Fernando is the Chief Technology Officer at ETF.com, the leading source of online news and analysis for exchange-traded funds. While tasked with many jobs from overseeing all of the programming to updating the company’s methodology, Fernando has security at the forefront of his mind; preventing third-parties from illegally using his company’s server space and bandwidth for cryptocurrency mining. Wanting to do more for the startup community in his hometown of Quito, Fernando co-founded a startup incubator and co-working space where budding entrepreneurs can work on projects, network with investors, and tap into Fernando’s expansive knowledge of building tech teams.
Transcript
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.
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