About
Jose Arocha’s Bio
I am an innovator, entrepreneur and internet geek in Silicon Valley with 10 years of startup and consulting experience and a fortunate education from MIT and Stanford University. I love working with internet startups in product management, marketing and business strategy. Most recently, between 2007 and 08, I was director of products and engineering at Laborfair.com, a San Francisco startup building an online marketplace of local, home services. Laborfair helps the housekeepers and electricians of the economy promote their services online and find work among consumers looking for help at home.
I love the playfulness of the internet and its possibilities for individuals to do the impossible. In 2004, I was awarded a Google scholarship and a Reuters Digital Vision fellowship at Stanford University to research new ways to leverage the internet for the social and economic empowerment of citizens in Latin America. I experimented with publishing platforms, social networks and voice technologies to device applications and business models that could address poverty by providing turn-key, media businesses to young micro-entrepreneurs of the developing world. My team and I also conceptualized and built the business plan for a “wiki” approach to community service that fostered trust and participation in local projects. You now could probably call it “local crowdsourcing”. We called these efforts TAVOS. I failed getting these ideas off the ground in the developing world back then. Fortunately, many of the building blocks for these ideas are now coming to life in the early-adopting markets and starting to reach my former audience for these early dreams to realize soon.
Later in 2006-07, I helped the Global Health Education Consortium (GHEC) to bring GlobalHealthEdu.org online, a web2.0 publishing platform for experts to share and engage students globally around Global Health through online presentations, forums and wikis. I continue consulting for GHEC today.
Between 1996 and 2003, I worked in technology consulting, enterprise application engineering, marketing, sales and support, initially with Invention Machine, an enterprise software & consulting startup in Cambridge, MA (now Invention Machine and Gen3Partners) and later, with my own consulting firm, Ingenia Technologies. I pitched to and negotiated with many corporate executives, and consulted for hundreds of top engineers and scientists around the US, Japan and Latin America to help them solve their inventive problems and device new technologies in energy, aerospace, automotive, consumer, electronics and industrial products. I remember training engineers at Honda R&D in Tochigi, Japan who back then were developing the hybrid car models. It was a fun and creative time with tons of frequent-flying miles.
Interests
I love my work with internet startups. But I also enjoy music and the arts with family. During weekends, you can find me at CreateIt with my daughter Isabela painting ceramics or listening one of Roselena’s concerts with the Peninsula Women’s Chorus.