Álvaro Pintado has time. At the same age that they bought his first mobile phone (16 years old) he began to make his first steps in the business world by trading with bitcoin mining machines; Shortly after, he wrote his first book and managed to create a chatbot (Whisper) that he sold for a five-digit figure, and he is currently in charge of hello.app, a startup that claims that “it is going to change the world and revolutionize Internet”.
Pintado’s short story is the antithesis of that of thousands of young people in Spain who are overqualified for their jobs, for whom degrees serve little more than to decorate their rooms. Because this young entrepreneur does not blush when he admits that he left the degree in Telecommunications, to the chagrin of his parents, a few months after starting it. “The career is very good, you learn a lot, but I have prioritized other things that at the moment are working quite well for me,” he argues.
His basically self-taught training did not prevent him from self-publishing his first book, The Decentralized Financial System, at the age of 17, of which he has managed to sell a few hundred copies to date. And neither did he obtain financing for 300,000 euros, through a round and a loan, to materialize his business idea together with Alexander Baikalov (20 years old), of which he spent 107,000 on the most expensive domain in Spain.
Pintado explains his recipe for starting a startup from scratch on the Bolsillo podcast and explains why hello.app will contribute to democratizing data storage by breaking the monopoly of Amazon, Google and Microsoft. How did you get here at only 19 years old? Because of his “innate desire to want to change the world that every kid has when he is young” and partly because he is the last one in school to have a smartphone: “You get more bored and, therefore, you are more creative (..)Within 10 “In years, people will realize how bad it has been to give hardware and cell phones to little ones.”
Pocket is a biweekly podcast that offers information, experiences and advice to better navigate the complex world of domestic finances. You can listen to and subscribe to the podcast through audio platforms such as Spotify, iVoox, Apple Podcast, and Amazon Music.
If you want to contact the Bolsillo de La Vanguardia team to participate in future podcasts or suggest any question about finances of interest to you, you can send an email to pocket@lavanguardia.es.
