The zAgile Story

un equipo para echar a andar mi novedoso emprendimiento

My first two weeks in Chile were spent either networking and following up with every contact I was making, or visiting with the students at UTFSM, getting to know them, their projects, skills and interests. 

   

I networked and 'schmoozed' relentlessly.  I took every opportunity to meet anyone anywhere who was willing to listen to my vision and objectives.  I quickly found out that Santiago was a very small city in terms of degrees of separation.  My network was spreading rapidly.  It seemed like I was spending most of my time at the neighborhood Starbucks in Las Condes.  The growing network gave me lots of opportunities to explore all kinds of possible relationships with people.  Given that I have often been called upon by friends and colleagues to help them with their offshore initiatives, I also explored such possibilities in Chile.  Since I was already there, I could look for suitable partnerships for not only myself but potentially others.   Through my contacts back home, I was quite confident that I could bring sufficient projects to generate a significant revenue in the context of setting up various incubators.  But I needed to find the right partners.

   

While everyone that I met expressed interest in getting involved or helping me in some way, as time went on, very few actually stepped up to their commitments or desires.  I was beginning to tire of this curious and seemingly cultural propensity of making lots of promises but not coming through.  The idea of engaging with a Silicon Valley venture seemed very intriguing to a lot of people in Chile, but most could not really step out of their conservative profile to consider taking the risks or figure out how to engage or provide any tangible value.

   

As this realization began to set in, my focus began to shift from the strategic -- evaluating Chile for long-term outsourcing opportunities, to a very tactical one -- getting a team to jump-start my venture and help validate the concept.  I was intent on making something happen.  I have always known that building momentum is very critical, especially in the early stages of a venture.  I had started to feel a little momentum for zAgile and I was afraid of losing it and stalling again.   

   

Thus, I began to put a lot more effort towards gaining the attention of university students.  Summer vacation months were approaching and most of them were in their final stages of university commitments for the year.  So it was a good time to try to get some involved in a proof-of-concept exercise.  A couple of times each week, I made the needed day trips to the UTFSM campus in Valparaiso, a city roughly an hour's drive west of Santiago.  There, I attended students' workshops and conducted various sessions with the students discussing various topics related to semantic-web technologies.

   

Through my faculty contacts at UTFSM, I had come across a couple of students that seemed very keen to work on the project and also were familiar with semantic web-related technologies.  I was also told that a few more would be available once they were done with their school commitments.   I was quite impressed with their maturity level and knowledge.  So I brought the first two on-board as consultants to zAgile, with expectations to quickly grow the team to a critical mass to get things rolling.  I also got setup with PayPal, hoping that I could use it to pay them (remotely). 

   

I setup a development server for us to begin our collaboration and development efforts.  Bringing the students on board was helping me gain some momentum and I wanted to do everything possible to reduce any friction in the process.  I signed up with GoDaddy over one weekend and had a server ready within a few hours.  My friend Leo once again came to the rescue, helping me setup appropriate security and tools for us to get started.  Given that we were designing/developing a platform for software development, we established our first rule -- one that demonstrated classic recursion --

   

  "use the platform that we develop and develop the platform that we use"

   

In the absence of product management bandwidth or even any level of clarity about what we needed to begin developing, this was the best spec I could come up with.  I figured that if we could build a platform which we could ourselves use to collaborate and develop software on, it would be a good start for others.

   

My new found friends at the BlueCompany graciously offered me office space and facilities to use for meetings and working sessions with my new team. 

   

It was at their offices that zAgile began to take shape.

   

Brainstorming at the BlueCompany offices

 

quépasa!

With the help of a couple of students, I began some early R&D exercises to explore various technology options. We also started brainstorming about what a proof-of-concept might look like and what we needed to accomplish in order to validate the concept to ourselves. The students were only available for 15-20 hours a week until the end of school session so I was still hoping to get more help.

 

I continued to pursue networking in parallel, spending all my available time outside with people. I was challenged with establishing any kind of credibility or confidence in a country where I was a complete stranger. My only option was to network as much as possible and use my passion and energy to get people to become believers in my vision.

 

Sometime late in the second week of my visit, I received a call from one of my new found friends -- Carlos Osorio. I had met Carlos earlier in San Francisco in late September when he was traveling with the members of Fundación Chile. At the time, he was wrapping up his PhD at MIT. Coincidentally, he was also in Chile when I arrived. He had been very instrumental in helping me build a network and meet people that may be able to help me move forward. On this day, Carlos had called to tell me that a journalist from quépasa may be calling to interview me about my visit to Chile. quépasa, as I found out, was one of Chile's leading weekly publications, primarily focused on politics and business -- their equivalent of Newsweek or Time. The context of the interview was not clear but I agreed to meet with them anyway. I do not have much experience with media and marketing but I felt that I had a very good story to tell so there was little or no risk in meeting them.

 

So I met with Josefina Rios from quépasa at Starbucks on a hot afternoon on Tuesday November 28th. I had spent the early part of the day looking for long-term apartment rentals. Yes, by now, I was convinced that rather than a 2-3 week due-diligence, I was going to need to stay much longer. Things had moved at a much slower pace than I had planned or desired. But I still felt quite optimistic that I would get some value out of the trip.

 

Josefina had obviously come prepared, having done the necessary due-diligence on my background. While I was all prepped to talk about zAgile, her questions were mostly about me. We spent an hour and a half talking. It was a rare moment for me as I tried to deflect questions about myself to take the opportunity to talk about zAgile. That does not happen often. But curiously, her interest was only in my background. The overall spirit of the interview was very positive. After the interview, we drove around the neighborhood with their staff photographer to find a place where they could take some pictures of myself. At one point, I found myself standing in front of a railing with the sun in my face, barely able to open my eyes, melting in the heat, as the photographer took a few dozen shots.

 

The article titled  El sueño tech de Sanjiva (sanjiva's tech dream) was published and the issue hit the newsstands three days later. I had walked into the BlueCompany offices on Friday morning to continue our working sessions when one of the managers, Alvaro Portugal, gave me the latest copy. Since it was written in Spanish, I obviously could not understand any of it so I didn't quite know how to react. The full-page shot looked impressive. The contents were another story. Rather than indulging into the details, I thought it best to just hope that the article could give me some credibility and generate needed interest in Chile for my venture.

 

PS -- over time, as I began to learn Spanish, I found myself occasionally going back to read the article and try to see what of it I could understand. And often, I would discover some subtleties or nuances that Josefina had captured about my professional life and my spirit. I realized that she had been very generous in portraying both. And often, I felt very flattered. In chronicling the zAgile story, I have used snippets from her article as titles of the entries as a tribute to her generosity and efforts. Whether or not anyone else read it, it proved to be a motivation for me in my continued efforts to make zAgile a success.

At Starbucks with Josefina Rios

 

quépasa!