Adrian Avendano – Connector – Coder – Entrepreneur
Career Profile
Adrian Avendano is an inspiring entrepreneur with a real passion for building communities in the tech industry. Since growing up between Mexico City and New York, he now has 16 years of coding experience and set up his first start-up in Galway, where he lived for six years. The core theme of Adrian’s ventures is using technology to connect people in a meaningful way – adding value to their professional life, personal life, or knowledge base.
Now with 12 exciting years of starting companies under his belt, we chatted with Adrian to hear more about how he leverages technology to create meaningful connections and his working style that we could all benefit from.
Adrian is based in Georgia which is a transcontinental country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. He’s waiting for lockdowns to lift so he can move back to Asia in early 2021.
Joining communities
“I would definitely recommend joining communities. I don’t think we realise, especially in COVID times, relying just on your family and friend network, I feel is quite limited. So it’s the same with your professional network, right? Most people rely on those three cohorts. Family, friends, and colleagues – that’s their social circle. But I think it’s quite limited in terms of the scope, in terms of how much you can learn, how much you can share, how much you can build together. So that’s why being part of a local community, I think is fundamental.
If you’re getting started, LinkedIn is useful to at least reach out to potential new people in a specific vertical industry. LinkedIn is a must, everybody should know that by now.”
Partnerships are important
“Focusing on the product is great, but now it’s so easy to build something. There are so many tools out there, so many people playing around. So building something, obviously, there’s an art form to it, but it’s not that hard. The hardest part is really attracting users or building partnerships. Once you have someone who could be a potential partner that you can leverage, you can use each other to basically create more traction, users, and feedback.
I spend most of my time like ‘Hey, who can I build a partnership with and have conversations with?’, ‘Are the goals aligned with what we’re building, does it ring a bell with them?’ ‘Yes, no? Why?’ If yes, continue. If not, then what’s missing? I feel partnerships are fundamental. Collaboration is a word that a lot of people say, but don’t act on it that much. People don’t collaborate enough.”
Focus
“My motto is play and focus, play, and focus. Meaning you need to play a lot, play hard, work hard, but really focus. How can you create the best methods and habits to better focus on the work that you’re doing? It takes years to really master the focus area. What habits allow you to better focus on stuff that you’re doing? And what noise?”
When it comes to blocking out noise, Adrian explained that “It’s like a holistic thing, right. In terms of exercise, diet, even taking cold showers, I take cold showers now. Meditation. Also, I block everything on my laptop. Only the stuff that I’m working on is open on my browser. I use ‘BlockSite’ to block stuff. We subconsciously go into those sites without even thinking too much about it. So we need other tools to help us counteract our bad habits. Writing a list of habits, small habits that you can do every day could help you to have more focus and less noise.
The other thing that has helped me is a lot of the basics, you know, basics like diet meditation, exercise.”
Looking for information
“First is pick the industry. Create a list of the most relevant sites that provide quality information. What’s the goal? What are you looking for? Find the most relevant ones and then check them out on a regular basis.”
Healthy habits
“What can you do today that will help you achieve? What set of steps can help you? Then if you feel you have achieved something in the last two or three weeks, if not, tweak, tweak, tweak, bring it back and change. It’s like an iterative process.”
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