Roberto Mateu

Disclaimer: if you are considering Roberto for a job, researching his past for a loan, or don’t consider Monty Python funny, this page is not for you.

Greetings, my name is Roberto F. Mateu (aka tico) and I’m a carbon-based lifeform from Caracas, Venezuela. I was born in Caracas on September 26th, 1981. This was exactly 21 years after the first televised US presidential debate (JFK vs. Nixon) and the longest speech in U.N. history (4 hrs and 29 mins, by Fidel Castro). Coincidence?, yes.

I went to high school at the Instituto Cumbres de Caracas where I had a reputation of being both a good swimmer and a mayor geek (the word used was Technofreak). The former was due to the fact that I swam twice a day (6am and 3pm) and won a couple of state level medals. While the latter was a result of a series of fortunate events, such as (but not limited too): i) asking “Santa” for a copy of Windows95 (I was young and stupid) and an internet dial-up connection for Christmas’95, ii) Mentioning in a math class in ‘96 that computers where going to break-down in the year 2000, and iii) Using an Apple Newton MessagePad 2100 as my notebook during my sophomore and senior years. After receiving my high school degree in July of 1999 I went to Cancun for a week, an event of which I have no recollection.

That same year I got accepted at the prestigious Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, where I earned my Economics degree in 2005. During my university years I was a member of the Cátedra de Honor, an exclusive group that studies and discusses history and politics, and ultimately teaches that most of high school’s modern history class is BS. I was also part of the Model United Nations team that represented my university at the Harvard competition in Boston. We went as the PR of China and my committee was the World Summit on the Information Society where we discussed Digital Divide and Internet Privacy. Yes, it was fun to be a bully. Afterwards I went into student politics and was vice-president and then president of the student council. I was later impeached as a result of an academic Wet T-Shirt contest (kidding). In the summer of 2003 I had the amazing opportunity to go to the University of Vermont and learn about parliamentary debate.

By the summer of 2004 I was finishing my thesis “Study of the impact on the Social Welfare of the intervention by the Venezuelan Government in the software market” and accepted a job offer in marketing at Procter & Gamble, where a worked for a year.

After P&G I started a a small web design firm (ticotek.net) which specialized in delivering simple, open source based websites to small and medium sized companies.

I’m currently a second year MS-MBA at Boston University and will soon be joining … something. Which will be great I’m sure. Because I have it all planned out. I just have not idea what it’ll be.