Dídac Lee, founder and CEO of Inspirit, co-founder of Galdana Ventures and vice president of the FC Barcelona Foundation, was the guest speaker at the most recent edition of Matins ESADE, sponsored by EY (formerly Ernst & Young) and organised in collaboration with La Vanguardia. During his remarks, Mr. Lee commented: “All entrepreneurs should understand their strengths and weaknesses very well and be humble and realistic with their proposals.”

Dídac Lee has more than 20 years of experience creating start-ups. Over a period of just 19 years, he created 15 companies, nine of which are still active. Mr. Lee explained that his career began at his parents’ restaurant, where he worked as a dishwasher. There, he explained, he acquired the skills that every entrepreneur should possess: discipline, perseverance and persistence.

His current focus, at Inspirit, is helping other entrepreneurs accelerate their businesses using the experience he acquired over all these years. “The best entrepreneurs I’ve met have one thing in common: they know how to create a cohesive team and cheer it on,” commented Mr. Lee. “The appeal that a product has in the market is also a variable that needs to be considered, but the profile of the entrepreneur is very important, because a good product is always the result of a good entrepreneur.”

“The market doesn’t understand me”

The Founder Institute has recognised Dídac Lee as the Best Mentor for European Start-ups, and Wired magazine named him one of the top 100 European digital influencers. The founder and CEO of Inspirit has failed on numerous occasions during his career. “The more innovative a project is, the higher the failure rate,” he explained. According to Mr. Lee, entrepreneurs’ most common mistakes are not validating the market – which can be corrected with a simulator – and, after an unsuccessful product launch, thinking “the market doesn’t understand me”. This latter aspect is related to what Mr. Lee called the “creative ego”, which manifests itself in entrepreneurs who have created something.

The founder and CEO of Inspirit stressed the importance of learning from mistakes. “There are people who fail and fail again for the same reasons because they haven’t learned anything,” Mr. Lee observed. “Nothing lasts forever, neither success nor failure,” he declared. “If something doesn’t work out, that’s okay – maybe someday it will work.” He added: “Time is much shorter at start-ups” than at other companies, because “anything can happen in the space of a year”.