-: Fernando Rivera, class of '93, CTO at ETF.com
and co-founder at Buen Trip Hub and incubator in Ecuador.
The company itself is a media company,
so it's a news portal that covers
the exchange trade and fund industry,
which is one of the fastest growing areas
of the financial markets.
My main responsibility, really, is to make sure
that we're continuously improving our methods,
our processes, and the quality of our code,
the security of our infrastructure.
For example, something very popular nowadays,
with the price of cryptocurrencies,
people try to hack into your servers
so that they don't have to pay
for their own electricity and bandwidth
and they use your resources, your computing power basically,
to run scripts to try to mine for Bitcoin
and other cryptocurrencies, so that's a popular attack.
Well, the alarms can come in at any time,
so you have to be ready and willing
to wake up at any time, and wake your team up,
at least the key members of your team,
and basically just work through it until it's resolved.
And now that we belong to a larger organization,
because we sold the company, then there's protocols
and procedures that we need to follow
in order to let other people know what's going on.
Since I live in Ecuador where there's no startup ecosystem
or the startup ecosystem was just starting,
I decided to co-found a startup incubator,
so we have a coworking space and we mentor entrepreneurs,
and we try to help them raise capital
and financing for their startups.
Well, one of the things that I emphasize
is that they should fall in love with the problem
that they're trying to solve and not fall in love
with the solution that they think they already have.
It's better to solve a problem
than to have a solution looking for a problem.
And obviously, because of my background,
many entrepreneurs come to me looking for guidance
on how to setup a strong technical team
and how to manage the process of software development.
I really enjoy working with young people
that are ambitious and looking to create new things,
and so, I try to help them on their path.