Apiumtech’s CTO Xavi Hidalgo was invited to talk on Andorra Difusió on the 9th of October. Just to give you a quick introduction; Xavi actually lives in Andorra and has worked for companies like Lazada and for the Swiss government in the past. Him and an old team he worked with won a prize for the Norman Nielsen group for a multiplatform application they worked on. Here are some of the interesting points they talked about on Andorra Difusió:
THEORY VS PRACTICE
One of the subjects discussed was the fact that what you learn at university is very important of course and it gives you a good “baggage” or a good base for your future career but that it’s very different than what you have to face on a daily basis, at work. In fact, at while you’re studying, you learn just a bit, a small percentage of what is coming. Once you finally get in a company, you start dealing with the real thing; specially in an industry that keeps on changing like the Tech industry.
ABOUT APIUMTECH
Apiumtech is a tech company that offers various services including IT consulting & training services and mobile & app development, software architecture and UX design. We’re growing little by little but quite quickly for a company that has not received any investment or funding. As we’re experts in Agile methodologies, we very often enter companies like that. We start by offering consultancy services to our clients, to help them in the introduction to Agile methodologies and show them how they can become totally Agile. Very often, that’s how clients see the way we work and really start valuing us and obviously, that’s how long relationships built on trust start. And therefore, we end up working on other projects or getting new referrals. It has helped us grow in the past two years, but it’s not the only reason for our growth.
VIETNAM
In fact Vietnam has a big role to play in all this. We reached a point in our company’s story where we started having scalability problems. Usually, when a company wants to grow, you can increase all the commercial budget, do more marketing, get bigger machines, etc. But in consulting and development it’s different. So we were facing a situation where the company was going well, we had a lot of work but it was getting more and more difficult to grow. It’s at that moment that we thought about contracting outsourcing/offshoring company – usually people go to India, Buenos Aires, Romania, etc. As for a long period, Xavi contracted outsourcing companies and has bad experiences with low quality, we decided to do the offshoring ourselves.
So why did we choose Vietnam? Well, Xavi got contracted in Vietnam by lazada (a sort of Amazon in Asia) as a CTO and saw an opportunity there; first of all, the government has been investing a lot in the tech industry, they are even trying to build a sort of Silicon Valley. And second of all, the country is politically stable. Adding to that the fact that he fell in love with Vietnam due to the people that are very welcoming, taking a decision was easy.
ANDORRA
Once in Andorra, our CTO asked himself if the fact that it was a small country would necessarily mean that there was no huge opportunities, but in both ways he was quite close to Barcelona.
Usually, the reflex he has (he did the same in Vietnam) when he arrives to a country is to look for meetups. By doing a quick research on google with the keywords like “agile development”, “test driven development”, etc. you always find more than 20 of them. This test was done in Andorra, and the results were negative, he couldn’t find anything. Was it not part of the culture to meet with people and discuss about common subjects? Because actually in Barcelona, it’s full of meetups of any topic you can imagine!
So that’s how we decided to organize one, with a lot of beers obviously. It actually went quite well. Very quickly we realized that there was a lot of work in Andorra with amazing opportunities especially in the banking industry where clients need to be 100% sure that they can trust you, without having bad surprises.
Guess what? It’s the perfect place for us. Because here at Apiumtech, we create a working software, always.
SMART CITY
They also got the chance to mention smart cities. I am sure anyone that is in the tech industry knows what it is or at least should know what we mean by smart city! A small reminder: it’s when cities use information and communication technologies or digital technologies to improve urban areas and services with the objective to help citizens in the reduction of consumption and costs. Another thing that is very attractive about Andorra for us is the fact that it’s not a smart city, it’s smart country! A great example of such initiatives is Andocarbur, a website that help you find carburants at good prices.
If you’re interested in listen to the audio of the interview our CTO had on Andorra Difusió, you can get it by clicking here.
