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
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