Confronte.com is a price comparison site for the Latin American market. Or, at least, that was our first idea :).
I finished college in 2004. I met Matías Garcia because he was teaching Operating Systems and Programming at the university. He was known as one of the smartest guys there. He was part of a group that came from Balseiro University in Bariloche, to teach in UADE.
At that time, I was working on my thesis with Ignacio López (Co-Founder of Wormhole IT), and we needed a tutor. Matías was our guy :). We talked to him, and he was happy to help us.
We finished it by March of the following year (2005), and we got our degree.
The following year, Matías started working on the idea of a comparison site. He traveled to the United States for work, and he thought that building an Argentinian site of that nature, would be a good idea. He started working alone.
Meanwhile, I was working at Hewlett Packard as Telecom Consultant, specializing on the latest technologies on the telecommunications market. The thing was, that none of the actual Latin American companies were buying cutting-edge technologies. We were talking about technologies like SIP and value added services, and the companies were stabilizing their SMS platforms. So, we were doing a lot of pre-sales work, but no action. I was getting bored.
We met with Matias and Ignacio for a "catch-up" dinner. Ignacio was working at Microsoft, and he was quite happy about that (JJ). Matiu told us what he was doing, and the bug got me. I sent him an email the day after, offering my help, and he replied with a TO-DO list. We didn't talk about money, shares or anything. We just worked.
I worked in both places for a couple of months, but my brain was overheating. Matiu needed more commitment to the project, and I saw an opportunity window. I grabbed my savings and jump to the pool. We worked 24x7 ... and we truly thought that we could go for the world.
At first, we were really focus on the Argentinian market. We thought that if we could reach that market, we could replicate our experiences. The thing is, that our mistake, helped to generate value for a local group. Clarín's media group was looking for a comparison site, and we were their option. They bought our company September 22th, 2008. But Clarin focuses only on Argentina, so we couldn't develop further to other countries.
I learned a lot. From legal issues, to the importance of having a partner. I'll always be thankful to that opportunity that Matiu gave me. I hope to enjoy my next startup as much as this one.
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