How to Make an Impact: These entrepreneurs in Spain got 100 ventilators to save lives in Madrid

The reason how we got together, the 3 of us, to do this session is you guys decided to do something impossible. And about 2 and a half weeks ago, you guys decided you can make an impact in Spain, and you got almost 100 ventilators to hospitals. So thank you guys for for joining and welcome to I think this will be the third show of Zavaronis in English on my YouTube channel where we try and bring some good values and some happiness and meet people from around the world. So for those of you just joining us on our show, my name is Neil Zavaro from Israel. My dream was to do 100 talks in a different— as many different countries as I possibly can. Corona happened and I decided why not bring all these amazing people into my house. And today we have Madrid, and for the 3rd show I thought it would be amazing to do it the 3 of us. So Fernando and Eduardo, again, welcome. Thank you so much for being here. How are you guys?

Hello, Nir. Thank you very much for your call. It's a pleasure to be here with you to share with you this 100 Talks with 100 Cities in the World, or part of the world. Coming from Madrid, my name is Fernando Arancibia. I'm a member of EO, as you are, an entrepreneur dedicated to IT, business intelligence, and also artificial intelligence, and also automation. And this is 23 of business, more or less. I have a daughter, but it's in GSO, and I come from Canary Islands. That is an amazing place, and I love the sea, and I'm living now in a fantastic city. The only problem of Madrid is we have no sea here, but well, nobody's perfect.

I, I live about minutes walk from the sea. So for us, that's good. Haven't seen it in a long time, but it's very close. Eduardo, how are you?

Good. Thanks for allowing us into your home remotely. Maybe at some point in the future we can do that in person. And my name is Eduardo Fernandez. I I'm also an EO Madrid member and I have 3 daughters and they are 5 years old, 2 years old, and 7 months old. And I also have a software company.

So wait, and you work from home at the moment as well? You're all in quarantine?

Yeah, I mostly work from home, but sometimes I go to a small office that I have right across the street. Because of the work I've been doing bringing ventilators, I have all sorts of authorizations to move and to move around. So I'm exempted.

So that's— wait, I'm still blown away by the quarantine with 3 small young daughters. Is that like a lot of work? Is that a— how is your day?

We're very fortunate. We've got a big house and our nanny moved in with us. So we're lucky that, you know, even with all the children and one of the, one of my 3 children is from my previous marriage. So she's only with us twice a month.

Twice a month.

Yeah, I know that.

I think in Israel, divorced parents are more happy at the moment than other parents. Probably.

Yeah.

So tell me, What's the weather over there at the moment? Have you guys started to feel summer?

Very nice and sunny.

April, there is a lot of rain. They say that in Spain. And at this moment it's doing so. At least this week is going to be a rainy week. But it's nice in terms of temperature. 15, 20 degrees.

So, you know, over here a lot of people are talking about the remote work and the whole concept, and a lot of people are saying it might be a good thing to keep if and when the situation goes back. How do you guys find working from home? Do you like it, don't like it?

I've always worked from home a little bit, to an extent. 1 or 2 days a week and Sundays I've always done some work from home. So being a software company, we had many people— well, we allowed everyone 1 day per week, everyone, no questions asked, you can work from home and more days with approval. So we were already quite prepared to have people work from home. We also have a nice office, as you know. So when the quarantine is over, we'll probably go back to the office, but might make it even more flexible for people to work from home. Instead of one day, we might make it, you know, more days or completely flexible, like come if you like or stay home if you want to stay home.

Do you think you will still need the same size of an office moving forward?

Maybe not, but we will probably grow in the next year or so. So we won't be downsizing. We also invested a little bit in that office. So even though we're renting, it's also a really good price and a beautiful office. So we're definitely not moving or downsizing.

Yeah.

If we were paying more money, then maybe, but it's not an expensive office. We got a good deal.

By the way, I think 2 short stories, and the first one is in 2018, I went traveling 20 cities in Europe in one month. That was a huge mistake. I'll never do that again, even if I would be able to fly. And every day I went to a different city. I met with EO, the Entrepreneurs Organization, the members, and shared a little bit about how to tell a good story. which was a dream of mine to do, and we're still working on a book to collect all the stories and do something amazing in 2020. And the interesting thing was that I did not know Eduardo. I was invited to his office, and I remember I was blown away when I came in, and you hosted me for a couple of hours. And I remember afterwards we sat on that small porch and had some meat and cheese and—

Yeah.

and drank wine, and I remember that the whole experience was just amazing. So first of all, thank you. And I think—

It was a very nice session. We really liked it. Not only some EO members that joined, but also some of my team members from my company, they really liked it. I learned about them, actually, things that I didn't know. So thank you.

First of all, thank you for saying that, especially now in quarantine. That is amazing to hear. That someone on the other side of the world likes what you do. I was actually thinking about doing some, some of these things, you know, for free with people all over the world just for the fun of it. And the second story I want to say is the reason how we got together, the 3 of us, to do this session is you guys decided to do something impossible. And about 2 and a half weeks ago, you guys decided you can make an impact in Spain, and you got almost 100 ventilators to hospitals. Eduardo, can you run it by us? It was insane to hear it on the phone earlier.

Yeah, so quick summary. We, um, some people from my EO forum were looking into buying masks, uh, 16 days ago, and talking to a A cousin of mine who is a doctor, he said, hey, masks are nice, but ventilators save lives and we need them today. And through connections from my family in Germany, we found secondhand ventilators. We were able to buy first 10 that went to a major hospital. They opened a new ICU, a new intensive care unit with 20 beds. And another EO member put up a GoFundMe to raise more money. We raised—

2.5 million.

So far, €400,000. We've spent half a million to buy more than 80, and then other entrepreneurs and other companies have picked up and followed our path to buy about 25, 30 more. So more than 100 total, and mostly the work of EO Madrid members.

So I think the fact that entrepreneurs can make a decision, and by the way, I think that goes for every person that listens or watches this, video, you can actually decide you make an impact. It could be a small thing like making someone happy, which is kind of what I'm trying to do, or share the knowledge or share the experience. Or what you guys in Madrid have decided is to make an actual impact within the hospitals. So, and a conversation starts, and does it at any point, does someone say, Hey Eduardo, listen, great idea, but we can't do it? Or are people positive all along the way?

Everybody was positive. Everybody was— nobody was saying, hey, we can't do this, because nobody was asking whether we can do this. We were just doing it. And obviously we didn't say, hey, let's bring 100. No, initially it was, let's bring masks. But then asking around, we found 10 secondhand ventilators. And then the next day, the broker offered us another 10. So after 10 days, we had over 100. The money, if you told me, hey, you need to spend half a million, I would be like, no way. But it was more slowly. It was first $60K, half put up by other EO members. So it was more like people coming in and helping. was interviewed on television a couple of times, in the radio, etc. And, you know, I didn't look for those interviews. It was other EU members trying to help, trying to get the word out, connecting us to journalists, to the ambassador for like helping in bringing from other countries. It was never a question of how we do this.

Sorry for cutting you off. Tell us that story. So you got to the ambassador of?

The, the ambassador of Spain in Egypt, because we found 40 machines in Egypt, and 40 is a lot. So it was all— we were all set. We had an invoice to pay them. Someone found us a plane. The pilot offered to fly for free, so we only had to pay for the gas. So a plane from Spain to Egypt was only $50K, basically, back and forth, Madrid to Egypt and back. because the pilot just said, hey, I'll go for free, you know. So it was amazing. And we had everything. We had the plane, the ambassador was checking, and the ambassador was basically a former EO member that is still a friend, and he's in touch with a lot of politicians. So in a couple of hours, we were on a phone call with the ambassador, and the ambassador said, hey, you know, it's actually late here in Egypt because they are ahead of us, So we gotta wait till tomorrow morning to get all the paperwork. I will go to the— I will go to the Ministry of Something in Egypt and I'll let you know. And we were all set. But then in the morning he called us, the ambassador, you know, this is not somebody, this is the ambassador or anybody. And he called us and he said, well, he texted us actually on WhatsApp. I've got the screenshots. And he said, hey, don't do it because just yesterday or like early this morning there is a new Egypt is a dictatorship, so, you know, they can quickly change things. And they said that they wouldn't allow any medical equipment leaving the country. So, you know, 40 respirators, 40 ventilators is— It's gonna be almost €1 million, I think, because they were actually semi-new. And we chose not to do it because the risk of the plane not being able to fly out was too high.

Wow.

I mean, it was too high. It was supposed to be illegal.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think you, you said, correct me if I'm wrong, that when you guys were talking about how to get this done, you were talking to your wife and she said, well, maybe my dad can help. So your father-in-law knows some people in another country through his former work and so on and so forth. Am I correct?

Yeah, my father-in-law— my wife is German, so is my father-in-law, so he connected us to brokers in Germany. Germany has the most intensive care beds per million people in the world. Their hospitals are top-notch and they've got many intensive care units. And also the biggest producers, the biggest companies that produce ventilators are German. So they've got a surplus. So they— it's hard to buy it new because the whole world is trying to buy ventilators. But there are many warehouses and many places where there are old ventilators that they don't want because they've got top-of-the-line equipment. And the old ventilators, they're very good. German engineering is really good. So they work perfectly.

By the way, you know, from all this conversation, the fact of how we guys, the 3 of us, we're talking and how your wife spoke to her dad, which knew someone, how you guys know or how you reached the ambassador. And if you can take something out of this is one, nothing can stop you if you make a decision, which apparently you guys were able to do something that a government, your government took longer and some—

Yes.

Some big enterprises were struggling and it wasn't a matter of money for them. Right, it was just being able to do it.

Effort and will, like, you know, will, the will to do this.

Amazing.

One step after the other, but it was pretty important also because at the very beginning it started small, but it was growing, growing, and okay, let's let it grow.

Yeah, often, I mean, 100 sounds Impressive. It is impressive. But at the beginning, it was only 10. It was actually going to be 15, and we lost part of the deal because somebody moved faster and got 5. So instead of 15, we did 10. But those 10, it's not that many, made such a big impact that we were like, let's buy more. And we were already a little disappointed that we had lost 5 on the way. So we started moving even faster. I started advancing the money myself. I gave the broker an advance so that he could buy with just a WhatsApp message. You know, we started like making changes on the go, started smaller, but every day and every day more people helping made us a very, very good team and very, very fast.

So I think— so the second thing I hear about the conversation, how things are moving, is the network and how it is important to keep the network not for the sake of the network, but you keep it because these are the people you meet along the way. Same as you and I met briefly for a couple of hours, and same as Fernando reached out and we said, yeah, we have to do it. And same goes for a lot of these things.

Yeah.

Keep your network and don't keep it for the sake of business or money. Just keep it because it's people you appreciate or people you you want to work with, you like them, and you never know when in life you might need them, especially these times, then they will do that for you because they know why you kept in touch. And, you know—

Yeah, totally. Yeah, to me it was the biggest takeaway that if I need to do something big in the future, I've got some amazing people that I can rely on. And seeing how they reacted in this situation is awesome. Obviously, you know, my, my EO Madrid colleagues and my forum mates, their reaction, you know, seeing them how they work in a crisis and how we work together. And, you know, some of us have pretty strong personalities, but I think it's actually 2 lessons. One, You're absolutely right. Keeping in touch with these people, even former EU members that left, you know, keep in touch because there's some amazing people out there, right? But then also the power of a powerful mission, right? When you're trying to do something that is clearly extremely important, extremely urgent, that there is no doubt that that is an important mission. And in this case, okay, you know, saving people's lives is a pretty obvious and important mission, right? But there can be others in the future. You know, companies, you are able to hire the best people if you've got a powerful mission, right, and good people. So that's what happened here. We had a powerful mission, let's save some lives, and some amazing people through the network, basically. And very quickly, very quickly, we got together and we made a big impact. So for me, those are 2 huge lessons.

That is amazing. Wait, I'll just put the light on and I'll be back. Just a second, because I'm sitting in the dark and it doesn't— just a second. Yeah. So yeah, that was weird. I didn't want to stop you guys talking and just darkness falls on this call. So yeah, so if, you know, I want to ask you something. You guys approved the money on a WhatsApp call or WhatsApp text and stuff, message, sorry, and stuff like that, but then how do you deal with uncertainty? You don't know the people on the other side, you don't know the situation in Madrid, you don't know if you will be able to fly that plane, so that goes back to being— A businessman, an entrepreneur, a family man, whatever, but at the moment on this planet, 99% of the people are dealing with a lot of uncertainty. How do you make a decision when there's so many unknowns?

So, well, I mean, I think all of us that are running businesses are used to dealing with a level of uncertainty. So, you know, there's like a risk versus reward scale, and I will always take some risks if the reward is big, right? And I will take more risks. I don't think entrepreneurs are like super, like, we love risk. No, I love the opposite. I love a lot of reward for very little risk, right? But at the beginning, it wasn't so much risk. We were looking to buy in 10. It was €56,000. A few of us got together so none of us was spending more than €25,000 roughly. And then the contact came through a trusted source. There were still some unknowns, like for example, were the machines in good shape or not? There was no time to really do a thorough check on the machines. Are the machines going to break in transit? Things like that. We were all trying to diminish every risk. I was trying to have the broker take a look at the machines. We were trying to talk to Iberia, the airline, so that they would be taken care of. But there's always going to be some risk. At the end of the day, also, you know, talking to the hospital, they were like, you know, just bring whatever you can. If they come in not such good shape, it's okay, you tried. It was a donation. They were not going to complain so much. So the risk, the worst-case scenario is that we bring 10 faulty machines and we lose some money. You know, I think that was a totally acceptable risk. compared to the potential reward. In the end, out of the 10, I believe they couldn't make one of them work. I know that within 24 hours, 8 were working, 2 were not working, and I believe they fixed one, but they couldn't fix the other one. So, you know, not all of them worked, but obviously, you know, having 8 work almost immediately and one more work after some reparations is an amazing result. Especially because every machine saves one or two lives intubated with the same machine, right?

Yeah.

So yeah, once we did 10, we also could trust the broker more. And soon after the next shipment, that's when we decided to give the guy a budget and advance the money because we could see that the guy was very trustworthy. So, you know, you just go slowly. It's like almost every business, right? Normally you don't start with like €20 million and, you know, like some big bet. You start more— at least EO members will typically start a little bit smaller, I think, and then grow.

By the way, I think there'll be a lot of startups who did get €20 million and they'll be gone by the end of this crisis. And I think that will create a lot of opportunity for the smaller guys to scale again and do stuff. And so what do you miss at the moment?

Say again?

What do you guys miss when we look at— so we have a new kind of life at the moment, from masks to lack of restaurants, staying at home. One thing you guys miss?

I'll let Fernando take that one.

What?

I'll let Fernando take that one.

Well, everybody— Yeah, in terms of— I hear you a little bit bad, but I understand that you are talking about equipment, but other part of equipment we are trying to get or sell.

No, no, I'm asking on a personal level, what do you miss seeing that we don't have our old life at the moment?

Restaurants.

Restaurants.

Well, human touch is pretty important. For me, for example, to see my daughter is the main point in my case. And normally to be with the people in the same room, to take a look, it's something extremely important to take a beer with somebody, to listen to other people near there and appreciate the feelings and human touch is pretty pretty important. And especially for you that are alone in your home now, maybe for you it's the same thing. Probably is it the worst part of the quarantine?

Yeah, I posted on Instagram I think 2 days ago that I've gone 30 days without a hug. So I'm single, I don't have a family. I don't know This, this probably will go live in a couple of days. So, and this week it's Passover, the Jewish Passover, and we always do it with the big family and a lot of people, and then we go out. And so it's kind of weird to do it alone at home today. Definitely strange, but I, I signed up for a weird webinar. to pass the time. So, and I have to tell you, I own— I'm a partner in 2 bars in Tel Aviv, so I like going out, I like meeting people, I like drinking. A lot of my work is social. I have a marketing agency, so now when we lost clients and the businesses like everybody else being hit quite hard, usually if we have a problem in the business I go out, I give, I do 100 calls, meet as many people as I can, and I fix it. But now you don't know who to call and there's no let's have coffee. So yeah, definitely interesting. And again, hearing you guys tell that story of the impact you can make out of your own homes and save lives and move— things from different countries and everything. To me, on a personal level, it's very inspiring. So, and it's a different way of connecting. And hearing you guys connect as a forum— for people who don't know, and we stated this a couple of times, forum is within EO. We have a group of people where we're accountable, we take care. We sometimes call it the board of directors of our lives. And in these times, a lot of us as entrepreneurs need to rely on one another and good things come out of it. And so hearing you guys do this and, you know, so what is your daily routine now? You guys go to— you wake up in the morning, you go to the office at the same time, your new home office, or is it— how do you guys do it?

Yes, more or less trying to keep more or less the same same time scheduling that normally. Wake up, take breakfast, then go to work a little bit. I'm not moving from my home. It's not like Eduardo that is going to the office and so on. It's nice. But I think that more or less everybody at the beginning was a little bit weird. We are doing more or less a normal scheduling and trying to remember how to play guitar, how to cook.

So how is, how is your guitar playing at the moment? Is it good?

Yeah, it's a great moment.

And Eduardo, you— what time do you start work in Spain?

Um, I keep flexible hours. I, um, I, I don't have a set time where I start. I start working after I eat breakfast, basically. Um, what I'm doing right now is, um, I am going to, um, a small office, a small coworking space that is literally 1 minute away from my house. And because we've got many children and a nanny at home, it's sometimes not so easy to work from there. So I come to this coworking. It's empty, it's been empty for weeks, and they give me permission to come. And it's nice because I can really focus. It's a little harder at home.

And usually staff will start at what time? Usually?

We've never had a— our company, we're a software company and we've never had a schedule or like hours, work hours. The only— most of the team must join a meeting. It's called a stand-up meeting because they have to stand up. It's pretty quick and that's every day. There's 2 teams, one at 10:30 AM, another one at 11. But that's it, then they can organize the rest of the day how they wish.

That's very interesting. We start, we still try and start our schedules around 9:00, 9:30. Startups usually start a bit later, but people are trying to keep some sort of a routine, so I think that is important. Are you guys keeping your alcohol in check?

Still drinking?

Regularly? Is wine part of your menu?

In my case, we normally share wine at dinner.

So, you know, I— when people ask me, why do you own a bar? I usually say it's not for the money or the profit, it's because I have a drinking problem. And I haven't had a drink in a month. So I'm losing weight just from that. So definitely miss having a beer with my friends. So, you know, a lot of people talk about the situation being bad, and maybe you need to understand that you're getting lemons and what is the lemonade you need to make out of it. What is the good that might come out of it? Do you guys have anything to share about how you guys think of that? What could be the lemonade for people, for young entrepreneurs or for young students or for people looking for a job now?

Jean-Pierre, this is for you.

I actually, I actually, it's a good question. I've been thinking about it. I even I've been preparing some money to invest, you know, just in case the stock market goes down. And I've been thinking about how some of our products can be adapted to this new situation. But honestly, I haven't really had a chance to do any of that because the last 15 days of my life have been completely dedicated to this ventilator project. I'm now starting to emerge and go back to regular life, and I'm first catching up on my my business and my family. So I actually don't know, and I'm really curious about what you guys say, because to me it's like I'm starting to read the news to see what the government is doing for companies, like loans and things like that, because I've just been completely dedicated to finding and transporting these ventilators. Yeah, that's a good question.

That's interesting. Fernando, how do you look at it when you come out of a crisis? What could be the lemonade.

Well, what I'm trying now these days that we are with a lot of— theoretically, we have a lot of time with ourselves— is to reconstruct or rethink about the right way to face problems, or your— mainly how to function productive, more capable. And I have remembered that focus is extremely important. And nowadays, especially these days, it's extremely easy to have interruptions, not only from the others, also from you, because one view is more interesting than the other. So you are just jumping from a point point to another. And your ability after 5 hours with the phone, the computer, the TV, or whatever, you have done nothing and have a lot of unusable information accumulated. So it's extremely important to focus on what do you want to do and to have the right— I don't know the name in English— discipline, The right discipline.

Definitely.

To be able to force yourself to do anything usable each day in terms of knowledge, in terms of tasks done. And this is more or less where I'm focused. From my point of view, this is something that's going to change a lot when we go out of this situation. Things are going to change. Hearing Eduardo, I totally agree with, for example, in companies, flexibility is going to be increased for sure because it works. And also, the use that we are doing of digitalization is extremely important. In terms of Eduardo and you and me, we're people coming from IT. There is now something funny and you can find this. What has helped you more to your organization in digital transformation? You can say the CEO, the CIO, coronavirus, coronavirus. Because of course, without this, a lot of things are still like always.

Yeah.

But now it's changing and situation is evolving and also the behavior of the people is changing. So let's see what's going to happen, but it's going to be pretty funny to see how the people is evolving.

I agree.

I think 30 days at home— when I'm a person who's never at home, I barely sleep, I'm always out, I'm always doing something, I'm always at work— and now suddenly when you took away my work, you took away my friends, and you took away everything, and and you put me in a cage and you told me, listen, figure shit out and try and find yourself. I'm finding that the lemonade might be for me dealing with my own mind, with my own fears, with my own abilities, with doing this. And I'm now filming and I hate being filmed and I'm holding camera the whole day and I'm getting used to it and It's about me making a decision not to watch the news on a daily basis. It's about me deciding not to look at Instagram every 5 minutes. It's about having this call when I'm fully dressed with shoes because this is something I consider important to me and I want to respect the people on the other side and the fact that in my mind I know that that's what's happening.

That's important.

But again, I hope everybody finds their lemonade. Fernando, Eduardo, I want to say a huge, huge thank you for you guys, for your time. I know how busy you guys are. This has been so inspiring. Last words, guys?

Thanks to you, Nir, for your call. It's been a nice opportunity to talk our story here. I'm here, we are here in Madrid waiting for you, man. Come here.

Amazing, amazing. So I'm here in Israel, I'm here in Israel. Can't wait for you guys to come out, come for a drink, and if you guys need anything, I'm here. Um, to the audience, thank you so much if you stuck all the way till the end. Um, hope you enjoyed this episode with our friends in Madrid doing amazing, amazing things to help humanity and save people's lives. Guys, see you soon. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Nir. Take care.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.