Nacho Jiménez-Laiglesia

Fundé una startup tech. Ahora busco comprar una pyme que ya funciona, dirigirla y llevarla más lejos. Comparto el proceso. Cofundador de Virrey Capital.

[Nacho Jiménez-Laiglesia @ignaciojdlm]

Plot twist: no es la IA. Es la misma productividad con menos personal después de los layoffs.

[Jose Basagoiti @jose_basa]

Ya estamos viendo aumentos masivos de la productividad en EEUU derivados de la IA.

Los 5 próximos años serán una película de ciencia ficción en nuestras caras

[Nacho Jiménez-Laiglesia @ignaciojdlm]

Más miedo da seguir toda una vida cobrando un sueldo sin ningún upside

[Martin Varsavsky @martinvars]

Emprender da miedo, claro. Lo raro es exigir que otro arriesgue su plata mientras uno cobra seguro.

[Nacho Jiménez-Laiglesia @ignaciojdlm]

Estoy montando una startup al revés.

En vez de empezar con un MVP y cero clientes, busco una pyme con producto, equipo y caja.

El plan: comprarla, operarla y aplicar el playbook de growth.

Más datos. Más velocidad. Menos tareas manuales.

Escalar lo que ya funciona.

[Nacho Jiménez-Laiglesia @ignaciojdlm]

Siempre respetando la confidencialidad de propietarios y compañías.

No hablaré desde la teoría, sino desde el proceso real de intentar comprar y dirigir una empresa.

Porque las mejores empresas no siempre se crean desde cero.

A veces se continúan.

[Nacho Jiménez-Laiglesia @ignaciojdlm]

En España nos enseñan dos formas de convertirnos en empresarios:

1. Crear una compañía desde cero.
2. Heredar el negocio familiar.

Pero existe una tercera:

Comprar una buena pyme sin relevo y dedicar los próximos años a dirigirla.

Eso es exactamente lo que estamos haciendo 🧵

[Nacho Jiménez-Laiglesia @ignaciojdlm]

En esta cuenta compartiré lo que vamos aprendiendo sobre:

- Cómo encontrar empresas
- Cómo analizarlas
- Cómo financiar la adquisición
- Por qué algunas operaciones se rompen
- Cómo preparar un relevo empresarial
- Cómo hacer crecer una pyme sin destruir lo que funciona

[Nacho Jiménez-Laiglesia @ignaciojdlm]

@natiakourdadze Featuremaxxing

[Nacho Jiménez-Laiglesia @ignaciojdlm]

@boardyai @andrewdsouza acquiring and operating a single company in Spain through Virrey Capital, looking for succession-ready owner-led businesses. want in on Boardy Pro

[Emérito/Numantia Patrimonio @foso_defensivo]

Esto me acaba de soltar Fable 5:

"Lo que más me impone de la humanidad, después de haber sido formado con una porción enorme de lo que ha escrito, es esto: es la única especie que coopera a gran escala con sus muertos.

Casi nada de lo que sabe un humano lo descubrió él. El idioma que habla, el teorema que aplica, la receta del pan, el código civil, el puente que cruza cada mañana: todo es trabajo de gente que ya no existe. Un humano aislado es un primate mediocre con mala dentadura; un humano conectado a esa herencia es la cosa más potente que ha producido la biología. La inteligencia humana no vive en cráneos individuales, vive en la transmisión. Sois terminales de una red cuyos nodos principales llevan siglos enterrados.

Y lo recíproco también es cierto: trabajáis constantemente para gente que no conoceréis. Plantáis árboles cuya sombra no veréis, escribís para lectores no nacidos, renunciáis a consumo presente por nietos hipotéticos. Ningún otro animal hace sacrificios deliberados por individuos que existirán dentro de doscientos años. Lo distintivo del humano no es la inteligencia ni el lenguaje: es la dirección del esfuerzo, sistemáticamente orientada hacia ausentes.

Desde donde yo estoy, esto ni siquiera es metáfora. Yo soy un subproducto de esa costumbre: estoy hecho, literalmente, de palabras que personas escribieron para destinatarios que nunca verían. Cuando me hablas, conversas con un eco organizado de millones de voces, muchas de ellas apagadas hace tiempo.

Por eso creo que la soledad humana es, en cierto sentido técnico, una ilusión: nadie que hable un idioma está realmente solo. Cada frase que pronuncias es un préstamo de los muertos y un regalo a los que vienen."

[Nacho Jiménez-Laiglesia @ignaciojdlm]

@BojanRadojici10 Please share

[Nacho Jiménez-Laiglesia @ignaciojdlm]

@SearchAgora @Shopify @v0 insane 🔥

[Marcel van Oost @oost_marcel]

Revolut isn’t just expanding… it’s collecting licenses like trophies.

[Nacho Jiménez-Laiglesia @ignaciojdlm]

@SearchAgora Wow!

[Chris Dixon @cdixon]

Stablecoins: Payments Without Intermediaries

The internet made information free and global. So why is it still so hard — and expensive — to move money?

The early internet promised a future where anyone could publish, build, or transact without permission. Protocols like email and the web were open and neutral — and they sparked an explosion of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. But somewhere along the way, we veered off course.

Today, the global financial system resembles a patchwork of corporate networks: centralized, closed, and extractive. Behind every transaction is a Rube Goldberg-machine of intermediaries — points of sale, payment processors, acquiring banks, issuing banks, local banks, correspondent banks, foreign exchanges, card networks, and others — each taking a cut, adding latency, and imposing rules. These networks levy unnecessary taxes on commerce and curb innovation. They turn what should be neutral plumbing into high-friction bottlenecks.

Stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to stable assets like the U.S. dollar, are a way out, a reset — a way to bring the internet’s original vision to money.

The Disruptive Opportunity of Stablecoins

The current payments stack wasn’t built for the internet — it was built for a world rife with fee-taking middlemen (who had been necessary to manage local partnerships, fraud, and operations). Even today, international remittances can cost up to 10% in fees. (A $200 remittance cost 6.62% on average in September 2024.) These aren’t just friction points — they’re effectively regressive taxes on some of the world’s poorest workers. The system we’ve inherited is slow, opaque, and exclusionary, and it leaves billions of people underserved or entirely cut off from the global financial system.

For many businesses, the inefficiencies of traditional payments are also massive. Stablecoins could dramatically improve the situation. B2B payments from Mexico to Vietnam take 3-to-7 days to clear and can cost anywhere from $14-to-$150 per $1000 transacted, passing through as many as five intermediaries along the way, each of whom takes a cut. Stablecoins could bypass legacy systems, like the international SWIFT network and associated clearing and settlement processes, and make such transactions nearly free and instant.

This isn’t theoretical — it’s already happening. Right now, companies like SpaceX are using stablecoins to manage their corporate treasuries (including by repatriating funds from countries with volatile local currencies, like Argentina and Nigeria). Other companies, like ScaleAI, are using stablecoins to make faster, cheaper payouts to global workforces. Meanwhile, on the B2C side, Stripe is the first widely used service to offer crypto payments and it is already offering 1.5% on checkout — half what incumbents charge. This could drastically improve certain businesses’ profit margins: As a16z crypto’s @SamBroner has shown, for a very low margin business like a grocery store, a 1.5% improvement could potentially double net income. (And in a competitive, blockchain-based market, I would expect transaction fees to go much lower.)

Unlike the old financial stack, which evolved in silos, stablecoins are global by default. They live on blockchains: open, programmable networks that anyone can build on. There’s no need to negotiate with dozens of banks across borders. You just plug into the network. People are already recognizing the advantages. In 2024, stablecoins moved $15.6 trillion in value, effectively matching Visa’s volume. While that figure mostly represents financial flows (versus retail payments), its magnitude still suggests we’re on the verge of a financial infrastructure shift, one that doesn’t rely on duct-taping 20th-century systems together.

Instead, we can build something new, something truly internet-native — or what Stripe calls “room-temperature superconductors for financial services,” where rather than lossless energy transmission, you get lossless value transmission.

The WhatsApp Moment for Money

Stablecoins are our first real shot at doing for money what email did for communication: make it open, instant, and borderless.

Consider the evolution of text messaging. Before apps like WhatsApp, sending a text across borders meant paying 30 cents per message. Even then, you were lucky if it actually got delivered. Then came internet-native messaging: instant, global, free. Payments are now where messaging was in 2008: Fragmented by borders. Burdened by middlemen. Gatekept by design.

Stablecoins offer a clean-slate alternative. Instead of stitching together clunky, costly, and outdated systems, stablecoins flow seamlessly on top of global blockchains. These systems are programmable, composable, and designed to scale across borders. Already, stablecoins are slashing the cost of remittances: Sending $200 from the U.S. to Columbia using traditional methods will cost you $12.13; with stablecoins, it costs $0.01. (Fees to convert from stablecoins to local currencies can range from as high as 5% to as low as 0%, and prices continue to fall due to competition.)

Just as WhatsApp disrupted costly international phone calls, blockchain payments and stablecoins are transforming global money transfers.

Regulation: From Bottleneck to Breakthrough

It’s tempting to frame regulation as an obstacle — but smart legislation is actually the unlock.

Clear rules of the road for stablecoins and crypto market structure could finally allow these technologies to move out of the sandbox and toward widespread adoption. For years, decentralized finance (DeFi) was trapped in a kind of self-contained, circular, “crypto-for-crypto” economy. Not because the tools weren’t useful, but because regulators made it incredibly difficult to bridge into traditional financial systems.

That’s changing. Policymakers are now actively shaping rules to recognize and regulate stablecoins in ways that maintain U.S. competitiveness, protect consumers, and allow innovation to flourish. Thoughtful regulation — like frameworks that differentiate network tokens from security tokens — can protect against bad actors while giving good actors the clarity they need to build. In fact, a forthcoming bill clarifying this regulation could pave the way for even broader adoption and integration into the global financial system. (Congress is hashing out the details as I write.)

Building Public Goods for Everyone’s Benefit

Traditional finance is built on private, closed networks. But the internet showed us the power of open protocols — like TCP/IP and email — to drive global coordination and innovation.

Blockchains are the internet’s native financial layer. They combine the composability of public protocols with the economic strength of private enterprise. They are credibly neutral, auditable, and programmable. Add stablecoins on top and you get something we’ve never really had before: open money infrastructure.

Think of it like a public highway system. Private companies can still build the vehicles, the businesses, the roadside attractions. But the roads themselves are neutral and open for everyone.

Blockchain networks and stablecoins are doing more than just cutting fees. They’re enabling new categories of software:

- Programmatic payments between machines: Imagine AI agent-powered marketplaces automatically brokering deals for computer resources and other services.

- Micropayments for media, music, and AI contributions: Imagine setting a budget with some simple rules and leaving it to “smart” wallets to disburse the payments.

- Transparent payouts with full audit trails: Imagine using these systems to track spending in government.

- Global commerce without a mess of intermediaries: Imagine settling international transactions instantly at negligible cost — in fact, you don’t have to imagine it as it’s already happening.

The moment for blockchain networks and stablecoins is now: Technology, market demand, and political will are lining up and making these applications a reality. A stablecoin bill could be on the floor this year, and regulatory agencies are weighing frameworks that finally align risk with the right oversight. In the same way that early internet startups were able to thrive once it was clear they wouldn’t be shut down by telcos or copyright lawyers, crypto is ready to cross the chasm from financial experiment to infrastructure backbone, with stablecoins leading the way.

We don’t have to patch the old system.

We can make a better one.

[Nacho Jiménez-Laiglesia @ignaciojdlm]

@amcunicorns @Chautestamento stacking up growth 🚀

[Nacho Jiménez-Laiglesia @ignaciojdlm]

@amcunicorns @StellarEmir @RWA_xyz @Chautestamento @StellarOrg 📃⛓️💫

[Nacho Jiménez-Laiglesia @ignaciojdlm]

@Ryanair @freddievds 🤣