Marc Cercós, a young enterpreneur who has already built up considerable experience in the IT field, and is the co-creator of eyeOS and developer of Archy.
With almost a decade of business adventures behind him, twenty-five-year-old Marc Cercós is an experienced entrepreneur. Alongside Pau Garcia-Milà, he was the whizz-kid of Catalan IT thanks to eyeOS, the desktop that is installed on a server and which can then be operated from any computer. He created it at the tender age of eighteen, when nobody had even heard of cloud computing.
The eyeOS experience was not only successful in business; it also conquered the social sphere. Garcia-Milà’s youth and media pull earned them a spot at conferences and symposia and also on the main mass media television programmes, which touted them as proof that Spain had plenty of up-and-coming talent for the future. His clients included Telefònica and IBM.
Marc left Pau in command so that he could focus more on technical development. This distribution of roles worked well for them, albeit the situation was sometimes tense. The whole media circus that had been whipped up around eyeOS was not Marc’s forte, and when the company had to adopt a stronger business angle and begin to focus on corporate clients to the detriment of household users, Marc realised that his future lay elsewhere. He saw eyeOS as a contribution to everyday people; it had served them in the past and could now do the same for others.
Marc spoke to Pau and sold him his part of the business. All of a sudden he was a twenty-something with a lot of money and no specific project. His first idea was to go California and enrol in the Computer Engineering programme at Stanford, the university where Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google, had studied. However, he soon realised that with his experience, going to university might be a step back and he decided to take some time off to think.
During this period he made two decisions: firstly, to relocate to San Francisco to be close to Silicon Valley; secondly, to launch Archy, an application for Apple computers that uses the Google Drive platform as a file sharing system and virtual hard drive. Archy allows users to perform tasks such as uploading files to a server or sending documents between people, without the need for email.
The system caught Google’s attention and they invited Marc to present it to the entire company at Google I/O 2013, the most recent edition of its worldwide congress for developers, held last May.