We were growing as a tech-oriented, quality-focused startup accelerator. Let’s see what happened as we were entering the next stage.

We were growing faster and faster. We moved to a nice, really big office in another neighbourhood, and we had several startups in our admission pipeline. We were around ten people at the time, balancing consultancy and startups, and Camaloon was doing also really well.

Step by step, we were realizing that working with startups was what we really wanted at that moment: after all, this long-term-focused vision had been at itnig since it was born. That meant being our own clients, responding to just ourselves (and our partners, indeed) instead of doing a good work for a certain amount of money, but for someone else.

Helping startups grow was definitely what we felt like doing.

I continued helping and managing the development team, that peaked up to six people at a certain point. We worked on several projects at once, both for startups and internal ones, and I have to humbly say that we did a good job. Among others, we crafted the first prototypes for startups like Agorique and Singular Chocolat, launched our new website, and improved an internal tool for invoicing and project management.

So we decided to focus more on that. After several months of hard work, we raised a round of investment that would help us do what we did best: be the missing piece in a startup, normally technology or business wise, and take it to the next level. Also, we progressively professionalized and enlarged our team, being able to do more and better in less time.

But as I was saying, a piece was missing for me, and a series of events led me to change this fact. As we developed our business plan, we decided to push it one step further, decentralizing our team structure and pushing key people to the startups that we participed in. Each one of them began being more autonomous, with their own people, and this is when itnig development team made no sense anymore.

I found myself thinking on what I wanted to do next. I loved the role that I had been having for almost two years, but I also wanted to get more knee-deep in the technical part. Prototyping had been really amusing, although I wanted to go further and push myself into that. And we had this promising, internal tool, which we found really useful, and thought I might make sense to extract it as a separate startup and offer it to the world.

So we did. In June of 2013 I began my adventure in this brand new startup born inside the itnig environment, then my partner and CEO came along a few weeks after, and in September we launched to the public for the first time.

The name of the baby? Quipu.

Fourth episode is right here (part two is here).