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History Matters

In 2012 I started a company after attending a startup weekend event, at the time I had some years of experience selling software to public entities in Latam and, naively, thought that maybe several other entrepreneurs could benefit from getting accurate information about opportunities that Request For Proposals (RFP) were hiding at plain sight.

Besides tech approach (scrapers, then Natural Language Processing, then taxonomies and email notifications), the most interesting learning path was how to make business outside of my comfort zone. And besides the business side, my most rewarding memory is about the people that joined that adventure.

In 2023, after several years of working as employee in some amazing companies and knowing the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”, I noticed that my entrepreneurial spirit was still burning when I read several ideas that were written in my personal notes but never got executed. Comfort did its magic through the years and global circumstances make it easier to prefer stability.

So, I decided to step up and tackle the most prominent problem that I’ve facing in the last 6 years: Over-Spending Cloud Architectures.

Limitless and Fair Use

I like to think about Cloud Services as toy bricks. It doesn’t matter if they are designed or the color palette in which they are assembled, the key thing is that they must be easily composable, the mechanism that makes it possible to express creativity in amazing ways is what makes cloud services so valuable. The trade-off is that you will be charged an infinitesimal amount of money every time that somebody sees your work. And that value compounds fast, like, really fast.

After deploying my first Grails (Groovy got me with its syntactic sugar…) app into Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 instances and having suffered the on-premises capacity planning and purchasing inferno, I embraced -as the entire world- the cloud with joy.

The problem is that when we experiment a no-strings-attached kind of situation, we tend to go beyond the reasonable limits or fair use (check 1,2,3), in tech industry that results usually in companies that have to spend a lot of resources to stabilize ill architected systems. Which isn’t a new situation for the world, in 2008 Leaning Pisa Tower was finally stabilised after almost 800 years of existence and 10 years of highly specialized engineering.

I decided to solve the problem in the best way that I could. Starting a company.

Taking Action: Get into Techstars

Every time that you think that you have identified a problem and have an idea about how you would put your skin in the game to solve it, ask for help. It doesn’t matter how good are you on what you do, the probability of winning a game is higher if you play with a team. For me that implied to go to test my hypothesis against professionals that dedicate their time to listen and help people to solve interesting problems, Techstars provided several advantages from my point of view:

• Their values aligns pretty well with mine
• Their standard deal is consistent and easy to understand
• Their mentor network provides a lot of experience and value for founders
• Their entrepreneurs toolkit is rational and customer-centered
• You have to put a lot of effort to get in

Last point is not minor, I think that people can use some friction to develop the grit required to build success, Techstars admission process is standardized, hard and fast-paced. But if you go through you will find that many of your assumptions are challenged, and a subtle knowledge start to arise. You can feel the magic happening. There are also several guides on how to prepare your application, obviously Techstars is not the only startup acceleration program that can help you, this guide was prepared by a former alum and now Managing Director of the program in Miami, the questions and the way that you are expected to answer them are probably as good for any other business endeavor that you plan to start.

Our Mission

We are building aXumption to help businesses develop better tech and stay frugal.

aXumption finds cloud architecture optimizations that will have positive impact in cost and sustainability over infrastructure, software patterns, tools, dependencies, and code so companies can build a software that is aligned with their business strategy directly into their continuous development process.

Looking ahead

Always remember:

Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.

– Suzy Kassem