Here is a short timeline:

• Jan, 20th: The LetMeGo Challenge was announced.
• Feb 20th: The deadline to apply was reached. 120+ applications were received.
• Feb 21st: 67 candidates were selected to move on to the next round.
• Feb 22nd – Feb 28th: Seven tests were administered to the candidates, one per day, to test different skills.
• March 10th: Three candidates moved on to the next round: Chris Cancado, Martin Omedes, and Sérgio Rebelo.
• April 5th – Nov 4th: A seven-month test started. Each candidate launched a version of LetMeGo in Portuguese under a different brand.
• Today, Nov 5th: After tons of analysis, the winner of the challenge is announced.

I wish Chris, Martin, and Sérgio could all win. They have all demonstrated themselves to be great humans and professionals with the skills required to make LetMeGo a successful venture in Brazil and Portugal. Still, one winner must be selected, regardless of what we would prefer in a perfect world. So then, the winner of the LetMeGo Challenge in Portuguese is…

Sérgio Rebelo!

Congratulations Sérgio!

Why Sérgio?

We analyzed the performance of the challengers in many areas, including resourcefulness, speed, copy-writing, customer service, market penetration, social marketing, search engine optimization, and business development. Of course, Sérgio didn’t lead in all fronts, but he did in most. Well done Sérgio!

What is next?

Sérgio has a great challenge ahead. If anything, we have learned that the Brazilian and Portuguese markets are quite different. Sérgio will work together with us in our New York office to hone these strategies. We will also attempt to reach agreements with Chris and Martin so that they can help us with our plans.

Credit where credit is due

While the candidates all worked very hard, I want to acknowledge the hard work that the LetMeGo team put into making this contest a success. They all invested an overwhelming amount of time and effort to make sure that the challenge was properly executed. @leonardosuarez and @gigiborja deserve a special mention, since they handled most of the planning and logistics. Great work, team!

Alexander Torrenegra

P.S. I haven’t yet recovered from writing this post; however, I must get ready for the end of the LetMeGo Challenge in Spanish. It will be announced next week, in Bogota. Stay tuned!

The LetMeGo Portuguese Challenge will end Friday, November 5th at 5 PM ET. The winning team will be announced with a blog post. The leader of the winning team will be invited to New York City to work with us for three weeks, all expenses paid. The three competing teams are BoraViajar.com, led by @martinomedes, MeuDestino.com, led by @chriscancado, and QualquerDestino.com, led by @sergio.

The LetMeGo Spanish Challenge will end Tuesday, November 9th in the evening… in Bogota! The team leaders will be flown to Bogota for five days and four nights. Bogota is the location of our Ninja development team. On the third night of the trip the winner will be announced at a private dinner. They will also be attending the next BogoTech meetup on November 10th, and sharing their experiences. The three competing teams are AlojameYa.com, led by @hmgauna, Bukyx.com, led by @androlindsay, and ReservaIdeal.com, led by @betolive.

May the force be with you all!

• meudestino.com – led by Christiane Cançado
• boraviajar.com – led by Martin Omedes
• qualquerdestino.com – led by Sérgio Rebelo

As with LetMeGo in Spanish, three sites are being launched in Portuguese as part of the LetMeGo I18N Challenge. These three sites and the teams managing them are competing against each other. The winning site will absorb the other two sites. Only the winning team will continue working with LetMeGo.

Although each team is following a different strategy, all of them share the same growing portfolio of lodgings within LetMeGo. Travellers using any of the new sites can book any of the lodgings already listed in LetMeGo.com. We even translate their messages automatically if they don’t speak the same language.

May the best team win!

* Bukyx.com – led by Andro Lindsay
* ReservaIdeal.com – led by Alberto Saavedra
* AlojameYa.com (going live soon) – led by Hernan Gauna

Why three sites instead of just one? Because the three sites, and the teams managing them, will be competing against each other as part of the LetMeGo I18N Challenge. The winning site will absorb the other two sites. Only the winning team will continue working with us.

Although each team is following a different strategy, all of them share the same growing portfolio of lodgings within LetMeGo. Travellers using any of the new sites can book any of the lodgings already listing in LetMeGo.com. We even translate their messages automatically if they don’t speak the same language.

May the best team win!

This is who they are (in alphabetical order):

Spanish Challengers

	Alberto Saavedra Alberto’s work experience includes stints at companies in four different countries. He has worked in software development and testing in Bolivia and Germany, solutions implementation in Mexico, and as a program manager at Microsoft in the United States. His education is similarly international, including a Computer Systems Engineering degree from Universidad Católica Boliviana, a graduate business diploma from CEPADE, in Spain, and stints as a research assistant while studying MSc in Information Technologies at Tec de Monterrey, Mexico, and as a participant in Google’s Summer of Code in 2005. He loves music and racquetball, and is active with the Seattle 2.0 community.
	Andro Lindsay Andro comes to the LetMeGo Challenge with a degree in Industrial Engineering from Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María and a diploma in Airlines Business Management from the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez. His previous experience includes management of a variety of projects and departments at both LAN airlines and at Metrogas, a natural gas company. He is a passionate traveler, who enjoys time spent with nature, as well as whatever other pleasant surprises life has to offer.
	Hernán Gauna Hernán has been interested in web-based businesses since his teenage years, and in the decade-plus since, he has been a freelance web designer, as well as the Web Production Lead for Latin America at Lenovo. He studied at a high school whose curriculum was offered in three languages, and has studied Communication at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. He is passionate about music, both that of others and that which he creates himself as a musician.

Portuguese Challengers

	Christiane Cancado Christiane holds a degree in Computer Science, as well as educational experience in Electrical Engineering. In addition to her positions in Brazil, which have included stints for CEMIG, Banco do Brasil, TTY 2000 and Alumbrás, she brings international perspective to her work on the LetMeGo Challenge, thanks to her experience working at VanceInfo’s office in Beijing, China.
	Martín Omedes Martín’s education has focused on marketing, with a degree from Instituto Superior de Ciencias de la Comunicación,Rosario, Argentina, and a certificate from UCLA, Berkeley. His career up to this point has been heavily focused on the retail and athletics industries, including positions with the clothing retailers Fluid Chain Store and Sport 78, as well as a period working for the Pepsi Center’s Sports and Entertainment effort, focused on maximizing customer experience. Most recently, he founded his own alternative sportswear brand under the D-Unit moniker, designing and producing 6 full collections distinguished by their quality and design.
	Sérgio Rebelo Sérgio’s education includes a course of study in electronics engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico, as well as a degree in Computer Science from Faculdade de Ciências de Lisboa. Since then, he has held a variety of positions in software development and project management, leading teams and fostering innovation at Nokia Siemens Networks, along with positions at Multipessoal and Siemens. Sérgio divides his free time between pursuing his hobbies (travel, books, music, and food), and spending time playing with his daughter.

Seven weeks ago, we announced a contest: the LetMeGo I18N Challenge. This project was designed to help us find the CEOs of two upcoming ventures: LetMeGo in Spanish and LetMeGo in Portuguese. Today, we are announcing that we have examined the applications of all of the entrants, as well as their responses to our various challenges (more on this below), and have selected the six candidates who will move on to the next stage. For the next six months, each of them will design and implement a competing version of LetMeGo en español or LetMeGo em português–at the end of this period, we will select two winning entrepreneurs, who will be named CEOs of their own version of the LetMeGo service, and, if everything goes according to plan, will eventually become partners in the parent company.

We received almost four hundred applications. Eighty-seven candidates for Spanish and sixty-seven for Portuguese were invited to compete in the preliminary tests. Sixty-one candidates completed the entire set of tests after one tough week. The job opening I wrote mentioned “The tests will be brief, and should not impact candidates’ normal lives.” At the time I wrote that, I believed it to be the case. However, our competitors, through their diligence and competitive spirit, put the lie to my words. As the candidates came to recognize each others’ skill and dedication, and realized how heated the competition would be, their efforts became more and more intense. By the end of the testing week, some candidates and teams were foregoing sleep, trying to ensure that the response they submitted for each challenge was the best it could possibly be.

Clearly, then, selecting only three candidates out of such a talented pool would be extremely difficult. We’ve never had the privilege of getting to know so many passionate, professional, and interesting people in such a short period of time. I’ve spent days worrying about how I would break the bad news to the talented candidates who would not be selected. In spite of my efforts, I have yet to put into words how proud I am of many (in fact, most) of them, and what an honor it was to evaluate their responses to our challenges. Not only was their work of the highest quality, but they proved themselves to be warm, well-rounded human beings. I hope to be able to work with many of them in the future, and look forward to the positive change they will enact in our world as they pursue their other dreams. Perhaps this sentiment, expressed by Steve Jobs in the famous commencement address he gave at Stanford in 2005, comes closest to expressing my wishes for those who didn’t win:

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

And the candidates for the next stage on the LetMeGo I18N Challenge are (in alphabetical order):

The runners-up, who will move on to the next stage if one or more of the above candidates drop out during the next 15 days, are (also in alphabetical order):

These six candidates hail from many different backgrounds. They reside in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Portugal, and the United States. Some of them have experience working with companies including LAN Airlines, Lenovo, and Microsoft. Others are lifelong independent entrepreneurs. Now that I think about it, I’m not even sure who did and didn’t go to college in this group. Regardless of their backgrounds, though, congratulations to everyone!

I offer my sincere thanks to all of the candidates who participated in the first phase of our challenge, for sharing the LetMeGo dream (if for only a few weeks). Thanks are also owed to Leonardo, for his thus-far flawless execution of this challenge. Thank you, too, SocialAtom Team (Andres Barreto, Maca Lara, Lina Ceballos, and Juan David Vargas) for the great work you did in promoting the challenge. Now, it is my job to encourage the winning candidates to produce their best work yet.

Alexander Torrenegra

Candidates: You have 24 hours after this post is published to deliver the expected results.

Objective: Showing the human side of LetMeGo is important. You will be expected to have a blog similar to this one. In this task we will try to determine how good you are at working with blogging tools and, of course, blogging.

Task: Create a brand new blog using the blogging tool or blogging provider of your choice. Write and publish an entry written by you in either Portuguese or Spanish. Talk about your experience as a candidate of the LetMeGo I18N Challenge thus far. You must also customize the look and feel of the blog so that it is similar to the look and feel of LetMeGo (make sure it looks nice!) – If you would like to remain anonymous, you don’t have to sign the post using your real name.

Deliverable: Post the link to your blog entry as a comment to this post. Also, if you are participating anonymously please send us an email to challenge[åt]letmego[døt]com with the link. Remember to post it here as well, otherwise we won’t consider your submission.

Rules: This should be a brand new blog, not an existing blog you already own. Please do not  use the LetMeGo logo or the tag of the logo.

Questions? Post them here.

Alexander Torrenegra

P.S. If you are a candidate that has ties with Chile and you were directly or indirectly affected by the earthquake, please let us know if you need extra time to complete the remaining tests. Our best wishes are with you and those negatively affected by the recent events.

You have 24 hours after this post is published to deliver the expected results.

Objective: To determine how agile you are with social marketing tools.

Task: To create a new Twitter account and obtain the highest number of legitimate Twitter followers you can during the next 24 hours.

Deliverable: Post a comment to this post with a link to the Twitter account that your created. You can post it anonymously if you like. Additionally, please send us the same link via email to challenge [at] letmego [dot] com. Both deliverables are mandatory. Regardless of the time of your delivery, we will count the number of followers you get tomorrow at 10 AM US Standard Time.

Rules: The Twitter account you use should be brand new. You cannot use an existing Twitter account. All the details and tweets of the account should be in the language for which you are participating: Spanish or Portuguese.

Questions? Post them as a comment to this blog entry.

Have fun!

Update: Some people have argued that this test doesn’t properly measure the Internet marketing skills of the candidates. Well, I couldn’t agree more. This test is more about resourcefulness than Internet marketing. In fact, as I mentioned to the candidates over the weekend “Initially, our main sources of traffic will be search engine optimization and our referral program. Other efforts, like PR and PPC, may also help, but I wouldn’t bet too much on them.” – As you can see, I didn’t even mention Twitter there.