the abiquo story

@diegomarino externalidades.net

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

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.

Like us :-)

Incorporation

• March 2006• Focused on bringing best tools for cheap

deployment of intensive calculations over distributed network, aka Grid Computing

• 12k€ of initial capital

A real startup…

• No funding• No contacts• No business plan• No …• But a lot of pizza,

coffee and code :-)

…but we were extremely happy :-)

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

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”

Welcome to the machine-to-machine

(M2M) world

• 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

And we developed really, really, really

cool prototypes

Twittering plants

Distributed hard disk

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

Do you remember this slide?

Welcome to Cloud Computing

(aka. Grid with a huge hype of marketing behind)

• So we started recoding our initial development (yeap… I’m almost always right)

• And we built a nice product… the rest is history

CAN renewed their trust, and we started to grow

We got worldwide users

Opened offices in Silicon Valley and London

Start gaining market exposure

First Customers

We hired an skilled CEO

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

Sponso

red Sl

ide

Advice for entrepreneurs

1.Never give up2.See rule #1

Advice for investors

1.Trust nerds2.See rule #13.Ask Alejandro Nuñez how to

pick the most profitable ones :-)

Please clap :-)

@diegomarino | externalidades.net