INNOVATORS VS COVID 19
Lucas Funes of Webee Tells Us How the Firm is Creating a Balance Between Growing Traction in the Market and Making Technology Accessible
First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times?
Lucas Funes: Like most families, it’s been difficult to find a new routine and re-adjust, but we are grateful for being healthy.
On the business side, we worked closely with our team to help them navigate the uncertainty and evaluate their personal situations while moving to a fully remote work environment.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded Webee.
Lucas Funes: I have a keen eye for technology innovation and creating products that facilitate the way companies work. Before founding Webee, I created multiple software products. For a long time, I worked closely with the enterprise from where I gained a deep understanding of the critical role technology plays in making organizations work efficiently. I always found it fascinating the endless possibilities that technology brings, and, from the early engineering days, understanding technology was never enough for me. I needed to help create it.
So I went as far as creating my own communication protocol back in the days when the IoT was a very distant concept. It made total sense to me that accessing data could bring substantial change for the world in many ways, but, in order to reach its full potential, we needed to find ways to truly democratize it, and it just didn’t make sense that from the get-go, solutions were not designed with the user in mind. Once again, I wanted to do something about it, which is how Webee was born.
How does Webee innovate?
Lucas Funes: We listen to our clients a lot, they all know better than anyone else how to fix their problem on a whiteboard, and that is when we came in. We bring simple solutions to their most pressing challenges, and as we do that, we question ourselves if this is the best way something could be done, and how we see the solution evolving over time. That keeps us moving and always innovating. That said, innovation is not easy to manage when you are a growing company. You need to balance between growing traction in the market and, at the same time, being true to your mission of making technology easy and helping the world move forward.
How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?
Lucas Funes: COVID pandemic really accelerated technology adoption and gave our company a whole new sense of purpose. It was exhilarating to see that the world was forced to reimagine the way we work and do business and that we were already working on a tangible solution to that. Of course, it was challenging; but we focused on making the necessary changes to help clients use technology to overcome COVID complexities and, at the same time, helping them bridge the cultural gap on technology adoption.
Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?
Lucas Funes: When you work on innovation, and moreover, in a new category of business such as the IoT, it is a very fast-paced environment when you are constantly in a state of “change,” so the pandemic crisis really showed us how important it is to have a flexible mindset and never take anything for granted. We have to be flexible and adapt, even if that means some sudden changes in product or business roadmap. We have a strong mission in mind, and only by being flexible we will achieve it and create solutions that resonate with the world.
How do you deal with stress and anxiety? How do you project yourself and Webee in the future?
Lucas Funes: The best way to deal with stress is by stepping back, stop to analyze, and delegate. Bringing others on board helps us gain perspective on how to handle the situation better.
Your final thoughts?
Lucas Funes: It is an exciting moment for IoT and all the progress we can make by adding sustainability and visibility to food, beverage, and agriculture operations.
Your website?
