Vicente Pascual

Vicente Pascual is Co-Founder and CEO of Cabify, the only unicorn company in Spain.

Vicente Pascual admits that lately he doesn’t dream much because he sleeps very little. His small daughter –his great treasure– is the reason for his sleeplessness. But when he daydreams, he sees “a nearby future when the cities will get back space for their inhabitants, thanks in part to companies like ours.”

Even so, he considers himself a simple person, “someone who works, with his feet on the ground, passionate about what he does and wanting to enjoy life, his family and his friends.” As he puts it, he took his first professional steps as an intern in the ICEX internationalization program in Vietnam. From there, he went to work as a consultant in PwC and BCG.

As someone who once looked at the moon and found it near but immense, he explains that:

“I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I never saw myself taking part in the construction of a business with the volume and importance of Cabify. With Cabify, I was lucky enough to be part of a company that had been born with the ambition of becoming global, and that has reached the goals it set itself.” 

Vicente says that “Cabify was born because its founder, Juan de Antonio, understood that it was necessary to change the cities into more pleasant places for living. It grew out of the discovery that it was easier to get people to choose ways of transportation that they don’t own (transport as a service) than to get them to change their own ways of transportation (transportation as an asset).”

For Vicente there are no secrets to success: “It’s a mix of ambition, of knowing right from the start that it’s necessary to be global, of being part of an exceptional team, of working very hard, and also –why not say it– of having the luck to be in the right place at the right time.” As he says, the growth process of a startup has many complicated phases: “The hardest thing is that you have to be continually changing gears, what worked at the start doesn’t work six months later. You have to be learning constantly, taking risks and making decisions without knowing if you’re right or not.”

In spite of everything that’s been achieved, what satisfies Vicente most is “having helped many people who had trouble getting a job to find work that they’re proud of.” His aim is to continue to grow as a professional and as a person, and transmit to the team some of the passion, curiosity and resilience to go on developing toward something better.

Vicente Pascual sees the future as something unpredictable, but says that “there is already a change, especially among young people, who are doing without the private property of vehicles.” And he concludes, with that strange power of clairvoyance possessed by people who dream while they’re awake:

“In the very near future the use of transportation through platforms will help the cities change, and vehicles will stop being so important on the street, and those streets will become more pleasant for individuals.”