Julian Martinez’s Blog

This morning the guys in Buenos Aires sent me a few pictures of the office. We recently ordered a number of LCD screens so that each member of our business development team could work in comfort with two monitors. It was great to see that they had finally been delivered and set up.

I guess with it being the end of the year, it also made me reflect on how much Adoos has changed over the last 24 months. I think the contrast in the two pictures below highlights this perfectly.

Our office early 2005

Our office late 2006

It’s really satisfying to see our work starting to pay off and the company begin to mature.However,
there is a long way to go yet. Last week we welcomed two new joiners to
our business development team. We will continue to grow this team in
2007 as we look to offer our sites in even more languages and enhance
our localisation efforts.

Nick, Joaquín and I spent Monday and Tuesday at Le Web 3 in Paris. It was a great opportunity to meet and listen to interesting people from the industry.  The conference opened with a 20 minute chat between organiser Loic Le Meur and Niklas Zennström.  Other first day highlights included a VC panel on what they thought the next wave of star start-ups would look like and some insight from Brent Hoberman of lastminute.com. It was interesting to hear that he has now become a non-executive director of WAYN,  the community site aimed at frequent travellers. Is lastminute planning a buyout? The benefits of any form of partnership are obvious!

The star of the show though was Marc Canter of Broadband Mechanics. He asked the speakers and panellists testing questions, pushing them beyond their comfort zone, something which the panel mediators seemed reluctant to do……

The second day of the conference was slightly disappointing because it was taken over by politicians. Don’t get me wrong, Shimon Peres, Francois Bayrou and Nicolas Sarkozy are interesting people, but probably more appropriate guests for political discussions. Judging from comments on the blogosphere, our frustrations are shared.

Still, we made a number of new friends and exchanged ideas with people like the founders of MobuzzTV,  WeblogsSL, Properazzi, Enrique Dans and other entrepreneurs from Europe.