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Nicolás Jodal: "People who think they can manage people by measuring them think they have human resources. And humans are not resources, they are people".

13/11/17

Laura Raffo interviewed one of the main exponents of the national software sector and a reference in the contagion of entrepreneurship in the world of technology.
Reading time: 5 minutes

Nicolás Jodal is synonymous with passion for technology and innovation. Since he was young, he was in love with science and physics, but it was when he discovered a microcomputer that he knew that this was his future.

 

He is the founder of Artech, one of the first Uruguayan technology multinationals with a presence in more than 40 countries. Nicolás cannot conceive of himself without helping new investors and that is why he created ThalesLab, from where he supports startups with high potential.

 

Careers with a future

 

The whole issue of software and robotics. The other is biology, bioengineering. Those weird careers that if you tell your mum, she doesn't know if it's legal or not what you're going to do. I would say that bioengineering and robotics and artificial intelligence have a great future.

 

Training

 

The world has changed. Before, the only way you could get an education was with a degree, now I would say it's practically the other way around. If you go to a university now it's simply for basic training, to teach you how to think. But you can't expect to have a degree to know about the cutting-edge things. You learn it on your own, reading, getting into it, advancing on your own. Because at the top it's all confusion, so if you wait for a career to come along, with a programme, it's because it's already happened. If there is something that has changed the world, it is that now we can go anywhere. In Uruguay we compete in software issues on an equal footing with any country in the world, we know exactly what is happening everywhere. It's a very good thing, but you can also have a guy in Kuala Lumpur who is studying the same thing as you. It's all become a game of speed.

 

Robotics

 

I am very enthusiastic about the subject, I have been studying it a lot. It can be applied to many things. The clearest thing is to apply it to an industrial robot, but that has already been studied. For me, the whole issue of autonomous vehicles is coming up: cars that drive themselves. And then there are autonomous vehicles, for example small cars that make deliveries. Instead of a motorbike, a trolley comes along the pavement and delivers. The drone is more problematic from an energy point of view because it uses a lot of energy to fly.

 

Freedom subject to discipline

 

It is similar to cooking. You can have a recipe, but you can't follow everything exactly. There are general ideas that you have to follow. For people to come up with ideas, there has to be an atmosphere of freedom. So you can't say: here we work from 9:00 to 17:00 and then complain because it's 9:05 and he didn't show up. Maybe that guy didn't come to work that day, but that night he woke up at two in the morning and came up with a great idea. That's why there has to be an atmosphere of freedom, which leads to all sorts of things. It's also a huge responsibility and it's very difficult to manage. When you pay people to have ideas, what do you know if they are delivering or not.

 

On the one hand you have freedom, but on the other hand you are like a professional player. You have to go and train every day. It's not that you have a great time. If you don't train, you don't do anything. It's a two-sided coin.

 

Measuring targets

 

We don't measure targets. People who think they can manage people by measuring them think they have human resources. And humans are not resources, they are people. At Artech they don't earn bonuses for delivering on time, they earn bonuses if the company had good results at the end of the year. If the company did well, everybody knows they win. If you pay people to do that, you create Pavlov's dogs. You give them and then what they will be waiting for is for the bell to ring and the food to come. And then something much worse happens, which is that they get used to hacking the system. I'm afraid of measuring things. If there's one phrase I'm against, it's the one that says "you can't manage what you can't measure". On the contrary! You have to manage what you can't ask for, because if I can measure it, why do I need a manager?

 

University preparation

 

It's like an athlete, you have to have a good pre-season. And they give them a hard time, they make them run through sand, they can't even walk afterwards. But then in the match they play well. If the pre-season is like going to a spa with massages, then you go to the match and you get overlooked. That's why for me college has to be hard. You have to miss exams, you have to struggle a lot.

 

Homework in schools

 

I am totally against it. I have fought with my children's teachers. I never achieved anything, I always lost. Now I don't have children in school anymore, but I fought every time.

 

ThalesLab: what do entrepreneurs need?

 

Two situations happen to us. On the one hand, people who have ideas but don't know how to implement them. On the other hand, people who know how to do things but are not exposed to the right problems. A typical case: a student comes to us who has passed all his exams, he is spectacular, and you ask him what idea he has and he is the reserve of the 5-a-side football pitch. That's because that's the problem he was exposed to, his concern was to play football with his friends. But it's a trivial problem, he wasn't exposed to having to solve a bigger problem. So one of the things we do is try to bring those groups of people together.

 

Another situation we face is people who have ideas but no business model. They often come with the idea that they have to find a way to monetise it, but we tell them to forget it. If the idea is good, the business model comes later. Whatsapp never had any idea how to monetise the business model until they sold it to Facebook for $19 billion.

 

We at ThalesLab work with people who don't have a business model yet and we don't worry too much about that. We give more time for the idea and the technology to mature and prove if it is a good thing.

 

Disruptive

 

A project is disruptive, it is something that changes the approach. For example, something typical. People are much more oriented to their suppliers than to their customers. When someone points the other way and gives much more strength to the customer than to the supplier, things are reversed. You make a refocusing that was not feasible before. There were far fewer suppliers than customers, suddenly you have five or ten strategic suppliers and a hundred thousand customers. There is no possible way to know the names of a hundred thousand customers. Now there is a way to know in depth the name and activity of two billion people, which is Facebook's business. If you know in depth the name and activities of two billion people, no supplier is strategic.

 

Fingerprint

 

It is nothing to do with what will be known in the future. I live it as a kind of Big Brother, I suffer it, I don't like it but that's how it is. Anyway, I think we're going to learn to handle this, you know when you see an old film and you're struck by the fact that the skinny guy is smoking? Soon you're going to think: how incredible all the things I put on Facebook, how I related my intimate life.

 

Access to technology

 

Everybody is going to have access to technology, that's not going to be a problem. The secret is who is going to be able to create technology. That's going to be a monstrous difference: the people who have the capacity to create technology from the people who only have the capacity to use it. But we're all going to use it. Bits expand much faster than atoms. There are cases of cities that don't have access to clean water but have bandwidth and state-of-the-art mobile phones. Technology expands very fast.

 

 

 

Source: Teledoce

 

 

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