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.
 

Over the past 6 months Orkut’s traffic has exploded but few people seem to have noticed and hardly anyone talks about it. If they keep up their current growth rate they will overtake Myspace soon!

So why is no one talking about it? Well most of the growth has come from Brazil and more recently India. Google has now has a huge platform to accelerate the spread of Google Talk, and possibly even catch up on Skype. Imagine – you login to Orkut, you want to chat to your friends? With an integrated Google Talk, you’ll only need to hit the chat/call button and you’re away…

Nicholas Latham has recently joined the team. He is our first MBA recruit and he is going to be a great help to me in managing the company, by taking many tasks off my plate!

Nicholas is our second senior recruit this year. He has a Bachelors degree from LSE, an MBA from INSEAD and has worked for Clifford Chance, Close Brothers Corporate Finance and Corporate Value Associates, a strategy boutique.

His international background (half Greek, half English, lived in Brazil, Greece, England, Spain, France) makes him well placed to be our localisation guru! He will head up an initiative to internationalise and localise all Adoos sites.

A big plus is that he is completely crazy about Madrid and Buenos Aires so it wasn’t hard to convince him to fly back and forth between the two cities (like I do).

One of the biggest perks we offer our employees is the option to enjoy 2 summers per year…!!  We bring the BA team to Madrid in June and July and then the Madrid team heads to BA from December to February!