A year ago Cristina Fonseca attended the first entrepreneurship talks organized by Beta-i. She and Tiago Paiva had concluded their MSc Degrees in Communication Networks Engineering at IST, tried and failed 3 projects, another one was mildly successful, before creating Talkdesk. By using TalkDesk services, a business can set up a customer support center in minutes with a simple internet browser. When a call is received, the customer information is automatically pulled up in a browser window along with call history. The power of TalkDesk is its interoperability with popular CRM (Customer Relationship Management) services like Salesforce, Olark and Zendesk. They were selected to be one of the nine companies to compete at the first annual Twilio Conference in 2011 for a chance to win one of two final investments from the first Twilio Fund. They won the first prize: a $50,000 investment from the Twilio Fund, a micro-fund that was started by 500 Startups and SV Angel. After that, they were selected for the new class of 34 companies, Batch 002, of the 500 Startups accelerator in Silicon Valley. This Friday was Cristina’s turn to talk about her success story.

After her talk she reminded me that she attended one of my seminars on effective study methods, that I regularly teach at IST. She told me that it was the first time she realized that she could be a good student and still have time for other projects.