Patricia de Loro, head of Amazon Business for Europe, has never really thought of herself as a geek, but looking at her career, most would disagree.
Having previously worked at The Venture City fund, the engineer was also the director of Verticals Strategy and Product Management at eBay between 2005 and 2010 and the head of Digital Transformation at Vodafone.
How did a telecommunications engineer get here? Patricia de Loro acknowledges in an interview for Business Insider Spain that, although she liked her career very much, she soon realised that she was not going to go in the same direction as her colleagues, who spent their weekends programming.
"In my final year project I talked about the regulation of telecommunications and I didn't make a satellite, which is what I had to do," she recalls with a laugh.
"What I've always liked is the way you explain technology. I mean, technology is great, but then how does it help? I liked technology as a business, for the way it was applied. Not just technology for the sake of technology," she says.
That's precisely why, when she finished her degree, she went into consulting, where she rediscovered her interest in the business side of things and took the IESE International MBA and MIT Innovation Program.
The MBA opened the doors to eBay, "one of the few companies that had survived the bubble," explains de Loro. The company was looking for a hybrid candidate profile that covered both technology and business and found Patricia.
"Now the position of Product Manager is well known, but at that time it was a novelty," says the engineer, who accepted the position and worked in the London and San Francisco offices with the digital giant .
When she eventually returned to Spain, her position had not yet been integrated into the Spanish ecosystem. "Tuenti was the only one who had a Product Manager because they were the first to adopt the American style of working," she says.
Vodafone, the opportunity that allowed her to be a pioneer in Spain
Even so, de Loro, who missed her home country, returned with an opportunity she didn't expect in the midst of the economic crisis. In 2010, she received a call from Francisco Román, CEO at the time of Vodafone, asking her to help him transform the business and the day-to-day operations of the tele-operator .
"It was a big challenge because in the end, setting up something from scratch is easier than trying to change an ocean liner," the engineer says.
During her time at Vodafone, Patricia de Loro led the company's digital transformation and says she is very "proud of what she has achieved."
"We set up the digital equipment from scratch. We changed everything. We incorporated methodologies that no company had," she recalls.
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Once the job was done, the technology bug came back to bite Patricia and she joined a venture capital fund.
"I never thought I would end up there," acknowledges the engineer, but she says that the project, directed by a former colleague of hers, Laura González-Estéfani, convinced her.
In The Venture City they focused on the less developed hubs -"anything that wasn't London, Silicon Valley or New York"- such as Miami or Latin America.
"Knowledge of product is one of the most important disciplines. People who have worked in large, very advanced companies, have that feeling, but that knowledge is not very well distributed," she explains, pointing out that in The Venture City they helped these ecosystems with fewer opportunities to grow by fulfilling the double function of investor and accelerator.
Amazon Business, a project with a "huge ambition"
As in her time with eBay, the opportunity to be a part of the most relevant company in the digital market came up again, this time with Amazon, where she started working in September 2020 .
"I liked it for several reasons," says the engineer. "Amazon Business is kind of like a startup within Amazon. That is, it is smaller compared to the giant, but it has huge ambition," she explains.
The head office is in Luxembourg, so Loro still misses Spain, but she says she comes back whenever she can.
Explaining her work, de Loro points out that "we are responsible for attracting the right sellers with the right selection and price for our buyers".
"Our product is the platform," stresses the engineer, who also adds that her team is in charge of the "tools to facilitate and eliminate friction between sellers and buyers".
Despite the short time she has been with the e-commerce giant, the engineer has already been adapting to a culture in which she assures that the focus is on talent and excellence .
What has cost her the most? "PowerPoints are forbidden," she reveals with laughter. "Your proposal must be perfectly argued in a document and in detail. At first I found it difficult, but it helps you enormously to get your head around it and to understand and really articulate what is important," she assures.
At the same time, de Loro has promoted Gen/D, a school in Madrid specialising in data-centric professional profiles to generate the talent that companies in the digital environment need.
She also maintains her investment activity and acts as an angel investor. She says she is particularly interested in the edge computing sector and claims that its potential is incredible.
Interesting for an engineer who did not consider herself a geek.
