What I’ve been up to.

It’s been far too long since my last post.  As  you can imagine, I’ve had my head down and my nose to the grindstone for the last six months.  As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m an advisor and shareholder in a number of startups and during the past six months, I’ve been working full-time at one of these called Tappsi, the leading cab-hailing app in Colombia.

As I wrote in April, the company, founded by a pair of talented entreprenuers, has grown to become quite a powerhouse.   I became the company’s advisor when it was still a two-man operation after they had launched the app and experienced incredible growth.  In those days, we talked about the different ideas for getting more drivers, what the company’s mission was in addition to other topics.

Tappsi now processes over a million rides a month and, after passing the 40-employee mark a while ago, a new challenge is being addressed: that of building a high performance organization.  Being an old fart and having worked at startups in Silicon Valley as well as leading high-tech companies in Latin America (e.g., Intel, Oracle, etc.), it was a no-brainer to dive in and join them in meeting the challenges ahead.

There are few Colombian startups at this stage in their development.  The ones that come to mind are companies such as PayU, Click Delivery and Adsmovil. Nonetheless, one of them most impressive Colombian success stories has to be CO Internet, acquired by Neustar for more than $100M.  Last, but certainly not least, are the equally accomplished crew from Mentez, Juan Franco, Juan and Jaime Roldan, who also developed an innovative payment platform (PayMentez) and have been investing in other startups in Latin America (note: sorry for leaving them out in the original post).  All of the aforementioned companies have been created by talented entreprenuers of Colombian origin and have been acquired by larger companies.

Tappsi is still independent, but is at a stage in its development that some of the above companies have already passed and others are experiencing. A company at this stage needs to look at how it decides what talent to hire, how to measure success, which areas to focus on and which to ignore.

Though I’m starting to focus the majority of my time (soon to be 100%) on our corporate product (sales, product ownership, etc.), the aforementioned are all areas where I’ve been lending a hand. In a sense, it feels like I’m going back to my roots when I worked in Silicon Valley at startups such as Santa Cruz Operation and NetManage.

Working at a startup is incredibly stimulating for a variety of reasons. These include:

1. It pushes your nose up against a hyper-competitive marketplace as opposed to working within a silo in a large corporation.
2. Having developers, sales people and support accessible enables quick action and amazing results.
3. If things are working correctly, everyone takes part in making the company a success.

There are more reasons, but it is certainly an evironment where anyone with the right attitude and talent can create quite an impact.

Anyway, I know it’s a lame excuse, but the result has been that I got a bit overwhelmed and among the things I let slide was my posting more often.  In the process, though, I also let a friend down when I couldn’t make it to an event, which I regret greatly.  Also, I’ve been much worse at responding to emails and being able to accept coffee meeting invitations. Apologies to all for this.