'Todo comenzó una tarde del pasado septiembre'...
It all began late September last year during a consulting assignment at newScale. Following this engagement, I had committed myself to spending the winter in Montpellier to learn French -- (I had made that clear to everyone, but as it turns out, perhaps not to myself). I had been incubating a concept for some time for a venture that I wanted to start (soon to be called zAgile) but things had stalled over the summer. I was struggling with trying to define the vision any further--experiencing a mental block of sorts or a creative vacuum--so I decided to take a break, engage with newScale, go to Montpellier, learn French, do whatever until the block cleared and I could regain the momentum and get back on track -- to fulfill my dream -- el sueño de Sanjiva.
During one of these weeks and during one of our lunchtime chats, Rodrigo Flores (Founder of newScale) told me of a visit of a few Chilean business leaders to the Bay Area in late September to explore opportunities for innovation and economic growth in various industries (high-tech, wine, ...) and he thought that I may enjoy meeting with them. This Chilean team was coming to visit the valley's top brass--executives from the likes of Oracle, Sun, Cisco and Autodesk. Obviously, I felt quite flattered and excited about the possibility. I had come to respect Rodrigo as a peer and a friend and the thought of meeting some 'fun' people (and wine lovers) from a world that was still quite unknown to me seemed exciting.
The meeting took place at the Holiday Inn at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, early morning on the 24th of September. Expecting to meet a few Chileans (as Rodrigo had modestly expressed), I was quickly overwhelmed when I entered a small conference room that seemed to be completely filled with people. There were 38 of them to be precise. Leaders from political, business, academic and commercial sector--members of Fundación Chile, headed by Senator Fernando Flores.
During the meeting, I had the opportunity to spend 20-30 minutes in an extemporaneous monolog talking about everything from the dream that pulled me into the world of technology to my experiences in the world of high-tech startups. Of course, we also discussed offshoring -- a topic about which I have been very passionate in my career.
Soon after the meeting, while having coffee at a nearby Starbucks, I discussed with Rodrigo the possibility of my exploring Chile for the purpose of incubating zAgile. It could serve as a pilot for Chile in helping them understand the needs of entrepreneurs like myself and, at the same time, help me get started with the realization of my vision. As the idea percolated through the members of the Fundación, it became apparent that the first step towards exploring this possibility was for me to visit Chile. Furthermore, given the approaching summer there (Dec/Jan), I needed to visit well before people began their summer holidays.
I planned the trip fairly quickly and, on November 11th, arrived in Santiago de Chile on a trip initially slated to be an exploration for 2-3 weeks. An adventure (una gran aventura) was about to begin for me and for zAgile. I returned home 4 months later but not before I had engaged teams of developers in three countries (Brazil, Peru and Chile) to begin working on the initial prototype (distributed teams of developers developing a platform for distributed software development -- what a concept :) ) and learned a little bit of Spanish (sí! hablo un poco español) and Tango (yo aprendí bailar tango en Buenos Aires). And of course, I also had some opportunities to try out Chilean and Argentinian wines, meet some very cool and fun people and make some new friends.
This blog chronicles this adventure as I began to build a software company -- zAgile -- una compañía que busca transformarse en una plataforma para el desarrollo de software en el mundo (a company that aspires to be the platform for software development in the world).
-Sanjiva 
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