Nicolás Orzabal and the Ping-Pong Table Theory of Trust

A ping-pong table is an unusually honest piece of office furniture. It can accommodate a game, an argument, or the paperwork that has outgrown someone’s desk. In Nicolás Orzabal’s recollection of Cloudgaia’s beginnings, it accommodated a conversation about values. A small team gathered around it and wrote down what mattered. A decade later, with the consultancy operating internationally, he still reaches for that scene.

There is something revealing about the memory he chooses. The co-founder and co-CEO could begin with a large client or an investment. Instead, the furniture gets a supporting role. The people around it get the credit. His anniversary reflection returns to trust: between colleagues, and between the company and the customers who keep asking it to do more.

“I always come back to the same thing: trust.”

Nicolás Orzabal · Cloudgaia’s tenth anniversary

The question running through his story is how such a conversation travels. A team can grow beyond the room where it began. Its expectations have to find a way out of the room, too.

Before the company had its name

Orzabal’s working life crosses several boundaries that technology businesses often keep in separate departments. His earlier roles include corporate IT at Avery Dennison, founding and leading Quala Consulting, serving as chief technology officer at Valuenet, and holding the chief commercial officer role at Fielo, a business focused on incentives and loyalty automation.

Those responsibilities place him on different sides of the same practical problem. A system needs to work. A customer needs to understand its usefulness. A business needs to deliver what it has agreed to sell. Looking across his career, the recurring subject is the relationship between those obligations.

Cloudgaia’s founders brought experience from Quala, Valuenet, Altergaia, and Fielo into the business. Their history in the Salesforce ecosystem reached back to 2008, before Cloudgaia’s founding in Argentina in 2016. The company’s story therefore has a prehistory: earlier organizations, earlier implementations, and experience accumulated before the current name appeared.

His connection to the platform also appears in professional credentials. He lists Salesforce Administrator certification from June 2017 and Sales Cloud Consultant certification from January 2019. A founder’s title can carry him into boardrooms; these qualifications sit closer to the systems his colleagues configure. They add a technical detail to a career that also includes sales and leadership.

The four co-founders are Orzabal, Francisco Okecki, Santiago Ramos Mejía, and Francisco Orzabal. Nicolás names the other three when marking the anniversary. The origin remains a collective undertaking, even when one founder is doing the telling.

A business built to be invited back

The work itself is less mysterious than the language surrounding enterprise technology sometimes makes it sound. Cloudgaia helps organizations implement, customize, and develop Salesforce systems. Its practice has included sales, customer service, marketing, commerce, and integrations. The software needs to fit the organization using it, including the awkward places where different processes meet.

For a consulting founder, this gives relationships unusual weight. The customer experiences the work over time. An initial agreement becomes implementation, questions, revisions, and further decisions. Being asked back means returning to people who have already seen how the team behaves.

Orzabal singles out Coca-Cola Europacific Partners as Cloudgaia’s first client and thanks it for its continuing trust. Elsewhere in the company’s client history appear Zurich, Schroders, and Mercado Libre. These names describe the setting for his work: established organizations with existing systems, existing people, and practical reasons to be careful about change.

His emphasis on continuity makes sense in that setting. A consultancy’s next assignment is partly a judgment on its previous one. The relationship has a memory. It remembers the useful conversation as readily as the polished presentation, and usually for longer.

Four words, many time zones

Cloudgaia gives its values a compact name: VIBE. The letters stand for Venture, Include, Believe, and Enjoy. Orzabal invokes them in his anniversary reflection as a continuing point of reference. The final word is a pleasing inclusion in an industry capable of turning even a coffee break into a workflow.

Taken together, the words combine a willingness to try things with an expectation about how people should experience the workplace. They are company values, rather than a psychological portrait of their founder. Their interest lies in the expectations they establish for a team.

The geography gives that task some scale. By 2022, Cloudgaia was describing ambitions to grow locally in Iberia and expand from there across Europe. Its international footprint connected Latin America, North America, and Europe. The aim was a global partner with a local presence, an arrangement that asks colleagues to share a purpose without sharing an office.

A conversation around a table can rely on familiarity. Across countries, the same conversation needs habits that other people can learn. That is the practical question beneath the cheerful four-letter name.

The company’s own explanations put some detail behind the words. Venture means making room for new ideas. Include connects diversity with trust and open communication. Believe expresses a purpose beyond the immediate task, while Enjoy includes celebrating progress and time together. These are statements employees can compare with their experience. That comparison gives a values list its real stakes.

Even the name has a deliberate explanation. Cloudgaia connects the technological associations of “cloud” with Gaia, the figure of Mother Earth. During its 2025 brand refresh with NSB Agency, the company kept that combination while changing its visual identity and presenting its name as a single word. It is an earthy choice for a business that spends so much of its time discussing the cloud.

When the partner became an investor

In August 2024, Salesforce Ventures invested in Cloudgaia. The company was celebrating its eighth anniversary. Orzabal set out a straightforward use for the support: expand across the Americas and Europe, increase the team, broaden services, and deepen relationships with clients.

The announcement also brought Salesforce figures Richard Arnold and Dan Burnham into the account as board observers. The relationship with Salesforce now included an investment alongside the consulting partnership. For a business concentrated on that ecosystem, it was a consequential development in a relationship already central to its work.

Orzabal’s own acknowledgment extended beyond the headline names. He thanked the Cloudgaia team, people who supported the process, financial advisers, and colleagues in legal and finance. It is a useful glimpse of how a transaction arrives in public: one announcement supported by many jobs that receive less attention.

His list of thanks gives the milestone a human scale. There is the founder explaining the ambition, and there are the people who helped turn it into an agreement. A funding announcement can look remarkably tidy once all the untidy work has been completed.

An extra chair at the top

On July 28, 2026, Cloudgaia announced that Samantha Mitchell had joined Orzabal as co-CEO. She had been leading its global consumer goods and manufacturing practice. Previously, she was chief digital officer at CONA Services, the Coca-Cola North American bottling system’s technology organization.

The appointment gives the founder’s story a fresh decision to examine. Mitchell brings experience in the businesses the consultancy helps transform, including work across commercial operations, enterprise platforms, and organizational change. The stated purpose of the partnership is to connect the company’s regions and accelerate its next phase of delivery and growth.

“leadership will help us move even faster as one integrated team.”

Nicolás Orzabal · July 2026

At the time of the announcement, Cloudgaia described a workforce of more than 220 people worldwide. Orzabal remains a founder in the leadership of the business, now sharing its senior executive title. The anniversary therefore marks a change in how the company is led as well as a date on its calendar.

There is an appealing connection between that arrangement and the beginnings he remembers. Another chair changes the conversation. The next part of the work will depend on what the people occupying those chairs decide together.

Conversation has also been part of Orzabal’s public role. In the Talking Out Cloud episode about Cloudgaia and Salesforce, he joins hosts Thiago Schmitz and Matias Cebrian to discuss entrepreneurship, the founders’ meeting, and the company’s early culture. At Inspireland 2023, he spoke with Copado chief technology officer Federico Larsen about artificial intelligence in business. The subjects move between people building an organization and the technology changing their work.

The visitors who get to ask the simple questions

A smaller event offers a different view of the founder at work. In 2025, ten Talento Tech students visited Cloudgaia’s Buenos Aires offices. Orzabal and the other co-founders shared the company’s story and purpose. Developers explained their daily work, and the visitors explored the interview process before joining the Argentina team for lunch.

Cloudgaia had participated in the program since 2024, working with Salesforce and the Buenos Aires City Government. The format included weekly mentoring over three months for Salesforce developer and administrator courses. Experienced colleagues helped students connect technical study with the routines and expectations of a workplace.

For a visitor, the founder is one person in a larger picture. The developers, the interview conversation, and the shared lunch all help explain what a technology company actually feels like. A career becomes easier to imagine when someone can describe an ordinary working day.

That scene gives Orzabal’s account of company building somewhere useful to land. The early team once gathered to decide its values. Years later, a new group arrives with questions of its own. He gets to tell the story again, this time to people deciding where their working lives might begin.

A table remains a good place for that conversation.