Hi there,

My name is Rodrigo Galindez. People say I’ve a thing with digital design, which might be true. However, I tend to consider myself as an incredibly curious and extremely stubborn person, which in most cases can be a fatal combination.

I’ve started my professional career designing blogs in 2004 for less than 200 bucks. My passion for design and experimentation led me to create one of the most successful free WordPress themes in those years: Modern Clix, a theme that was downloaded more than 20,000 times, until I plugged off everything to work on something else.

In those years, I wrote an article about how I would redesign Twitter. Somebody submitted this article to Hacker News and it ranked to its frontpage. Immediately after I started to receive job offers from startups in San Francisco, New York and Europe.

Some of these startups got successful, some of them were a complete failure. I was a first employee in one that sold for more than $100 million, and also the first employee on one that raised $1 million and now it’s disappeared.

Somehow, working next to these founders, something made me believe that I could do my own startup and be rich like them.

How wrong I was.

I started a kind of tech company in an industry that nobody cares about, neither me. With no idea of how the industry works, without any money, and most importantly, with zero knowledge in business. But you don’t start things because you study them, naïvité, after all, if what makes the world round.

This startup was a failure as we were never able to monetize it. The translation industry is a very competitive industry and we learnt this in the most painful way you could imagine. However, in a last attempt to work here, we pivoted to something we didn’t want: a traditional translation company, offering the same translation services that all other 27,000 companies in the world are offering. That’s right, we pivoted to the same type of company that we were trying to kill, and in the process, a bit of our souls died.

But you can only connect the dots when you look back, and this is exactly what I’m observing now. Leaving the tech industry to work in an unknown, under valued industry where the norm is ghost companies with shitty websites, was the best decision I took, albeit inconsciously, in my professional life.

Starting this new company opened a pandora’s box of knowledge that never stops. I learnt how to create a business development system that is the basis of our company and helped bring 6 figure sales in short time. I learnt what is a cash flow and how to operate within it. I learnt how to analyze the weakness of our competitors to position ourselves. I learnt that clients never pay on time and the reason why. I learnt, between tears, how difficult it is to start and manage a company. And in all this learning I completely fall in love with the translation industry.

Language Buró offers professional translation services for several big names in Europe, including A1 Telekom Austria and Gas Natural Fenosa. We specialize in many subjects, including financial translation services, and translate into many languages. For example, we offer dedicated Russian to English translation services.

The days of chasing fame and fortune are gone. Intellectual challenge in a flexible work environment, one that could allow us to be free to travel anywhere, anytime, is what we are aiming for today.

These days I currently live in Berlin, and use the city as a base to travel the world.

I’m happy to connect with you, dear reader. As you can imagine, I’m not available for design work anymore, but I’m happy to chat about the things I learnt along my way, which center about starting things and making them work through persistence and hard work.

Send me an email to [email protected].

Thank you for reading,

Rodrigo