Xavier Ginesta

"This was the first thing I had done without an economic motive," says Xavier 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 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."

Watching them, the frustration he'd carried all week gave way to something else -- gratitude, and a kind of awe he hadn't expected. The money he'd worried over suddenly felt almost beside the point. "I experienced a sense of joy that I had never experienced before, to be honest," Xavi 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 more a sense of plenitude. A sense of being home. A sense of this is what happiness is all about."

Before the festival, Xavi had spent two decades building Voxel, a Barcelona-based company that became a global leader in electronic invoicing and payments for the travel industry. Voxel was recognized as the third best workplace in Spain by the Best Workplaces ranking in 2019 and 2020. 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." That same conviction, in 2019, made him CEO of the Spanish chapter of Conscious Capitalism.

As the Festival continued to generate unexpected ripples -- not just in him, but in the hundreds of volunteers and thousands of people who participated -- Xavi arrived at a decision that surprised even himself. In 2024, he sold Voxel and started Humanitas Foundation. Even a company built on making people happy, he realized, wasn't the right vehicle for the work pulling at him now. "There was no way you could have convinced me to sell my company," he says, "but when I developed a new sense of happiness, that transformed my behavior." His own journey made him realize that transforming the world begins with inner transformation.

Today, Humanitas Foundation 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. Xavi calls the underlying philosophy transformational philanthropy -- giving aimed at the root, not the symptoms. Most conventional philanthropy, in his view, patches problems without touching what created them. 'The root problem, to me, is our mindset,' he says -- a belief he'd already put into words in 2022, co-authoring a book by the same name, Humanitas, with the mystic Sergi Torres.

This shift wasn't overnight for Xavi. He had been practicing meditating for over a decade, a practice that taught him to catch a thought as it formed, before it turned into words. It's the same instinct he credits for his biggest calls in business and in life: trusting the pull before his rational mind got a chance to argue it down.

He describes anyone doing this kind of inner work as joining, without ever signing up, an invisible network of people quietly doing the same thing -- proof, to him, that the work scales further than it looks. Join our moderators Abby Falik and Rohit Rajgarhia, in conversation with this former tech entrepreneur turned philanthropist -- as we find out where that pull has taken him.