Alejandro Pena, CEO of Keter, discusses the importance of community and how Keter has been able to help people achieve their dreams by providing them with a place to share ideas and grow.
Many people strive to achieve their dreams but are often still figuring out where to start. As CEO of Keter, Alejandro Pena has a solution.
Alejandro grew up in Argentina and moved to the United States with his family when he was 13. He attended high school at the University of Pennsylvania on a soccer scholarship and, upon graduation, decided to come back to his family’s native country. Keter was founded in 2004, and Alejandro joined the company in 2006. Through its first decade-plus existence, it has grown from a small startup into a global leader.
“We are a global company and have offices in Argentina and the United States, but we do most of our work online. That’s how I like to operate since we can grow without hiring people here or there. We can hire the best people from where ever they are, so that is what we try to do,” Pena says.
The company develops community websites focusing on social services such as education and daily life advice, consumer products, and travel information. Keter’s proprietary technology backbone, developed over 12 years, lets the company run its websites for startups and multinationals.
Previously, Keter was focused on the development of social networks and communities. However, with the advent of new technologies in the digital sphere, Alejandro Pena explains that much has changed.
“What we have noticed is that when it comes to content or software products related to information sharing and communication between people, nobody beats a social network,” he says.
“People need to communicate, and we have not seen a better tool than social networks. However, the problem with social networks is that they need to be built for communities. So when you look at the current situation of social networks, many people have created their own community on top of the platform because there is no way to make it private.