Hello world.

There are many questions to ask yourself when you start a new company, a new project. What are we going to sell? What should our name be? Who is our target customer? Many questions with even more answers, all different and valid depending on what you want your company to be.

One thing that was clear to us from the beginning: we want to be as open and transparent as possible. We’ve learned so much from other transparent projects and companies; we too want to give back to the ecosystem and benefit from their feedback.

So here we are with our first post. There will hopefully be many more, each sharing more details as we build our company, with our successes and our failures. We are starting with a one-page draft where we explain what Vernon is — please comment, your feedback is part of the process too — :

What is Vernon?

Venture growth

According to the Oxford Dictionary:

venture (/ˈvɛnt͡ʃɚ/)

1. A risky or daring journey or undertaking
1.1 A business enterprise, typically one that involves risk

When you’re starting your venture — either a startup, an investment or a new project — you usually go at it by yourself, with support from your friends, colleagues or family, because you don’t exactly know where you’re going. The beginning of your journey will involve many wrong paths, some u-turns and, hopefully, one or two unexpected shortcuts.

And then, after some time, you reach the first goal: you’ve proven the business model, you’ve found your product market fit and maybe you’ve raised your Series A from a VC or secured corporate support from your parent company. Congratulations!

Well, that was the easy part. You’re in a race now, a race to prove that the business makes sense at scale.

Your venture has just entered the growth stage, and at this point you’ll usually have to:

• Scale the team without becoming bureaucratic and slow.
• Launch new features and optimise existing ones. Most importantly: decide what things you should do and what isn’t really working.
• Make sure your architecture and infrastructure can handle the increased traffic, larger user base and greater number of code contributors.
• And all while you need to increase your revenues every month.

We’ve gone through this phase a few times and we know how painful it is. At Vernon we can walk that path with you and we think we can help you successfully take your venture to the next stage.

How can we help you?

Whether your are a startup, an enterprise or a VC, we can help you grow your venture by:

• Accelerating your development cycle: from idea to release, we help you optimise each step — depending on your team, objectives and culture — so your throughput and quality are boosted.
• Ensuring technology is an enabler: we not only make sure technology is not a bottleneck for your product — not now and not in the future — ; we also foster a culture where technology is not a commodity but part of your core value proposition.
• Crafting product from business: by establishing a healthy product practice, we help you mix business plan impact with long term vision to craft a profitable and durable product — rather than developing an endless list of unconnected projects — .

Why are we different?

Isn’t this industry already crowded enough? Innovation consultants, service design firms, design studios, traditional business firms just entering the industry, strategy corporations or boutiques going digital, big tech consultancy companies, development boutiques, one-stop shops for digital ventures, freelancers… While we plan on sharing our take on the industry in a future post, we wanted to give a little advance on why we’re a different animal:

• Focus on execution: hands-on approach that gives greater value to execution — our work does not end with a PowerPoint presentation — .
• Bridge the gaps: we make business, product and engineering work together. From the top line of the business plan to the last line of code.
• Partner with your team: we are not an outsourcing company, we are embedded in your team. Filling the gaps, empowering your employees’ skills, transforming the way they work and transferring know-how.

Some of our services

Specifically, what do we do?

For Startups

• Interim CTO / CPO
• Product development cycle optimisation
• Tech / Product hiring support
• Scalability assessment and improv. plan
• Definition of product KPIs, prioritization and impact on business

For VCs

• Due Diligence, deal-flow support and follow-up
• Involvement with and advisory to the boards
• Laser focus workshops
• Ad-hoc projects for portfolio companies: the same set of services offered to startups

For Enterprises

• Building internal ventures (i.e. a startup within your company)
• Interim CTO / CPO
• Product development cycle optimisation
• Tech / Product hiring support

Who are we?

Teo Ruiz

• First engineer and VP of Engineering at Fon
• Engineering manager at elpais.com
• CTO at Busuu and Head of Engineering at Lyst in London
• VP of Engineering at Jobandtalent

Pedro Torrecillas

• Industrial Engineering and dreamer at Imagine Silicon Valley
• Strategy consultant in Strategy& (part of PwC network)
• Product Manager at Social Point
• VP of Product at Jobandtalent

Got feedback? Want to know more? Let’s talk at [email protected]