Carlos Paniagua is the co-founder and CTO of Glia - one of the leading digital customer service providers that to date has raised $107 million in VC investment. Coming from Guatemala originally, Carlos has spent a third of his life in Estonia, where he also resides currently and runs the technical team of Glia, while his co-founders and the rest of the team are based in the US. 

In this episode, Carlos shares his experience in running a US-Estonian organization in terms of operations and fundraising. We also have an in-depth discussion on the realities and challenges of a startup CTO as well as a look into the role of digital channels for sales and customer service in the pandemic era.

The topics covered in this episode with Timestamps

[03:35] - Digital communication in customer service

• The impact of the pandemic on customer service
• Digital sales and support channels becoming mission-critical for most businesses

[09:45] -Being based in Estonia and the US, operations, and fundraising

• Choosing Estonia for engineering talent
• Advantages of the time zone difference
• Establishing enough overlap in work hours between offices
• Communication and socializing information that is important
• Ease of relocating to Estonia
• Living, working, and running a company  in Estonia as a foreigner
• Hiring abroad vs. relocating
• What VCs look for from the technical perspective
• Making sure the licensing is figured out throughout your whole tech stack
• Considerations in picking VCs to back you
• The value that VCs bring for the tech side of the business
• The mechanics of the technical due diligence process
• Making past and future tech decisions digestible for investors
• Presenting a US-Estonian company to investors

[34:10] -  The role and reality of being a CTO in a fast-growing company

• Practical involvement of the CTO in various parts of the business (product, sales, engineering)
• Choosing fundamental priorities in development to drive all product decisions
• How to determine if you want/can be a CTO
• Implementing team onboarding practices
• Scaling the team
• Planning of development process and managing expectations
• Product education for customers
• Making feature decisions from customer feedback
• Prioritization in the development process
• Being a technical founder of a startup without significant prior work experience
• Competing for tech talent

Find out more on https://www.pursuitofscrappiness.co/ 

Support for this episode comes from Nexpay > https://paynexpay.com/

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