Share This
Who are you?
I’m Camilo Nova, Founder and CEO of AxiaCore, a company who creates the best web applications for business and startups, based on speed, quality and security.
Do you believe in non technical entrepreneurs and how useful are your technical skills in your daily activities as an investor and CEO?
You can innovate pretty much in any industry using technology, so today you’ll need to have any technical skills to start a business, even new entrepreneurs should try hard to learn how to code in order to understand how difficult is a problem to resolve.
For me I was pretty much lucky to feel in love with computers at young age, since then I never stop learning new things and meeting more people every day, so for my work it is a very big plus when evaluating investments and running a company.
There are many software engineers that find satisfaction by working for big companies and contributing to massive projects, why did you fund Axiacore? Is there something that motivated you to start up?
I was working at a very big company some time ago, and suddenly I realised politics won over ideas when a decision was made, that’s stupid if you think about it for a moment. This is how you kill innovation and make your work boring and meaningless, that day I decided to start AxiaCore, so I could find back my passion and be able to apply the innovations that I know were better for a company without politics and corporate bullshit.
It’s the first time we interview someone from South America, how is the startup scene there and in particular in Colombia? Is there anything you need to improve?
Colombia is becoming a central place for US and Europe to reach South American markets, we have a growing economy based on foreign investments and natural resources, and there are a lot of entrepreneurs from other countries relocating here because you can get a lot of business connections and investors for new projects.
Bogota, as the country capital, right now is an international city, full of restaurants, banks, universities, tech companies, and people from different countries who came here and fell in love with this place.
One of the hardest things that a founder needs to care about is recruiting, how do you recruit people?
Recruiting in tech companies is one of the most challenging aspects of the business, we need to compete with multinational companies for talent, a lot of US companies have offices here and they are hiring people all the time, so is very hard to get someone to work with you, and even harder to make stay working with you.
At AxiaCore we attend and support Tech Meet-ups, specially Django Bogota, which is one of the most growing meet up in the country since it’s creation, from there we are able to meet and talk about the cool stuff that we make, how we work, and the people we work with. This is very interesting for hackers and hardcore coders, which is usually the people who end up working with us.
What’s the person that has most influenced you in the last years?
Elon Musk, what he’s doing with Tesla is just awesome.
What do you think of the Free Software (Open Source) movement?
The Open Source movement is one of the most important component of this high-tech companies environment. Right now all of the new startups, even IPO companies were built using open source technologies, even today the best developers are contributors to open source projects, mainly on GitHub which become the place were you can tell if someone is a good developer or not.
Having the flexibility to work with the best software components in the world, made by the best people from all over the world is pretty huge, and let us to ignite the most complex business ideas very fast, this is why tech companies are growing so much in the last decade.
What’s the best tip for a Computer Science student who wants to startup?
Work for a corporate company before join a startup, at least for a couple years, that way you can get a good point of reference between what’s
cool and what’s not.
I am a Computer Scientist too, so I am curious, why python? There are dozens of languages out there, why eternal love to python?
I was a hardcore Java Enterprise Edition developer, I did write software in C, Delphi, .NET, Ruby and others, but when I get to Python I never looked back, it was love at first type and the more I learn the more I like it, as soon as you read code and take a look into big projects you’ll get a blast for it’s simplicity and readiness.
Learn Python, and try to use a framework like Django or Flask, you’ll be surprised how great you feel writing software.
