Lucas Martinez (Geneva, 1983) has been living in Barcelona for two years remotely running Talent.com, a Canadian internet job search startup that is on the verge of becoming a unicorn (reaching a valuation of 1,000 million).
Like him, dozens of foreign professionals work remotely from the Catalan capital. As a result of the pandemic, the community of digital nomads in the city has not stopped growing. The reasons are more than known. “There is no place like Barcelona in the world. It has quality of life and a growing technological ecosystem,” says Martinez, who acknowledges that he also has roots in the city. His father is Catalan, and his mother is Galician. The couple emigrated to Geneva, where Martinez was born and educated.
“Despite the fact that I had no business reference in the family, I had always dreamed of being an entrepreneur, so I opted for Business Administration studies at the HEG University”. When it was over, Martinez entered the workforce as a consultant at Oracle and on the sales team at Education First, for whom he worked in cities including London and Dubai. “My time in multinationals lasted just two years because when the opportunity to found a startup presented itself to me, I didn’t think twice. Maxime Droux, a friend from university, and Benjamin Philion suggested that I move to Montreal and create Talent.com, the equivalent of Infojobs in Canada, although with a different monetization system”.
That was 12 years ago and since then the company has expanded internationally, to countries such as the United States, Colombia, France, the United Kingdom, Switzerland or Germany. “At the beginning of 2022, before the arrival of the cuts in the technology sector, we raised 120 million dollars and reached a valuation of close to 1,000 million,” says the entrepreneur.
The company bills more than 100 million dollars a year through a business model based on the click. “The portal is free for the employee and the employer. We add all the job offers that are published on the internet and we monetize the business by charging companies for each click on their offer that is generated through Talent.com”, details the entrepreneur, who says that it is a model identical to that of the job offers that are published on Google.
The company is focused on posting blue collar or labor jobs. “It is in sectors such as logistics where the greatest volume and turnover of jobs is generated. In any case, Talent.com is also established in the world of the office and in intermediate positions”. In total, the company publishes around 35 million offers a month.
According to the manager, about 500 workers keep the platform active. Half work at the Medellín branch, and about 75 at the Montreal headquarters. In Europe, the startup has smaller subsidiaries and since Martinez landed in Barcelona, ??the company has hired 15 people. “The idea is to turn the offices in this city into a European hub,” says Martinez, who only regrets about the Catalan capital is the fact of having to work with a six-hour difference from Montreal.
Although the work days are long, Martinez takes time to enjoy his three children, Barça matches (he is a regular at the Camp Nou) and paddle tennis, a sport he has become fond of in recent years.