Thoughts on Demo Day
A quick note about how our company started, what did we do in the last four months, and how do we see the future.
Our company, Keego, was born out of frustration.
We needed to translate my birth certificate in order to apply for an UK visa, and we could not find a provider to do it. The space is filled with agencies that are very comfortable working offline, but have never moved their workflows to work on the web, making the process complicated and expensive. On the other side, machine-based translation has not reached a level of maturity that can be trusted to produce any sensible content at all, and it will not get there any time soon. And finally, crowdsourced translation is so impersonal and focused on working with high-volume companies that their solutions are not appealing to individuals and small businesses.
So I translated my birth certificate by myself and in a bus stop in Rome we thought: what if we could build a platform that connects a translator, no matter where he is, with a client? No agencies, no crowd-sourcing, no machines. Just human communication through a well crafted website. We wanted to give an update on what is an unsexy industry, an industry where translation is treated as a commodity and where translators are treated as simple editors, that work for cents, instead of real crafters that have the responsibility of removing language barriers every day.
And in that moment, Keego was born.
A few weeks later, eventually we decided that it was best to build our company in the United States, as it’s here where all the innovation in tech startups is happening. So we moved from London to New York and spent the past winter refining our idea and building a product. Then we applied to several incubators and accelerators, and were lucky enough to be accepted into The Brandery, a Top 10 US accelerator, in Cincinnati, Ohio.
We packed our stuff and moved to a new city where we knew almost nothing, just because we believed that it was the best thing to do for our startup. From London, to New York, to Cincinnati. And the rest is history.
The road has been bumpy. But we have dealt with this in past. Having worked with startups most of my adult life — and in many cases, in startups were I have been the first employee — I knew from the pains, frustration and wins of its founders that it would not be so simple. Startups are a fucking hard thing to do. And it’s all about attitude, it’s all about a gut feeling that guides you to think that eventually, everything will fit, everything will be alright.
Tomorrow will be Demo Day, an event where we present our companies to investors and the startup community. It’s our chance to produce mass-reputation: whatever we did in the past few months was to get to the best possible position for this day.
To the community of Cincinnati and to The Brandery founders and team: thank you for making us feeling at home, from day one, and for smoothing the path. Keego would not have been possible without your help.
To our advisors and mentors, thank you. Your feedback and guidance has proved to be invaluable for our company.
To our clients and partners, including Xapo Inc., and Roadtrippers: thank you for trusting in us — we will never let you down.
And to the more than 2000 people, bilinguals and professional translators that are part of our community and trust in our vision: we are doing this for you.
See you tomorrow.
Thanks to Emily Cooper for proofreading this article.
