Having just arrived from the United States, where she has left her family and her home in the San Francisco Bay Area, Anna Navarro (Olot, 1968) comes to all. It is the surprise signing of Carles Puigdemont to make a ticket in Junts’ candidacy for Parliament on May 12. And she is ready to put into practice what she learned in the Catalan volleyball team, aged 12 or 13. You have to roll up your sleeves, you have to fight. “Get down on the floor”, the Argentinian coach told them. And Navarro, an entrepreneur and technology guru who has made a career in Silicon Valley, who has forged valuable experience helping American companies go abroad, thinks about this every time she has to make a difficult decision.
Moving to Barcelona has been. He arrived in California in the early nineties, via British Airways, where he worked while studying for a degree in Anglo-Germanic Philology at the University of Barcelona and a postgraduate degree at the Humboldt University in Berlin. “I thought I would end up being a teacher or having a publishing house,” she says. Daughter of a painter and an industrial engineer, technology was not a strange element in her life. “I liked to go with my father to see the machines, to get inside them, to see how things work”, he says. Her first job was as a technical English translator.
British Airways gave him the possibility to work in San Francisco, but soon his business adventure began. He was 23 years old. “I opened a translation agency. I didn’t know it was in a place called Silicon Valley, there was no Google, or Yahoo, or anything like that,” he says. The startup worked; companies asked him for translations, but also how to market their products in Europe. She was signed by Cisco Systems to reproduce the model. He trained in telecommunications. And his career took off: Xerox, Verisign, VMware, NetApp, Procore Technologies. For a few years, she slowed down to raise her four children.
She has received distinctions for her influence in the technological field, including the Creu de Sant Jordi, in 2021. Fifteen years ago she promoted Women in Localization with two friends, an organization that promotes female leadership in the technology industry and which has representation in 30 countries. Also in Catalonia. “Now men can enter, who are heads of globalization of companies, that is to say that they are all there, Amazon, Google, Spotify…”, he details. So he has helped some of those firms incorporate Catalan into their services. Activism for the language is another facet of it.
It is already in campaign. The first will be to make yourself known outside the technological field. Without a card, he is pro-independence; economically, he wants “everyone to do well”.
She comes to Catalonia to be a councilor in a Government of Junts. “I can contribute my experience in the formation of teams, with clear objectives”, in the government or as a deputy in the opposition. “I have come to help. From the outside, and having traveled so much, I’ve seen how things can go, how trains can be on time, how bureaucracy can be expedited and how small businesses can rise. And I would like to put this learning at the service of Catalans”, he underlines.
