Recently arrived from the United States, where she has left her family, and her home in the San Francisco Bay area, Anna Navarro (Olot, 1968) is coming for it. She is Carles Puigdemont's surprise signing to enter the Junts candidacy for Parliament on May 12. She is willing to put into practice what she learned on the Catalan volleyball team, when she was 12 or 13 years old. You have to roll up your sleeves, you have to fight. “Get on the floor,” the Argentine coach told them. And Navarro, a businesswoman and technology guru who has made a career in Silicon Valley, who has gained valuable experience helping American companies go abroad, thinks about that every time she has to make a difficult decision.
Moving to Barcelona has been. He arrived in California in the early 90s, with British Airways, where he worked while studying a degree in Anglo-Germanic philology at the University of Barcelona and a postgraduate degree at Humboldt in Berlin. “She thought she would end up being a professor or having a publishing house,” she says. Daughter of a painter and an industrial engineer, technology was not a strange element in her life. “I liked going with my father to see the machines, getting in there, seeing how things work,” she says. Her first job was as an English technical translator.
British Airways gave him the opportunity to work in San Francisco, but his business adventure soon began. He was 23 years old. “I opened a translation agency. “I didn't know I was in a place called Silicon Valley, there was no Google, no Yahoo, or anything like that,” he says. The startup worked; Companies asked him for translations, but also how to market their products in Europe. He hired Cisco Systems to reproduce the model. He trained in telecommunications. And his career took off: Xerox, Verisign, VMware, NetApp, Procore Technologies. For a few years, she slowed down to raise her four children.
She has received several distinctions for her influence in the technological field, including the Creu de Sant Jordi, in 2021. Fifteen years ago, with two friends, she promoted Women in Localization, an NGO that promotes the scarce female leadership in the technology industry and which has representation in 30 countries. Also in Catalonia. “Now men, who are heads of company globalization, can enter, so they are all there, Amazon, Google, Spotify...,” she says. So she has helped some of these firms incorporate Catalan into their services. Activism for the language is another facet of it.
It is already in campaign. The first thing will be to make yourself known outside the technological field. Without a license, he is an independentist; Economically he wants “everyone to do well.”
She comes to be a councilor in a Junts government. “I can contribute my experience in building teams, with clear objectives,” in the government or as a deputy in the opposition. “I have come to help. From the outside, and having traveled so much, I have seen how things can go, how trains can be punctual, bureaucracy can speed up and how small businesses can rise. And I would like to put that learning at the service of Catalans,” she emphasizes.
