Tag Archives: alumni

Tetuan Valley: The Gathering

Posted by Nast Marrero on 13/01/2012 None comments

Hey friends,

Awesome night last Wednesday! The first 2012 Tetuan Valley Alumni Meetup was a great success! I persuaded Alumni by reminding them this might be the last year of the world (so Mayans said, no?)… and you know what happens when you get all apocalyptic… party.

When I got there already a lot of friends had arrived. The night started pretty high talking with Alex Barrera, and scheming plans to conquer Poland. He also told me about his new workshop on Writing and Copywriting for Startups. I don’t know if that was him dropping a hint about my blogging skills… Well, seriously track Alex down and look for news on his workshop, I’m sure it’s gonna be great! I’ll try to attend myself to keep weaving for you the cream of the crop of the startup blogging… hehe

Tetuan Valley Alumni Meetup - January 2012

So, exciting times. And lot of news: TooRisk are about to release the beta and they had just launched their website the very same Wednesday, Mashpan keeps enriching its top-notch talent and has enrolled Philip de Smedt, Taggito is taking NFC technologies to the next level and getting offers from WOW tech corporations, super Mariano came from Zaragoza for the meetup and told us Linkovery is doing great and you might hear soon about their latest joint-ventures, bringing in with him a very interesting friend (Alba de Donesteve founder and CEO of 2givit), Okuri got K..ed (hehehe wait to hear and you’re gonna jawdrop), and Byron Stanford (I love to say that name) has some amazing projects running for 2012, both with Zoomry and Ppresentation, I got Timpik Camilo & Jose María Estévez to have a sit down about some synergic projects; and I had the pleasure of meeting 1UpTalent‘s brilliant cofounder German. We even got Luis Rivera to come!

And that ain’t all: Liz, our best favorite hero behind the bar at Irish Rover, told us all the girls and guys in orange are gonna have a cool discount in our next meetup if they wear their colors. Cool, ain’t!

If you want, you can check out the sloppy pictures I took at the event and see. And remember: Next Tetuan Valley Alumni Meetup wil be 29th February! How cool is that?! An unique opportunity in the next 4 years. Irish Rover Madrid, 20:30.

Life After Tetuan Valley

Posted by tuquedices.es on 13/12/2011 None comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2011 Fall edition. This post is writen by Rosendo Chas, FeedTRACK (former tuquedices.es)‘ founder.

Six weeks ago, when the first session of Tetuan Valley Startup School V started, many of the terms used by our first orator, Bernardo de Tomás, cofused me. Not that I haven’t heard of them, but I heard of them in a different context: engineering.

For example, to an engineer, “Lean” is either a manufacturing system or a software development methodology. Another example, scalability is the potentiality for a system or an application to grow, but to an engineer is a continuum not a yes or no concept.

Also, other jargon used by Bernardo was totally unknown to me, such as: freemium, bootstrapping, ROI, MVP, etc. Further more, I was not sure about what “startup” really meant.

I realize now that Lean Thinking is more a paradigm than a methodology, a user-oriented way of thinking, an iterative, trial an error, way of living. And the embodiment of this paradigm is the Lean Startup, likely, an Internet company capable of pulling itself out of the chasm by the bootstraps.

But what about the companies which don’t fit in this ideal?

Many of the projects in TVSS V gonna need providers (not only Internet providers, I mean) and even commercial agents to get the clients. ExecInterview is gonna need english experts and FeedTRACK is gonna need psychologists and statistics experts. That means that we are not scalable?

Most of the startups are launched in a short span of time, but what about companies like P2P Leanding, their negotiations to get the appropriate backup (a partner which adds trust to their formula) could take time. Oniri.co (Hukuju) and Nubedu are gonna need to convince teachers and institutions to buy their product, and this is gonna take more than Internet advertising. Referama and TooRisk are also gonna need to knock some doors.

Mobflint and GroupJect are pretty close to the ideal, they could advertise only in Internet. But Mobflint needs testers and developers, and GroupJect needs users to populate their social network (the same for FeedTRACK).

Only Mashpan fits perfectly the ideal, offering from the very beggining the solution to the problem their application is meant to resolve.

So what about the rest of us?

My advice is to follow the wise words of Woody Allen, in the lips of one of its latest characters, Boris (Larry David):