Henshaw-Plath spoke about the business process of a social network. He noted that it is not linear, but rather involves twists and turns along the way that alter the original idea. A startup—an emerging venture with high growth potential—“is not an established company or a franchise operating in a ready-made environment. “It’s a business trying to find a new model amid uncertainty,” said the man who was also the founder of the Ruby developer group at Yahoo. For that reason, he argued that one must abandon the traditional concept of a business plan that sticks to the initial idea throughout the growth process and instead constantly address customer needs. “We need to discover not only the market but also the product—they go hand in hand,” he added.
When starting a company, the former head of the development team at Odeo.com—the company that created Twitter—advised taking into account people’s problems, which are often reflected in actions rather than words. When one of the conference attendees asked about the factors he considered when creating Twitter, the speaker replied: “It’s a problem knowing where your friends are, calling them, telling them things, what’s happening in your life, and knowing what’s happening in others’ lives without wasting time telling the same message to everyone.”
The speaker, who has lived in our country for much of the year since 2007 and runs the consulting firm Cubox in Montevideo, described his relationship with Uruguay as “very complicated.” He pointed out the difficulties in the Uruguayan system for running a business, as there are “a lot of bureaucratic processes.” However, he immediately highlighted the fairness of the rules: “As a foreigner, I don’t feel treated differently.” He highlighted, as positive aspects of the country, the Plan Ceibal project, which he described as “wonderful,” and the internet access plans promoted by the state-owned company Antel, which do not exist in many countries. “I believe Uruguay is going to undergo a major transformation when the children of the Plan Ceibal reach college, because these individuals will have, from the very beginning, the mindset to explore technology and the internet—something that never existed before,” he concluded.