The Story of Mindata, the Spanish Consultancy That Grew Into More Than 25 Countries Without Opening a Single Office

Cristina Hernandez founded Mindata in 2018 around an idea that cuts against much of the usual talk about digital transformation: the real problem large companies face is not a lack of technology, but the complexity of their own organizations. Less than a decade later, the consultancy she leads operates in more than 25 countries, growth that was not built by opening offices one by one but by following clients wherever they needed her.

Her thinking rests on a distinction between what is difficult and what is complex. The first, she argues, gets solved with technical knowledge. The second requires orchestrating people, processes and systems that do not always move at the same pace, and that is where most large companies get stuck, even when they have generous technology budgets. For Hernandez, technology should simplify that complexity, not add another layer on top of it.

Before founding Mindata, her career moved between the public and private sectors, a mix she says taught her that transforming an organization means managing people, changing processes and sustaining a long term vision, not just installing new tools. That experience also led her to build Mindata from the start around a distributed work model, something the pandemic did not create but simply accelerated, allowing the firm to serve clients in other countries without relying on physical offices.

Hernandez argues that good technology should be almost invisible, like any infrastructure that works well enough that nobody notices it. She applies the same logic to how she leads, saying she focuses her management on growing the people on her teams rather than directing them, and on anticipating client needs to remove friction instead of adding layers of bureaucracy.

An active participant in DigitalES, Spain's main technology industry association, Hernandez is one of the few women leading a technology consultancy of that size in the country. Asked about it, she plays down gender as a factor and points instead to coherence and the ability to listen as the qualities that truly sustain leadership. With a presence in more than 25 countries built in under ten years, Mindata has become an example cited within Spain's technology sector of international growth driven by client relationships rather than investment in its own infrastructure.