Garça Pudenta

Three coffees with milk

It all started in a random cafeteria in Valencia, on a rainy Tuesday. Marc, Elena and Iker knew each other from university, but they hadn't seen each other for years until they met by chance that afternoon. Marc worked as a programmer in a company he hated, Elena designed packaging to order, and Iker had just left a master's degree in business administration halfway through because, according to him, "the classes never taught him anything that he couldn't learn on his own".

"What if we set something up together?" Iker blurted out, almost jokingly, as he stirred the sugar from his coffee.

No one laughed. They were silent for a moment, looking at each other, as if the three of them had been waiting for that phrase without knowing it.

The idea was born that same night, scribbled on a napkin: an app that connected small local food producers with restaurants looking for fresh ingredients without going through intermediaries. Marc could program it. Elena could design it. Iker, with his unstoppable verbiage, knew how to sell it.

The first months were hard. They worked at night, after their other jobs, in the living room of Elena's shared flat. They lived on cold pizza and borrowed spirits. There were nights when Marc wanted to throw in the towel, convinced that no one would use the app. There were weeks when Iker didn't get a single meeting with investors and returned home with a long face, although he always feigned optimism in front of the other two.

The first customer was a small neighborhood restaurant that agreed to try the app just because the owner was Elena's uncle. It worked. The second customer came by word of mouth. After six months, they had twenty restaurants and eight registered producers.

It was not a path of instant success or spectacular headlines. It was slow, stubborn, made up of small victories: the first bill paid, the first employee hired, the first time someone outside them called them "entrepreneurs" without sarcasm.

Two years later, the company – which they finally called Root – had a presence in three cities and a team of twelve people. Marc continued to program, although no longer at night. Elena had hired another designer so that she would not be the one to put out the fires all the time. Iker, at last, had the meetings with investors that he had always dreamed of, although now he faced them with less verbiage and more data.

Sometimes, when the work got heavy, they would return to the same cafeteria as on that rainy Tuesday. They would order three coffees with milk and laugh remembering how naïve they had been to think that it would be easy.

It hadn't been. But they hadn't given up either.