Carlos Hernandez

Who is Carlos Hernandez?

Carlos Hernandez is the CEO and founder of Quaderno, a SaaS business he started in 2014 and built from Gran Canaria, a small island that he memorably described from the SaaStock Europe 2017 stage as being "in the middle of nowhere." His story is one of the more unusual founder journeys in the European SaaS scene: not a Silicon Valley transplant or a venture-backed prodigy, but a self-described "polymorphic" operator who arrived at SaaS the long way, through years of hands-on commercial work rather than through a single overnight idea.

By his own account, Carlos has been in business since the very beginning of his working life. He started out as a freelancer, then formed a small company working as a contractor for larger companies, and finally launched his own SaaS product in 2014 — what he believes was one of the first SaaS companies in Spain. That progression, from solo freelancer to contractor to product founder, gives his perspective a grounded, practitioner's edge. He has lived every stage of the independent-builder path, and Quaderno was the culmination of it. He also operates as a nomadic founder, running the business while moving rather than from a fixed headquarters, which shaped both how he built the company and how he talks about the realities of remote, distributed work.

His SaaStock Europe 2017 talk, "Bootstrapping a SaaS business from Gran Canaria," was framed not as a victory lap but as a candid reckoning with "a few myths of SaaS success" he had personally struggled with since founding his first company. This page collects Carlos Hernandez's recorded SaaStock talks, with transcripts, for founders who want the unvarnished version of building software far from the usual startup hubs.

About Quaderno

Quaderno is the SaaS business Carlos Hernandez founded in 2014, and according to his own telling at SaaStock Europe 2017, it was one of the first SaaS companies in Spain. The product operates in the tax compliance and sales-tax automation category, helping online businesses handle invoicing and the often-painful work of calculating and reporting taxes across jurisdictions — a problem that grows sharply more complex the more places a company sells into.

What makes Quaderno notable as a company story is less the product category and more the circumstances of its creation. Carlos built it from Gran Canaria, deliberately outside the conventional startup geography, and ran it as a nomadic, remote-first operation. That set of constraints — bootstrapped, self-funded, built away from the major ecosystems — is exactly what his talk dissects. Rather than presenting Quaderno as proof that the standard SaaS playbook works everywhere, he uses the company as a lens to test which pieces of received wisdom about SaaS success actually hold up.

Because Quaderno was bootstrapped rather than venture-funded, its growth had to follow a path dictated by real revenue and disciplined choices rather than by raised capital and aggressive burn. Carlos's SaaStock session leans into the texture of that reality: the myths a self-funded founder absorbs from the wider industry, the gap between those myths and what he experienced building from a small island, and the lessons that emerge once you stop assuming the conventional narrative applies to your situation.

Key lessons from Carlos Hernandez's talks

Question the myths of SaaS success before you adopt them. Carlos opened his SaaStock Europe 2017 talk by naming "a few myths of SaaS success" that he had been struggling with since founding his first company. The core lesson is that much of the standard SaaS narrative is context-dependent, and a founder who swallows it whole — especially one operating outside the usual hubs — can end up chasing benchmarks and assumptions that were never built for their situation.

You can build a real SaaS company from anywhere. Carlos founded and grew Quaderno from Gran Canaria, an island he describes as being in the middle of nowhere, and believes it was among the first SaaS companies in Spain. The takeaway is that geography is not destiny in software: being far from Silicon Valley or the major European ecosystems is a constraint to work with, not a disqualification from building something durable.

Earn your way to founder through the trades that come before it. Carlos's path ran from freelancer, to running a small contracting company for larger clients, to finally launching his own SaaS product in 2014. The lesson for aspiring founders is that the unglamorous earlier stages — client work, contracting, learning to run a small business — are not detours but the foundation that makes a self-funded SaaS launch survivable.

Bootstrapping changes which rules apply. Building Quaderno without outside funding meant Carlos had to confront the difference between the venture-shaped advice the industry broadcasts and what a self-funded, nomadic operator actually faces day to day. The practical lesson is to treat popular SaaS "success" frameworks as hypotheses to test against your own constraints, not as commandments to obey.