In my posts describing my experience as an employee at a startup, I told you that one of the perks of the job was to get to know top level people. I guess you should be asking yourself:

“Why is this guy talking about getting to know top-level pros when the article is supposed to be about co-working spaces?”

Well, let me tell you something; being at the right co-working facility can be like playing in an All-Star game. In this article, I will narrate my experience as a member of a startup in the first class of the Google for Startups Campus Residency Program in Madrid.

So let’s dive in!

It was Spring 2017; I had been in Mumablue for almost three months. Our founder, who was an active member at the Google Campus Madrid, came to the office very excited saying:

“Guys, I have great news!”

We all looked at her thinking (we were only six people at the company), “Well, maybe we’re going to have a pizza party this Friday.”

“We have been invited to apply for the first edition of Google for Startups Residency Program in Madrid.” She said.

That phrase was the beginning of one of the most significant experiences of my life. At first, my knowledge of Campus was limited. But let’s be honest, if it had Google on it, it sounds like a great place to be, right?

The first step was to send a pitch video, and I had the pleasure to be the member of the team delivering that critical speech. It took me around an hour to record the piece; I was mentally exhausted and nervous about the outcome.

Days passed by and around two weeks later, we received an email. The subject had the words application and Residency; it was pretty obvious the email contained the result of the application. Suddenly, our founder shouted, “We qualified to the next round!”

I felt relieved.

We now had to go to do our final pitch at the building in which, we didn’t know at the time, we will spend the next ten months of our lives.

As you may get from the last sentence, we got invited to be one of the six startups in the 2017 class in Madrid. This was our biggest achievement as a team so far.

This is the first thing you see when you enter Campus.

We moved in. The building was pleasant and the environment charming. The cafe was a vast space filled with a mass of people chasing their dreams on a laptop. There were optimism and high energy all around that place.

Our spot was the first on the left at the right wing of the third floor. Well, I guess it’s better if you see it by yourself.

That was my table — so many memories.

It was August, and basically, no one from the program moved in before us. It all started in September.

A tremendous welcome day was launched by the Campus staff. We received our welcome kit with notebooks, calendars, and even a passport. Why a passport? — you may ask — this was a tool we could use to work for up to a week at any of the Google for Entrepreneurs coworking facilities and partner venues around the whole world.

Imagine being able to go to Tel Aviv Campus and exchanging your experiences and knowledge with people from there, isn’t that an enriching experience?

As a member of the program, we got access to many resources including Google’s own people. Of course, the first to get to share some knowledge with them were our IT team, which at that time was made of one person.

However, as time passed, we started to have a chance to talk to some pretty interesting characters. The first one to visit with my team was an expert in UX from Google who gave us some ideas on how to improve our website. Then, some days after that, a diplomatic representation from Hong Kong came to Campus and chatted with us for some good 40 minutes.

But, two months into the program, I realized the only way to take advantage of this experience was by being willing to talk to people.

Following my new mindset, I got to know the Senior Global Operations Lead for Google for Startups. This man, whose humbleness was one of the greatest things I learned from him, gave us so many ideas for our entry strategy into the U.S. market and also connected us with high-level people within Google in the publishing and toys spaces. — Why toys and publishing? Because Mumablue makes personalized books for children. -

That’s one of Mumablue’s illustrators drawing one scene of a book.

By late Fall, we had talked to so many pros, investors and business leaders, but the best experience of the whole program was about to start; it was time for the Expert Summit.

The Expert Summit was a two-week program in which Googlers from around the globe came to campus to work one on one with the startups in the program.

As I mentioned before, we were on the Kids’ goods industry, and we had the opportunity to work alongside a Product Manager, who before working at Google was a Manager at Disney. Just imagine for a second the impact this guy had on our company. It was priceless.

We also worked with a UX expert, who in two weeks, gave us all her insights on how we could improve and take to the next level our mobile web. And guess what, her audit guided us to build a brand new website. Then a group of Architects and Engineers helped our IT team to solve some technical issues and implement routines to make their work more efficient.

By the time we left campus in March, we were now a team of 11 people; we were 6 when it all started. We all had experiences and met some cool people who added value to our roles.

This is one of our last days at Camus. Some of the team members including me. :)

The good thing about this experience is that, once you are involved in this program, you will always be a member of the community. We got invited to the next Expert Summit, our relationship with other founders and team members is a great tool to share knowledge, there are always great lectures and events we are regularly invited to, and as I like to say: we’re part of something bigger than ourselves.

I hope this short story serves to illustrate how it is to be at a place like a Google for Startups Campus, and how you can take advantage of it. Depending on the city, they have one class per year, make sure you check them out here.

To sum up, here you have five things you should keep in mind to succeed at your coworking space:

Talk to people, don’t be shy. Go to the events! Give back to the community. Be a leader. (And sometimes be a follower too) Enjoy every second of it.

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you in my next post.