The Nearshore Cafe
Hear from Nearshoring veterans about what it's like living and doing business in LATAM. Join our hosts and numerous guests from LATAM & the U.S. with interesting real life experiences. This podcast is full of great stories and useful advice on how to navigate the world's most untapped talent market along with travel tips.
The Nearshore Cafe
Tullio Siragusa Shares Insights on Nearshore Innovation
How has Tullio Siragusa transformed nearshoring over the past 25 years?
Join us as Tullio, an industry pioneer, shares his journey from introducing nearshore services to the U.S. with SoftTech to navigating its evolution across Latin America. Discover how Mexico became a nearshore leader, Colombia's rise, and the unique contributions of talent from Monterrey and Guadalajara.
We also explore the role of AI in nearshoring, the growing interest in regions like Europe, and Tullio's insights on leveraging global talent. Drawing inspiration from Steve Jobs, Tullio highlights how empathy and design thinking shape business success. Plus, enjoy personal reflections on the cultural richness of Latin America.
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Welcome to the Nearshore Cafe podcast, home to the most interesting stories and people doing business in Latin America.
Speaker 2:Welcome everyone to the Nearshore Cafe podcast. I'm Brian Sampson, your host Today. I want to welcome our sponsor, plug Technologies PLUGGtech a great way to find software engineers in Latin America for US companies. I am really excited to welcome our guest, tulio Siragusa. Tulio was somebody I had in mind when I concepted this show, as someone who's worked in Nearshore for just about as long as anybody has, and just really excited to have you. Welcome, tulio.
Speaker 3:Great to be here, brian, looking forward to the conversation.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, tulio, I'd love just to get right into the nearshoring part of it. This is something that you were really early on. Can you maybe set the scene a little bit? When did you start doing this? What did the world look like when you were, when you were venturing into this?
Speaker 3:You know, when I got into it I didn't realize I was pioneering this near shore initiative. 25 years ago it was around September of 1998. I had just spent nine years with a very large telecom company at MCI, predominantly working with global accounts, and had a very strong relationship with some of the top Fortune 100 companies in the New York area. And I was approached by a company by the name of SoftTech. At the time it was fairly small, maybe 200, 300 people. Their business for the previous 17 years was predominantly in Latin America and South America and they wanted to enter the US market and take advantage of the Y2K initiatives. Right, that was generating tremendous demand for talent, which created opportunities for both offshore companies and nearshore companies.
Speaker 3:This, mind you, was during a time when the economy was doing very well, so the labor arbitrage wasn't as attractive back then. I remember speaking with the CTO of Bear Stearns, and I'll never forget this conversation, and he says look, we have all the money in the world. I throw money at a problem. I don't need to work near shore, offshore, hire the right people and pay them right. And that was a good lesson in terms of what is it that the actual value of this is so. At the time, I remember working with Blanca Trevino, who's now the chairman at SoftTech, her sister Fernanda, which is one of the most creative people I've ever worked with in my life, and we're sitting around in Monterrey, mexico, thinking about how do we differentiate ourselves from the offshore players. This was a time when the big offshore players were also small.
Speaker 3:They were all yeah maybe a hundred million dollars in revenue. They were definitely not multi-billion dollar companies. This is the heydays, the early days, the pioneering days of both.
Speaker 2:So we're thinking of, like the tatas and the outsourcing period yeah, the top of the tiny little companies back then.
Speaker 3:So, anyway, the way I landed there is that they were interested in bringing someone who had strong business acumen and connection with large accounts, and at the time, mci was known as like the second best sales and marketing organization in the world, next to Xerox. So we knew a thing or two about bringing new ideas to the market. I had just finished working with Vint Cerf in the early 90s introducing the internet to the world talk about the biggest disruption that ever happened and again doing it. We weren't thinking this is a big disruption, we were just putting some new solutions out to market. And looking back, I actually interviewed Vint a few years ago on my other podcast and it was just an amazing experience, not knowing that you were changing an industry. In some cases, you were changing the trajectory of the world, of the business world. So, similarly, we were just sitting around in a conference room in Monterey trying to figure out a way to coin a differentiation right. Well, they got offshore. Who are we? Well, how do we define who we do, who we are, what we do? And landed on this term near shore services, and it stuck.
Speaker 3:It has become the way you describe doing business in Latin America, or at least tapping into talent out of Latin America.
Speaker 3:For the past 25, 26 years, and so very early days of pioneering this concept. Of course, over the few decades I've seen it evolve and mature quite rapidly and expand. First it was Mexico that has become the most mature market near shore and then, of course, now we have every country in South America, with heavy emphasis in Colombia. Colombia is a new emerging market where you have good talent, cost of living is fair, so it's a whole new world now and in fact Gardner has even predicted over the next few years that a significant amount of outsourcing will shift to Nearshore and Latin America because the pandemic normalized it right. Yeah, the pandemic made it normal to have remote workers everywhere, and when it comes to Nearshore, it's just another remote worker. It doesn't matter that they're in Santiago or Guadalajara or Cali, it really doesn't matter. It's a similar time zone, a very westernized world culture and, as a result, it's no different than working with someone who's in Tucson, new York or Boston, for that matter.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right. Yeah, I totally agree. So back to the early days just for a second. What were some of the initial sales calls like Were buyers? Did they need a lot of education around how this worked or did they instantly get it because offshore had already matured a little bit? You know, you think of the late 90s and the internet. The world is flat and Thomas Friedman and you know it's, uh, it's, it's a little. You know. Offshore, I think, was more accepted.
Speaker 3:Um, they were both pioneering concepts, yeah yeah, um, I think offshore had a jump star on it, but there were a lot of challenges. Many companies failed their first initial outsourcing efforts because they weren't set up to be successful. In fact, I remember spending a lot of time while I was at CSC helping organization adopt shared service models Like first learn how to share talent pools and resources internally, where you can have a centralized IT organization, where each department can basically leverage the capabilities and do in sourcing Right. Get good at that first, and then that's a lot easier to outsource once you've gotten good at that. And so there were a lot of changes that needed to take place within organizations to be successful in outsourcing period.
Speaker 3:So these were very early days for everybody, and the very first sales calls were very enlightening because quite often there was a desire to either cut costs or improve the services that they were providing or expand the capability of what they were providing to various business lines.
Speaker 3:But everybody owned their own little kingdom, right. So go back to like the way even big banks, citicorp or JPMorgan Chase at the time it wasn't JPMorgan Chase, was just Chase, and then they merged later, right? But if you go back to those days 25 years ago, each department or each division had its own IT. There was no centralized IT. So you had all these business units that had their own IT department and so whenever they needed to get something done, they budgeted for it and managed it within its own division. So selling to those companies often required connecting with a lot of division heads. So the idea of coming in to outs had the ability to do a lot more centralized deployments and really, if you think about it, the middleware it changed the tech industry right, allowed for disparate systems to come together and that created opportunity for, uh, centralizing it and even services around it.
Speaker 3:So as technology advanced, that was really the first thing that made the shift for everybody to be able to outsource, you know, the introduction of middleware software, right, or middleware uh solutions, so. So the initial calls were very enlightening because, um, they were everywhere, you know. Somebody was interested in the cost savings, somebody just couldn't find enough staff. So there were a number of things, and what I realized very early on was we needed to specialize. This was before open source software, so the majority of the near shore projects and offshore projects were very IT centric and off-road projects were very IT-centric, and so your specialization evolved around helping implement things like SAP or Oracle or PeopleSoft or BI solutions that were becoming more prevalent.
Speaker 3:And what was happening at the same time is a lot of these big companies were pushing software and many of those implementations were failing because they hadn't figured out yet that you have to customize the stuff in order for actually to work. So there were a lot of disruptions happening at the same time. It was like a perfect storm, and in some cases, if you had developed a good enough specialty in one area or another, you could differentiate yourself and, of course, if you were in a position to do it at a lower cost. You can also differentiate yourself. The other challenge was you didn't have enough staff. Like you know, this was the early days of IT in, for example, mexico, so the country itself wasn't pushing it as a way for export, just like India was a little bit more ahead of its time in terms of pushing it, so it was more challenging in the early days.
Speaker 3:The sales cycles were longer and the conversations were very. Mostly the salespeople were learning what would work and stick. But eventually we figured out. You know you have to get good at specializing in certain competencies and I remember we started to get very focused around some SAP competencies and we landed on some strong ABAP4 development type of competencies. That was the rave back then and so we started focusing on that. And then we also started focusing on some CRM initiatives. Again, crm look at Salesforce. Back then they were a small company. They were not the behemoth giant they are today. So I remember being able to contact some of the CEOs of these companies back then and working with them and figuring out how do we solve this problem for this particular client. So very early days of learning how to position these services to a certain degree, it was like being in a startup. You know stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, as you were talking, I was just thinking about things we take for granted today, like agile development, aws, slack, jira, and I'm sure some of that didn't even exist. You had to find solutions around that as well.
Speaker 3:Very different world and we certainly weren't talking about developing software. Companies were not trying to figure out do we license and customize versus build and own? Open source really has democratized building out software. Many companies the lines are blurring today between what is an enterprise company or a technology company. Many enterprise companies have adopted build your own software stacks.
Speaker 3:Those were not the days where this was happening. It was very clear cut. I had a third-party platform. I had middleware software I needed to work with. I'm trying to get some BI in place. You know you're working with MicroStrategy, the SAPs of the world, the Oracle, the Siebel systems of the world.
Speaker 3:I mean, some of these companies don't even the names, don't even exist anymore, right, but it was a different world. It was very fragmented and, uh, everything was done on premise. Yeah, so remote work was also foreign. So we had a lot of challenges of introducing something that hadn't been done, uh, introducing something that was different, while at the same time there were many other technology disruption, middleware was being introduced.
Speaker 3:Uh, you know, other things were coming on board new startups, new technologies, new being introduced. Other things were coming on board new startups, new technologies, new computing power. All these things were happening at the same time. So in the early days you're just trying to. It's like a race. You're keeping up with everything that's going around you. It's still happening today, but not at the pace this was back then. This was such a transformational moment in our technology history that anything that can help you differentiate yourself was key. So landing on terms like near shore, developing certain expertise being very niche focused and owning a segment, building partnerships with companies that were moving the envelope forward these were all key things to being successful back then.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one other thing I was going to ask you about with the early days, which is still a factor today, is customs and hardware and getting the right equipment to the right people. And you know, as countries either ease or create more constraints around, you know moving equipment around. What was that like? And you mentioned Monterey, so I imagine most of the operation was there. What was that like in the early days?
Speaker 3:Difficult, but you know you had to be a lot more creative. Let me just paint the picture of a typical solution that is actually embedded in our phones today. Typical solution that is actually embedded in our phones today. I remember working with Viacom, which owns MTV and VH1. And the MTV and VH1 executives were complaining about how much travel the creative teams needed to do between New York and Los Angeles, and so the number was very costly. There was, if number was very costly, number two. It's just very productive, very time consuming, so it had an impact on productivity, which ultimately impacts creativity.
Speaker 3:So, like, is there a way we can create collaborative rooms? You know conference rooms between these two cities, and so I remember working on creating a video conferencing room and back then it literally like you had a conference room that was wired with like equipment and I remember talking to picture tell about needing the hardware for the equipment and cisco for the collaborative platform and the various software that needed to play into this. And then you have to deal with the, the telecom connectivity, and did you have enough bandwidth between these two locations? This is live video on a conference. So t1 wasn't going to cut it and ds3s were very expensive back then. There's so many factors. This was a multi-million dollar initiative. Today we have facetime on our phone, zoom right, I mean it's like it's we take it for granted I can just connect with a hundred people instantly. You don't think about do I have enough connectivity, do I have enough bandwidth between you? Just don't even think about it back then. That that was the kind of stuff we had to work on and put together and and uh, it was complex challenges, multi-million dollar challenges that today just becomes a commodity right.
Speaker 3:So those were very much the heydays of putting us on a path towards automation, towards more connectivity. And the technology just wasn't up to snuff. So it was more costly, it was more complicated, you had to put together a lot of different partners. You didn't have a one-stop solution, but the guys who played in it learned. More costly, it was more complicated, you had to put together a lot of different partners. You didn't have a one-stop solution, but the guys who played in it learned a lot. We learned how to solve problems. We learned how to leverage technology to solve business problems.
Speaker 3:This wasn't about implementing a video conferencing solution. This was about connecting two creative teams together on a regular basis so that they can improve their productivity. So we learned how to tie in the technology to solve the right business problem, and those things have informed many of the things that have come over the years that still, you know, have evolved into agile methodologies, lean canvas, all these things. Design thinking contributed tremendously to a lot of these things that we now take for granted or are readily available at our fingertips. But I felt like I was working with the people that were paving the way for the early days of technology and the evolution that it's taken over the past 25 years. Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 2:Um, no I didn't know at the time.
Speaker 3:I was participating in that. That's the funny thing. You're just doing it and then you realize you look back like, oh, we kind of did a lot to change the world. Had no idea we were doing that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we rarely ever know we're in the moment until the moment passes. But yeah, that's a great point and maybe a little bit of a change to geography. So my understanding is the majority of your near-shore experience was leveraging Mexico. Talk about some of your travels there experiences, cities, meals We'd love to hear some of the fun stuff too.
Speaker 3:I fell in love with mexico back then. I was, uh, traveling in and out of monterey I lived in new york city at the time pretty regularly was not easy to get a direct flight. I'd fly, usually through houston, and, uh, I would say I wish we had more, you know, zoom and things like that that we do today, because back then a lot of things happened in conference room and whiteboards, a lot of traveling, and I was a new father at the same time, so I did miss out a lot in terms of my son's growth with all that travel. I remember one time I traveled I was, I think, in four cities in one day. So you know, I had breakfast in one city, lunch in another, dinner in another. I think. Three cities, excuse me, not four, but you know that's the way it was back then. So I was younger, I had probably a little more energy than I do now, but I did fall in love with the Monterey. It was a great culture, very service-oriented culture.
Speaker 3:I've had the pleasure since then of traveling into other cities and operating in other cities, like Guadalajara and Hermosillo and Chihuahua in Mexico City, even Merida on the east coast of Mexico, and I've seen in Colima just south of Guadalajara. They have all the uh, all the um react talent in the world over there. So you know I I've um, you know I've. The whole near shore space has really evolved since then. Now it's not just mexico, you have costa rica, you have peru, chile, colombia, argentina, brazil, and every country has its own specific nuances and specialties. Some of them are more mature in one area than others. So it really becomes important to understand the landscape If you're a service company, especially that you can make a recommendation based on where you think the best talent is. There are certain skill sets that are strong in some markets than others, so it's really just understanding your product, and the product is the people and the talent.
Speaker 3:But I've been amazed at the quality of work that happens out of Latin America. I've worked with engineers that have been toe-to-toe as good as any Google engineer, and so it's very impressive. And also because it's a Western world culture, it's not a very yes-oriented culture, which happens a lot in Asia. So when working in agile environments that require daily stand-ups number one, you could do it in concurrent working hours. Number two, it's not a yes, we'll get that done and figure it out later it's more like no, that doesn't work. Here's why. So there's more of a collaborative situation that takes place. So I've learned that if you want to create the closest experience to having hired a good employee, a remote employee, your best bet out of North America will be, you know, really in Latin America. That's where you're going to get to that experience, and that's not me selling it because I've been involved with it for 25 years. It's just the fact of having seen it hands-on. And it works the same way for other regions of the world that are near shore to those markets.
Speaker 3:And so, ultimately, what I think has happened, brian, is the outsourcing space has evolved and matured to the point where everybody understands the value of near shore. Everybody wants near shore within their continent. People in Europe want near shore, which is why Eastern Europe has grown so much. You have development shops in the Ukraine and Poland and Croatia. They're serving the needs of the UK and EMEA. They also serve the needs of the US on an offshore basis.
Speaker 3:But I think the pandemic really opened people's eyes to realize. You know, what we really need is just remote workers that are within the same concurrent working hours. So you're going to see a continuous shift, I think over the next five to 10 years, where the concept of offshore will become mute. It's more like where can I find the talent that's close to where I work? So if it's Europe, it might be Eastern Europe.
Speaker 3:If it's Asia, it might be in India and Vietnam or in Malaysia. If it's in North America, it could be Latin America or it could be Canada. Right, but the point is people want to work within the same concurrent working hours and also there's a cultural alignment and there's a stronger propensity to understand the accents within the region that you're in. Right, and then that's a reality you have to face. You know we're all very different. You have to accept those cultural differences too and harmonize them, and sometimes working in a nearshore fashion everywhere allows that to happen. So I'm excited to have seen how we started something in one region that has been really replicated throughout the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, one thing that I noticed you didn't lead with with some of the reasons was price, and of course it's cheaper than onshore. But I feel like the world has realized like you can only go to the bottom on price. Nearshore is not really leading with price. It's workday overlap, it's quality of work, it's cultural alignment. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.
Speaker 3:There's also been a shift, Brian.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how price is part of your conversations with buyers lately.
Speaker 3:Most of the outsourcing companies started in IT services and selling to enterprise companies, where the expectation has always been you scope the work, you take ownership and you move it forward and in that model you can have a lot of leeway in terms of the kinds of talent you have on the team. You can have a mixture of senior and junior so you can manage the margin right and there's definitely a cost benefit of having done it offshore and nearshore. That was a big driver. The labor arbitrage was a big driver. The cost the labor arbitrage was a big driver initially, absolutely no question about it.
Speaker 3:The gap between what the savings were back then to what it is now has continued to shrink and the reason for that is because there's also been a shift in the talent pool. There's more demand for software engineering talent versus systems integration engineering talent, which is very different DNA. I could be a systems integrator working on a third-party software, doing customization and doing that kind of work. That's a different skill than someone who can write code from scratch and build a product, than someone who can write code from scratch and build a product, someone who could take an idea from an app and build a product. So over the years, a lot has shifted towards agile, towards building more products.
Speaker 3:Software is really kind of eating the world, and not only technology companies have had a need for more developers and there's not enough of them in the US, so it's become an issue in just where's the talent right? So when you get to a place where you have 10 openings for every one available engineer, you don't have enough people, so you have to look beyond your boundaries, and so it's not so much. Where can I go save money as it is? Where can I go find the talent to keep my roadmap on track, to make sure I follow through on the promises I made to the board? Yeah, so it's.
Speaker 3:It's a critical shift. Now there's still some who came from the it space. They're always trying to negotiate a better deal, but it's like you know what's what's really important here you make some commitments and you can't find people.
Speaker 3:So don't worry about the price. The price is a component, but it's not the component. So the focus needs to shift and it's happening more near shore. I've seen it, which is one of the reasons we've expanded into other markets in Latin America. We keep expanding into other markets because there's still that desire for labor arbitrage. That's always there, right? But as time goes by, you're going to see a continuous shift around that, because, especially with more technology that's driving everything and more software that's running everything, ai in some cases might eliminate some jobs, but in other cases will create more jobs for people who can build these things, who can manage these things, who can execute against them, and those are specialized skills that you're not going to get good talent if you're trying to be, you know, cheap, right? So the idea is to balance that. There's still value in the labor job arbitrage, but it's more like 15, 20% versus what it used to be 50, 70%, yeah, and you can get more savings offshore, but then that's also shifting.
Speaker 3:I mean, let's look at India, right, India's got its own tech, silicon Valley approach to things today. So if you were a services company, you're losing people to folks who want to go work for a software company. They don't want to be in a services company, they want to be in a product company. They want to replicate what's happened in Silicon Valley. So it's taken a lot longer to find talent. The attrition rate's a lot higher if you're in a service business, because people want to work for software companies. So the market's shifting there. So you have to keep in mind that with that shift comes rising costs because you're competing for talent. And when you compete for talent the prices go up. And the same thing is happening, you know, in Mexico and other marketplaces as well. So it's really about where can I find the best talent that serves the needs that I need for my roadmap In the IT space? You still have a lot more different cost structures. Lower cost structures because it's not as complex as building software. You're really just customizing, implementing and integrating.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's great. That's great Just for fun's sake. A lot of people I know in the US, when they think of Mexico and tourism, they're thinking Cancun, Acapulco and so forth. They're not necessarily thinking Monterey, Guadalajara, places that you've spent a lot of time in. Give us your tourism pitch for those cities and what would be draws for people to check those out.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean Monterey, caprito is the king of Monterrey, you know, it's like you want some good goat or lamb, that's the thing. They know how to make it really well. Oddly enough, one of the best Italian meals I've ever had was actually in Monterrey, mexico, and I grew up in Italy, so that says a lot about the kind of it's very much a foodie kind of area, and if you like lime mountains and that kind of thing, you'll definitely enjoy it. But every place is different. You know Hermosillo they make the best steaks on the planet there and they're known like the New York Times rated them as the best hot dog in the world, right? So if you want a doggo, you go to Hermosillo. And they have some other things there, from a foodie's perspective, that you can't find anywhere else, even the Bacanora, which is a form of tequila that's very specific to the Sonora region. You can't find that even in other areas of Mexico. And then, of course, guadalajara has its own delicacies too, you know, and that's a very modern city.
Speaker 3:If you go into, like Zapon, the downtown area, you feel like you're in New York City. If you take a picture from a restaurant outward and you send it to a friend, they're going to think I thought you were in Mexico, you're in New York. It's a very different vibe. So it's a very modernized city, and in Mexico City it's the biggest, I mean, it's huge. You fly over it for an entire hour before you land, right. So it's, you know, it's there's something for everyone, but the people are very, um, service oriented, uh, it's, it's a, it's a giving, hard working kind of culture, and so there's definitely, uh, a lot that you'll enjoy. So you know this. I'm talking about the cities that are non-tourist cities. Yeah, so, of course, the tourist locations, the beaches, etc. All that thing is wonderful, but in the uh, in the other cities, you won't feel like you're in such a foreign place. Yeah, people always surprise, like this feels like I'm back home, because because it's it's a modernized country with a lot of modern cities.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's great. That's great Talk about what you see for the future. You know of nearshoring and development, and you mentioned AI before. What are some trends or predictions that you recommend we're mindful of?
Speaker 3:I think we're going to see more globally distributed teams where the program management or program management, I'm sorry, project management the subject matter experts, the architect type will be close to home. So you're going to see more of onshore, nearshore demand for that kind of expertise because it just makes sense, it's smart business to do it that way and leveraging still some arbitrage opportunities offshore where you can. So I think ultimately there's still some companies that have waterfall methodologies that allows them to do follow the sun, and then there's those who have more agile methodology that doesn't allow it, so they need to work more in the same time zone. But I think over time, what AI will do is a couple of things. I think AI can enable a follow the sun for everyone so that you can leverage globally distributed team more effectively, so that you can leverage globally distributed team more effectively. So in some ways, if done correctly, ai can build some program management expertise that can automate the distribution of work and also help facilitate it, because that's hard work sometimes you can't be up all day and all night managing these teams right. So I think AI will be a game changer from that point of view. Also, you're going to see more of AI being used for some automation like testing and QA, even some development. So some of the teams will play more of a not kind of role, right, they're monitoring the bots doing the work, making sure it's following a good cadence, and they're playing that expert role and, as a result of that, you can do it more effectively, no matter where people are, and what ultimately will happen.
Speaker 3:This is just my own prediction. I don't know if it'll take 20 years or 10, the price points will be very similar no matter where you go in the world. I think the arbitrage model will eventually disappear and it's just going to come down to where can I find the best talent? How am I leveraging AI to manage it all in such a way that's transparent and seamless and that's going to change the trajectory of the entire software development industry. We're not there yet.
Speaker 3:I don't think we see it yet, but this is just what I'm seeing in terms of how AI will evolve our space and really just in some ways, create more equivalence worldwide. You know, I think this idea of arbitrage shouldn't be there personally. So in some regards, it's going to equalize things worldwide and the cost savings will come from some more automation and using AI, so you'll still get it, but it's not going to come from the arbitrage of labor based on where people are. That's just my personal prediction, based on what I'm seeing and what I've seen over the past 34 years, of where things are going to go. When are we going to get there? I don't know 10 years, 20 years, maybe the next five years, but I think that's where it's going to go.
Speaker 2:Sure, Now, in the present day I really think this is the decade for Latin America and more and more conversations I'm having there's more awareness, which leads to more curiosity, of, oh, like Nearshore. What is that? Can you explain it to me? Which means there's more companies trying this out for the very first time. What sort of advice would you have for companies that are making their first venture into nearshoring, that are making their first venture into nearshoring.
Speaker 3:I think it's a valid point, not just for North America, but you'll see the same trend in the UK and Europe, with South Africa, for example, and Eastern Europe. Both are good nearshore locations from a concurrent working hours, and you'll continue to see more in Asia with, like India and Vietnam. Vietnam is an emerging market that is actually very strong. For example, our company we have 2% attrition rate out of Vietnam, which is unheard of in this industry. So it comes down to this Don't look at it as near shore or anything like that. I think that term while I'm proud that I was part of the team that created it needs to be dropped.
Speaker 3:It's just remote work, and if anything the pandemic has taught us is that you can get things done no matter where you are, things done no matter where you are. So if you're new to Nearshore, just think of I'm just hiring remote workers. It doesn't matter if they're in Guadalajara, in Lima, in Cali or Santiago. It really doesn't matter. It's no different than them being in Dallas, tucson, new York. It's no different than them being in Dallas, tucson, new York, miami or Seattle. And that shift in mindset will open up many, many more doors for technology leaders, because they'll begin to realize that there's people on both sides, whether they're onshore or nearshore, and it really just comes down to having good connection, being able to communicate with each other, being able to have intimacy, which is what happens with concurrent working hours and ultimately, just think of it as remote workers. It'll save yourself a lot of headaches like, oh my gosh, such a big thing, we're moving offshore, near shore, now you're just tapping into another remote worker marketplace. Yeah, that would be my advice. That's good advice.
Speaker 2:Tulio, since I've met you, you've spoken a lot about design thinking. Can you share a little more about what that means and also how it's come into play with remote work?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I've really embraced design thinking, because what resonated for me is this idea that the pillar of design thinking is empathy. You know, the genesis was different. It was very focused on product and user experience, but it really has evolved to be a way to organize your efforts around either solving a problem or finding solutions or creating opportunities. And it's not just how you look at user adoption for a product or your go-to-market strategy. It's really about how you organize people and how you get people working together. People and how you get people working together. And at the end of the day, brian, no matter whether you're a B2B company, a B2C company or a B2B2C company, we're all in the people-to-people business. There's a person who's buying your product or service. There's a person who's selling it. There's a person who created the code on the website that's selling it to you. There's a person who invested in the company. There's people involved, whether it's a direct person-to-person relationship or there's an app in between. On both sides there's a person, and so understanding that empathy allows us to get at a deeper level, not just a transactional level, allows us to think about how do we create better experiences that meet people's needs. So when I think of design thinking. It's a model for finding ways to get closer to providing on the needs of people on their terms, and so it creates an environment where, when you think about what you're solving, you elevate it right.
Speaker 3:So, for example, what does a CTO really want? They're in charge of a product roadmap. They need developers, they need testers, they need architects, they need scrum math, they need all kinds of people that can perform transactions right. But the ultimate desire is to be successful in order to meet the needs of the commitments being made to the investors or the board. And, tied to that, your ability to be successful is your ability to take care of your family, to achieve your aspirations, all the personal things that drive us on a day-to-day basis. Yeah, so when you're selling to a CTO, you have to keep in mind empathetically what is it that they actually really want? Those are the things that they really want as a human being. The rest is just transaction that enables them to achieve what they really want.
Speaker 3:So what design thinking does is it enables you to ask the question five whys deep, to understand. What is it that you're really solving? What is the real problem? What is the real desire that you're delivering on? And it's got to be an emotionally tied desire, because we're emotional creature. And so as you begin to think about how you structure your organization, how you structure how you serve clients, how you structure how you build products, when you keep that in mind, it changes your approach for the better. And what happens is you begin to operate with the adoption in mind up front, because it's all about creating a great experience for your employees, for your clients, for your investors, for your partners, for your vendors. If you keep that in mind, the only way to effectively do that is to use design thinking methodologies which allows you to listen, ask more questions, connect, understand what the real problem is or what the real desire is, prototype and test ideas, reiterate and get it to a place where you're actually driving intimacy.
Speaker 3:And I mean when you think about someone like Steve Jobs. He was masterful at it. Apple, the Mac was not a superior product when it first came out to the PC. Quite the opposite, it wasn't even close. But he created this emotional attachment where, if you're a cool kid, you're going to use the Mac. You know cool kids use Macs. Or the crazies making the world go around use max. I mean, look at that commercial that they had out with einstein. You know we're we're supporting the crazies who believe that they can make a change in the world, right? So if you're one of the cool kids and you're the creative type, it's like I'm one of the crazies, I'm going to buy a mac. He created a culture around this. You know, being part of this group of cool kids, you know that are creative and even though the product was not up to snuff, eventually and it's now the leading PC in the marketplace computer in the marketplace, right.
Speaker 3:But he was masterful in appealing to the need and desire of emotional creatures. And he's not the only one who's done that. There have been many other brands who have done that. So if you can apply that in a B2B context, especially because a lot of people think, oh, I'm just trying to get a transaction done, but there's still. That is not true.
Speaker 3:You can apply empathy into everything you do and I always say empathy wins, always If you're in a competitive environment and you're presenting your solution and it's transaction versus transaction, the client's going to choose the one that they feel like. These guys understood me, they validated my concerns, they created a better experience and it's all subconscious, it's not like they're actually consciously thinking through this. It's because they feel that they were more understood. So if it's apples to apples, the one that's going to win is the one that's applying empathy. So I really love it for many reasons, because I believe that as leaders, it's our duty to help people feel empowered and to meet their needs. The more we meet people's needs, the more we can all be successful. So everybody gets lifted up by doing that. No one suffers, no one loses by applying empathy. So design thinking is really a system for improving the human-to-human connection, to be more people-centric in how we do business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, great points about intimacy and empathy. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. Well, as we start to wind down the show today, I just had a few fun questions for you. Sure, your favorite purchase in Latin America under $50? Your favorite purchase in latin america under 50. I gotta think about that one, besides food. Well, if food is the answer, I'd love to hear that I mean food.
Speaker 3:I would. I would have to say food. I remember, um I 50 would get you really far. Yeah, a restaurant, I mean you and your friends can eat like, like kings and queens, for 50 bucks. Uh, you can have an incredible meal for under 50, and I'm not talking about like, like it would be equivalent of having spent 500 here that kind of level meal. So if you want to have like a, an incredible, like dining out experience for less than 50 bucks, you will. You know, latin america will not fail you yeah, I agree, I agree wholeheartedly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. Uh, how about uh vocabulary? Do you have a favorite spanish word?
Speaker 3:uh, I have one cute word, but, but it's an inappropriate word.
Speaker 3:You'd be surprised how often that comes up on the show. It's just a cute kind of way of referring to someone. But I think in recent years there was someone I worked with in my last company that always said goodbye by saying besitos. So I kind of adopted that as a cute little word. Sometimes I'll say things like besitos, which means kisses, but he could get away with that kind of thing. I don't know if I can get away with it as much as he did, but that was definitely a cute word besitos as a way to say hi and goodbye.
Speaker 2:Sure fair point. Well, tulio, that's all the time we have today. Really appreciate you coming on the show. I want to give a thanks again to our sponsor, plug Technologies pluggtech a great place to find software engineers in Latin America for US companies. Tulio, thanks again, it's really been a blast.
Speaker 3:Pleasure. Thanks for having me All right, everyone. We'll see you next time, besitos.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me All right, everyone. We'll see you next time.
Speaker 3:Besitos.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining us at the Nearshore Cafe podcast Tune in next week for a new episode featuring another special guest with exciting stories Ooh.