Cyest

I can't believe that today is only Tuesday! It seems like I've been here a week. Yesterday was my first day at Cyest, the startup that I am working for. I had a couple meetings with Andreas Cambitsis, who is one of the co-founders. We discussed the mission of Cyest (perfect creation of technology to build business), what current products are in existence (they are involved in many different businesses, though mining makes up ~60% of their revenue), and what projects they think I might be able to tackle. We have decided to first focus on the pricing of a mining product that they have created--it is a cross between Excel and SQL, but more powerful than Excel and more user friendly than SQL. They had created the product for one of their clients, and now believe that it solves a problem that exists in every mining company. The question is what should the licensing fee be? Currently there exists some competition at $6000 per seat, but most companies are still using Excel for their scheduling/financial modeling.

The company has 75 employees, though not all are on site. It is next to Sandton City, which is a huge shopping mall in Jo'burg. The office building is very nice, though yesterday there was a power outage (not sure if this is a regular occurrence or not). I'll post some pictures of the office, as well as my apartment, sometime this week.