Why Joaquin Quiñonero Candela left Spain ?

European ideas of creating wealth

"With all my respect for startups and dotcoms, they do not manufacture anything"

I took this quote and photo from a tweet on the book Leadership made in Spain . It has 12 interviews of entrepreneurs from Spain, one of them named Espinosa de los Monteros.

In twenty-five years during the 13th century, the Mongol army subjugated more lands and people than the Romans had conquered in four hundred years. They never manufactured anything. Their wealth was growing through war and pillaging.

In middle ages, wealth meant having land. Manufacturing goods exploded in England in the 19th century

There many ways of creating wealth, but the type of wealth created in Silicon Valley is least understood in the outside world.

Take for example Snapchat. After the IPO last week, the company, a text messenger in essence, is valued 24 billions, more than Best Buy or United Airlines. Snapchat lost $500 million and they will continue to loose money. How is this possible?

How Facebook creates wealth?

Then I read the article Inside Facebook AI Machine  Quotes

Facebook today cannot exist without AI. Every time you use Facebook or Instagram or Messenger, you may not realize it, but your experiences are being powered by AI.

We can not manufacture AI or ML. But Europe knows this very well. Here is the head of Artificial Intelligence in Facebook

 He comes from Spain. His name is Joaquin Quiñonero Candela. He is one of the many brilliant scientists from Europe.

Candela was born in Spain. His family moved to Morocco when he was three, and he attended French language schools there. Though his grades were equally high in science and humanities, he decided to attend college in Madrid, ideally studying the hardest subject he could think of: telecommunications engineering, which not only required a mastery of physical stuff like antennas and amplifiers, but also an understanding of data, which was “really cool.” He fell under the spell of a professor who proselytized adaptive systems. 

 Why brilliant minds leave Europe and Spain in particular?

Because the entrepreneurial elite of Spain did not keep the pace with the new ideas of wealth creation. The quote by Espinosa de los Monteros. at the beginning of this post, makes impossible for scientists like Candela to create a similar wealth there.

At the end I see this picture from Facebook Building 20 in Menlo Park. This is where I worked when Sun Microsystems still existed

And this only tiny part of Facebook AI operations.

Cooldimi

We are cooldimi . We are a startup. Of course we are not Facebook (not many companies are). But we create wealth via AI and ML for companies who are not the size of Facebook, and whose business focus is different.

We can monetize hidden treasures all companies have. We increase the CX (customer experience)