Xavier Ginesta

"This was the first thing I had done without an economic motive," says Xavi Ginesta, a successful Barcelona tech entrepreneur, recalling the not-for-profit festival of consciousness he launched in 2022.

But it ended up costing five times more than planned, and the number kept nagging at him throughout the two days of the festival. "I never thought it would become this much," he says. Then, on the closing night, he looked around: 2,000 people, strangers dancing side by side, on tickets purposely kept cheap enough for anyone to come. "The atmosphere was so incredible," he says. "That ecstatic dance was literally ecstatic."

At that moment, something in him came loose. "I experienced a sense of joy that I had never experienced before, to be honest," Ginesta recalls. "Creating a great company where people were happy was very satisfactory for me and it gave me a lot of happiness. But this was different. It was excitement as well, but it was more a sense of plenitude, a sense of being home, a sense of this is what happiness is all about."

Before the festival, Ginesta had founded Voxel, in 1998. Trained as a telecommunications engineer, with a doctorate in electrical engineering from NYU, he spent the next two decades building the Barcelona company into a global leader in electronic payments for the travel industry, ranked the third-best place to work in Spain in 2019 and 2020 — a company he would eventually sell for over $100 million. The culture he built there rested on a specific inversion of the usual order: "Our higher purpose in business," he says, "was not running the business, but using the profits our business was generating to generate happy workplaces."

As the Festival kept creating unexpected ripples — not just in him, but in the hundreds of volunteers and thousands of people who passed through it — Ginesta arrived at a decision that surprised even himself. He'd been moved toward a different kind of work — helping human consciousness itself evolve — and his company, however well-run, wasn't the right vehicle for that. That's when he decided to sell it, in 2024. No argument could have talked him into that before the Festival — "There was no way you could have convinced me to sell my company," he says — and none needed to, once something underneath had already shifted. "Transformation is not a change in behavior," is how he puts it now. "It's a change in your belief system that drives a change in behavior with no effort."

What came next was the Humanitas Foundation. Today it funds a neuroscience research institute in Barcelona, co-hosts the Science of Consciousness Conference with the University of Arizona, and continues to run the Festival of Consciousness itself. Ginesta calls its underlying philosophy transformational philanthropy: he'd come to see most conventional giving as necessary but incomplete — good at treating the symptoms of a broken system without ever touching why it's broken. "The root problem, to me, is our mindset," he says: not the policies built on top of a system, but the belief system underneath it. The foundation describes its own work as building "a living network that connects people, talent, and resources," aimed at creating new forms of prosperity and human development.

None of this was new territory for Ginesta. He had been meditating for over a decade, a practice that taught him to catch a thought as it formed, before it turned into words — what he calls, simply, control of his own mind. That same pull toward consciousness had already made him, in 2019, CEO of the Spanish chapter of Conscious Capitalism, and in 2022, co-author of the book Humanitas with the mystic Sergi Torres.

Ginesta describes anyone doing this kind of inner work as joining, without ever signing up, an informal network of people quietly doing the same thing — proof, to him, that the work scales further than it looks. Join us in conversation with this former tech entrepreneur turned philanthropist, who sold a company built on making people happy in order to find out how far that same idea could go.