Month: April 2017

Entrepreneurship

Jaime Novoa: From writing tech news to writing checks

Apr 24, 2017 by Itnig Startup Ecosystem 0 Comments
Even though Jaime now is working on the VC side of the table, he assured me that he doesn’t wear a suit every day.

There’s not a lot of information in English about the Spanish startup ecosystem out there, but there is one person that has dedicated half a decade to covering tech and startups in Spain and that’s Jaime Novoa.

He recently went from writing stories about startups to writing checks as a part of the K Fund team.

Even though he’s not chasing breaking tech news anymore, he’s still doing a lot of the same work:

When I was a journalist I tried to find interesting companies before anyone knew about them, and that’s something I still do today at K Fund.

But there’s also a lot of obvious differences:

The biggest change is the amount of information that startups share with me now, compared to before. When you’re a journalist companies doesn’t share much with you, and they often don’t tell you the truth. But as a potential investor, they have to open their books and show you everything, and that’s pretty amazing.

Surprising

Even though Jaime has been known as a well-informed person in tech circles, being a VC opened his eyes to a different kind of information flow:

As a VC I was surprised to know how little I knew about the companies I was covering as a journalist.

And that makes him respect the journalists writing about startups and technology ever more than before:

I usually defend journalists writing critical articles about startups, because from the outside it’s very hard to know what’s the truth and have good data points. That’s why so many publications only write about funding rounds because that’s the one thing both investors and companies actually share.

A failed business

Even though Jaime succeeded in making Novobrief into one of the main sources of breaking startups news in Spain, creating a sustainable company was harder than he though:

I totally failed with making Novobrief into a business, but I see now that I should have been monetizing from day one. My idea was to build a brand first, and then make money, but that was my biggest mistake.

He adds that the blog is actually making him more money today, than back when he was doing it full-time.

The world of venture capital is new, but not rocket science according to Jaime, which explains that the things he needed to learn were the different stages of how an investment work, certain metrics and legal issues.

It’s a great time to be in venture capital in Spain, and that’s because it’s a great time for startups in general in the country. The ecosystem is growing tremendously and will continue to change and grow the next years for sure.

He always envisioned himself continuing to work as a journalist.

I never ever thought that I would be working in a VC firm, neither to work for a startup, I always thought that I would go on to work as a journalist. But Iñaki Arrola approached me and said they were looking for someone with my profile for K Fund, and for me, it was plainly the right time to do something different.

Bullshit detector

Many say journalists make good VC’s because they’re good at asking the right questions and seeing through founders attempt to paint a better picture of their company than what’s the truth. Jaime agrees:

I think journalists build up a bullshit detector, and that is helpful also as a VC.

These days he sees between 5–10 companies per week, mostly in Spain, but also outside the country.

Looking back to when he started writing around 6–7 years ago, he can with certainty say that the community of founders and tech companies has matured a lot.

There are so many things going on these days, in the whole country, not only in Madrid and Barcelona. These days Barcelona has the most momentum, but that can change overnight. I don’t spend time thinking about which city performs best, I think it’s a childish mindset.

B2B SaaS

What Jaime however does think about is young tech companies, and even though he doesn’t like trying to guess what kind of verticals or industries that will do well the next years, he has his thoughts:

I really like the B2B SaaS vertical and although I’m not a good at predicting, I think that Spain will foster more of these great B2B SaaS companies going forward.

And if you’re missing breaking startup news from Novobrief, Jaime is not here to comfort you:

I’m not planning on working as a journalist anytime soon. I have my full focus on K Fund and I have so much left to learn in this industry.

But there’s one thing he does miss about his old career:

There’s something special about the adrenaline you get by breaking news before anyone else, I do miss that thrill sometimes. If journalism is in your blood, you’ll write some way or another, and I’m happy to be able to write on the K Fund blog these days.

Startups

How Typeform is scaling their culture in hyper-growth

Apr 17, 2017 by Itnig Startup Ecosystem 0 Comments

When your startup consists of you and your co-founder, it’s not that hard to shape the culture. Even though Typeform started with two co-founders , it has grown and in the last 18 months from 30 to 150 employees, and they have no intention to stop growing.

So how are they keeping a healthy culture? It’s not a poster on a wall, we live it, says co-CEO and co-founder Robert Munoz:

Our company culture is a product of what kind of workplace I, David (co-founder) and the first employees wanted to create when we started Typeform. We didn’t have a master plan to define our culture but we knew that a total focus on product, people and creating a collaborative place to work made sense.

Product & People first

Traditionally SaaS companies are all about product in the beginning. Robert and David have always been searching for the balance where product meets people:

We know that if we invest in both our talent and in our product at the same level, revenues will come along with it.

Typeform’s co-founders and co-CEO’s David Okuniev and Robert Muñoz.

That’s why they have created three pillars to put people and product as top priorities:

  • Business to take the market
  • Innovation to be ahead of the curve
  • Culture to create a great work environment

He explains that scaling culture has become more and more important with growth, as the company has been going through three different stages most startups face.

We started at (1) product phase, where it’s all about building the best fucking product. Then moved into a (2) service phase where it was all about giving our acquired users the best service possible. Now we’re at the (3)organizational stage, where building a well functioning business with different teams and functions. Here’s the focus on scaling culture maybe the most important key.

At a time when good work culture is uber important, the founders acknowledges that they’re facing challenging times as they grew from 50 to 150 employees in one year.

The magic number — 150

Oxford evolutionary psychology professor Robin Dunbar created a theory that humans only can maintain personalized relationships with 150 people, so it’s not without reason Robert says they’ve been struggling a bit with communication lately:

We are very aware that we’re crossing this magic line. Decision making based on consensus is not as effective as before and spreading information across the organization is a new challenge, so we need to add more structure in place.

The main challenge with adding structure, according to Robert, is to be efficient as an organization without killing creativity and the startup feeling.

The last year we’ve been focusing on redefining our vision, product mission and values, as this is a big part of creating alignment and improving communication and decision making.

Creating values is hard, especially if it needs to resonate with a lot people. So a while back the Typeform people sat down to draw out their company values.

First, me and my co-founder David met with the creative/content team and some other people to write a list of values that we thought made sense for our day to day. Then we published and announced the values to the company and we realized that some of the values didn’t resonate and that some others were confusing.

They needed a value revolution.

We decided to scrutinize the values with every team of the company and we realized that if you want people living the values, it’s better to make them participate so they feel more engaged and you don’t end up just hanging your values on a wall.

At the end, they threw away their first values and came together with the whole company up with a list of seven values that randomly formed the acronym: CHEF PIE.

Lunch roulette

Another key element when growing fast is making sure everyone get to know each other, no matter how big the team gets, says Robert:

Something we really focus on when growing fast is keeping founders and managers approachable, this is super important, and we are experimenting with several ways of making this happen easier.

One of the experiments is a Slack bot that matches random people for coffee breaks and lunches, so everyone gets to know each other better, also all the managers.

It’s actually been a real success. I love having coffee with people from the office I don’t know that well.

The Typeform barception.

When you walk into the Typeform office in Barcelona, the first thing meeting you is the barception (bar + reception) with free drinks and coffee served by the barceptionist. There’s also free healthy lunches, more benefits than your average day can handle, and a big lofty office.

You would think that even for a company that have raised $15 million in venture capital, this kind of spending would be over the top. Robert thinks the opposite:

Somebody told me that you’ll never over-invest in people. I don’t think investing heavily in culture is expensive at all, at least in our industry. Luckily we have investors that believe in that mentality as well.

Inclusion

The co-founders Robert and David along with the management team is learning as they go in terms of growing a huge, fast-moving organization. To succeed in their mission to make their product a little more human, there’s one element they need to do perfectly.

We need to include our teams as much as we can in the shaping of our culture, and continue to spend a lot of time, effort and resources on making people challenged, happy and at home.

As they’re planning on growing the team substantially the next two years, and with an additional office opening in the US soon, the ultimate test for Typeform lies ahead of them:

As we scale the culture of the company can change a little bit, but we don’t need to freak out about that, it’s like any person’s personality, it changes. However, we want to keep building an awesome place to work. A place where people can be themselves, be heard, innovate, and do big things together.

Technology

Learning the Design to Code process

Apr 2, 2017 by Itnig Startup Ecosystem 0 Comments , , , ,

Even if you’e not a designer and never used design software before, you can still release products that do the job and are well designed.

The following steps I’ll guide you through can be divided into three parts:

  • Planning
  • Designing
  • Coding

It’s far from a complete UX process, but it will allow you to take your own design and make it come alive.

1. Plan it

In your initial phase of planning you need to know your goal, and what you want to achieve with your project.

When you know for what purpose you’e building your app or your product for, you need to know who’s using it.

You should think of your audience in three different ways.

>Who: Demographics, age, gender, profession, etc.

>Where: In what setting they will use your product in.

>What: The kind of device they’re using your product on.

Take this information and let it influence your decision as you design.

The next step is to do at basic flowchart, in other words see how the user goes through your product, step by step, instead of just hard-coding it.

When you make a flowchart you avoid making mistakes that forces you to go back and do big changes. An example of a flowchart I’ve used in Quipu is pictured under to give you a rough idea, but if you want to dig into it — here’s a video explaining the process using Sketch.

It’s extremely important to have a thorough plan for whatever product you’re designing. It will save you time and effort for sure.

The last part of the planning, is to define a functional definition of each page in your product. It’s a document that will be your documentation or knowledge base about what each screen does, what it shows, and what routes and actions are possible to take from there.

So if you’re building an app, you should have a page with the following information for each interface:

Name of the view (or the module) –> The purpose of the page –> Full information –> Partial information –> List information –> Routes/actions.

If you did your flowchart correctly, the documentation will be heavily dependent on that Flow Chart.

2. Design it

The most important thing as a fresh designer or working on a project you’ve coded yourself, is to use established patterns.

There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel again.

A place where you can find questions and answers for most issues are ux.stackexchange.com. It’s similar to stackoverflow.com, just for design, and we know how important that is to most designers, so don’t be afraid to seek inspiration and help from more experienced people.

Then start on your wire-framing. Translate your flow and functional definition to a low-fidelity screen that contain everything but the design finish. In other words, focus on getting all the routes, actions, buttons and content right before making it look nice.

One of the most important thing of the design process, is to design it like you would code it. I recommend using Sketch, but use whatever software you’re comfortable with, like Illustrator or Photoshop.

Design as you would code it simply means using non-filled transparent containers to imitate containers and wrappers. Also use naming conventions for layers and groups just as you would use while coding your components.

The last thing I want to mention in terms of design, is to use Atomic Design principles which is a way of designing interfaces that extends to what we’ve been covering in the “Design as you would code it” part above.

It talks about structuring your design, and define it into atoms (colors, fonts, shapes) and form molecules by using them (buttons, inputs, lists etc..), to finally do organisms. An organism then becomes a template For example, A navigation bar that has a menu, a search bar and a logo (few molecules).

Foto: http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/atomic-web-design/

3. Code it

As a designer I will not teach code, most of you probably are more talented coders than I am, so I’ll just mention the software you should use to help you get all the CSS styles you will ever need.

Zeplin.io is a software that takes Sketch Designs, exports CSS styles and gives you all the sizes, margins, paddings, borders you need in order to translate your design to code and not loose the quality and level of detail you worked so hard on.

Zeplin.io is in my opinion the best way to translate design to code.

If you followed the atomic design, and designing as you would code it, then this process is simple, quick and with minimum errors.

I can honestly say that in Quipu where I do the design, this is the most time-saving tool I’ve ever come across. It drastically reduced both cost and time spent on getting the looks of our apps and website translated to all browsers.

Also read:

https://blog.itnig.net/why-ux-ui-designs-should-be-aimed-at-zombies-1968d72b0472

This post was written by media manager at itnig, Sindre Hopland, based on the presentation by lead designer at Quipu, Kamil Jura.