1. the abiquo story
@diegomarino
externalidades.net

2. • Early days
• Grid Computing
• Machine-to-machine
• Cloud Computing

3. Nerd - Definition
• nerd
– n. Slang
– 1. A foolish, inept, or unattractive person.
– 2. A person who is single-minded or
accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits
but is felt to be socially inept.

4. Like us :-)

5. Incorporation
• March 2006
• Focused on bringing best tools for cheap
deployment of intensive calculations over
distributed network, aka Grid Computing
• 12k€ of initial capital

6. A real startup…
• No funding
• No contacts
• No business plan
• No …
• But a lot of pizza,
coffee and code :-)

7. …but we were extremely happy :-)

8. But I had a long term vision (Oct/06)

9. Grid Computing phase
• We made no money, as you may have imagined
– But we had the best product of this market: 6X more
efficient than IBM’s solution
• We had to reinvest 40k
• 2 BA’s trusted us, only if we changed our
business plan in order to develop “a new product
which can be sold by volume and embedded into
devices, to avoid chineses to copy you”

10. Welcome to the
machine-to-machine
(M2M) world

11. • We had no money to develop this… so we
needed to find another investor
• Alejandro Nuñez from CAN trusted us and
gave us 300K of convertible debt based on
some creepy slides

14. And we developed
really, really, really
cool prototypes

15. Twittering plants

16. Distributed hard disk

17. M2M phase
• We made no money (again), as you may have
imagined
– But we had the best product of this market (again):
Siemens, HP and FON engineers p*ss*d their pants
after demos
• We ran out of money
• And we choose to develop our original vision
again

18. Do you remember this slide?

19. Welcome to Cloud
Computing
(aka. Grid with a huge hype of
marketing behind)

20. • So we started recoding our initial development
(yeap… I’m almost always right)
• And we built a nice product… the rest is history

21. CAN renewed their trust, and we
started to grow

22. We got worldwide users

23. Opened offices in
Silicon Valley and London

24. Start gaining market exposure

25. First Customers

26. We hired an skilled CEO

27. And I left the company looking for
nerds to enjoy a new trip
• SzenaRisk
• New way of managing financial risks (lots and
lots of money behind)
• Team made of top spanish Quants
• Actually selling licenses exceeding 200k€ to
top firms like Ferrovial, BBVA or InverSeguros
• … and looking for smart investors
ponsored
Slide

28. Advice for entrepreneurs
1.Never give up
2.See rule #1

29. Advice for investors
1.Trust nerds
2.See rule #1
3.Ask Alejandro Nuñez how to
pick the most profitable
ones :-)

30. Please clap :-)
@diegomarino |
externalidades.net