This article was written by Analía Plaza and first published in Teknautas, the tech section of El Confidencial. Translated and republished here with consent from El Confidencial.
Suddenly, they heard someone screaming and running around the office. “I was with the commercial director and asked: what’s going on? She was in shock and she told me: ‘I’ve just seen Pep grabbing Alex by his neck and pushing him into the wall’“. Pep’s office has glass walls: in one of many meetings, Pep did not agree with Alexandre, his advisor, and he grabbed him. The rest of the company saw it. “They’re always running one after the other,” several workers recall. “Alex would leave the office and Pep would be running right behind him”.
The scene is neither new nor anecdotal. “We’ve had many arguments with shouts and blows, as in most startups,” says Pep. “People at Facebook also threw computers at each other”.
Pep Gómez is 23 and runs a company of 91 employees. The company’s headquarters are in Madrid, but Fever also has offices in London and New York City. Most employees and teams (sales, product, operations and marketing) are located in the Spanish capital. The product is Fever, an app that allows users to find interesting plans in a limited number of cities and to buy tickets, from dining out to movies, concerts or theater plays.
Founded in June 2011, Fever has raised more than $10 million from VCs and business angels: its $8 million Series B ranks amongst the top-10 in the country in 2015, and renowned Venture Capital firms such as Accel Partners or Fidelity have backed the startup.
Pep leaves his laptop on the table and asks for an iced tea before starting to talk. Fever’s history is long and complex: in four years, the company has gone through two capitals (Barcelona and then Madrid), opened two international offices, employed over 160 people and reached three million app downloads. It has attracted the attention of international investors, local ones (professional football players Guti and Sergio Ramos, Alejandro Sanz and the co-founder of idealista, Bernardo Hernandez) and a diverse pool of talented employees from companies like Tuenti or Google, as well as the the co-founders of Series Yonkis and people coming out of Stanford or MIT.
Despite starting the company just 4 years ago, Pep is just 23. He’s been lucky, he says, because he made mistakes and he’s had the opportunity to amend them. “There’s a ton of very good people trying this and who have not had the same level of luck. You screw up once and you never get another chance. I had it“. Pep feels lucky: starting a business in Spain is not easy, particularly at such a young age, and he’s got the funding and team to do it. “When nobody believed in me I had to look for opportunities on my own. If you see Fever’s first and last pitch, they barely have anything in common”, he says.
“And yet, I still managed to get people to trust me.”
Castellon, September 2009: a successful event
“I met Pep in the summer of 2009,” says Bernardo Hernández in a Skype call from New York. “I got an email inviting me to give a talk at the University of Castellón and I accepted”.
Iniciador was one of the first events for entrepreneurs in Spain. It started in March 2007 in Madrid, continued in Barcelona in 2008 and in 2009 it had expanded to 20 more cities. On May 25 of that year, Iniciador’s first edition was being led by Rodolfo Carpintier. For the second, the organizers wanted Bernardo, then head of marketing at Google. As co-founder of idealista, 11870 and the first investor in Tuenti, Bernardo is one of the most respected internet figures in Spain.
“Everything was being managed by a guy called Pep Gomez” he explains. “I came to Valencia by AVE (Spain’s fast trains) and I was hoping to find a man of at least 35 years old. But what I found was a boy that was just 17. ‘¿Pep Gomez?‘ Yes, it’s me‘. I do not know if I said it or only thought about it, ‘Where’s your father?’. And he said ‘No, no, it’s just me!’. ‘Are you the one who has sent me all those emails?’ ‘Yes!’“.
Pep was born in 1992 in Castellon. He was a good student, although he admits he was the “typical kid who always bothered others” and by the time he reached high school, when he “found what he was studying interesting”, he changed. His parents own a hotel in a rural area of Spain and they always paid special attention to his education. He studied English and classical music until age 12 and he then devoted himself to jazz. Music is one of his great passions and the one that introduced him to the world of the internet: with his first Macbook, in 2007, he started a music podcast.
“I spent many hours working on it and the results were good. I learned that there were other podcasts out there because we’d mention each other on air”, he explains. “Since I had a blog, I went to the ‘Evento Blog’ (one of the first internet and blog-centric events in Spain). It was amazing and I kept in touch with the people that I met there“. In 2008 he launched a blog network and participated in the coordination of Campus Party, at the time the biggest LAN party in the country.
“I became interested by the figure of the entrepreneur: a guy who starts something, makes money and does what he likes. I’ve always seen my father as someone who does not believe that to be happy you need money. And that’s ok, but you can have a hard time if you don’t have money. I thought: I’m seeing people building projects, selling them and not having to worry about money anymore”, he recalls. “You sacrifice a few years of your life and then you have enough in the bank to not have to worry about searching for a job”.
Infected with the entrepreneurial spirit and with two other organizers, Pep started running Iniciador in Castellon. They found sponsors, the support of the City and the University Jaume I and Bernardo as their first guest. The September 25, 2009 edition was held in Castellon and more than 1,000 people attended. It was a success that many remember in the Mediterranean Spanish city.
“It was unbelievable,” Bernardo remembers. “The city major was there, Alberto Fabra (Pep’s cousin) who would then go on to become president of the Comunidad de Valencia was also an attendee. I thought ‘what this guy has done is incredible’. I stayed for the night, we had a few drinks and I told him: why don’t you come to San Francisco?“
In San Francisco Bernardo led StepOne Ventures, an organisation that gave scholarships to talented Spanish engineers and offered them jobs at startups in the city and in New York. The program is called Youth with a Future (Jóvenes con Futuro) and Bernardo needed someone to help him, so he asked Pep if he’d like to receive one of the scholarships. After finishing high school and the day right after he passed is university entry exams, Pep flew to the US.
San Francisco, June 2010: I don’t want to go to college
“I had a big house and I invited him to stay. He worked and learned a lot”, Bernardo says. “In the middle of the summer, he decided to stay and started considering applying to Stanford or Berkeley to study computer science. It was too late to enter, so he thought about waiting a year and reapplying then“.
Pep called his parents to tell them. Worried, they talked to Bernardo, who seemed as someone they could trust. In this conversation, he told them that staying in the US was a good choice for Pep.
“I told them that I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but that I knew going back to Spain was not in my plans. The chances of learning a lot in the US were unmatchable”, Pep adds. “I told Bernardo about my plans and he said I needed to go to college. He could give me a job for one year, but after that I should go back to school. I didn’t want to. Right then Peter Thiel launched 20 under 20, a program that gives $100,000 to 20 young kids so that they skip college. I thought: If Peter Thiel says that going to school is not necessary…”
“One day he said: I don’t want to study, I want to build a company”
StepOne connected Pep to many Silicon Valley workers and companies. He bought an iPhone, he moved into an apartment with an Uber employee and started paying increasing attention to the world of apps. “I saw that many people were building all kinds of monopolies on mobile, from different industries. It was a new business that few people knew about, but it was going to be huge”.
“He was very curious and started making lots of contacts,” says Bernardo. “And one day he said: I don’t want to study. I want to start a company”.
Hurricane Party was SXSW 2011’s most popular app. It was used to view, create and share events, to know where the best parties were around town. Hurricane Party burned $100,000 from investors and had to shut down: its founders, originally from Austin, explained their failures in public, built Forecast (a new app to share plans with friends) and again ran out of money and had to close shop.
But Pep and Bernardo liked the idea of seeing on your phone, on a map, where people were and where they would go. “I worked in Google Local and Maps and found it interesting,” says Bernardo. “Pep had some ideas and I suggested to take over Planetaki, a Tumblr-like product we were about to close, or to try to replicate Hurricane model. He chose the latter. At that meeting we selected the name of the company“.
Barcelona, June 2011: here comes SeriesYonkis
Kzemos Technologies, the name of the company behind Fever, stems from “what we do” (in Spanish) and was registered in Barcelona on June 15, 2011. On July 14 the company decided to name Bernardo as president and CEO and Pep and Jordi Tamargo as directors. Still in San Francisco and through a mutual friend, Pep met Jordi and David Martinez, co-founders of SeriesYonkis. Due to problems with their third partner, Alexis Hoepfner, David and Jordi had left the company that summer, sold its part and joined Fever. Jordi, who does not speak about projects he’s no longer involved with, declined to be interviewed for this article.
“At first it was called Kzemos, but a designer suggested the name Fever”, says Pep. Pep moved from San Francisco to Barcelona, opened its first office and raised a small amount of capital from FFF. “I had savings and my colleagues had some money they’d made at Series Yonkis, but I owned most of the company because it was my idea and I had built it. We raised €100,000 (Bernardo was our first investor) and we worked with some freelancers for a few months”.
On August 24 Pep was named president of the company. In September, he announced on Twitter that he was traveling to Madrid to recruit engineers. His pitch was attractive: it had the backing of Bernardo, the participation of Series Yonkis’ founders (one of the most visited sites in Spain) and Fever, like Tuenti, could be a hit among young people. The first team was, according to sources close to the company, one of the best in the country: Oriol Blanc had built ING Direct’s app, Javier Soto, now at Twitter, minube’s (which was selected by Apple as the app of the year in Spain), Israel Ferrer, also a Twitter engineer nowadays, was a talented Android developer and Pablo Lopez, the company’s CTO, came from Tuenti.
With the money they had, an office and a good team, the next step was to build the app.
“There was never a concrete plan about when to launch the app”, an employee recalls. “We had December 15 as the date for the beta. The version we had could be used, but they changed their minds“. Fever had a hard time defining itself: first it served as a way to see how many people were in clubs and later it focused on sharing photos. They tried to replicate Banjo (an app to find people and activities around you) and even Badoo (dating).
Employees was often shared among employees, crossing the faces of those who had left.
“Pep did not have a clear product vision”, says another former employee. “He wanted a company that would push him into a select group of young successful entrepreneurs and did not care what kind of app would take him there. We knew it was an app to make plans, but it was unclear if it was to chat, invite people to drinks, or to upload photos or share your location. Launch dates were always pushed back in order to change the app“. As there was no product yet but the company needed to create excitement amongst potential users, in January the sent a press release about Series Yonkis: Jordi and David officially announced that they had sold their stake in the company and joined Fever.
The lack of vision discouraged the team and until May of the following year the app was not launched. Many employees had already left by then. “I had a good time there and I would have stayed, but I wasn’t sure what we were doing”, a former employee said. “The problem is not that the team was disjointed, but that they could not put up with Pep. It was difficult to work alongside him. He was 19, had never had a job or boss, and was unstable and aggressive”, says another employee.
“In March 2012 we started working seriously to launch the app”, says Pep. They also looked for more capital. After raising money from FFF, they received a €1 million seed investment from several investors.
Madrid, July 2012: back to the beginning
Although the first version of Fever was published on the App Store on May 26 2012, the company’s team would explode soon after: in July several employees (two of them do not include Fever on their LinkedIn profiles and thus don’t appear in the graph below) left, including Jordi and David.
“The amount of work that I put at stake, versus the amount of work expected of Jordi and David, was not the same. They didn’t have as much interest in the project and we parted ways. We launched the product, but the atmosphere at the company suffered and it was not the same”, Pep recalls. “We moved to Madrid. It was a bad summer and I went through a brutal depression. It was my dream and I was seeing that in the end…“
Fever at that time was an app to make plans, but also something similar to Happn or Wibbi -the app created by the son of Spain’s former prime minister José María Aznar- which allowed users to see people around you and start chatting to them. In this talk by Pep in 2012 at EBE there are screenshots of it. Due to the app being rushed and having several bugs, the company decided to withdraw the app from Apple’s App Store between July 2 and August 24.
Starting in August, the product got rebuilt. “The CTO left,” says Matias Surdi, a backend engineer that worked at Fever between August 2012 and January 2013 and who then went to Microsoft. “We kept what the previous team had created. The platform was built in Ruby and it was difficult to take over a project in a programming language in which we had no experience. My position was: either give us six months to learn or we’ll make it from the ground up“. Pep took the second option and Fever was rebuilt in python. Meanwhile, other workers were busy creating a local database of Madrid.
That team also ended up leaving. “Everyone went through the same process”, a former employee remembers. “The atmosphere at the company was very good, but people got tired of seeing that there was no vision and that things changed very quickly”.
Graph: Employee turnover in Fever
(The length of the bars indicate the length of employee’s tenure at Fever. Graph created using Graphext)
“There was so much bad legacy at the company that it didn’t work out”, Pep says. “When you start a company it’s difficult to do well from the beginning.” Did such a high employee turnover affect the image of the company? “I think so, but facts prove things. We changed, we fixed it and we created a team that works. In February 2013 we raised more capital and we had a product to launch. Our first version of Fever, huh? First new Fever“.
Madrid, summer 2013: we are a serious company
The spring served for three things: to introduce new members to the project, to raise another million euros and to publish a redesigned version of the app.
Alexandre Perez Casares has a degree in industrial engineering and won the National Prize of Industrial Engineering. He graduated, joined consulting firm McKinsey and won a scholarship to go to Harvard to do a Masters in Public Administration (MPA) combined with an MBA at Stanford. There he collaborated with Blink, a Spanish app similar to Hotel Tonight app that ended up being acquired by Groupon, and met Bernardo. Bernardo introduced him to Pep. Alexandre, who was in London working on a mutual fund, joined Fever as an advisor.
By then Fever had spent almost all the capital it had raised and needed more. With the help of Alexandre’s contacts in the finance world and Borja de la Rica -the nephew of Endesa’s president- as an investor, Fever received another million euros.
“Investors saw the product and said: we’ll give you more. 95% of our first investors gave us more money. It’s an interesting fact”, Pep says.
Although between April and July 2013 the app disappeared from the iPhone App Store, on March 25 of that year the company released its first Android app: the company had a product, capital and a team. Those in charge of mapping Madrid’s bars and clubs moved to the content team. Jaime de la Torre (today at Airbnb) also joined the company as chief operating officer, helping Pep, Alexandre and Borja de la Rica in the management of the company. “One of my jobs”, he says, “was to hire and structure the teams and departments”.
That summer Bernardo also participated in the day-to-day operations of the company: he’d left Google in May and he traveled to Madrid to help in the redesigning the product and the new office located near Madrid’s famous Puerta de Alcalá.
“Pep went from Barcelona to Madrid with all the burden and he deserves all merit. But he has no experience, he likes taking shortcuts and it’s not easy for him to have a long-term vision about things. He doesn’t know how to build teams or to motivate people that are older than him”, Bernardo notes.
“The product was bad, so in those three months I brought in a team of designers [Adrian Mato and Danny Saltarén], built the basis of the current app and established a senior management team. I pretty much went through the same stuff with Zaryn [Dentzel] in Tuenti: as chairman of the board, I have an important job as a mentor. Pep is very good and has my same entrepreneurial nature. But for these young people to grow up I can’t be present all the time. We considered the possibility of me being president and him CEO, but in the end it would end up being me who would manage the company and that would limit his development as an entrepreneur. These are roads that he has to discover alone“. On August 7, Bernardo announced that he was returning to San Francisco to lead the product team at Flickr under Marissa Mayer’s leadership.
Gradually, Fever grew. It already was an app for making plans with a marketplace model: a platform that connects supply (plans) with demand (people) and charges a fee per transaction (when a user purchases a plan). The company sought businesses that would include their local events in the app and people who wanted to buy them. Depending on the business, they charged a fee or not.
“We were looking for trendy bars and clubs and we offered them to put their events in the app. Most said yes”, Jaime remembers. To acquire users the company had the idea of putting together private events: they’d hold concerts in the office and invited influencers and users. “These were secret, difficult to access and had a big impact.”
“To attend you had to download the app. It was rudimentary but it worked. All user acquisition came from word of mouth. Bernardo insisted on this“, says Pep. “We had about 30,000 users and, since October, everything started growing”.
New York, October 2013: New Market
On October 24 2013 Fever opened in New York. Angel Caride (formerly of Google) and Clark Winter, a contact of Bernardo, started working in the company’s NYC office. Jaime coordinated everything from Madrid. Borja disassociated itself from day-to-day operations (he’s still an investor) and Alexandre continued to work hand in hand with Pep.
The app’s launch in the Big Apple was not a success: until then it had been manually acquiring users and this model couldn’t be replicated in NYC. Madrid continued growing at healthy rates.
“The company grew and needed someone to provide the right metrics to investors”, says Sergio Aguado, who joined in October 2013. The more plans and users, the more data to measure. Sergio organised the company’s metrics: acquisition, behaviour and recurrence. Also the cost per customer (CAC) and lifetime value (LTV). In most companies, there’s a healthy business when LTV is greater than CAC: that is, when a customer generates more income than what it costs to acquire him or her. Over time, these metrics were refined.
“I saw a job for the same position I had, which was surprising. There was a reason: they wanted a data magician“, Sergio explains. “The term they liked to use was ‘sophisticated data’. They needed a statistician that knew how to sell data, because VCs and investors required someone more experienced. At the time, that figure was easier to find in the US than in Spain”.
In March 2014 Fever published a version of the app built by the designers Bernardo recommended. “The task that we had given to the team was: we have enough cash to survive for 6 months. Nobody is going to give us any more. You have to make a better product to improve the data and figures we have“, Pep adds. “We launched it and we focused a lot on marketing it”.
Sergio left Fever that month. Like most employees, he was making €300 a month while on probation period [depending on the person, the salary and length of the probation could go from one month to one year] and the offer he received was not what he expected. “800 euros. I said it was insufficient and I was offered 1,000 until the company raised a Series A. They used the ‘until we raise a Series A’ all the time. I’d been hearing that since October and I got burnt. I did like my job and the team, though“.
To attract the attention of new investors, on May 7 2014 the company announced the three million it had already raised as if it was new capital and the launch of the app in New York. Several international media outlets (Business Insider, Techcrunch and Wall Street Journal) published it. Thereafter, Fever focused on filling up the app with plans and users to grow and reach a real Series A.
Spain, April 2014: stewardesses, growth
“We did everything”, says a former employee. “We gave away vouchers for daily menus at restaurants, we had hostesses at bars offering users to download the app. We needed to show investors that we knew how to get a low CAC“.
The summer of 2014 was the summer of the Fever hostesses in Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona. “We had an army of 150 in Madrid and 100 in Valencia,” he continues. For €12.5 per hour and €1 per download, they had to get people to download the app: in return they’d give out sunglasses or €5 discount vouchers.
Giving out sunglasses in exchange for downloads was a big way acquiring users.
Every hostess had a code to count her downloads (some would publish the code to get more) and get paid: although two consulted hostesses recognize that the hourly rate is higher than the industry standard, delays in payments and trouble collecting commission made them angry. Several employees rebelled and went to the office to complain, and were reassured that the money came from the US and that it would take a few days to arrive. With an additional cash contribution from investors, the company was able to pay them.
Hostesses were able to achieve many downloads. There were also ads on TV (fire paid and then through media for equity deals with Atresmedia) and ads in Madrid’s subway, where they managed to pay one euro per download.
But hostesses are expensive, ads don’t generate as many downloads (they only amplify the impact of other marketing actions) and the head of marketing left the company, forcing Fever to focus on online advertising.
The growth hacker job posting called the attention of Miriam Muros, who had previously worked at Tuenti and had launched her own startup. She decided to give it a shot. “They wanted to raise a Series A as fast as possible and needed 40% increases across all metrics”, she says. “They gave me complete freedom to achieve that”.
What were Fever’s techniques? In addition to coupons for users (if you invited a friend you’d each get €5), Miriam always talks about Tinder’s script, a clever hack. “We used to match all users and, when there was mutual interest, we’d send notifications suggesting “let’s do something together: why don’t you download Fever and choose a free plan?”.
Then they invested in Facebook ads. “Pep met Francisco Hein, who at the time worked at Happn, and he explained to us his techniques”. Happn is an app to flirt with people that you’ve crossed paths with, and in six months it grew so much that it raised €8 million from VCs. Part of the success was due to Francisco’s work, who is an expert in using Facebook’s advertising tools and network. He’d end up joining Fever in January.
“We saw a tremendous opportunity. The more money we were spending, the more users we had. If we were able to optimise this, we’d achieve a very low CAC”, Miriam recalls. “I focused on reengagement, which meant getting existing users to make free plans and to come back to the app”.
With emails, contests and striking notifications -one example: On December 28 (April Fools in Spain) they sent a “you’ve won a trip to New York!” message to users, who would then click on the notification to find out that it was a prank and all users got was a voucher- Miriam and Icíar Mestre, who was the head of operations, increased user retention significantly.
That was on users’ side, but the company also had to get bars, clubs and businesses on board. “The idea was to increase the supply side of things as much as possible, so that investors would see that there were many people willing to collaborate with us”, a former employee says. Depending on the nature of the partner or business, Fever charges a 10 to 25 per cent commission (although at the beginning it didn’t use to charge anything at all). There are restaurants, cultural activities and tickets to movies. Despite the fact that beauty and health-related plans have associated a higher commission than restaurants (and that’s why there are so many on Groupon-like sites), Pep insists that Fever is not Groupon (you don’t join because of the discount, but to discover new plans) and that’s why there are so few in the app.
“There was a rush to acquire new users”, says another former employee. “They just wanted me for that, like interns, and his answer in an email -‘focus on acquisition and forget all the nonsense’- was the last thing I needed”. Six months later, he left.
Sales jobs at Fever were based on results and that’s why many would end up departing. “A girl that worked in the sales department was not acquiring new partners and wasn’t commissioning either. We sat down with her and we told her: this is not working and you have two weeks to fix it. She left. Do you think in those cases the company is firing her or is she leaving because she wants to?”, Pep asks himself. “That person wasn’t worth it. You set objectives and goals and these were not being met”.
The other main reason many left Fever were the type of internships the company offered and low salaries. “You join as an intern and, if they think you’re valid, they let you stay with a very low salary”, says another former sales employee. “Then they set goals and you have to fight to get paid. A new manager joined and he needed to win the attention of the executives, so he set impossible goals and people were burned. In the end, everybody leaves this company”.
In the engineering team, which had very high turnover in 2012, there are no longer “such big problems”, says Ismael Esteban, ex-Tuenti and now Fever’s CTO. “We have very talented people in the team. I think the main problem was that the talent was excessive at an early stage. Managing engineers is complicated, but we are improving. They treat us very well: it’s not that they treat us better than the rest, but the budget per employee in the team is higher“. The fact that engineers’ salary is higher other positions is common in the industry. “It’s not a bad place to work. You have to work hard, but the Fever I saw when I joined was not the one that most people talked about”, says Alejandro Perezpayá, who started as an intern developer. Are there differences between engineering and marketing? “I think so. They realized that they have to take better care of us“.
The company’s marketing actions took effect: downloads increased (from 300 to 3,000 daily on iOS), the app maintained its position in the rankings and it continued to have high user retention.
London, March 2015
In March 2015 Fever closed its series A round, led by 14W along with other notable Venture Capital firms such as Accel Partners and Fidelity Growth Capital; the two firms have also invested in Wallapop, the Barcelona-based mobile marketplace app.
Accel’s Sonali of Rycker, who led the investment in both companies, declined to be interviewed.
What do investors look for in this type of deals? Virality and retention. The more people come back, the higher LTV is; as marketing optimisation improves, the lower CAC becomes and also the time it takes for a business to start rolling. As in most startups there’s very little historic data, so most metrics are based in estimates.
Daily downloads of Fever for iOS.
Actual revenue in models like Fever’s is not that important, at least at the early stage. Tuenti has never been profitable and Wallapop has yet to make any money despite having raised more than $140 million in venture funding. Considering the above and assuming an average monthly profit of €4.5 per customer, a calculation made with the help of an industry expert shows that a client -not a user- costs Fever €100 and that its LTV is €7.5. A different way of seeing this is that the user would have to be alive at least 22 months for the company to get its money back.
But we, journalists and users, don’t get to see companies financials and databases. However, investors do. Fever declined to share any metrics citing privacy and confidentiality reasons, like most startups. The company says that it’ll start monetising this year, that CAC and retention levels are good and that the time it’ll take them to be profitable in each city is shortening. As Pep says, “if a company raises a new round it’s because it’s doing well”.
Fever has raised more than €10 million in venture funding from Accel Partners, Fidelity and other top-tier VCs
The third key point is scalability: to repeat the strategy in other cities. With everything learned during the previous years, Fever launched in London in April 2015. Nacho Bachiller, who had finished his engineering degree at MIT and then worked at McKinsey, coordinated the launch. “I learned what went right and wrong in New York,” he says. He managed to sign bars and businesses from a specific London location, Shoreditch, and achieved 2,000 daily downloads; although those numbers decreased to 300 soon after. “The launch was efficient and we grew fast. Investors want to see that we can replicate the model outside of Spain“.
This will be one of the keys in Fever’s next round of funding. “We know that it works here and also abroad. London is a good example”.
Nacho is the current director of international expansion, Francisco is in charge of marketing, Pep is CEO and Alexandre still serves as an advisor. Yohannes leads the product department out of New York and Ismael is currently Fever’s CTO. Icíar is still head of operations, Jaime and Miriam left in in 2014 and 2015, respectively. She’s one of the members of the management team who was been at Fever the longest: one year.
“It’s one of the best teams that I have worked with, but I did not agree with certain things”, Miriam summarizes. “The year I was there we had three different people in operations and most of them left because of the management team. At times I’d ask myself: who’s left Fever this week?”.
As it’s always been the case for the company, most employees leave after a short period of time: those in the lower ranks for salary and type of work reasons, those in the middle due to management reasons and those at the top because they work close to Pep. The engineering team is a world’s apart when it comes to salary and how they’re treated.
“There are big differences between departments. You can’t write to Pep, you have to ask Esther for permission (his secretary). My relationship with them is non-existent”, says a person who has been an intern for a year. “I had a good time because it’s a job that I love, but at the same time…”, says one former employee. “They see a lot of employees as rat labs that can be replaced at any time. And they say so openly: watch it, because I might hire someone for half of what you cost me”.
“Some people say: I’m not here because of him, but because of the team”, adds another employee. Two often-repeated comments are that “Fever deserves a better CEO” or that “managing him is in itself a full time job”. If many stay at Fever it’s because they trust the company’s product and enjoy being around their colleagues.
At the top is Pep. He’s young and has made quite a bit of money, but those who know him say that he still has a lot to learn. And four years later he just doesn’t.
Most former employees interviewed left unhappy, mostly because of his management style. His sexist comments (asking employees to dress “like sluts” to be on photos, telling them that their peers “want to fuck them” or insisting on “getting boobs, more tits” in promotional material) and the humiliation of his workers (calling his interns “monkeys” or attacking middle management) have been mentioned as many times in the preparation of this article as the scenes of demoralised workers following meetings or talks with him. Many people remember Raquel’s farewell, a photographer who left the office crying while Pep, in front of everyone, screamed: “Do you think that these people are not happy? Do you really think these people are unhappy?“
Chueca, September 2015
Pep stopped making media appearances when he noticed that he’d became someone who he was not: the young entrepreneur who says he has build a company and tells people how to do it, but in reality he hasn’t yet. The Spanish press at one point called him ‘the Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs of Castellón’. “I tried to get away from that. It’s nice because people pay attention to you, but it’s harmful for the company”.
Pep was interviewed twice for this article: on June 8, along with Alexandre in the company’s office at the Puerta de Alcala, and on September 1, alone, in the neighbourhood of Chueca. His future is to grow with Fever, build a business and go public: create the monopoly he first saw when he was in San Francisco when he was 19. “We want to change the way people decide make offline plans”, he says.
About his employees, he says that only six people have left the company on bad terms. And what if investors see their inexperience as CEO and replace him with an adult? “They will not. The company works very well and investors are happy with the team’s structure“.
You’d do that if you don’t believe in the person who’s managing the company. I don’t think that would happen in a company backed by Accel Partners, because they invest in entrepreneurs. It could happen, but given our current results, I find it hard to believe.
In what sense you’re the best?
I love being around people. Marketing, for example. I lead product and now we’re launching some cool features. Finance is complex. I love talking to people, being with them, listening to their problems, helping them and finding the right talent. Getting enough talent and money to be able to achieve our objectives.
What has been your biggest mistake?
The first few years of the company. Knowing what I know now I would have done many things differently. I would not have made those mistakes. But right now nobody wants to leave the company. Nobody. Nobody. You can call anyone. Nobody wants to leave. Nobody. And that’s because there’s potential, we’re building something big.
This article is based on more than 29 interviews that were done over the past three months, including employees, former employees, investors and advisors.
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