It is my pleasure to introduce our newest member, Alvaro Jimenez, who is the founder of Gaudium Capital.  Alvaro’s classification is Investments.  He has been nominated by David Woodward and Jim Odom.

 

Alvaro is from Spain and grew up in the Barcelona region.  While attending school at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, he studied abroad at UCLA for a year.  When he finished his undergraduate degree, he knew he wanted to pursue a graduate degree and based on his experience at UCLA, knew he wanted to do that in the US.

 

It turns out that the MS in Real Estate program at UW was the only degree that gave him everything he was looking for.  While studying at UW, he had a summer job with late Rotary member Jim Potter at La Serena Holdings, where he learned more about commercial real estate development.  Jim served as a mentor and Alvaro first learned about Rotary from Jim.

 

After graduating from UW, Alvaro took a position with Security Properties Investments, leveraging his degree in commercial real estate management.  After two years, he then decided to do something completely different and took a job with Microsoft, working as an Enterprise Services Sales Finance Manager.  After three years, that was becoming too routine, so he took a position with the fintech firm, New Alchemy, and began focusing on blockchain innovation.  Unfortunately, the firm was forced to cut back and lay off many employees, and although Alvaro was retained, he saw that it was not a promising situation, so decided it would be a good time to start his own firm.  Thus, he launched Gaudium in October. They do angel investing, provide advisory services to start-up firms, and offer their expertise on blockchain technologies.

 

Alvaro is excited to join Rotary, particularly because it allows him to follow the advice given to him by Jim Potter several years ago.  In his spare time, Alvaro enjoys writing about existential philosophy and photography!  He also enjoys the annual summer visits he receives from his parents, when he gets to take them to an interesting part of the US, and this year it looks like it will be the Grand Canyon!

 

Please join me in welcoming our newest member, Alvaro Jimenez.