[00:00:27] Jay: Hi, everyone. Welcome to The First Customer podcast today. I have a, I say special guests a lot, but today I really mean special guests, Federico Toledo, founder and director of Abstracta, co founder and director of Abstracta. Hello, my friend. How are you?
[00:00:45] Federico: Hello, Jay. I'm really, really happy to be here. Thank you for having me. How are you
[00:00:50] Jay: been a long, it's been great. I'm great. It's been a long time coming. I could not be more excited. I don't get the opportunity to talk to that many QA agency owners, let alone have them on the show. So, I'm going to get right into it. So give me a little bit of the background. where are you from and did that have an impact on you being an entrepreneur down the line?
[00:01:12] Federico: That's an interesting question. I'm from Uruguay in South America. Uruguay, I think it's the way you pronounce it in English. and yeah, I grew up in the countryside in a close to a small town close to the capital. It's a very small country and half of the population lives in the capital. We are talking about 3 million people in the whole country.
So just to have an idea of the size of the company, we typically say that we know each other, or at least we have a friend in common, right? and yes, of course, that had a, an impact on, everything I am. I think I had the chance to study in the university because the university here is free for everyone.
So otherwise I couldn't have that opportunity, you know, because I grew up in a very humble family. So being here, growing up here in Uruguay, I think, had a great impact because of that. So I could study and get my degree in computer science after Uruguay. I finished my degree. I applied for a scholarship that allowed me to spend a few years in Spain, where I did a PhD on particularly on testing.
I studied and researched about model driven testing techniques. And I also had the chance to work with some colleagues and some friends from the university. And we decided to start working on a product for test automation for a particular local platform. I'm talking about 15 years ago. so we decided to start implementing a particular tool.
Show that prototype to the people in the company we were working, at that time, and they didn't want to invest money or time and resources on that idea. So we decided to start our own company, working on weekends and free time. You know. Until we had a really working prototype, we got some money from an agency here that helps entrepreneurs.
So here you have another point where. growing up and living in Uruguay was an important part of, this entrepreneurial, journey, right? Because this agency gave us some initial seed money, that allow us to, you know, quit our jobs and, dedicating ourself to that prototype, but to that product.
But this was the origin of Abstracta focusing on developing a testing product. But after a few years, we pivoted to offering software testing services. the product, it was not very successful economically. It's, we are still working on it, but it's not what, it doesn't represent the majority of what we do in the company.
Now. today we are a com, a team of 150 people, more or less. And 90 percent of the business is around, professional services around software testing, automation, accessibility, performance, security, different things, around quality. But we also research and develop different products or contribute to open source.
But, this is a very long answer to your original question,
but I think it tells
[00:04:44] Jay: a bunch of questions at once. It's good. That's
[00:04:47] Federico: But it tells a little bit about my background and about being here in Uruguay. And another thing that I think it's more recent but important in my background, I spent three years in California, in Berkeley. I just came back last year from an amazing experience living there.
I really had a great time. And now I'm very grateful to be again in my home country.
[00:05:15] Jay: beautiful. Wow, there's so much I want to talk to, talk about there, but, well, first of all, I've never known a doctor of QA. So you should, that should be your name. You should be the doctor of QA. That should be your title. You don't need to be chief quality officer. You should be doctor of QA doctor, man.
Come on.
I, we should, is that domain available? You should register it right now if it's not. that's fantastic. I did not know that. you bring up an interesting point. I feel like so many Okay. Testing, automated testing frameworks or platforms have a really tough time. And I think it's because people don't really know. What they're for, or like who you would sell them to a QA manager, right. Or a QA engineer who really uses them and understands kind of the benefit of them. Maybe a CTO, you know, maybe somebody in that suite, but did you guys find that like, it was really hard to figure out who to sell it to consistently.
And that's maybe why economically it wasn't where it needed to be. It just feels like in general automation. It's hard to land that, that perfect customer, that understands the benefit of having an automation platform,
[00:06:25] Federico: Yeah, I see what you see, what you say, but, again, it was 15 years ago. We started with this idea. I think we were too, early in the development of the testing. Culture and quality culture in the industry, right? Because 15 years ago, we were talking about test automation, model driven testing, because our probe was kind of a local.
And now you call it local or script list. There are many names for that now, but 15 years ago was a crazy idea. And we got in love. We fall in love with the solution. In the industry, people didn't see the problem as we saw it. So we had to evangelize, more about software testing as a, you know, to establish that base.
And after that, continue talking about test automation. And after that, talking about our solution. Today, the industry, I see that the industry evolved to a point where test automation is more like a common practice. So it's easier to sell the idea because now everyone understand what it is, but 15 years ago, we had to explain and,
[00:07:43] Jay: You need to.
do the education piece. You had to do the education piece and try to sell a product. That's tough, man. That's tough to do on any sort of budget. I think
[00:07:53] Federico: Yeah, exactly. But, on the other hand, something really good that happened because of that, it was that we po positioned the company as a, with, with certain expertise in the quality field, right? We were researching, we were developing products. We were ahead of the many other people in the industry.
So that position, that idea helped us to build a brand. that now, it's helping us to find, talent people for, to work with us in this idea. And also, of course, opportunities to work with different customers around the globe.
[00:08:34] Jay: again, so many things I want to talk about. Switching gears slightly. How have you as an entrepreneur, as a business, you know, co founder, how have you said the word brand? And I think that's interesting. How has your personal brand, how have you tried to grow that while kind of trying to grow your business brand?
And where did those things kind of intersect?
[00:08:55] Federico: Yeah. You know, you, you are talking about how did I, if I wanted to do that, it's not something that I planned. to work on my brand, my personal brand, what I really wanted to do since the beginning of the company. Was to share what we were learning, and that was a, a genuine, spirit. You know, we were learning about software testing.
I'm talking about a small country with a small, industry around the tech industry that is growing a lot, and it's big for the size of the country, right? but, in Latin America, we didn't have so much. content, quality content in Spanish. So I have the privilege to understand the, to have the possibility to follow the main thought leaders and contributors to the community and read the content because I could read English and one of the things I wanted to do is to Take this content, those learnings and translate them to Spanish with my interpretation, with my addition, right?
And that was something that nobody else was doing, but at that time. So I
[00:10:13] Jay: that.
[00:10:16] Federico: think part of the brand I could build around myself or my personal brand was because I was doing that a lot. like enabling. Knowledge to people in Latin America in Spanish, and helping them to also grow in the area, right?
I started with a blog because 15 years ago that was the common thing to do. Now it's more like podcasting or. sharing content in YouTube, but, 15 years ago was mainly in a blog and with the content I generated in the blog, I decided to put everything together and add some other content and generated a book that I edited myself and you can download from my site for free.
And it turned out that it was the first book about software testing in Spanish.
[00:11:11] Jay: Wow.
[00:11:12] Federico: So, and now something that it really, is really beautiful for, you know, many people,thanking me because I, from different universities in Latin America or people working in the industry telling me, Hey, I could break into technology.
Because I read your book or I read your content, I could learn about software testing. I saw a path, a career path in this space. So I decided to jump and start working on that. And this is very, very recomforting, you know,
[00:11:49] Jay: You're the Latin American QA doctor. what a, wow. I mean, what a great kind of accidental, you know, just almost purely altruistic thing it turned into. Right. It's like nice that you can, it's like you're giving back, but you're building your personal brand. You're sharing knowledge about QA. You're doing all these things.
So that's like such a beautiful kind of tie together.
[00:12:16] Federico: And, you know, now that I mentioned the different things, I am thinking that, because I received my education for free in this country, for me, it's natural to decide to provide what I learned for free for others, because I know this is the way we can help each other to grow and get to better possibilities and opportunities.
Right,
[00:12:40] Jay: I love that. You did, you keyed on something early on that I would love to get your opinion on. How has the relationship changed between developers and QA during your career? I have my own opinions, but I want to hear yours.
[00:12:58] Federico: what? So the question is, how?
[00:13:01] Jay: How did the relationship between developers who were writing the code and the QA people who were reporting problems with that code change during the course of your career?
[00:13:13] Federico: Yeah, I remember at the beginning it was like, it's also associated with the waterfall, the silos, right? And something that agile methodologies was, it's been trying to change, right? And, and generate more integration. When we offer our services, something that we typically say is that we want our testers to be as integrated with your team as you allow us to do, to be.
Right? Because years ago, the typical, scenario was give me your product and I will give you a list of issues, right? And after you fix those issues, I will do a retest or something like that. We didn't have much collaboration or communication with them. It was through reports or things like that. And now it's like we are in the same virtual room, working and communicating every day.
And so. The change I think is towards that direction, of intense collaboration, maybe even some overlapping because, there are more developers doing or collaborating with a specific team. Quality, or testing tasks that in the past, it was not something very common to see. What's your view on that?
[00:14:40] Jay: I agree. A thousand percent. I mean, it used to be, and I never really put it in that context of waterfall versus agile. I think that's a great note there. yeah, it was always, it was very much us versus them, right? it's, and they would almost developers would get angry when you would find something and they would be annoyed.
And now it's a perspective shift where. Before they would be very defensive and very protective of the things that they built and say, no, it's not about, you know, it's fine. It works on my machine is the old, you know, the old cliche term. Right. But, I think as we evolved software development over the last decade or two, it's, they're more worried about putting out bad code and having people see bad stuff. That hasn't gone through QA, right? If it gets to the stakeholders and there's problems with it. a that's a problem today. And before maybe, like you said, maybe they could hide behind the process of waterfall and they go, well, we did what we were supposed to do. And we, you know, it just didn't get. Tested properly deployed properly, or, you know, the requirements are wrong or whatever now in this, I like the word, the phrase, they're intense collaboration. I feel like it certainly has become more of a team and we're the same way, JDA QA, we do the same thing. Like we, we want to be integrated.
We want to be as high up in the chain as we can. We want to be involved in, you know, requirement creation, right? Like come to us and talk to us about the things that broke last time. And we'll tell you, Hey. Maybe we should try to do something a little bit different, maybe write the requirements in a way that the development team and the QA team can help qualify this thing better, right?
So, I think we kind of feel similar about the positive, shift there. So, I want to talk about your conference real quick, but first I want to talk about, and we're going to keep this tight today. so maybe this will be our last one. How do you use conferences as lead generation tools? And is it just networking? Are you actively getting company's names and doing sorts of, what are you doing at a conference or your team at this point? What are you guys doing at conferences to try to land new business?
[00:16:50] Federico: Yeah, again, at the beginning, conferences was another place to share learnings and to share or to show what we were working on or to evangelize about software testing and test automation and all of that. but if I see. What, what happened in the past, in the different conference, it helped me a lot to be, to build a network.
I wouldn't say to generate leads. Of course, there is a component that is like a marketing or sales, activity related to that. But it's also about generating a network, meeting people, establishing connections, but true human connections, right? And this is why something that I don't like that much of the.
The virtual conferences. I think it has the possibility to participate in a conference in any world, any part of the world. Right? So we can share perspectives from different people. And this is amazing. But something I was missing a lot was like a meeting face to face shake hands. and establishing like, or the different talks that you can have with the speakers or with other attendees while having a coffee.
Right. And this is the part I value the most about conferences. but of course, after you meet people, Some people know what you are doing, you know what they are doing, so you can, cross reference each other, for some other opportunity you know that could apply for that person. And they do the same for you.
So this is probably the most beneficial part thinking of the, from the sales perspective related to conferences, and it also contributes to what you mentioned before about building your brand or the brand of your company, because, people can see that you are working on a specific topic.
[00:18:55] Jay: right. All right. Well, I'm going to give you a second, to talk about your conference. before we do that, I'll be very upset myself. I don't ask this. Who was the first customer for Abstracta?
[00:19:08] Federico: As I told you before, we started working with a, particular test automation platform.
[00:19:15] Jay: Mm hmm.
[00:19:16] Federico: that, tool is the test automation, tool for GeneXus. GeneXus is a local solution for development,
[00:19:25] Jay: Mm hmm.
[00:19:26] Federico: It was built in Uruguay, but they have clients all over the world. In 2009, I, visited a friend in New York City.
It was my first time in, in the States. And after a month around the area, I flew to Chicago for the GeneXus event. I gave my first talk in English. It was not very good.
[00:19:50] Jay: hmm.
[00:19:50] Federico: My English was
[00:19:51] Jay: Is that recorded somewhere? Is that on YouTube somewhere? I would like to
[00:19:54] Federico: I hope, I hope not, but, you know, when I gave that talk, I showed the, the product and I met some people who were interested in the product.
So they ended up being the first customers. It was GeneXus USA was the name of the company.
And, they started, they were one of the first companies using the product there in the States. So our first client was from America, from the States.
[00:20:27] Jay: Beautiful.
[00:20:28] Federico: And the funny part of that story is that I didn't tell my partners in the company until I came back to Uruguay.
So I spent one week with that information, without sharing that with them, because I wanted to see their faces.
[00:20:43] Jay: Oh, that's great. I
That is beautiful.
yes.
I love that. you gotta hold that. Sometimes I do the same thing. Sometimes I won't tell my wife that I have a surprise for her because I just want this. I want her face. I want to see the surprise. I like that. Doing that better. Getting the surprise when you're there.
That's beautiful. All right. Tell me where can we find information about your conference? Where can people find information about Abstracta and where can they reach out to you directly if they absolutely love you like I do? where can they find those three things?
[00:21:11] Federico: Sure. thank you for that. another thing we share is that we, I also have a podcast. I focus on quality. The name of the podcast is Quality Sense podcast. And because of the podcast name, we ended up calling our conference quality sense conference. Last year we had the first edition here in Uruguay.
Our idea is to have a different edition in different countries. this year is happening in Chile, in Santiago, Chile, in the capital. It's going to be in November. There's gonna be one day fully virtual and one day fully in person. The talks are going to be recorded and published in our YouTube channel, but, As I mentioned before, I really value both things, the virtual conferences and the in person conferences.
This is why we are having, the two options and we already confirm people from Europe, from United States, from different countries here in Latin America. So it's going to be, an amazing conference. If you don't speak Spanish, don't worry. There's going to be more people speaking only English. The talks are going to be, translated so you can enjoy the conference, as a whole, you can find more information in quality senseconf.
com. And you can find me in LinkedIn mainly is where I'm typically. More active, I love to talk if you are interested in participating or learning more about the conference or anything related to testing, because I really enjoy talking about testing and the experience. I'm really happy to be here, having this conversation with you, Jay, and I hope we can do this again in the future.
[00:23:02] Jay: I have a whole like 45, you know, minutes or an hour of questions that we got to get through, some other date, but, I didn't know you were the doctor of QA. So that's, I'm going to call you from now on. I hope you're okay with that. everybody please check out, Abstracta. Check out the Quality Sense podcast and conference. Federico is a great guy. great QA engineer runs a great business and I feel very fortunate to have him on today So thank you for joining me and we'll talk again soon. All right, buddy.
[00:23:29] Federico: Thank you so much.
[00:23:30] Jay: See you, man