You go to a networking event. Do you know who you are going to meet? Do you know who you need to talk to? Probably not. And even when the conversation is interesting, a few days later you can barely remember half of what you told each other.

That everyday friction is what gave rise to BlaBlaNote, the new venture by Oriol Vila, co-founder and CEO of Holaluz for eleven years. The company surpassed 300,000 customers, grew to 900 employees, went public in 2019 and became one of the leading names in the ecosystem when it was still in its early stages. Since 2025, he has been starting again from scratch with a Relationship Intelligence platform designed to help us keep track of the people we meet.

(Side note: the tool would have been very useful for writing this summary of the Petit Comitech we organised together with EAE Business School.)

Entrepreneurship is about building something useful for yourself

The idea behind BlaBlaNote comes from an inherited belief: “According to my father’s theory, if you build something that is useful to you, the chances of it being useful to other people increase.”

After an event or a lunch, Oriol was the kind of person who would create a Word document or Excel spreadsheet with everything that had happened. The problem is that those documents “end up gathering dust”. What was missing was a tool to actively manage your relationships, rather than simply archive them and forget about them.

Going back to square one

After Holaluz, Oriol spent some time working as a board member, advisor, coach and lecturer. But he knew exactly what he wanted: “I like entrepreneurship. I like being on the front line, getting things done, delivering them and testing them.”

Even at Holaluz, the early days were his favourite stage: 60 to 70 hours a week, including weekends, for three or four years. “It is the stage I remember most fondly. It was very agile, a blank page with everything still to create.”

He is also quick to point out that the past guarantees nothing: “Past success does not define future success.” Holaluz was a B2C energy company; BlaBlaNote is a B2B software business, a field in which he admits he is learning from scratch.

What he does carry with him is his reputation: “All my emails start with, ‘Hi, I’m Oriol Vila, co-founder of Holaluz.’ That way, at the very least, people reply to my first email.”

Not for everyone, not alone, and not before the market is ready

For Oriol, entrepreneurship is not suited to every profile: “Saying that everyone can be an entrepreneur is like saying that anyone can be a chef, a hairdresser or an elite athlete.”

He identifies three conditions that make the difference:

• Resilience. The number of rejections, or simply the lack of replies, that an entrepreneur receives is extremely high in a world saturated with emails.
• The right company. “I would not start a company alone or with the wrong people.” For him, entrepreneurship on your own comes with a kind of leadership loneliness that is difficult to sustain, while a bad co-founder is one of the main causes of failure, and suffering, in a startup.
• Networking. We live in a relationship-driven world. Finding the right people to collaborate and grow with determines both the speed and the strength of a project.

To all of this, he adds one final variable that no one can control: timing. “Everyone launches a company when they believe the time is right. But only time will tell whether you were right.”