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Steve Jobs + high-res version

The Latinos Of Silicon Valley

A great article by Giovanni Rodriguez in Forbes (The Latinos Of Silicon Valley) describes with ease the role that Latinos are playing in the Silicon Valley.  He mentions Rebecca and I as emerging leaders. We’re thrilled to see a community of new leaders emerging in the Silicon Valley and to be considered among them. But truly, our team makes all of this possible.

I wanted to expand on the article with my point of view and explain why his article matters so much.

The Latinos of Silicon Valley –– We are about technology. We are like a startup. We are about the world. (Giovanni Rodriguez in a Forbes article dated May 11th 2013)

We’ve been in the Silicon Valley for well over a decade. We came directly to Stanford after a full year of traveling abroad.  Over the years, we’ve learned that the Valley can be fun, unpredictable, exciting, rewarding and sometimes even heartbreaking. There’s a reason why people from all over the world come here –– it all boils down to an insatiable feeling of curiosity and the unstoppable need to create something, to put a ding in the universe, as Steve Jobs would say.

I’ve always been curious about the most random things. As a kid I wondered what would happen if I used my dad’s computer. I reformatted the hard drive and it took him hours to restore it. It was thrilling and scary at the same time.   I wondered about luck and class differences. As a kid I was acutely aware of the socioeconomic differences we had to face as a family. I think experiencing that and being aware of it has helped me strive for something better throughout my life.  I was part of the have-nots and though it was tough, I enjoyed being the underdog and rising above it –– and still do.

I wanted to know more but I didn’t know where to start. My mom was pivotal, as she implanted the seed of curiosity by filling the gaps of knowledge with new and mesmerizing facts and stories about far away lands. Even though I had a great coach, after a while the oppressive environment with a revolving door of presidents and coups brought me down, so I stopped looking and I became a follower. But thankfully not for long. It was hard because it meant being completely aloof and putting my head down, which has never been one of my strengths, so I started looking again.

When I arrived to the Silicon Valley, everything changed –– not overnight but it was a pretty fast transition. I took up computer science, though I’d never programmed in my life and I was lucky enough to get an internship at Sun Microsystems. I didn’t know anyone but as things happen here, we met a super cool guy who happened to be a director of marketing at Sun and he happened to be looking for interns. Plus I happened to be persistent. I worked Saturdays and Sundays at the office. I was thankful that they would let me come to the office on the weekend and also surprised that not many people did, except the director.

My family’s emphasis on education, hard work and risk-taking was a great platform where to stand. Then I came here, to the Silicon Valley, as an outsider and now I feel part of the fabric of it. The platform my family built helped me stand tall and face challenges, accept failure and to always strive to be better. I believe we have a big responsibility to open up doors and to build up our presence in business, technology and innovation.

As Giovanni said in his article, we  “expect others — Latinos and non-Latinos alike — to begin investing.  For one of the most remarkable things about Silicon Valley is that it is fast emerging as one of the world’s new melting pots.”

 

The capitalization table is key to a startup and should be understood and managed accordingly. To understand what a cap table is and how to build it, please read my post below which explains some the basics. Also read Brad Feld’s introductory post on cap tables. Gust has some great resources as well to understand how to value your technology startup.

If you want to skip to the nuts and bolts of creating a cap table, visit CapShare and give it a spin. You’ll need all the details laid out before you plunge in so that things make sense to you.

The financial responsibilities that come with launching a company properly can be confusing, especially if you have not done it before. In some cases the company is launched and before you know it, you have hit hockey-stick growth and you are surrounded by people that are very knowledgeable and that can take care of the legal and financial aspects of running a company. That is the entrepreneur’s dream. Focus on product and hire other brilliant people to take care of the rest. However, that is not the norm so many entrepreneurs need to learn the basics quickly because as much as you want to, you can’t rely on third party folks to advise you on how to run your numbers. It is key that you understand the financials so that you can make decisions quicker. This becomes extremely valuable once you are negotiating a big partnership or your first big client. If you are seeking the partnership, then it is very likely that you will be dealing with sophisticated business people. Also, the opposite could hold true. Your potential investors or partners might be savvy in other business verticals (that’s why you might be seeking them) but they might not be familiar with what it means to invest in a technology startup and how to do it while minimizing the risk.

One of those things is the capitalization table. I will run you through the process that I went through to figure out the cap table for Interesante.com –– hopefully this will serve you as a template to follow or at least a base to start.

Basics first.

Who are the founders, how much equity each one gets and what is your employee incentive pool (EIP). This really depends on your company but typically you want to set aside somewhere between 10 to 20% of your total equity to attract new hires to your startup. There’s a great post from Fred Wilson about equity compensation. It reads a bit  dated but still has valid points of view. Investors like to see that entrepreneurs are thinking long term and that are realistic about hiring and growth needs.

Equity Incentive Plan.

Think about how are you going to compensate your advisors, employees and partners. What is your plan for advisors and how many are you going to seek and why? Your advisors will be your lifeline to knowledge, VCs, potential hires and business strategy. You need to honor their experience and compensate them with the most valuable asset that you hold, which is your equity. Plus they will be in a position to be paid in equity. Depending on the commitment they are willing to make you can decide on the amount of equity you are willing to pay. Here is a great explanation of how Michelle Wetzler negotiated her compensation and the factors she looked at. Take a look and learn from it.

Think long term and offer a deal that fits within their current workload. It should be firm enough that they pay attention to you but flexible enough to allow for some breathing room. You’ll need to define a contract that you can offer to all your initial advisors. There needs to be a cliff  for the initial options to be vested and a long-term commitment should be agreed upon. A contract between 24 to 48 months is reasonable and established on-going meetings. Once or twice a month should be enough.

For your key employees you need to make it worthwhile.  Depending on experience and seniority, the range could vary.  Keep in mind that anything above 1% of shares will affect your pool in a big way. What you give away needs to be measured against the employee incentive pool and not the total of the company pool. That will give you some constraints and will force you to be more creative.

Beyond the basics.

Fred Wilson has a great post on cap tables. As he points out, the cap table shows you all the major stockholders of the company,  major option holders and option holders. It shows all of the classes of stock and how much was paid for them. For each investor, shows how much of each class was bought and how many shares of that class are owned as a result. Total up the cost and shares and then calculate ownerships on a fully-diluted basis (which means you include the options, whether issued or non-issued or vested or non-vested).

Santa Maria Startup Weekend + high-res version

Why Is Startup Weekend Important?

 Startup Weekend is now a global success taking place in major cities and now is entering smaller communities and becoming a lot more diverse. Santa Maria Startup Weekend is a great example of this. Communities that have entrepreneurial potential that needs to be unlocked.  I will be one the speakers. The coaches are great and the judges come from very diverse backgrounds. The event promises to be exciting and dynamic.  There are only a few seats left, so make sure to register.

We’ve all gotten that “aha” moment, when we’ve realized that a product or service can be much better than it is today or that a brand new servicecan help people be more efficient.  We have that little voice inside our heads that suggests solutions to problems we are experiencing in our daily lives. A brand new idea or an improvement to an existing product that could make our lives much better. These ideas are a mixed bag –– sometimes they are inspired and unique and some others they are, well a bit too thin. But none of them are worthless. All the creative process serves a purpose. A “thin” idea is the first step you take to form a well thought out and worthwhile idea.

Unfortunately these ideas stay at an empirical level. Friends of mine often see the task of creating something new as a monumental task devoted to the geniuses of design and engineering.  This is where Startup Weekend comes in. It helps you realize that you can create things and that your dreams can become a reality much faster than what you thought.

I attended one of the first Startup Weekends in San Francisco and San Jose and the events were amazing. It changed my point of view in terms of what a person can accomplish. Before Startup Weekend I had already started Tangelo, my own services company (clients include: Intuit, Padnos, Zuberance, etc.) and was trying out the entrepreneurial path. It was my first year and it was tough. I went to a Startup Weekend not knowing what to expect. What I found was amazing –– a group of people with the drive to do something big. Every single one of them emanated great entrepreneurial energy. I learned that I didn’t know much but that it didn’t really matter because we were there to figure it out together. I learned that you need to continue to improve because this group will be supportive but that you need to keep up with the pace. I learned that Startup Weekend is more about the people you meet that the idea that you bring in.

There are very few startups that have gotten funding or that have continued after Startup Weekend. FoodSpotting (acquired by OpenTable) and InDinero (financial services for small businesses) are the ones that people usually refer to. This should not stop you from going. The purpose of Startup Weekend is to open your mind and to light your entrepreneurial fire. To meet folks entrepreneurs and investors that could help you at the event but most likely in the future.

Come with an open mind and all the energy you can muster.

 

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of sitting down with the team at GigaOm to talk about our experience building a distributed workforce for your startup. I’ve had the opportunity to work with excellent people in Argentina that have made this possible for over five years and for startups and established companies.

As GigaOm says,

Daemonic Labs was built from the ground up as a distributed company. It’s headquartered in San Francisco, but also has offices in Argentina. In this interview, Daemonic co-founders explain how they built the company, what they look for in employees, and the benefits of building this way.

I think that to build a lasting and successful cross-border startup, one needs to be motivated by a love for your product and a deep trust in the people working with you.

Here is the video of the interview.

It’s been a wild ride at Daemonic Labs, the startup I cofounded with Pete and Santosh. A couple of weeks ago, we released our first public version of Dabble, the product we’ve been working on for almost a year.  Plenty of publications picked up the news including the New York Times in their article titled, Could These Start-Ups Become the Next Big Thing?. This happened organically shortly after our official launch at DEMO.  Other publications include CNET, TheNextWeb, betakit and VentureBeat. La Nacion in Argentina, Wayerless, infotechnology and many others wrote about us as well. We’re stoked about the outpouring of support and coverage for Dabble. We know this is the first step of an exciting journey and we want to bring our supporters along by explaining in more detail the thinking behind the first version of the product.

Let’s start with smartphones. I view smartphones not only as geographically aware multipurpose interfaces but also as devices that understand and measure significant daily metrics which give more context to social interactions online. According to Clive Thompson of the New York Times, “Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye.” Metrics like weather, distance, time of day, calories burned are now measured in real time and are easily accessible. The work of a properly designed application or service is to give them contextual meaning and to make them highly relevant to the user.

The new crop  of geolocation apps needs to be a lot smarter and evolve dramatically from the status quo. As technology evolves and people demand more from their devices, real time data and time become factors that help deliver a better user experience without dominating. Is it more important for a user what is happening right now or is it more valuable to deliver a crafted recommendation based on interests and relevance? –– As users get more sophisticated and application developers understand the subtleties of adding value to a person’s –not some abstract user’s– life, applications  will evolve to support real needs.

Which brings me back to Dabble and our vision. We look at the smartphone as a device to interact with your surroundings intelligently. Dabble makes the world around you more meaningful and interesting. A tool that synthesizes data and makes it relevant to you.

For instance, I traveled to New York City a year ago. I took Dabble with me (I take Dabble with me where ever I go.) and created content by placing digital postcards around the city in the places I love. With any other app I basically forget that I’ve created that content and once I’m back home, the digital breadcrumbs are gone and are rendered useless. With Dabble, I leave that content there and -literally- one year later I still see people stumbling upon these postcards. It is such a great feeling to discover postcards that were left there months before. Dabble postcards are preserved in time and space for people to discover them later and reengage with the content. I’ve had conversations with people I don’t know that have stumbled upon the postcards I’ve left in New York City, Miami, Peru, Argentina and Ecuador.

These connections happen due to the emotional charge that a Dabble user shares when creating a postcard. A postcard has an image, a location, a creation time and a piece of text. Pictures are key and they are truly worth a thousand words. The message and the location give context to the postcard. It makes it timeless, useful and magical.

 

When you are facing an impossible task, you need to step back and look at the reason for the perceived impossibility of the task. What makes the  impossible and why?.

There are instances when you are truly in an impossible situation and that is often defined by externalities outside of your control. What I’m talking about here is a task that for anyone else seems impossible except for you.  Building a company from zero to a successful enterprise is an impossible task for most people. If you are in a startup you already took the plunge into impossible tasks. This post is about how to make the next jump and continue to grow your company. First of all, impossible is a premature acceptance of failure. It is a way to give in to the pressure before giving it your best. This perception is fueled by foggy emotions, unrealistic vision and  a lack of a solid process. What you need to achieve is clarity and then you can truly decide whether the task is impossible or not.

Here are some tips to help you achieve the impossible:

Fully trust your intuition.

Let your intuition guide you. Find your own way of getting things done and forget folk stories about how a startup should work or how your company should be built. Do it your way and convince others to follow you.  Trust yourself and have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

Gather your top level goals

Focus. This will help you narrow down the tasks to the essential. When you’re working at a high pace and with a competent team, you should keep an eye on the high level items and not get sucked into the details too often. Most likely, the solutions that you’re dreaming up on paper will change once you talk to your team. They will help you find the best and most efficient one.

Take the time to plan

Plan. I don’t mean to state the obvious. What I’m referring to is a real honest-to-God plan. Step back and look at the big picture and break it down into doable chunks. Don’t be shy about pushing the envelop with regards to what can be done. A doable chunk should push your team to their limit without knocking them over the edge. Nothing too extravagant or too simple.

Take 30 minutes every day to plan your day and review your progress. Separate the how from the when. Figure out what are you going to tackle and schedule it. Be very discipline about your planning time and follow your plan.

Don’t deviate from your plan, for anyone.

Discipline. The process is sacred. Be disciplined and don’t deviate from your established process and plan for anyone. Not your boss, not your customers. This sounds extreme but it is the best way to ensure a proper delivery. A process that is too flexible is worthless and a plan that is too complex is demoralizing. The only time you should make an exception is if the vision has changed, at which point you are starting basically from zero and be prepared for that because it might happen, specially at a startup.

Remove the noise

Relax. Be proactive and remove all possible clutter from your mind and physical environment. Clear your schedule and do not participate in activities that do not contribute to your success. When you catch yourself drifting or day-dreaming, don’t fight it. Simply take a break. Then go back to your desk and refocus.

Finally, get it done

Just do it. Develop a system through which you can visualize your progress. Use a list or a check-in meeting to ensure you are moving forward. This system should be tangible to you and to your team. There is no better motivator than getting things done.

Feel free to share your own home-grown tips on process at a startup in the comments. Would love to hear them!

Latin America has become one of the most productive regions within the digital arena, showing  fantastic potential in technological innovation. In this blog post I want to go further and tell you what is happening right now inside of South America’s most innovative Startups. Prepare to be surprised. Uruguay, Brazil, Chile and Argentina are the countries that have the biggest startup movements and that are  linked to the forefront of technological innovation in Latin America. Colombia and Peru are gaining presence in this area as well, although in a different way as their entrepreneurial community is younger and less experienced.

According to several entrepreneurs surveyed for this blog post, cultural differences are one of the biggest challenges to overcome.

Every startup in this post share the same key characteristics for success: they were born with the global marketplace in mind, they are competitive, they aim to bring value to the digital arena and they were created to make a dream come true.

 

FOOD EXTRA: Innovative Startup in Argentina

Food Extra is a social network to find out where food comes from, created in Argentina. This social network was built to connect food consumers and food producers. Food Extra allows each part of the food chain to interact with each other building trade relationships. On the other hand, Food Extra gives consumers information on how food is processed, as well as where the food comes from.

The central concept of Food Extra is food traceability.  According to an article written by Sebastian Nader, Food Extra co-founder, traceability is one of the current useful tools in the Internet. Sebastian Nader -a graduated in Economics- , Fernando Valdivia -Veterinarian- and Sebastian San Juan – Systems Analyst and graduated in Management-  are the founders of this new Argentinean Startup which has already landed in Silicon Valley. (Update 05/23/2011: Sebastian San Juan doesn’t work in Food Extra any more. Currently, he is a member of the Celeste Olivieri‘s team)

Fernando was kind enough to give us an interview where I asked him about how Food Extra actually works.

“Food Extra allows its users to get information about the products they consume: data about the company which has processed the product as well as the people involved in the production. In addition, users can read, write and share reviews and comments”, said Fernando.

Once Food Extra’s mobile app launches (which will be in May, 2011), the iPhone’s screen will read the bar-code of each product registered in Food Extra’s database and the system will send all of the information available about that product to the user. People could also use geo-location  to find other users as well as food production spots.

However, to start using Food Extra at all, we have to wait some time as the public version hasn’t launched yet.

 

SOCIAL WEB: Innovative Startup in Chile

Social Web is a young startup that offers digital services such as social media marketing, web and app development.

Social Web won the Startup Weekend -Chile- in 2010 with its innovative product: Social Meter, a new web platform where TV ratings are measured using social networks. Cristian Correa and his team won the Santiago Startup Weekend 2010 competition and received 5 million Chilean pesos in funding.

Social Meter is a web platform where people share what they are watching on TV in real time through social networks, such as Twitter or Facebook. Social Meter’s goal is to improve the quantification system of People Meter. The platform measures the audience more effectively. It creates an interactional network with the user who receives discounts as a reward for participation. Users can also comment on the TV show they are watching and see what their friends are watching.

This Startup will offer a new TV rating measurement system to TV companies that is real time, covers a wider range of people and is web based. Social Meter will launch “soon”, per its website.

 

VIVA REAL: Innovative Startup in Brazil

Brazil stands out as one of the countries where innovative ideas are born every day and whose entrepreneurs are constantly searching for new opportunities. VivaReal is a good example of these innovative ideas. It is a real estate portal for buying, selling and renting properties.

This Startup received the award “Best Real Estates Portal in Emerging Markets”, given by Property Portal Watch.

VivaReal’s founder, Brian Requarth and his partner Thomas Floracks have a lot of experience in the US  real estate market and since 2008 they have worked only in Latin America, where they have been living for a long time. Requarth and Floracks wanted to be on top of the real estate search in Brazil and expand to Latin America. Viva Real has been recently launched in Latin America and even in the USA and shows great potential to reproduce the success it has had in Brazil.

According to Alice Allan, editor of Property Portal Watch, “VivaReal has combined the traditional sales and marketing system with a very innovative educational approach. For example, they offer seminars in order to educate people about the value of online marketing”.

 

RING2SKYPE: Innovative Startup in Uruguay

Ring2Skype is an Uruguayan Startup that gives local telephone numbers to Skype users.

Skype offers VoIP call services only to 25 countries in the world. Ring2Skype was created to offer the same service to those countries which have been left out of the Skype list. While everybody can get a number, Ring2Skype especially concentrates on  the entrepreneurs whose work is linked to others countries and who need to maintain fluent, daily communication.
Since October 2009, the Uruguayans, Andrés Bzurovski and Sergio Fogel -founders of Ring2Skype-, slowly have been gaining ground as the solution for several Startups with respect to international call services. Currently, Ring2Skype offers local telephone numbers for free to 100 cities in the world. The company is headquartered in Miami, has a development center in Uruguay, and clients in more than one hundred countries.

 

MEGUSTA-PE.COM and ROM.PE: Innovative Startups in Peru.

Megusta-pe.com is a Peruvian platform where users can share their favorites sites. Generally speaking this is a good idea -while not very original- but the site doesn’t talk about any specific topic, it is just about “everything” and I don’t think that this will add any value to the ecosystem. What people need is information within a categorized system that helps them find what they are looking for.

Besides, its design and content isn’t entirely neat and user friendly.

Rom.pe is an online magazine that promotes original articles about Fashion, Technology, Businesses, Economy, Art & Design, etc.

Like “megusta-pe.com”, Rom.pe covers a large range of topics but in this case they are organized into categories and its content is a 100% original (without any copy-paste or translations from others sites). Although this doesn’t mean a lot to many of us, it is just what makes Rom.pe special, because most of the successful Startups from Peru are only copies of successful business models from the USA. There are only a few companies which stand out thanks to their innovative and genuine spirit.

Rom.pe is a personal project of Lynn Mora -launched in December 2009-. Mora admits that his project “has demanded a lot of effort but it has finally reached success”. The site -which is currently running its second version-  has incorporated advertising and has started to sell articles to other media.

Right now, 30 writers and 3 editors are working for Rom.pe, which so far has produced 157 genuine articles.

The entire content of Rom.pe can also be read by mobile devices.

 

FACTORY INTERACTIVE MEDIA: Innovative Startup in Colombia

Factory Interactive Media is a young Startup that offers audiovisual technological development. Its “star product” is called HeartView, a technological platform for cardiovascular disease.

Personally, I agree with what  Alan Colmenares wrote in his blog: “I’ve seen a lot of initiatives here in Colombia and many of them have merit, but I haven’t seen initiatives which, in my opinion, take Startup space (specifically, Startups which make use of technology to innovate) to a level that’s really required to get Colombia more competitive (especially when compared with Chile, Argentina and Brazil)”.

A good example of this is the Colombian Startup Factory Interactive Media which won the second prize in the “Startup Competition of Red Innova” which took place in Madrid last year.

While Factory Interactive Media won several contests with HeartView, its way of presenting itself isn’t as innovative as this Startup could be. The design of its website lacks readability and its style is quite old fashioned, in contrast to current sites which are filled with “whites” and stand out because of the simplicity of their message.

 

2011 will be the most active year in Argentina regarding angel investments, since the stock market crash in 2008.

According to the study carried out by Ernst & Young Argentina, based on investment intentions showed by more than 800 employers surveyed, investments will rise 10% – 20%.

If we also consider the non-stop growth of new enterprises in this country, we can foresee a very positive scene for the new generation of entrepreneurs.

Thanks to the Argentine work force -recognized worldwide as creative, innovative and committed- this country became in a very promising region, especially respecting the Internet industry.

In recent years, several Argentine Startups, linked to technological innovation, have grown surprisingly fast and even started to compete in the global market. However, most of them projects were benefited with an initial investment of foreign capital because the micro-investments are not highly developed in the country.

In Argentina, the culture of angel investments hasn’t kept pace with the startups. This is why groups have emerged to promote angel investments in Argentina, a practice hitherto reserved only for USA and Europe. Clearly these groups are trying mainly to create a framework of trust in which investors feel more secure. Credibility in financial matters is one of the major pitfalls that Argentina must overcome to achieve a real growth of angel investments.

Groups promoting angel investment in Argentina

  • The Business Angels’ Club

This group, created by former students of IAE, seeks to promote investment awareness in those people who are able to provide risk capital. The Club aims to encourage the emergence of a new generation of entrepreneurs, companies and investors to maximize the intellectual capital of Argentina.

The target investor profile pointed by the  Business Angels Club is a person with an entrepreneurial spirit who, in addition to providing capital, can also be involved in the creation and consolidation of a company through their experience, knowledge and contacts.

  • Investor’s Club of Emprear

This Club has similar characteristics to The Business Angels’ Club, regarding its target investor’s profile, its philosophy and its goals but, in addition to regular meetings where projects are presented, it organizes training programs for investors and entrepreneurs as well.

How does the investments system work?

The Clubs conduct the search, screening and analysis of projects, but the investments are decided by each member. People invest money from their personal assets in the projects they choose.

Both clubs are concerned about supporting the growth and development of Argentine enterprises, due to the enormous human and material resources of the country, which were so far only exploited abroad.

Globant, the Argentine Startup which causes wonder around the world

With only $ 1,000 inicial investment but big ideas and knowledge, the engineers Martín Migoya, Martín Umaran, Guibert Englebienne and Néstor Nocetti founded this computer services company, which now has about a thousand of professional employees and first class customers like Coca Cola, Sabre and Citi and others.

Currently, Globant has offices in major cities of Argentina and also in Colombia, Chile and the United States.

Globant is also a novelty because its Human Resources department, which has modern policies tailored to the needs and expectations of the generation of professionals known as Generation Y. As a result of these policies, Globant is the company with less employees fluctuation, a common phenomenon in most companies involved in the technology industry.

A couple of years ago, Martin Migoya, Globant’s CEO, said in an interview: “The greatest value that our group is contributing to society in Argentina is showing that a small company -born in a 30m2 apartment- can become a multinational which transcends borders and has a value at which Argentines are not used. “

Tangelo just finished hosting the first Tangelo Startup House of 2011 in Argentina. From January 5th through the 13th the Tangelo team gathered  in the city of Buenos Aires where we were hacking internet products for two straight weeks. In order to deliver in such a short period of time, we needed a framework to help us cut through the noise and deliver a working prototype. For software development we use Agile methodologies but when you want to build a product that eventually can become a profitable business, there are many more things to consider beyond software development. In all honesty, the development of the code is probably the last step in a series of events.

We are great fans of Eric Ries and his Lean Startup methodology. So we decided to tape the graph of the underlying structure of a Lean Startup to the makeshift “white board” and morph its guidelines to fit our goal and restrictions. For those of you that have not read Eric’s blog,  I highly recommend reading the Lean Startup blog and if you can you should attend one of Eric’s workshops as well.

In a nutshell, The Lean Startup is designed to launch a minimun viable product to market within a reasonable timeframe and attemping to control the risk associated with launch.  It is basically a combination of smart Agile Software Development and focused Customer Development. It forces you into rapid prototyping which allows you to test ideas in the market and with real customers faster. User feedback is at the core of this cycle so that you can eliminate flaws in the product much faster than through traditional practices.

Eric Ries wrote about adopting a new way of developing products by eliminating “waste”, which is often generated by default. When we talk about “waste,” we mean time and money spent on actions which then fail to prosper and should be eliminated thus forcing developers to start again from the beginning. This blog post would then become the base of his Lean Startup.

Lean Startup Process

Lean Startup Process

How do we use the Lean Startup guidelines at Tangelo?

Basically, we take the guidelines established and make them fit with our  business model. We truly believe the guidelines are valuable and the guidance is marvelous. At the same time, the moment that you apply one “business model” such as this as a blanket to mandate what your company produces, then you are most likely dimming down the light that makes your company shine.

Let’s take the case of proverb.io, one of three products we are now developing internally.

The whole project started with one simple idea: there are many people who like to collect and share famous quotes and they are scattered across social networks. So, we thought, it would be nice to build a website in which these people get the opportunity to set up a community sharing similar interests as well. Right now we are testing the idea by analyzing real users’ behavior and taking into account their needs and their passions.

There was no need for a business plan. We  went directly to the sketch of the idea, the user interaction and the implementation. We failed a couple of times already but every time a user comes up and gives us feedback, we feel empowered to continue. We know there’s a need and we’re doing our best to fulfill it.

We developed a working prototype in less than 2 days and we liked it. Most importantly, some users liked it and started using it constantly.

Why are we working with The Lean Startup guidelines?

  • It is the best process which allows testing ideas, spending the lowest amount of resources.
  • Our customers are amazed at our capacity and speed to implement their requirements.
  • It is a system that works seamlessly with social networks at the time of testing.
  • The economy of resources allows us to be more proactive. For example, the time saved is used to make advances in other aspects of the project,such as find and solve new problems.

The key values of Lean Startup are:

  • Perfect quality, detection and resolution of problems at their source.
  • Elimination of all activities that provide no added value.
  • Optimizing the use of  resources (capital, people and space).
  • Continuous improvement, cost reduction, quality improvement, increase productivity.
  • Flexibility and ability to quickly produce a variety of different products, without sacrificing efficiency.
  • Building and maintaining a long term relationship with suppliers taking risk-sharing agreements
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Outsourced Movie

Outsourced Movie

Written by Antonio Altamirano. This is an excerpt of the post on outsourcing I did in my personal blog. After years of working with purely remote teams across the world I’ve developed a view of outsourcing that works really well for us. To my surprise, it continues to be counter-intuitive to many of the people we talk to on a daily basis even in the Silicon Valley.  We work in  the Silicon Valley and Argentina and beyond all the points that we are making in this blog post, you might wan to read what BusinessWeek says about the benefits of working with the South American continent and then give us a call to see how we can help you.

Our general perception outsourcing is wrong. The concept that outsourcing means exchanging an office filled with Americans in the Silicon Valley with an office in Mumbai filled with Indian workers is outdated. There’s really no value there beyond the cost point. Definitely some headaches due to timezone and culture.

There’s really no added value in simply moving an office anywhere for that matter. You will face the same geography-centric issues such as the lack of top talent and the inability to attract out-of-the-box innovative thinkers to your geographically bounded work space.

Your company needs talent wherever that talent is and at the best prices. However, top talent across the world is usually not attracted by a top brand or a shiny office any longer. They are attracted to an interesting challenge and a unique work proposition.

Tangelo, is one of those rarities. We find top talent in South America and give them top challenges under their terms. We don’t force them to a location or job they don’t want to do. We equip them with the technology they need and set them free. We accept failure while trying because we know that makes you a stronger professional. We don’t accept people that don’t have the capacity to learn and adapt from one day to the other. The people a company hires and partners with is what makes every company different.

We integrate our people into a truly flat organization and push decision making to the edges of the organization. Everyone has a stake on it. Soon, we’re moving to a model where all employees are stock holders.

No matter what Thomas L. Friedman says, practitioners of the new outsourcing understand that the world is really not flat at all. I agree with what Sandeep from Monsoon Company says about the world not being flat:

The world is not flat. It is curvy. Lumpy. Tilted. Full of nooks and crannies. And as a whole, still ROUND.

So, if you are outsourcing the standard way, well.. you’re doing it wrong. Start evolving and you will reap the benefits of a global workforce.