Consciousness as Capital

Xavi Ginesta

A telecom engineer, Xavi Ginesta spent two decades building Voxel, a Barcelona payments company, into a global leader and one of Spain's best places to work, with a simple premise: happy people were the purpose, and profit the means. He also went on to lead the Spanish chapter of Conscious Capitalism. He never built his company to sell, and for years couldn't have imagined letting it go. Yet in 2024 he sold it for over $100 million. It wasn't failing; something in him had shifted.

The shift began with the Festival of Consciousness, the first thing he had ever done without an economic motive. It cost five times what he'd planned, yet on the closing night, watching 2,000 strangers dance together, he found a kind of abundance no balance sheet had given him. One of his most senior employees had volunteered to clean the festival floors, and she thanked him simply for letting her be part of it. Today the festival is run entirely by volunteers, with no ticket prices.

Through the Humanitas Foundation, he now funds the Barcelona Institute of Advanced Neuroscience (INAB) and partnered with the University of Arizona to host the Science of Consciousness Conference in Barcelona. All of it rests on one conviction: "The root problem is our mindset." He describes generosity as an “inner technology”: a practice that lifts us out of a scarcity mindset, so that new ideas, and a different kind of wealth, can emerge. He calls this transformational philanthropy: rather than treating symptoms, it supports shifts at the root, in how we see ourselves and each other. He also convenes a growing network of philanthropists exploring this way of giving.