Serial entrepreneur Carlos Barrabés is the founder of Barrabés.com, an e-commerce platform for ski and mountain gear. A key figure in introducing and popularizing the Internet in Spain, he is an expert on digital innovation and its implication for society. Ashoka’s Valeria Budinich caught up with Carlos to discuss how the world is changing fundamentally and what this means for new leadership and ways of organizing.

Valeria Budinich: When did you discover that you were an entrepreneur or that you wanted to be one?

Carlos Barrabés: My parents owned a shop where I used to spend a lot of time playing.  I woke up early with my parents to open the store and I would go home when we closed. So my entrepreneurial spirit – that way of life – was ingrained in my culture. It was, in fact, my family’s way of life.

Budinich: When we talk about entrepreneurs creating a new world, what was the first world that you created?

Barrabés: My first world was making a radio program with the loudspeakers in my school. I was 16 years old. You couldn’t hear very well, but it really excited me as a means of communicating with my immediate world. I’m from a very small town in the mountains, far away from the big cities, and I studied in a boarding school – so I always felt the need to express myself because I didn’t find that many avenues. For me, entrepreneurship has always been a medium of communication and expression. It also has an incredible element of introspection. Deep down, we create when we have something internal that we want to solve. I’ve always done the things that I felt I needed to do. ‘Doing things,’ creating companies and projects, is the way I like to be in the world.

Budinich: Can you point to a time when something you thought would work didn’t? What did you learn from that experience?

Barrabés: Yes, of course. Something that I was very interested in was Second Life. I participated in many interesting Second Life projects and dedicated a lot of time to understanding it. The truth is that once the online social world found its grounding with Facebook, what I had learned became very useful, but in the moment, I thought that it was bigger than it was. The philosophy stuck with me, but the project itself did not. And that happens! It’s normal to fail. In fact, it’s necessary. If you don’t fail it’s because you did not risk enough, and if you didn’t risk enough it’s because you didn’t put your whole self out there.

Budinich: You were one of the main players in bringing the Internet to Spain. Looking back, what are the most significant contributions that you and your team made?

Barrabés: That’s hard to say. We had a vision from the beginning not to keep what we knew to ourselves. I wanted to spread the word and my team felt the same way so I gave many talks – I’ve talked to well over 100,000 people in my life. So really, the vocation of storyteller evangelist was there from the beginning. We were fully aware that we had something that could make the world a better place. That is why we set out to tell the story and it’s why we continue to tell it today. It’s important to remember that the new world of the Internet is still very young. We are in the first stage which is why it should be regulated and understood as a step towards a different world where everyone is a player, where everyone gets to participate. The next phase of digitization will bring huge opportunities. Big players like Facebook are first edition monopolies