🏆 10X Growth in LATAM Developers 💻 Scaling Software Talent | 🎙 The Nearshore Cafe Podcast

Welcome to the Nearshore Cafe Podcast, home to the most interesting stories and people doing business in Latin America. Welcome everyone to the Nearshore Cafe Podcast. I'm Brian Samson, your host. I want to give a shout out to our sponsor, Nearshore Direct. That's gonearshoredirect.com. They provide non-IT marketing, designers, SDRs, all sorts of roles for US companies that are growing. I'm very excited about our guest today. Welcome Stephen Moody to the pod.

Yeah, thanks, Brian. Happy to be on here.

Yeah, great to have you. Well, Stephen, we've got all sorts of fun stuff to talk about, everything from your travels and work in Asia, obviously the States, but You're in Latin America today, in Argentina. Tell us a little more specifically where you're calling from.

Yeah, I'm in Buenos Aires. I'm in Palermo, which is the place where most tourists stop when they come to Buenos Aires. It's very full of tourists and people from all around the world. A lot of Russians here, a lot of people from Brazil, as well as the US. Very cosmopolitan city, about 3 million people.

Yeah, right on. I think when we spoke— So today you're specifically in Palermo, and I think you're living in the north suburbs, like suburban Buenos Aires. Is that right?

Yeah, I'm trying out Olivos, which is near the coast. Actually, when I looked at the map of Argentina, Buenos Aires, I thought that looks— the capital looks really close to the ocean. So there must be a beach here. It's so close. And it turns out it's technically the river. So there's water, but it's not what you imagine when you think about— I was born in California, so I have specific spoiled standards of what do I expect when I see the ocean.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the coastline is a little bit different, a little browner, right, from the sediment. But that's OK. So I'd say most people aren't going there for the river, they're going there for other stuff. What brought you there?

Yeah, so I originally was going to come here when I first started traveling in 2008 and just a circumstance by chance, I didn't come here. I went to Costa Rica instead because it was a little easier and at the time and convenient for what I was doing. So in 2018, I had been around the world and traveled dozens of countries, and Argentina was the last place I wanted to go. And so I got a flight, I said, okay, this is it. Once I go to Argentina, I won't want to go anywhere else. I'll never really have a need to travel again. I came here and I loved so many things about it that I decided to move to South America and start my business. And I knew I wanted to be in this time zone, in this region. So I came here first just not really knowing anyone, but knowing that there are things about it I loved. And about 2 weeks after I was here, I was like, okay, I don't need to try anywhere else. This is the right place to be.

That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, let's, uh, let's just hear a little more about the perspective you're, you're coming from. Um, you know, you've worked in tech a long time. If you don't mind just giving, giving the audience a little bit of background, um, like what kind of work have you done? Um, you know, your education, stuff like that.

Sure. Um, well, I, I'm actually really on my third career right now. My first 10 years I worked in restaurants, and, and I, you know, got my way through college by, um, mostly, you know, working in Domino's, McDonald's, and all the, the fast food possible. Uh, and then after, you know, finishing college, I, I found my way into tech and was very, very fortunate to get there. Yeah. So, but around the same time, I was also lucky to get into a company that was doing remote work, and I wanted to be remote. And so I started out remote very early in 2008.

Wow, that's very early for remote work. Yeah, not everybody was so enthusiastic then.

Yeah, for me, it was just working from cafes, and I was— I still had the student mindset where, of course, Of course I work from a café. Work is a thing that you do. It's not a place. So I just kind of adopted that. Once my boss knew that I was going to respond to messages at any time, at 8 PM I'd respond to a Yahoo message, it was really easy to build trust. It just kind of evolved into a natural thing.

Yeah. Where were you when you were doing this remote work? Back in 2008?

So, my first job was in the Bay Area in San Jose and remote at the time for me was just, oh, I can go to a cafe, I'd rather be there. And then I negotiated working from San Diego and at first I made an agreement that I would drive up, so that was about an 8 to 10 hour drive, I would drive to San Jose for meetings every 2 weeks. And about 2, 3 months in, One day I got there and my boss said, "What are you doing here? You don't need to be here." And it became really obvious that that travel time was not really helping anyone, that everything we were doing was online. And I just stayed in San Diego and went as fast as I could.

Yeah. Now, with your background, restaurants you mentioned, but as you got into tech, you've had these different parallel paths of software development, but then also marketing and growth. Just tell us a little more about, you know, the types of projects and things you've worked on.

So I studied philosophy in university, but mostly because it was the foundation of computer science, and I actually wanted to study computer science, but I needed to finish university and get into the working world. And I was fortunate to meet some architects from AT&T that actually had studied philosophy, so I had some confidence that that would be okay. And then working in restaurants, I learned a lot about the systems that run the restaurants and the business. And so I had a familiarity with the point of sale and the ERPs and everything these companies were running. And so with that combination, I ended up in marketing, but within a year I was implementing systems for marketers, the marketing automation systems and lead management because Most people go into marketing because they failed at math or they really wanted to be an artist and that was the next closest thing. And so, because I just had a little bit of knowledge about the foundations of the math and logic, I was able to, you know, in many cases run circles around them.

That's really interesting. I actually started in restaurants as well, you know, in the Chicago suburbs. And it is really hard for me to go into any restaurant nowadays and not try to like analyze like the whole system and the processes and the flows and what's wrong and how I would fix it. And I don't know, do you, do you have the same, uh, same thought?

Absolutely. I, I was working at Denny's and, uh, when I started there when I was 16 and my second Denny's I started when I was 18 and I went back to my first one and in the first shift I wrote down a list of 90 things that they could change to make it better.

I love it. Yeah, I still refer, you know, even 20 years later, you know, I still refer to a lot of the things that I learned, you know, as a teenager and also worked my way through college, you know, working in restaurants and, you know, everything from like leadership frameworks to systems and processes and bottlenecks. And yeah, it was great training. And also the public too, dealing with the public.

Yeah, I mean, one of my hiring rules now is, to that point, is I almost don't want to hire someone who hasn't worked in a restaurant or retail because there's so much learned knowledge there, and especially the established companies. You know, I still remember, you know, learning that you should never criticize someone in public. You should, you know, praise in public and criticize in private. I think that was just like standard operating procedure at most multinational restaurants, and most non-restaurant managers never learned that. It's like, how is that possible? It's so basic. It's so foundational. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, if you can motivate a bunch of 16-year-olds to do work, you can motivate anyone.

Yeah. That might be the quote of the day. I like that. Well, fast forward us to Asia. What brought you to Asia? Where did you go? What were you doing out there?

So after I was working remotely from San Diego, so still in California, and I had read The 4-Hour Workweek and I caught the idea that I could outsource my job. So I actually ended up outsourcing my job to a VA in the Philippines.

No way.

Wow.

And this is early before this became a thing. Yeah.

Yeah, like 2010. And I actually had it down to a 4-hour work week. I spent 2 hours talking to the VA to make sure things were working right and then 2 hours making a presentation to the team to be like, look, it's working. That was the job. And I was, you know, making a very good salary doing this. And that lasted about 8 weeks before I realized I was so bored. I didn't want the 4-hour work week. I wanted to actually do stuff myself. I also discovered that the, there were a lot of VAs that were actually subcontracting their work to another person. And this could go on 5 levels. Deep.

Oh my gosh.

So especially the people on, on sites like Upwork, you know, the one who could write the proposal on Upwork, you know, they were the one who spoke English and, and they all read The 4-Hour Workweek too. So they knew the game and, and it just surprised me that the, the trust was so low and, and there was all of these things that just didn't quite feel right. And so I decided to go to Asia to actually try to hire myself to to figure out who I could hire that would actually not be as obvious, that they wouldn't be on Upwork. I had this intuition that the best people are probably not in the popular swimming pool. There's probably another pool that's worth visiting. So that kind of took me there and I fell into living in Vietnam and built out the agency there for about 4 years and learned how to hire and do all those things locally.

Very cool. Where in Vietnam were you?

In Saigon, as I like to call it, or the Ho Chi Minh.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. And what type of people were you trying to hire?

So at the time I had this agency around this marketing software, and at the time that was— I found that very interesting. It was very strategic software. You know, the idea of managing and scoring leads and sending them the right email was so novel. And so I was building a team around that. Basically to scale the consulting. And I assumed that, well, if I could do it, anyone could learn this. So I, of course, I can hire some people to do this. And it turned out there are so many things I knew as, you know, an American in tech that, you know, I took for granted that, you know, I couldn't just teach to people because it was, it was so unconscious that I even knew these things. So, you know, spent a lot of time doing that, started hiring developers to build other products. Because I, once I realized I didn't want to be that business in general, so we actually built a prototype for a virtual trade show in VR for the Oculus Rift.

Oh wow.

When we first got the Oculus. Yeah, so it was this beautiful idea and I'm amazed it still hasn't happened, but we just take like a baseball stadium and skin all the ads for different trade show sponsors. And then if you look at an ad for 30 seconds or 10 seconds, it'll play their demo video on the jumbotron. Now these are the worst demo videos in the world, right? These are B2B marketing software videos, all look the same, they're awful. But when people would put on the headset and they would explore and they would look at something and then they would hear an audio and they would look at the jumbotron and they would just stare at the jumbotron and watch the entire stupid video. I was like, wow, this is remarkable. How is this working? So we did a lot of stuff like that. Unfortunately, nothing really quite had commercial success. And I didn't have a co-founder, so I was going back and forth between Vietnam and California trying to build connections and find clients. And the whole time zone and jet lag just completely burned me out.

Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sorry, how many years were you there in Vietnam?

I want to say it was 4. I think it was 2012 to 2016.

Yeah. Yeah, right on. What was the, just like the working culture like out there?

I was very fortunate because I didn't speak Vietnamese. So my subset of people I was hiring, I selected for people that spoke English and it turned out, and I was hiring from one of the best universities and I actually had employees that had their own cars in a very poor overall, very poor culture. Someone I knew at the time, was making $150, uh, a month that was living on that. And, um, so the, the culture is so— Vietnam is one of the most capitalist places in the world, which is funny because it's technically a communist country, but on every ranking of capitalism, they are the most enthusiastic country about capitalism in the world. And there's especially in Saigon, especially, it's this intensely, intensely open place to other influences. Because they've been colonized by the French and by the British and by the Chinese, or tried, and everyone's tried to be there. America's tried to be there, and yet they beat them. They've won every war. They beat every empire. So they have this confidence that comes from having outlasted wars with all these major empires, combined with this openness and curiosity, not just about Americans, but My favorite Indian food in the world was in Saigon.

Oh, wow.

There was this incredible Indian restaurant.

Yeah.

And I used to get Turkish ice cream on the boardwalk in a beach town nearby.

Yeah.

And so there's just these surprising things there. And so the culture was hardworking, but they were so far behind the US. There was no time for new stuff because you could take anything, at least as of, you know, 2015. You could take any idea from the US 10 years ago and implement it and become rich. And so it was a culture focused so much on execution and not really focused on how to scale things or novelty. There wasn't time for novelty. It was just how fast can you run at this thing that is obvious. I had a friend that, I remember, right, she started a business just cleaning offices after living in the US for 2 years and discovered that you can make money cleaning offices. She just built a team of people that would go to offices and do the cleanup and had better tools so they could go twice as quickly.

Yeah, very interesting. I've only been to Vietnam as a tourist, so this is really interesting for me to learn about the business culture. Being a tourist was great. We went to Ha Long Bay and had the hot noodles even though it's 102 degrees outside and, you know, and, and sweltering, uh, you know, washed down with a cold beer is, uh, you know, uh, one of my favorite parts of Vietnam. But, um, how about, um, uh, finding talent there? You know, you, you spoke about you found, uh, industrious, hardworking, um, uh, educated, you know, people with, um, but, um, as an expat essentially trying to get something started, like how hard was it to recruit? You know, where did you, where, you know, where were you looking? How did you interview? How did you kind of figure all this out?

It was hard. My favorite statistic is that my average salary on my team dropped by 50% for 3 or 4 years in a row just because the learning curve was so high. And it turned out, a lot of it, I mean, it comes down to marketing, right? And my background is marketing, and I think there's a lot of amazing stuff in marketing that we lose because it gets lost in marketing. But just knowing what the other person wants is so important. And so one thing I did, which in hindsight was amazing, was I set up an office I wanted. I had an office that was, was full of beanbag chairs and we had second monitors at every desk. And so I was doing things that made people more productive and I was thinking about the right tools and made sure they had a MacBook. And Dan Pink has this book, I forget which one, that he talks about what really motivates people. And most people don't actually get motivated by money. A lot of people, they want a fair wage and then they want other things. They want the right tools, they want growth, they want learning, they want meaning. And so, a lot of things I did by accident I think worked really well. For example, I paid for lunch for my entire team every day. And so, everyone got together and had lunch together. And, you know, small things like that, like, you know, years later, everyone on the team will get together and have reunions, everyone who still lives there. And, you know, there's this intense closeness from that, from that time spent together and bonding. And so it got easier. It was really hard at first.

Yeah.

You know, no one knows who I am, and it's, it's not that they don't know who I am, it's that, you know, I remember the first interview I did in a cafe, and, you know, Saigon's just this amazing city full of cafes, and I look 5 feet away and there's 2 guys who are interviewing for a personal assistant, and you know right away as an American that they're just trying to look for people to date. And it's complete pretext for that. And so I'm competing with that, right? That every time that happens, it burns the trust people have for Americans, for foreigners. And so the Vietnamese culture can be summarized as, I think the saying was, family, then friends, then foreigners. And so my most expensive person, you know, she made so much money that She went to a personal wealth seminar and the person said, you know, you should, you should put 20% of your money, you should spend on yourself. And she raised her hand and said, I don't know how to spend that much money.

That's wild.

But, but then she was a project manager at an agency and she had the connections. And once I hired her, things got easier because like I need someone to do a photography or design. And she would just have somebody the next day that wouldn't even want to charge you money.

Yeah.

Uh, because she was a friend and, and friends don't charge friends money. And so they wouldn't even want to charge her.

Yeah.

And they didn't see me as the foreigner, you know, trying to make profit. They saw me as the friend of a friend. Oh, and that was a huge unlock in the culture.

Yeah. Really interesting lessons on leadership all around there. That's, uh, that's awesome. Um, well, let's, uh, go to the other side of the world. Where you are today, you know, in Argentina. Tell us a little more about what you're doing, your company, you know, what you're trying to achieve here.

Yeah, so during the pandemic, I— long story short, I discovered that time zones and remote work, even though I've used these words for 15 years, they mean something different now. You know, everything before 2015, you read about remote work, you know, most of it from Jason Fried and about remote, it all comes down to work asynchronously. Someone else can work while you sleep.

Yeah.

Write better communication and you don't have to have meetings. And so when I visited Argentina in 2018, I was here with a group of nomads and travelers and we could have lunch every Monday together at 1 PM, no problem. Everyone had their own schedule and they were autonomous. I came back in October with the same group and we had 3 different times for lunch. Because no one was able to get lunch unless their boss was on lunch. And I was like, wow, that's something changed. And so I came here because I think there's going to be a massive shift to the time zone here. You know, Latin America has not been the biggest beneficiary of remote work yet. You know, Philippines and India, I think, were the first beneficiaries because they had the biggest advantage in English, but they got all the customer service work and the low-quality work. And countries like Vietnam are getting a little bit, but the time zone is just huge. I used to get up at 4 AM in Vietnam to meet with clients in California. And that wasn't to meet with them when they were getting, starting their day. That was when they were 5 cups of coffee in. I had to keep up to that. And, you know, Argentina doesn't have a lot of English. Latin America doesn't have a lot of English, But, um, they have time zone and you can't teach time zone.

Yeah.

So I, I came here to, to teach English and, and then see what happens when more people here can't have enough English to, to work remote jobs.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, you, uh, you really could have gone anywhere in Latin America. Uh, what particular or, or specifics about Argentina, you know, attracted you?

I, we could spend hours talking about our travels and I can tell you, you know, name a city, I'll tell you everything I hate about it and everything that's wrong with it. What I love about Argentina is there's only one problem, the economy, and it's a big problem. The currency devaluation, I don't think anyone who hasn't been here can read about it and even understand and feel what it's like. I can't get broccoli in the grocery store now, and I'm pretty sure it's frozen broccoli because I'm pretty sure it's because it's imported. And because of the exchange rate, people don't want to import stuff because they don't know what it's going to be worth in 2 weeks. And so there's this scarcity mindset that comes with the hyperinflation that's happening here. That's not— it's not your American inflation. This is— it's a different type. It's a different quality of inflation and how it affects people. But that said, that's it. When you earn pesos, you feel this every day. You can't get the same thing you can't get a price quote for more than 2 hours to buy something. But when you earn in dollars, most of the inflation problems go away. You— because most of the inflation, it increases the value of the dollar. So there's still a little bit, but it's just— it's no longer a problem.

Yeah.

So I think Argentina is the biggest opportunity to benefit from remote work and adopt quickly because people here don't just want to make more money, they want to earn in dollars.

Yeah.

And that is more— I mean, I mean, I have— I know people who are in their 20s that, you know, talk about how their savings in bags of $100 bills that still have the old logo on.

Yeah.

Because they've been saving them their whole life.

Yeah.

And now they can't exchange them in Argentina because they're not accepted. So they— but they'll keep them because it's still worth more.

It's still worth more. Yeah.

Yeah, and so yeah, so that dynamic just fascinates me. And, and yet it's— for all the challenges with that, the things here are so beautiful and amazing. It's, you know, there's not a lot of violence here. It's a very civilized country. You know, most people here pride themselves on being more European, and I don't know if I agree that, that they're more European or, you know, or what that really means, but But there's a desire for dignity here that it's not really Latin. And actually, I mean, I love Latin America, but from a perspective of trying to hire people to match the US culture, I think that Argentina has this incredible advantage that doesn't exist anywhere else in Latin America.

Yeah, yeah. And maybe just to illustrate your point about inflation, at least the last time I was there, and speaking about restaurants as well, most of the food prices are in chalk because they can erase it and rewrite it, you know, 2 hours later, you know, based on the cost of goods. Do you see that as well today?

Yeah, um, and it's worse than that. I mean, if you talk to anyone in their 30s, they remember, uh, 2001 and going to a convenience store and their parents yelling at them to grab an orange before the price went up. So there's a trauma I call it like anticipatory PTSD because people are so worried it's going to happen again and that they're reliving it. And so yeah, there's instability around the pricing and I didn't think it would affect me, but I'm seeing these shortages in foods because I think that they're just, they can't import them. They can't get the right price for 'em. And so it's there. Yeah.

You mentioned something earlier, you know, Latin America as a whole and then Argentina. Taking a macro viewpoint of Latin America, what is the typical US person's view on Latin America or those that you've interacted with?

Yeah, this is one reason I'm in Argentina because I think there's opportunity to establish what it means to hire in Latin America. I don't think anyone really knows what that means. And so when I considered where I would go, I thought about that, about the perception. I think in my experience, most people that go to Colombia have just watched Narcos on Netflix.

Yeah.

And they say, oh cool, I'm gonna get coke. And the truth is they will. For $5, they're gonna have a 72-hour binger. And if they survive it, you know, they'll be happy for it, I guess. But that leads to a certain culture that the culture adapts what the foreigners expect too, right? So that becomes the culture in Colombia because That's what the foreigners are expecting. And I think a lot of people in Mexico, when they think about Mexico, they're thinking about going to an Ensenada and drinking the wrong water and having diarrhea, or they're going to Cabo for spring break. They're not thinking about Mexico City, the place with the most museums per capita in the world. They're not thinking about mole, this incredible food. Made with chocolate that you put on chicken. Like, that's— that doesn't come to mind, you know. They're limited to a very specific idea, or, you know, they're thinking about the, the drug wars on the border. And, you know, the truth is most of Mexico is safe. But if I'm trying to build something in a place, I, I hope that the average American will also think it's safe. Yeah, that makes my life a lot easier.

Yeah.

Um, so I— in Brazil, I've talked a lot of people about these you know, what they think about Brazil and they don't know.

Yeah.

I mean, Brazil is a huge country and they speak Portuguese and they really don't have that much reason to let anyone tell them what they should think about them.

Yeah.

They don't care. So there's not really an understanding of it.

Yeah. Yeah. That's really interesting about the misconceptions. What kind of advice would you give to somebody who is Maybe I'll use the phrase nearshore curious. They're starting to hear more about Latin America. They're a businessperson. They haven't read The 4-Hour Workweek yet, but they're interested in labor arbitrage or at least trying to understand it. What would be your top 1 or 2 pieces of advice that you'd give them when they're exploring Latin America?

Yeah. So, first, I'd say you have to read The 4-Hour Workweek, of course. No, I'm kidding. It's a wonderful book that is misunderstood, and all the more because it's out of date. The first thing I think is important to realize is that Latin America is not cheaper. Latin America is a place where things are cheaper because you don't get things bundled into the price. So the price of things in the US includes the ability to sue anybody and become a millionaire. Millionaire. A month ago, I was in an Uber here, and I was rear-ended and had whiplash. And I said to the driver, we're in the US, we'd both be rich now. In Argentina, you just take 5 pennies, look at it, make sure the car is going to survive. He's driving home with the back of the car falling off, and that's fine. In the US, you're getting an ambulance, you're getting a tow truck just because the fender's off. So there's, you know, the— if you're trying to— if you're visiting Latin America and you're trying to live cheaply, you don't get the things that you think you have. If you drink the local water or a beverage, you might get a parasite in your stomach. And it's not that that's the culture here. It's that you were trying to live cheaply, and that's the culture of the poor people here. I think it's a trap that people make is that they try to come here to save money. And the more interesting thing is what can you do if you live on the same amount of money? What's the impact you can have with that much money? What are the things you can explore? And I think you can get a lot further with that. You also don't get stuck with what Venkatesh Rao called favela chic where you're basically living in a favela but you're posting on Instagram and you look fabulous. While being poor.

Favela chic.

That's interesting.

Yeah.

And, and that's a trap, right? Because if you get used to living on $1,000, and you can in most of Latin America very well, even as a foreigner who doesn't know very many people, but then you're going to only make $1,000 a month. And then you, what happens if you have to go to the US? What happens if, if you have a death in the family? How are you paying for that? Where's, Where's your security for that? So it's much easier to live on the same salary and figure out what to do with that money and make a difference. You know, you can hire people, you know, in non-obvious ways. You know, one thing I'm planning to do is, you know, hire an Uber driver that will just drive me around and who's practicing English. And, you know, find someone who could be an intern but also is a driver. That's something that most people thinking about this could not even afford in the US, but that probably costs $1,000 a month, $1,200 a month in Argentina, and certainly cheaper in a lot of other countries. So there's more freedom in play if you're not trying to save money. You can only save money until you get down to zero. But if you focus on how you're going to make money and how you can use what you're doing to invest and build on what you have, than, you know, spending time in Latin America, spending time in these countries. There's a lot more you can do.

Yeah.

Um, so I think that's, uh, that's the biggest thing for me. Um, and, and the second is you just, you have to understand that people are coming from a different culture, and you have to learn the different patterns. Um, so one thing I love about Argentina, there's this book, The Weirdest People in the World, that kind of profiles how the US is actually unique. It's Western-educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. And every study in psychology and sociology is basically only on weird people, which are mostly Americans and Western Europeans. And you don't get that culture in Latin America except for Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires is Western-educated, industrialized, and democratic, and it's just not rich. Yeah, it's got everything else. But if you branch out much further from Argentina, you're dealing with a culture that has completely different assumptions about the world. You're dealing with a culture where people have not been motivated to be proactive. There's no reward. There's a great story about a strike in Colombia. I think it was the, what was the banana company? Chiquita Banana, if I remember right. They had this big strike in Colombia and they came to meet with the strikers to negotiate an agreement and they just shot them all down. So, you know, the real history of Latin America is a history of Europeans and Yankees coming to try to pillage. And so you have to understand, especially if you're coming from that background, that that's an underlying assumption in most of Latin America. Now, whether people are nice to you or not, they might be nice to you because they're like, well, I'd rather be pillaged than be here in some places. But, but that dynamic is there, and they know more about your culture than you know theirs because, because you two is the same in the whole world. They've seen the same Marvel movies. They know Hollywood culture because that is a global culture. And it goes a long way to understand their culture and what they love and where they're coming from and make that connection. And it's real easy not to. These days you can go to most of these places, use Google Maps, go to Starbucks, you know, get, get all the same things you would want in the US and, and just, um, you know, be around people, different people, and feel like you have an experience. Yeah, it's very easy to travel without traveling.

Yeah. Now, Stephen, right now you're— if I had it right, you're, um, uh, connecting developers with US companies, uh, developers in Argentina with US companies. Did I have that right?

So that's the vision. So I started this company Longitude The main goal is to get more talent in Argentina working with US companies and to build up that talent pool. And what I found is that the biggest opportunity is to improve the English.

Yeah.

So actually, only 4% of engineers in Latin America have a LinkedIn profile in English. And so that's approximately the percentage of developers that US companies can even see, because if they're not on LinkedIn, they basically don't exist, right?

Yeah.

So, so we built an app and a set of tools to help introverted engineers improve their English and improve their confidence in their interviewing so they can actually get the best work. And we're focusing on the people who are the most talented engineers possible. I, I would love to help everyone I can, but my goal is to help the top talent get the best work, and I think that that raises everyone's position in society if we can kind of reinforce that benefit for the best engineers.

Yeah.

So my focus is on this app where we have a dozen students now, and we're helping them practice and improve and learning from what they're doing, and then learning how can we connect them with companies in the US, how do we lower the risk for the hiring, and so So we're exploring what that means, what can we do to lower the risk and make it feel safer. Because it's actually very weird to hire someone in another country that you've never met in person, and even stranger when they don't speak your language, and even stranger when you give them access to your systems and say, "Please don't steal my passwords." That's really interesting about how you're really increasing the total addressable market you know, for, for companies looking for talent.

And, um, uh, you know, when you think about, uh, cost arbitrage and so forth, um, it's, it's less about that, you know, you know, as you mentioned today, it's really like if I can identify that 10x engineer and they happen to be, you know, somewhere else, there's a lot of 10x engineers down there, um, and the fastest way for them to increase their salary is to improve their English, right? It's actually, you know, not, um, not going from a 9x engineer to a 10x engineer. It's going from a, you know, 2x in English to a 10x. And, you know, that's where they, they really start to get the opportunity. So love what you're doing. I think it's, uh, it's great for the world.

Yeah, I, I, I love this topic. Um, but I, I was talking to an agency owner this morning about this and His team even knows that they can triple their salary with English, and sometimes they still don't learn. And I keep telling my team here, our competition is not Duolingo, our competition is football. Because it's, you know, Wednesday afternoon at 5 PM, you know, you're asking yourself, do I go play football with my friends, or do I learn English? And that's your choice. And what I'm trying to do is make that a better choice. Ideally, you're learning English with your friends and you're learning the English that you actually want, not to talk about where's the bathroom or I want a hamburger, but the English to argue over JavaScript versus Python.

Yeah.

And win, you know, win your favorite debates. Yeah. I think that's what excites developers and there isn't a lot of tools for them to learn English even though it's very valuable for them. It's more valuable for them than it is for the average person, and yet no one's built the tools to make it possible for them to learn it quickly and for them to practice. Yeah, so that's, that's a puzzle I'm exploring and really enjoy playing with that.

Yeah, I think that's great. Uh, just a few, uh, fun questions, Stephen. Um, uh, the best meal you've had in Latin America?

I, I mean, I, I have to promote La Cabrera Steakhouse here. I— this place is my favorite because it's It's such an institution. They— most people have dinner at 9 PM in Buenos Aires, and when I try to get people to go to dinner before 9, they drag their feet until at least 8. They might find excuses to avoid. And La Cabrera opens at 6:30. Yeah, basically just for travelers.

Yeah, yeah.

And they have a 40% discount on the place. It's already a very good price. Yeah, it was 40% discount. So you show up, no reservations, in one of the top steakhouses in the city, and you're whisked in with, you know, suddenly the place goes from empty to full, and they're, they're cooking all this food so fast. And, and it's the only place in Argentina that will actually give you your check when you want to leave because they want you to leave because they have a reservation at 8. So it's a, it's a, it's a really exceptional experience. And, and, uh, I found, you know, there's a lot of food in Argentina, in Asia, that is exportable anywhere in the world. You know, Indian food you can really kind of have anywhere in the world because it's mostly just spices. But some foods like, you know, fish in Japan and steak in Argentina, you can't really get it anywhere else.

That's right.

The freshness is the thing. And so, you know, I was, I was told this and I didn't really believe it till I got here, but the, you know, the steak here is just so exceptional. It's it kind of ruins eating steak anywhere else in the world.

I concur with that. I have yet to have meat anywhere near as good. And I think a lot has to do with how precise they are with the fire and the temperature and just tinkering with that all day where at least in the States, you know, we just kind of throw our meat on the grill and, you know, hope for the best.

Yeah.

What's your best purchase in Latin America for under $50?

Best purchase in Latin America. This is an electric mosquito swatter.

That is great.

No one here had ever had one.

I've never seen one.

It's a Chinese product.

Yeah.

Oh, it's amazing. Yeah. I, uh, there's a mosquito problem here, um, and, uh, it's, um, Buenos Aires, uh, in January becomes like, um, you know, the hottest version of Miami. Yeah, just complete humidity and heat and sweat and, and combined with the rain. And, um, so I actually— there's so many mosquitoes here that I, I, you know, I'm playing with the idea that if I ever had a religion, one of the first rules is that You, um, you can never use the word should. And every time you use the word should, um, the next person who dies gets reincarnated as a mosquito. And people say should here so much that that's why there's so many mosquitoes here.

I like that. I like that.

Uh, and then yeah, huge savings. It's, it's a joy to, to, and also what's really cool is just giving someone the, the electric swatter and, and seeing them have the empowerment that they can actually do something about the mosquito.

That's amazing. That's amazing. I wish I had that when I was there in January a few years ago. That's great. The pizza in Argentina is different from most places. Are you pro-Argentine pizza or against?

I'm against the official pizza, but actually the best pizza I've ever had in my life was just like a barbecue pizza. Someone made. Like, I don't know what they did, but it was like, like they made like a flatbread pizza on the grill.

Nice.

And it was, it was amazing. Okay. It was. And I worked at Domino's for a long time. I, you know, developed a lot of ideas about pizza. But, but this was really, this is really exceptional. Whatever they did, I'm still not sure. But yeah, the average pizza, it's a lot of deep dish. So if, you know, I think a lot of people, it might not be their style.

Yeah. And it's A lot of cheese.

It's not what I'm used to.

A lot of cheese. A lot of cheese. Yeah, they love their cheese there. Last question for you, Stephen, is your favorite Spanish word. Oof.

Favorite Spanish word. Ah, the one on my mind the most is confianza. So growing up, I heard this idea a lot about how, you know, Latin languages are so much more complicated. They have all these words for love, amor and quierer, and we only have one in English. And that's actually fairly true. I discovered a couple months ago that in Argentina, there's only one word, confianza, which means confidence and trust. But there's no real word which I, for me, I'm looking for a word that translates to confidence with faith. There's no word that combines trust and faith here. So confianza most closely means like, oh, someone has confidence, or there's not really an explanation that you can trust somebody, and there's not really a language for that. So I think that says a lot about the culture, about how they relate to strangers and and how they connect and build. And because you don't need a word for that if you're used to most of your world as people that you've known your whole life. Yeah. You don't need a word for trust.

That's right.

If you don't distrust anyone.

That's right. That's right.

So I've been puzzling over that a lot. Yeah.

I like it. I like it. Well, that's all the time we have today, Stephen. It was a blast. Learned a lot. Had a lot of fun. I want to thank our sponsor again, Nearshore Direct. That's gonearshoredirect.com. Stephen, hopefully we can have you back sometime. This is, this is great.

Yeah, I'd love to interview you next time.

That's fun. Yeah, we have a lot of similarities in our backgrounds and stories. Well, thanks again to our listeners and Nearshore Direct, and we'll see you again soon. Thanks for joining us at the Nearshore Cafe podcast. Tune in next week for a new episode featuring another special guest.