation and entrepreneurship in the electricity sector. Success Stories

��ý Standout — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 07:02:32 +0000

After founding seven startups, Elena de Benavides now faces a greater challenge: coordinating innovation and entrepreneurship for Red Eléctrica de España.

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Elena de Benavides (PDD ’13) admits that, as of late, she can hardly find time to check her personal email.

Still under 40 years old, she has already founded seven startups, invested in 10 and served as investment director at Gala Ventures. But her latest challenge is even greater: since September she is coordinating activities related to open innovation and entrepreneurship for Red Eléctrica de España (REE), one of Spain’s biggest companies.

As REE’s Open Innovation and Entrepreneurship Lead, she is looking for entrepreneurs, ideas and projects that can contribute to profoundly transforming the company. In her quiver are a “venture capital fund that allows for investing in startups where there are synergies, accelerating startups with early-stage technologies that, if given support and assets from Red Eléctrica, could offer a distinctive value, and exploring new business models with more established companies”.

Without fear of the unknown

Benavides is quite aware that one of the greatest challenges she faces is knowing how to manage the unknown. No one knows with certainty where the electricity sector revolution is headed, but none of the main players within this sector can afford to stay put, to stop moving forward or to stop experimenting with less linear and unidirectional systems until, little by little, they figure out which track is the one they should be on.

And this, Benavides points out, “implies philosophical, cultural and technological challenges for the sector’s main stakeholders, from distributors to carriers, all the people involved in the system’s operation, and the customers, who should be aware of the consequences of their energy consumption.” In addition, operators such as REE are called on to play a crucial role in electrification of the economy, key in the fight against climate change. Artificial intelligence, big data, and the internet of things (IoT) are emerging as some of their allies.

“Innovation implies philosophical, cultural and technological challenges for the sector”.

Elena de Benavides (PDD’ 13).

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It is no small challenge, but then again, neither were Benavides’ previous professional endeavors. She has founded seven startups in a country where only 22% of these projects are spearheaded by women, and has served as director of investments within the venture capital and private equity sector, where female representation in positions of leadership is minimal.

Managing “emotional and economic mayhem” in startups

Among the toughest challenges that Benavides had to overcome as investment director at Gala Ventures was the “the professional change in itself of moving from the realm of entrepreneurship to the venture capital sector, where leadership positions are typically held by finance experts, and where the management of the emotional and economic mayhem of the startup teams you’re investing in and which later begin to take off comes into play, and, lastly, creating an area within Gala where the particularities of this type of business operation could be better understood.”

While she was facing these challenges, the sector as a whole experienced, in the space of just a few years, a sudden change: “We professionalized quickly, many people who we could co-invest and associate with came onto the scene, and the money that came in multiplied.” She also admits that with so much capital, “some companies’ valuations skyrocketed beyond reasonable amounts.”

She knows the market well because in 2017 she had invested, directly and personally, in projects such as Zapiens Tribe, which manages knowledge and human resources; fintech Rebellion; and photo app Mimento.

She had arrived at Gala Ventures after serving as CEO of the most successful startup she has managed to date. According to Benavides, “the International Institute of Phlebology allowed us to improve the quality of life of many people with venous pathologies.” How? Essentially, by “offering an injectable solution that we had patented which prevented them from having to go through surgery”.

Her joining the institute and her time there from 2010 to 2014 can be explained by the same three factors that have prompted Benavides to participate in startups: “Completely understanding the business model and the social need that it meets, that there be an economic exchange between the company and its customers and, lastly, collaboration and total trust in the team”.

Importance of training

A few months before making the switch to the venture capital firm Gala Venture, while acting as CEO at the International Institute of Phlebology, Benavides completed ��ý’s Programa de Desarrollo Directivo (PDD is equivalent in English to ). Then, in 2013, “the program gave me not only new knowledge, but it also helped me open my mind, to broaden my vision of seeing different areas within a company in a very practical way, and to understand, for example, finances, even though I’m not a finance specialist.

“For me,” she says, “it was a truly formative experience, and I continue to have ties to the school because I belong to its network of investors and entrepreneurs, I receive information on specialized programs that can complete my knowledge and we’ve even created a small investment vehicle with my former PDD classmates that allows us to stay up to date on what’s happening in different sectors.”

Benavides forms part of ��ý’s Business Angels Network, which brings investors together with startups, and has also been a mentor in ��ý Women Angels, which promotes investment by women.

��ý��has developed a wide range of courses and activities through the��Women Win��platform to support women like Elena in their personal and professional development and aspirations to lead.

Elena de Benavides: 3 keys to remember

The main challenge: managing the unknown.��

Collaboration with and total trust in the team.��

Training is essential: it helps to open your mind and gives you knowledge that you lacked.��

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Amna Alyamani. Empowering Saudi women. Success stories

��ý Standout — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 11:53:51 +0000

Amna Alyamani, an MBA graduate, returned to her home country of Saudi Arabia to set up a bakery-café that employs only women.

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Amna Alyamani returned to Saudi Arabia after finishing her MBA, where she dreamed of empowering women and putting into action her new entrepreneurial skills – one croissant at a time.

Alyamani, a Class of 2019 MBA, is set up a bakery-café in her home city of Jeddah that employs only women: three the first year, and another six the following year. If all goes well, in the third year she will begin franchising, with an estimated nine employees per location.

Amna Bakery was founded in Sep ’19 on the grounds that the hospitality industry in Saudi Arabia needs to be more inclusive, empowering women to learn and grow in the industry.

But if the scale is initially small, the ambitions are not. “The objective is to empower women and create jobs,” she says. As someone who trained formally as a pastry chef, she wants to start small and scale once quality and training standards are in place.

The bakery produces high-quality but reasonably priced breads, croissants and other pastries, as well as sweets such as brownies, cookies and cakes. It sells fresh juices, teas and weekly roasted coffee as well. Her production estimate for the first year was around 90,000 units.

That’s 90,000 brownies, cookies and pieces of cake produced by women who historically have had limited opportunities in the labor market but who in recent years have been allowed to work in sectors, such as hospitality, once closed to them.�� “I want to empower more people to work,” she says. “I will give you the tools and the training to be able to work.”

Slipping through cracks in the labor market

It’s a hopeful return to Saudi Arabia for Alyamani, who earned a BA in Hospitality Management and Marketing from the Glion Institute of Higher Education in Switzerland and has a certificate in Basic Patisserie from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.

After she finished her undergraduate degree, Alyamani decided to go back to Saudi Arabia to work in the food sector, with the idea of learning the industry from the ground up. But that plan was thwarted by strict regulations limiting what Saudi women are allowed to do in the workplace.

Instead, she began working in the marketing department of Al Baik, a Jeddah-based fast food chain specializing in fried chicken and shrimp. Of the 5,500 employees of Al Baik at the time, only three were women, including two daughters of the owners. “Women weren’t really allowed to work in the hospitality sector,” she says.

But in recent years, the kingdom has introduced some tentative economic and social reforms, in the hopes of preparing the economy for a post-oil age. While last year’s lifting of the ban on women driving has received much media attention, just as important are recent measures to expand their role in the workplace.

They are reforms born, at least in part, of necessity: While unemployment for Saudi men is just under 7%, according to official statistics, joblessness among Saudi women is more than 30%.

“It taught me to have a voice”

After five years with Al Baik, Alyamani realized she wanted to strike out on her own. She also realized she didn’t have the business skills to do so. “I realized I didn’t know what I needed to know to set up my own business,” she says. “Entrepreneurship requires a lot of mental strength.”

She decided an would be her best bet, but the path to her MBA was difficult, and she has found the coursework challenging. “But the first ‘A’ I got was in entrepreneurship, so I knew I was on the right track,” she says.

A summer between the first and second years of her MBA spent working in a Paris-based bread factory in the mornings and consulting for a restaurant looking to expand in the afternoons, strengthened her resolve to set up a bakery after graduation.

Beyond acquiring the skills and knowledge to set up and run her own business, the case method used at ��ý, with its real-life focus and its reliance on discussion, has taught her to speak her mind and challenge the opinions of others. “It taught me to have a voice and to speak up,” she says.

��ý��has developed a wide range of courses and activities through the��Women Win platform to support women like Amna in their personal and professional development and aspirations to lead.

“I look at the person who I was before and who I am now and I’m so happy. I’ve never been more ready.”

Amna Alyamani (MBA ’19)

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5 tips from Amna on becoming an entrepreneur amid adversity

Find your voice, make yourself heard and say what you think
Be aware of your mental strengths and work on them
Train, prepare and learn for the future
Follow your gut instinct and don’t be discouraged by others
Plan based on what you believe in — it’s far more effective (and rewarding) than planning on “going viral”

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