Gabriel Aldemiz - Chicisimo.com

Gabriel Aldamiz is an etrepreneur with a long history on internet companies, he is currently on his third startup and he is as exited as the first time he got into the business.

He started as a very high scientific robust approach and low User Interaction, and now he believes it should be the other way around.

They where a scientific company, they where no tinto usability and customer experience and they focused on technology, that was a mistake if you have all this technology and not how to apply it you are in trouble.

By his third start-up they made an alliance with websugar.com with a blog focused on women in the US. They where an editorial and they need a lot of people, here he discovered a well full of opportunities and here he discovered niche to feed information to girls online.

He wanted to make something his family could understand, he started looking at the female segment and she discovered a group of girls dressing on the morning and sharing those pictures and telling them “this is what i´m going to wear today” at first he thought they where crazy but as he researched more, he found out most people do this than you think.

Coming from a purely scientific company, this was a revelation. And this girls where creating traffic, no one wants to check out online what you like or what are you listening, but people would totally check your outfit online… One week later he had an ugly prototype... at this point is where he discovered:

"Go from Idea to product as fast as you can… Start from User Interface and start building up functionality."

"You can have 1,000 ideas to generate revenue but you really need one very good one that is scalable."

I like his style and I believe this is how to do business online, he doesn't care about secrecy, most of the ideas have been there for many years so it's not new, the difference is on the execution.

Arnoldo

If your like entrepreneurship, or you want to get some tips on raising money, you must read this…

Today at IE we had a session at “IE Managing the Tech Startups” with Enrique Dans, and he brought a guy to explain us how to raise money while trying to start your company as an entrepreneur, and let me tell you it was one of the few interactive experiences I had really enjoyed at IE.

Jorge Mata is a true entrepreneur, not like the ones you imagine when you hear from Wall Street news or the ones you see at movies, he is a regular guy just like you and me that worked for big corporations and suddenly at 36 decided to send everything to hell and start his own company. In fact I had the opportunity to speak for a few minutes one on one and asked him what was he thinking to stop working with family and a mortgage and just resign to try his idea and he said "you actually really need to be missing a screw up here (pointing at his head) to did what I did at that time, but then again here I am and it came out ok...".

He is also one of the guys in Spain that has raised more money as a solely entrepreneur. Jorge is an incredible guy who’s really down to Earth and didn’t came with a fancy presentation to try to impress us, he just stand there and told his story and then he just told us to start asking anything we ever wanted to know about raising money for a start up.

Phrases like “Dollars are green everywhere” or “Selling your company is like opening a watermelon, if you open it too soon you won’t get to enjoy tasting it, and if you open it too late, then your through” he pretty much explained us what has he gone through during his ventures and not one single moment did he ever pretended be an expert, in fact many of his answers where “Well, honestly I don’t know, probably some people do that differently with good results, but this is what has worked for me in the past”. Most of what he said, although mostly it’s common sense, the way he explained it made it really clear, he gave us tips like that should take care of your Angel Investors, that they really become your family and you should be always open with them, if you have a problem or are going through a rough time you should always speak to them, at the end it’s on their best interest to help you since they have money involved. Based on his experiences, he always tries to give them at least 1x or 2x times what they invested.

Hearing experiences from a guy that’s being so successful against all odds of being too old for an entrepreneur in Palo Alto at the time, or that he actually made it when the Internet bubble burst, and that raised more than 45million USD in one of his funding rounds, and with all of the above realizing that he’s just like you…. It’s really inspiring. You can get more information from the tweets that we did during his lecture at hashtag #IETECHSTARTUP.

If you have always wanted to ask a real successful entrepreneur something, just post your question in the comments and I’ll make sure he answers us. BE SMART Don’t waste this opportunity.