“Here, I am completely free to do whatever I need to do”
Alejandro Gaspar, Sales Engineer at Webbing, shares his journey in telecom and experience of stepping out of his comfort zone – and reveals how all of this led him to join Webbing.
I am from Spain. I was born and grew up in Barcelona, but now I live in Madrid with my family. I have two hobbies: skiing and scuba diving. Every winter, I spend a week in the Italian Alps skiing, and I ski hard, from sunrise to sunset. As for diving, it’s usually a week or two on a boat in the ocean in very exotic places. My last trip was in December, I went to Palau.
Ever since I was a kid, I have been fascinated by electricity and technology: disassembling toys and building something new from them was one of my favorite pastimes. Later, it extended to computers, and when I was 15, I was one of the first people in Spain that got Internet access at home.
But despite all that, when it was time to decide what to study after school, I had no idea. So my grandfather told me “You should learn either electrical engineering or agriculture engineering”, because at that time these professions paid well. I chose electrical engineering (and I love it!) and went on to study at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.
Starting a Professional Journey
Upon getting my master’s degree, I went to Paris to work for Alcatel. One of my customers there was the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. This type of infrastructure generates a huge amount of data, and at that time, no networks were capable of processing all the data generated by the collider. Alcatel designed a specific mesh network, and I developed a mathematical method for replicating this type of network for other customers and industries.
After a year in France, I decided to return to Spain and pursue something more business oriented. I found a small consultancy that specialized in telecom cost reduction.
Getting a Global Perspective
I then joined Telefonica, the largest mobile network operator in Spain, as a project manager. One of the clients was Inditex, the parent company of Zara among other brands. Every time they opened a new store in any country, I was responsible for providing them with connectivity services for a worldwide VPN. Although communication was centralized in Spain, each country had its connectivity requirements, so I had to travel a lot.
After Telefonica, I joined JSC Ingenium, a mobile core network provider, where I started my pre-sales career and gained a lot of knowledge about mobile networks and about MVNOs specifically.
I also traveled quite a lot. I visited many interesting places around the world, such as Mongolia, Iran, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, which at the time was not as open to foreigners as it is today.
But although I love traveling and discovering new places and cultures, it was tiring. People say that Australia is the farthest place on Earth, but there are other places that are harder to get to. There were no daily flights to some of these places, and at times I had to use my personal time for traveling. So, after working at JSC Ingenium for five years, I returned to Telefonica, this time as a digital business development manager. I was in charge of gathering services developed by all the companies belonging to Telefonica and turning them into products for international wholesale customers. In a couple of years, I was promoted to IoT pre-sales and focused on M2M / IoT for multinational companies until I was contacted by a headhunter who told me about a company called Webbing.
Taking the Leap with Webbing
I did some research about Webbing and I met with people from the company who explained the technology, and I really loved the product.
In a way, joining Webbing was a leap of faith for me. When you work in a big company, you become accustomed to your place, you do your daily routine and you’re in your comfort zone. When I considered leaving the biggest Spanish MNO and starting to work for a foreign company that had no office in Spain, many people around me were saying “Man, you’re crazy”. But I felt – and I still feel – that I’m too young to stay in a comfort zone. I’m not at the age of just working to get a salary and getting ready to retire. And it’s good to be evolving in your career and your knowledge, always expanding your scope.
One Word to Describe Webbing is “excellence”
I never regretted my decision. Last month marked two years since I joined Webbing and I’m still happy. Working at Webbing is very different from some of my previous experiences: here, I am completely free to do whatever I need to do in my work.
It is also different because I am the only company employee in Spain, working full-time with no office. Working from home is fine and I see my colleagues on Teams every day, but sometimes I miss being able to gather with them, so it’s always nice when I get to meet them at events like Mobile World Congress where we have a chance to chat or have dinner together after the event.
If I had to pick one word to describe Webbing, it would be “excellence”. And by excellence, I mean not only that we have a good product that I personally believe in, but also deep expertise and experience – sometimes we don’t just sell the product or service, we educate customers, explaining which kind of solution would really fit their needs.
