Roberto was born in Santander in 1971. Two constants are those that appear in his professional career: innovation and team management.
Graduate in Philosophy and Letters (1992), in the specialty of prehistory, he began his doctorate studies investigating Palaeolithic rock art. At that time the first connections to the internet were seen in the research centers and, “cacharreando”, published a website about one of its lines of research. This website allowed him to get in touch with the Japanese company Texnai, which at that time was developing hardware and software to spread knowledge about archeology through photographic virtual reality. That contact finally became a job funded by the Government of Japan consisting of a kind of “street view” of Palaeolithic art. The work was published in 2003 and won the national university edition award.
In 2002, it changed the air and set in motion what would eventually become a state benchmark in mobilizing empty housing: the Bizigune program. That professional stage allowed him to discover that, in addition to innovation and team management, he was attracted to work on something that would improve people’s lives.
In 2014, he founded the real estate company Etikalia, after discovering that a positive social impact could also be achieved from the private sector. Etikalia had many ingredients to fail: opening a real estate was not the most “popular” in the middle of the bubble and that ethics and non-profit sounded like geeks. However, it has worked. As an innovation, it has introduced professional rental management as a preventive tool for conflict. From the observation that the management of rental housing is usually done in an amateur way, with the known results of defaults and defaults, Etikalia proposes that the best way to obtain good results is through professional rental management.
