Why Are Startups Turning to Latin America for Scalable Growth with Brian Samson

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. We'll also learn from marketing and sales experts to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue strategies and their 10x ROI B2B Growth Guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and today I'm very excited to welcome my guest, Bryan Sampson. Now, let me tell you about Brian. I'm gonna read his bio to make sure I get all this right. He's a 3-time founder. He's spent the last decade building service businesses that specialize in nearshoring. We're gonna talk about what that is. It's really connecting Latin American talent with US companies. He spent time in San Francisco and then moved to Argentina where he built businesses from the ground up, living firsthand through the highs and lows of Latin America's unique economic environment. He's currently the host of the Nearshore Cafe, which is a podcast focused on doing business in Latin America that has over 65 episodes. He's also a licensed foster parent, has adopted a daughter through the foster care system, something that he speaks about regularly, and we're going to talk about a little bit today as well. He's general partner of Hang Ten X Capital, which is a micro private equity firm. They have dozens of investments. We're gonna talk about some of those lessons learned as he's invested in companies and grown companies. He has an MBA from my crosstown rival over at UCLA Anderson. And then he is also the 4-time head of talent for VC-funded tech companies. So Brian, welcome to the show.

Mark, so happy to be here. Thanks for the invite.

Yeah, and I forgot to throw this in. You're also based in Hawaii, is that correct? Is that where you are today?

That's correct. Yeah, that is the Hang Ten part of Hang Ten X Capital.

Yeah, I thought that might be it. So, you've obviously lived a really interesting life, spent time in the Bay, spent time down in Argentina, and now you're living in Hawaii. Why don't you kind of tell us your story? How did you kind of get into this and how did you make your way through all of that?

Yeah, thanks again for the opportunity and the question. You know, I grew up as a pretty average Midwest kid from, you know, Midwest town. And I think if I were able to show 18-year-old Brian, you know, what happened in life, it'd be a fun story and probably not something expected. But I, you know, great parents, couple brothers, you know, just like your idyllic kind of Norman Rockwell Midwest picture.

Uh-huh.

But ended up moving to California, you know, got really into the tech startup world. So, a couple big trigger points in my career that I'll highlight, moving to San Francisco, That was that was big for me because I felt inadequate. I felt like I had, I just didn't belong, you know, amongst all these Stanford and Berkeley and Caltech, MIT people, and they're all doing crazy things. And you know, I I didn't know if I belonged. But it also gave me a little bit of a chip on my shoulder. Like, I had to find a way to compete. I had to find a way to hang. And I think there were 2 things that helped me navigate that. The first was I wasn't afraid to work. And the second was I was pretty good at finding patterns and like identifying things earlier. So after about 5 years in San Francisco, and my background was in talent, so I was the head of talent guy, you know, at all these startups. And generally pretty earlier stage, you know, so like a Series A or Series B, and I'm sure Your audience understands that dynamic, but it's just, it's like chronological, you know, A is smaller than B and so on and so forth. If you're a Series D or E, you're probably ready for IPO, you know.

Right, right.

For some sort of big event. So I was usually more on the earlier side. And that meant I got my hands dirty and I was also involved in the strategy. And I realized that I enjoyed that a lot. I liked having a big scope and big impact. I wasn't really the right person for the scale. You know, when you're at like, you've raised $100 million and now it's, you know, just about building a massive team. That wasn't really me. But going zero to one, I could do that really well and build the playbook and set up the systems and the processes and Do the recruiting myself and, you know, kind of advise the founders. So after about 5 years of doing that, I felt like I'd come a long way from this humble, you know, babe out of the woods, you know, Midwestern experience. And I think I was ready to be a founder.

Okay.

Now, there's, there's a lot of different directions I, I could go in here, um, uh, with my, with that career path. But I, I didn't grow up around entrepreneurs. I didn't really know any entrepreneurs. Most people I knew, um, were not only not entrepreneurs, they were about as risk-averse as you could get. You know, my, my dad worked in accounting for the same company for over 30 years. My uncles, you know, had long tenures with their companies. So, I didn't really know entrepreneurs and I wanted to do it, but I wanted to reduce as much risk as I could. So, how do you reduce risk as an entrepreneur? You raise money.

Okay. Play with other people's money.

That's right. Yep. Uh, so I was lucky enough to find an investor, uh, raised about $2 million. And my idea— one of the companies I had worked at was in this rapidly growing industry called fintech, financial technology. Um, honestly, PayPal— have you ever used PayPal? That's a fintech company. Yeah, that's probably like one of the OG fintech companies. I happened to work for Lending Club, which was a big dog back in the day, had a massive IPO in 2014. So I'm dating myself a little bit. Since then, it's, you know, hasn't done so hot. But I had this thesis.

Yeah.

As there were so many different fintech companies that had great product ideas, usually run by business guys that had no trouble raising capital, but they were kind of agnostic, maybe even apathetic about how their tech was built. So hey, I think there's a business here. So Found this investor, did all the work, you know, with my pitch deck and thesis and operating model and learned a lot of the stuff on the fly, which I think is a skill that I appreciated later on in life. And maybe, you know, for any listeners that just say yes and figure it out, you know, there's a lot of things you can figure out. You just need the confidence to do it. But anyway, our pitch was we would build the software like the minimum viable products, the MVPs for a lot of these fintech companies. And if they got some wind in the sails, we would keep going and build more features, you know, onto the initial platform. $2 million seemed like an enormous amount of money for where I came from, but it didn't get you more than, you know, some avocado toast and a studio in San Francisco. So we needed a dev team and the world was kind of our oyster.

Uh-huh.

I was thinking, okay, knew a lot about India, Uh, I heard about Eastern Europe, even was thinking about Taiwan, which is a really interesting place. You know, a lot of engineers, you think of like chipmakers, um, Japanese influence, hardworking. And then I was kind of pointed in the direction of Latin America. I'm like, you know, let me, let me explore this a little bit. So I ended up, um, taking a trip down to Argentina, which is where I had a, like, a contact of a contact, and kind of went in, uh, with blinders on, you know. Um, but went to Buenos Aires and then Uh, a town about 4 hours outside. So, uh, if you're, say, in San Francisco, think like Redding or something, right? Like way out there. So, um, there's a town called Tandil, which is world famous for salami.

Okay.

You happen to like salami, it's incredible. They have salami stores, so it's It's a very European-influenced country where, like, for me, when I lived in California or even here in Hawaii, you've got Safeway. That's your one-stop shop, you know, or Whole Foods or Foodland. Um, very European in Argentina. So there's the meat store, the cheese store.

Okay. Okay.

And, you know, you kind of work your way down the block, and I really like that. But they— you go to these salami stores and there's just bushels of salami kind of growing down the lane, and it's amazing. It's so good. But not to digress anyway, magical country. I knew almost instantly this is a place I could do it because maybe a lesson for your listeners here. In volatility lies opportunity.

Okay.

And I noticed this, um, I like to describe Argentina as like either the most first world of the third world countries.

Okay.

Or the most third world of the first world.

Okay. So right on that, right on that line.

Yeah. And Gorgeous, beautiful Parisian-style architecture. Some say it's the Paris of South America. Tree-lined streets, cafes, people are sipping wine, beautiful little cafes, the best steak, you know, and community. People are just out there leisurely. having a nice meal for hours. And, um, surrounded by all that was a government that totally mismanaged the economy. Inflation so bad for many years that restaurant menus, even fancy ones, were not on a printed menu. They're in chalk.

Right, because the price would change from day to day.

That's right. Uh, there's stories of, um, colleagues that I had that would go to the hardware store to buy a tool, and from the time they picked it up off the shelf to the time they went to pay for it, the price changed.

Wow.

So we talk about how stressed we are over 10% inflation and Right. COVID years. Wow. But again, in volatility lies opportunity. So in this amazing country with fantastic quality of life, but crazy inflation, labor strikes, mismanagement, government mismanagement, you have this population that is used to this type of adversity. It's innate. They grow up with it. They navigate it all the time. Stuff that would totally stress me out, stress a lot of my colleagues out, friends in the States, just a regular day for them.

Interesting.

So they become really good at overcoming adversity, finding workarounds, getting creative, amazing critical thinking skills, problem-solving abilities. flexible, and they can deal with chaos, right? Now you tell me, Mark, if you knew about, um, a potential talent pocket that had all those different attributes, I imagine you'd be pretty excited to, to look at that for hiring.

That's right. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think, uh, a lot of a lot of people saw that, um, or a lot of people would, would appreciate that. And I saw that like, wow, why is nobody talking about Latin America in 2015? You know?

Uh-huh.

Um, so I felt like I was— obviously it wasn't— I'm not pretending I'm Christopher Columbus or something and I discovered it, but, but I felt like nobody was really talking about it in 2015.

Yeah.

Um, so anyway, fast forward a couple years, you know, Grew that company to about 80 developers, um, and then COVID hit.

Uh-huh.

Um, ended up moving on from that business but was just all in on Latin America. And it wasn't just Argentina, you know. I saw opportunities in Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, uh, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and so on and so forth. And they all have their little nuances and arbitrage opportunities and everything. So I ended up building 2 more nearshore companies, one leased recruiters that was called Bali Staffing. We grew that to over 55 recruiters that were supporting companies in Latin America. I'm sorry, recruiters from Latin America supporting VC-funded tech startups in the US.

Okay.

Let's say you needed to raise, you just raised $20 million, you need to hire 50 people in the next 6 months. And rather than going through the process of hiring a whole recruiting team and then making those hires, right, you could just turn the key and you had sourcers and recruiters that knew how, knew their way around San Francisco and San Jose and all the engineering pockets and outreach and so forth. What if you had a turnkey team? So that's what we did there. And then lastly, we created Plug, which provides mostly software developers from all over Latin America to growing US companies. And today we're inching to 100 people.

Wow. Uh-huh.

And, um, this is all leveraging this, what I still think is like a, a really special untapped region of the world with amazing talent.

So interesting. So you talked about sort of the power of nearshoring, um, from the perspective of being able to like, you know, turnkey rather than having to Staff up a recruiting and sourcing team, and then they go out to help you staff up for this development team. You can really sort of use this sort of nearshoring solution as like a turnkey solution that just plugs in. Talk to me a little bit about how you've seen that impact companies and serve as a growth lever. And we work with a lot of folks that are trying to break through some of those revenue roadblocks in that path from $1 to $20 million a year. And so they're always looking for, you know, strategies that can help them do that. Talk to us about how nearshoring can help be that growth lever.

Yeah, I think this might be a good time to start with some definitions.

Sure.

So I'm sure most of your audience has heard of offshoring.

Yeah.

I'm sure most of your audience has heard of outsourcing.

Yeah.

So I'll talk about those 2 and then we'll also talk about onshoring and nearshoring.

Okay.

So when I think about offshoring, it really means there's an ocean between, right? And offshoring almost always means lower cost.

Okay.

The predominant countries that the US Offshores, Philippines, you know, usually customer service, things like that, virtual assistants, India, China, Vietnam, you know, a lot of technical jobs. So they're not working your time zone, massive cost savings.

Yeah.

And then you've got onshoring, which became much more popular after COVID, right, of let's stay in the same country. But a lot of people moved, uh, out of the cities to lower costs. Yeah, suburban, rural, you know. Uh, a lot of people had that dream of, um, living in the cabin out on the lake, kind of away from all the, all the chaos of the city. Uh, so, um, Onshoring, you know, you might have a team in Kansas City and your headquarters are in San Francisco or New York. That's onshoring. Not a huge cost differentiator, but the— maybe from— maybe everywhere is from San Francisco, New York, but generally speaking, a mild cost savings. But you're not sacrificing country or time zone, right?

Very, very turnkey too. Like, it's—

Yeah, correct. And then, you know, you'll still have cultural nuances, right? Like, sure, somebody from rural Texas and somebody from New York, you know, you might have some things there. And then lastly, you've got nearshoring. So nearshoring, I feel like, is more prevalent. People are talking about it more and 2025, especially as COVID identified the importance of time zone. People were living all over the place, but if you were on the same Slack group and you could get real time—

Yeah.

You're in Asana on Monday and you wanted to hop on a video call, time zone matters. So with nearshoring, and again, it's respective of where you are in the world, Nearshoring, let's say you're in Australia, nearshoring might be the Philippines, right?

Right.

Similar time zone, cost savings. If you're in the States, it's Latin America. So generally speaking, you're gonna get 40 to 70% cost savings out of Latin America, where offshoring, maybe it's 70 to 90%, you know, like—

Oh, wow.

Massive cost savings. Um, but why I like Nearshore, and it's really that same time zone, and then all the things we just talked about, um, overcoming adversity, flexibility, adaptability, problem solving, critical thinking. And they've got the, the, the US-style English, which is something that I, I really appreciate. Um, if you tell somebody to take a hike They're not grabbing their backpack and, you know, trails. Um, they watch a lot of the same Netflix shows we do. They watch it in English. They're fascinated by American pop culture, movies, you know, all this stuff. Um, where in my experience, and maybe this is just me, when I call United Airlines and I, I know I'm connected to, say, someone in the Philippines.

Yeah.

I feel like if my problem is not exactly in the script that they have It's not gonna get solved.

Not as adaptable.

Yeah. Um, so with Latin America, you're getting more of a conversational, um, it almost feels like I'm speaking to somebody, you know, in the States.

Interesting.

Massive cost savings, same time zone, understanding of US culture, you know, problem-solving ability. And broadly speaking, how all these connect are If it's a core part of your company, maybe it's staff augmentation or like an embedded part of your team. And if it's non-core, maybe you'll outsource it. So like another agency or independent contractor, you know, might run that function and they're there to kind of fill a need, but it's not like a core thing and—

Mission critical.

Yeah, yeah. You know, very common accounting, right? Like people might outsource their accounting and then maybe it's in Kansas City, maybe it's in the Philippines, maybe it's in Mexico, or maybe they're a tech company and they have software developers somewhere else. Maybe they've got software developers in Mexico. That's staff augmentation. So they're not necessarily outsourcing it.

Right.

Their talent located in a different, different part of the world. And then maybe I'll just bring this all together as the growth lover, you know, your original question, Mark. And yeah, wow, have I seen some amazing success stories of companies that— and especially during COVID when, you know, I've got a buddy who is a CTO of a Series B tech startup.

Okay.

And, you know, maybe May or June, so a couple months into COVID 2020, you know, he texts me. He's like, uh, so Brian, you know, and he knew me as a, as like a VP of talent guy, but also a nearshore guy. Uh, Brian, you know, I'm, I'm paying my senior dev like $250,000 a year to work from home in San Jose.

Right.

He's just working from home. Like, you know, can I, you know, do you have, is there, uh, You know someone that can save me some money if everyone's just working from home?

Yeah.

Well, yeah, of course. Let's try Latin America. So we found him a full-stack developer, a DevOps engineer, and all for significant cost savings. And they're working from home too. IP protection is, you know, very similar to the US. Latin America, you know, if you look at a continuum of risk profile with countries, the State Department will tell you, you know, be wary of, say, China or North Korea or Russia. That's not the case with Latin America. Latin America is on, you know, the continuum almost on par with like Canada, right? Like you wouldn't feel anxious about your trade secrets, you know, in Canada. Very similar to Latin America. There's all the protections and not everyone knows about that, but, but all that, all that's there. So massive cost savings, this huge growth lever allowed my buddy to hire more people, accelerate his product roadmap, and reach profitability a lot quicker. And there's a lot more stories like that.

I bet. I bet. Wow, that's really interesting. And you spend a lot of time talking about this on your podcast, right? And that sort of a lot of the focus there.

Yeah, um, our podcast, uh, the Nearshore Cafe, we're, uh, I think 68 episodes now, and it's split pretty evenly between, uh, people like my buddy in the States that, um, were illuminated onto this world of Latin America, and they talk about their whole, uh, story, their whole anecdote. of doing it, like where did they start, what country they picked, mistakes they made, big wins that they had, how they figured out hiring and hardware and currency and all that stuff. And then the other half of the guests are those from Latin America, and it kind of normalizes like the amazing talent there. There's VCs in Lima, fintech entrepreneurs from Brazil, UX designers and project managers in Mexico, and they tell their stories and what it's like working with the States. And I— our listeners are blown away by the English level and the high-level knowledge that they have. And a lot of times they're like, Honestly, I can't even tell the difference between that person and somebody, you know, on my team in Minnesota.

Right, right. That's so interesting. That's so interesting. Well, so I want to shift gears a little bit. Given that you, you know, you've seen a lot of startups in your investing with your, you know, micro PE firm and that you've been part of, you know, multiple successful ones. You know, for folks in our audience that are listening and maybe they've been on this growth trajectory and they've hit sort of a roadblock and they're thinking about, you know, what are ways to sort of break around that? What's a lesson that you would sort of impart to folks, you know, early-stage companies as they're sort of rapid growth and maybe things aren't clicking? Like, what's just sort of a good piece of advice that you would share from the other side?

Yeah, maybe I'll share, um, a mistake that I made.

Okay.

And how it's, it shaped me. Um, I think especially if you don't come from sales, yeah, you kind of forget, um, that, um, you can't just like buy your way to sales. And that's, that's usually the first instinct of Once you get a little bit of money coming in, or maybe you raise capital, um, this, uh, normal instinct to delegate sales, hire outside salespeople.

Yeah.

And I did it. I did it too. Um, you know, I hired 2 salespeople really early without having figured out that process for them to follow.

Yeah, yeah.

Sales systems, a sales strategy. So, and they did okay. But what I didn't realize was I needed to do that.

Yeah.

But what I also underestimated was as the founder of the company, I had a card that was, it was like the magic card that got me in the room with a lot of customers. It doesn't— even if you're a founder of a 2-person company, that founder card has a lot of weight. It can really get you in, and clients love talking to the founder of the vendor, you know, that they're talking to. So, um, so that would— I think that's the key lesson I want to impart is—

Interesting, interesting.

Gotta get out there. You gotta take your lumps because then when you do hire someone, you've got a sales playbook. You know what works.

That's right.

You've got a personal story of the numbers you've gotta hit, the approach, the way you've gotta pitch it, what collateral works, what collateral doesn't. So when you hire someone and they work or they don't work out, you've got a much better idea and you can also kind of call BS, right?

Right. That's right.

If their numbers and stories, you know, don't, aren't really matching. So I think that's like a huge lesson and any peer groups I'm in, CEO groups, you know, when they, when people bring up like, hey, I'm getting ready to hire a salesperson, Yeah. Well, have you sold your own product?

Right.

And if they had and it's wildly successful, okay.

Right.

Go for it, but not before. So I think that's really key. You know, the other thing is maybe even piggybacking on this founder card of you gotta be willing to get yourself out there Um, and recognize that the first 10 podcasts or 10 posts or anything you do, it's gonna be ugly, and that's okay. Um, you're working for your own retirement now.

Yeah.

Everything is compounding. Um, I'm so much better today than I was yesterday, than I was the day before. And at 10 years of doing this, you know, 3,000+ days, um, Wow. When I compare myself today versus— and I got a lot, a lot of room to grow, but I compare myself to, you know, 3,000 days ago, 10 years ago, it's all compounding. So get out there, make the mistakes. I will say, and this is— might be obvious for people, but if you understand baseball, for example, you've got to rise up in the majors, you know, so you go to Single-A, you do well, you get promoted to Double-A, do well, Triple-A, and then eventually the majors. So I would start in kind of low, lower pressure, lower consequence arenas. So work your pitch out with tiny potential prospects. Master that, then go after ones that are a little bit bigger. Use case studies and testimonials to get you to the next level, the next level. Um, that will help get the kinks out, develop your confidence, um, build your skill set. And, uh, you take excessively more risk as you keep leveling up, but you've earned the right to do that.

Yeah.

Try not to leapfrog at all because you might not really build your skill set to be successful.

Yeah, that's so true. So true. But it's funny that you talk about, you know, folks wanting to leapfrog into not having to have to handle their own sales. And so often we see, you know, founders that are like, all I gotta do is, you know, hire a salesperson, tell them to be exactly like me. But they don't have that founder card. And so oftentimes we even see folks that are like, well, they were a superstar over my competitor. I'm sure they'll be great here. But the reason why they excelled over there is because they were operating within a system, within a process that someone else had built. But they're, they're not skilled at building that process. They're skilled at running a process because sales fundamentally is a process. So, it's so interesting that you call that out. I do want to switch gears a little bit before I let you go. I know that there's something that's sort of near and dear to your heart and your family around, you know, sort of adoption and foster care. Tell us a little bit about how you got involved with that and, you know, what your experience has been.

Yeah, thanks for the opportunity, Mark. You know, I hope to just inspire a few more people to look into becoming a foster parent. For my wife and I, we, we knew nothing about this world until like February of 2020. So, you know, right before COVID Oh, wow. Went to church and someone spoke from one of the foster homes here in Hawaii where there's a couple thousand foster kids. But I looked deeper into this and there are 440,000 foster kids in the US.

Wow.

Um, and these are kids that, um, they're not adults. They didn't choose their circumstances. These are children, right?

They—

no one chooses to grow up in abusive, uh, parents that are neglectful, not around, addicted to drugs, in and out of jail, uh, sex trafficking, gangs, all this stuff. Um, Wow, the statistics are— it's stacked against these kids. I think it's like 2 or 3% of them will go on to college. And I look at, you know, where I grew up, you know, kind of middle class, middle America. I mean, at least half of the kids, you know, from my graduating class went on to college. And I think that's kind of common in like that demographic. Wow, 2 or 3%, you know, going to college. Um, once they reach 18, they're kind of on their own. Um, there's almost no support. So that's why you just see huge rates of, um, all the worst things, you know, um, jail, uh, sex trafficking, physical abuse, drug abuse, just And they didn't choose their circumstances. So anyway, my wife and I were lucky enough to take on a little 6-month-old girl who is the most resilient, gritty girl ever. I mean, her life circumstances before we met her, just unbelievable. I Couldn't even fathom that kids could grow up the way that, that she did. And, um, uh, 2 years into the fostering process, uh, we ended up, um, adopting her.

Okay.

And, uh, in, uh, about a month and a half, she'll celebrate her 5th birthday. Um, and just, you know, lights up the house, huge smile. You know, she's into princesses and, you know, My Little Pony and Trolls and loves to sing and dance. And, um, but even if we didn't adopt her, um, just the chance to, you know, be part of her life was really special. And, um, the burnout is really high for foster parents. Recruitment is very low for foster parents. Um, so I just encourage, um, there's 440,000 kids. They need all the good homes that they can get. So if you happen to have space in your home and are looking for a way to give back, this is something that would make a huge impact on the life of a child.

Wow. That's a really inspiring story and obviously something that's really near and dear to you and that you're passionate about. So thanks for sharing that. So I've got to be mindful of your time. Really loved our conversation and sort of sharing from your experience. But before I let you go, for folks that are listening, how— what's the best way for them to get in touch with you? Sure.

Thanks for that, Mark. Plug Technologies, that's the predominant company that is connecting talent from all over Latin America to US companies. The website for that is plugg.com. .tech, T-E-C-H, yeah, plugg.tech. And, uh, if you go to plugg.tech, you'll find me, my partner Ruben, and our whole team ready to, um, not only help you staff but also just give you good advice on what's the right country, how to think about talent pockets, currency, scale, office space, getting hardware in and out, you know, all the nuances of Latin America so you could Turn that into a huge arbitrage opportunity.

Yeah, sounds like it. Sounds like— well, Bryan, thanks again for joining us today. I really enjoyed our time.

Me too. Thanks so much.

Talk to you soon.

All right. Thanks, Mark.

Thank you for joining this episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. We hope you've gained insights to grow your business. If you enjoyed this discussion, Please rate, comment, like on your favorite platform and share to others who will find it useful. Do you know a CEO, founder, or leader at an early-stage B2B services, tech, or SaaS company who would like to be a guest and share their story? Send us a note. Let's schedule a conversation.