"Lisbon was a serendipitous discovery", an interview with Daniel Eiba, Founder & CEO at EYESO

EYESO is a marketplace for professional photography. Using blockchain technology, it aims at disrupting the incumbents in the market, allowing talented artists to sell their best works to powerful brands.

With its Founder and CEO Daniel Eiba, we discussed ICOs, blockchain engineering talent in Lisbon and the future of work. 

Lisbon, Portugal

BRIDGE IN: First of all, I’d like to know a little bit about your experience in general. You have worked in Germany, then in the Bay Area and then in Portugal. What put Lisbon on your radar? How is it different from other locations you have worked in?

Daniel - I do like to move around a lot! I’ve spent quite some time traveling, working and studying abroad. I spent some time in Australia, then France, Germany, UK, and the US - right before coming to Portugal - so I do have some insights on how these ecosystems work, although this has been in a two decades timeline so things may have changed a lot in some of these locations. In Germany, Portugal and the US I definitely have a pretty good read and it has been an interesting journey. 

To answer your question: Portugal was not on my radar initially. I had been in the US for over 6 years, working for Yahoo and Flickr and I was looking for a change of scenery. There were a few options in my head: within the US it would have been LA and NYC, since both of them have growing startup ecosystems. In Europe, I was looking at Berlin, Zurich and London. 

But then, in 2016, I got a call from an executive search firm, and they pitched Portugal and Uniplaces to me. That was the moment when Portugal actually got into my plans - I hadn’t spent much time researching or hadn’t even heard that there was a thriving startup ecosystem before. It was right after the first edition of the Web Summit so there was a lot of excitement around Lisbon. That definitely carried quite some weight when it came to deciding my next destination. Right then I started talking to Uniplaces and I was impressed by the company - I really liked the leadership team and the VC behind them: Atomico.

Coming over here was overall an easy start, but it was more of a serendipitous discovery. It is quite different from all the other places I have been to before. First of all, it’s a fairly small country and therefore a small ecosystem. But what was interesting for me to find out - especially after having spent some time in France and Spain - is that everybody speaks English really well. This makes it quite easy for foreigners to come in and operate from day one on a business level. I was impressed with the quality of engineering, which for such a small country is quite amazing. I think it has to do with the fact that almost every university here has an engineering faculty. Design here is also high quality and tasteful – online and offline. I have been interviewing for product designers and I was very impressed with the design work that is happening here. One last thing that stood out is the work ethic. Even compared to California, I found my team here to be extremely engaged and motivated, so there were definitely some positive surprises coming to Lisbon!

Logistically speaking, it was easy to come from the US holding a European Passport. But when it came to shipping my belongings from the US, in terms of bureaucracy and regulations, I have to say: Customs is a bit of a nightmare here and there is plenty of bureaucracy, so I think advisory is necessary to make sure you follow the really strict guidelines and deadlines. 

Getting started then was very easy on a personal level. As per business banking and investment, there is a lot of room for improvement: banking system for startups seems to be stuck in the 90s, I have had my good share of frustration there. 

BRIDGE IN: So you moved here, you started working at Uniplaces and the EYESO project came. You told me you are now looking to raise funds in Berlin - what went wrong here? What were the challenges during the creation of your company and what is the advice you would give to other founders that decide to set-up a company in Lisbon?

Daniel - As I mentioned before, what I found interesting is the access to great local engineering talent. That led me to create two projects here in Portugal with my partners from Berlin. This was the time when ICOs and Cryptocurrencies were in their first growth wave so with the first project Concensum we did an ICO, set-up a company in Singapore but had the development team in Portugal. Interestingly, we found very good blockchain engineers here, at a time, in 2018, when things were just getting started in this area. This was a very scarce talent to find, and if you happened to actually find someone internationally, the salaries were astronomical. In Lisbon, we had a very good base to operate out of, with cost-effective talent and great output.

Initially, my partners were thinking about doing the development in Ukraine, which is one of the usual suspects when it comes to engineering, but we ended up deciding for Portugal and, putting things into perspective, I couldn’t have wished for a better team when we developed EYESO after Concensum. 

To provide some background: EYESO is a marketplace for professional photography. On the platform, you would find things from fine art to nature photography - anything but stock photography. The problem with the market is that it is controlled by a handful of large organizations (Getty being the most famous one) that command handsome margins which often means that the photographer is left with the drags. Similar situation with Spotify who pays about $0,0032 per stream.

So we created a platform where we could give back control to artists. Specifically, control over the licensing and prices, while taking a low margin ourselves, hoping to disrupt the incumbents. 

Now, starting a business like this is no easy task, especially not in Portugal when you are not a local. But I have to say it was a great experience - it all started at Second Home with myself, a brand, and a simple WordPress site. 

Second Home was a very welcoming space, the community manager was great, always connecting people over coffees… That is when I realized that the future of work is coworking spaces: I ended up hiring several people out of Second Home. So in terms of how do you scale up quickly, coworking spaces are fantastic. I hired mainly out of the community, just because of the vibrant place that Lisbon is. I have to say that my experience with local hiring platforms was pretty poor. 

So hiring for me was not a huge pain; on the contrary, for accounting and finance, there are a lot of specific requirements so that part was definitely more challenging than I experienced, for example, in the US. 

On the other hand, I was surprised to see that the Minister of Planning and Infrastructure - Pedro Marques - actually came to talk to us about what challenges we were experiencing as a tech startup, coming into the country. I found it was a really nice token of appreciation and showed interest coming straight from the Portuguese government. So you know, it is true that there are bureaucratic processes to overcome, but it is also true that the Government is listening and doing its best to change for the better. 

The real challenge for EYESO was securing investment here: a Seed Round with a Portuguese lead investor. The cryptocurrency ecosystem had changed: we initially planned an ICO for EYESO but the overall climate around ICOs in 2018 had already deteriorated. It wasn’t the right time for it so I had to look for traditional forms of funding and started talking to some of the VCs in town. That’s when I realized that Lisbon was still quite young in the VC space, with a very low-risk profile and very much focused on B2B. All the bigger rounds that happen here, they all have a European or US lead-/co-investors, which in the end convinced me that we had to broaden the search and look into Berlin, London and the US. In 2019, according to Atomico’s State of European Tech report, 19% of funding rounds into European startups included an American investor.

BRIDGE IN: Several reports have lately shown how Europe is catching up with the US when it comes to VC funding. The European tech ecosystem is younger so it is somehow natural that VCs are showing interest in what’s happening here. What are the reasons behind this growing interest in European startups?

Daniel - SF and Silicon Valley have been in the making for decades, so obviously comparing a very old ecosystem to something that is a newly born comes with some uncertainty. Last year Europe raised close to 35 billion which is an improvement from previous years but also still a tiny fraction of what’s happening in the US. 

There is also a cultural difference: in California and in the US there is a lot of creativity and the general attitude is that there is no bad idea. There is a fail-fast mentality that is a perfect match for creating a new business: people have ideas, resources and the means to do things quickly, and if they fail, they learn from it and they try again. Growing up in Germany, this mentality was something that was not really appreciated or embraced - failure would be regarded as a bad thing.

The US is also a very large, homogeneous market compared to the EU, where ecosystems are fragmented, with a lot of different languages and cultures coming together. 

And then there is also a lifecycle: I think before betting on the hyper-growth of Europe we have to wait and see where we are in the next 10-20 years.

However, a recent trend I see is that US investors are coming to Europe - Lakestar for example has opened an office in Zurich to look after the Iberian market and Sequoia Capital opened a London office. It definitely shows interest, and I can think of a few reasons why: 

• Startups in the US are overpriced, and if you look at salaries, in the US you see engineers coming out of top universities asking for +200,000 $. Unit economics are key in the early days.

• The quality of startups here in Europe has increased dramatically over the last years - they have innovative ideas and performing teams. 

BRIDGE IN: Let’s talk about buzzwords now. The pandemic has put the spotlight on remote work. Is the fully remote model the future of work as many say?

Daniel - This is a relevant question because I lived and worked in SF when I was at Yahoo. At the time, to go to the office in Sunnyvale from SF, meant driving 1-2h  one way, and this is the daily commute of thousands of people who work in Digital in the valley. I ended up leaving at 6 am to avoid traffic and cut the commute to 40 minutes. 

That was the time when Marissa Mayer came to Yahoo and put a stop on remote work, which forced really talented engineers who previously did not need to go to the office to actually now be there. 

In 2020 we have better technologies and tools available to enable people to work remotely, but I think it is more of a cultural question in my view. 

I am a fan of remote work in principle, but there are a few things that I find essential, such as the initial team building. Even for my small startup here, I found it great to be sharing a space, to be able to talk to engineers, discuss ideas and brainstorm together. This kind of spontaneity is hard to achieve when you stick to the strict meeting schedule of being fully remote. There is this notion of team norming-storming-performing that is easier and more effective if done in person. It also depends a lot on the tasks you have to perform and the team size. 

There are a lot of advantages of remote work: it is a massive time and money saver, both from the employer and employee’s perspective. 

I think we need a hybrid model: some people may be very reluctant to change their habits but with the advent of COVID-19, remote work has become the new standard – for now - and people are starting to see the upside.

BRIDGE IN: What’s next for you?

Daniel - I just co-founded a remote language learning platform, which offers instructor-led online language training. It’s called Lingosoup, and our customers, mainly businesses and expats, are looking for individual training programs and fast learning results in English and Portuguese with professional teachers.

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