Is Silicon Sangria Barcelona’s answer to Silicon Valley? [video]

Silicon Siesta, Silicon Sangria, Silicon Tapas, Silicon Dali, Silicon Bottelon, Silicon bullfighting, Silicon Fiesta, Silicon Rambla and  Silicon del Messi are just a few of the name suggestions for Barcelona’s answer to Silicon Valley. And some of Silicon Valley came to Barcelona last week just before one of Europe’s biggest tech events of the year -Mobile World Congress -you can see our live coverage here. The event, organized by the newly launched E3 Union, was aptly named ‘Silicon Valley comes to  Barcelona’ and featured technorati such as TechStar’s Brad Feld and Startup Geonome’s  Bjoern Lasse Herrmann who talked about how Barcelona could replicate the valley’s key to success.

Inspired by Canadian entrepreneur Victoria Lennox’s work on NACUE–  the National Association of Colleges and University Entrepreneurs she set up to sit as the umbrella organization to promote student enterprise amongst universities in the UK, the founders of E3, Marc Sanz Lopez and Aida Martinez with the help of Celine Schmahl, have a similar vision for Spain’s student entrepreneurs.

Union E3 has 6 of the main universities of the country and their respective university entrepreneurship clubs on board to start collaborating to learn faster, create more and become bigger collectively for a bigger impact.

Their goal is to incorporate every single university around the country, unite the entrepreneurial entities within the universities and form new ones in order to develop ecosystem and pool of know-how for student entrepreneurs.

The panel for what Barcelona can learn from Silicon Valley included Innovalley’s Ariadna Mateu – a tech clothing company based in Silicon Valley and a young entrepreneur dubbed ‘Spain’s answer to Mark Zuckerberg Pep Gomez who discussed how failure is seen as success and other Valley differences. The audience then heard about the Supporting Ecosystem in Spain hearing from VC’s like  Josep Amorós Moya who is Vice- Director for  Spain’s Wayra – Part of Telefonica’s venture arm.

We also caught up with Jeroen Kemperman, founder of iesemeetsthevalley.com– a mission bring Spanish entrepreneurs to Silicon Valley this year.

Interview with E3 founders Marc Sanz Lopez and Aida Martinez.

Interview with Barcelona based entrepreneurs Jeroen Kemperman founder of iesemeetsthevalley.com and Cortney Woodruff.