Brian Samson explains why U.S. companies are shifting from distant remote teams to nearshoring in Latin America. Developers in Brazil and Argentina work directly with U.S. clients, speak up on technical decisions, and cost significantly less than domestic talent. He notes 60% of M&A deals now involve multi-country teams.
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Companies started to realize, ooh, there's, there's some downsides to going all the way to the other side of the world. But we can make remote happen. So how can we get everybody back in the same time zone if they're not going to go back to the office? And that really was the boom for Latin America. And then in 2020, 2021, companies had to figure this out. And the result of that was you had work could be done anywhere, but there was like a big boom and then boom back because workers went to the extreme, like they were in New York and then all of a sudden they moved to Indonesia or whatever. To be digital nomads. And then, you know, the big boss is who the US client is interacting with. It all trickles down, all trickles up. You never talk to the real software developer. That's not the case at all in Latin America. You're talking directly to the software developer. There's not all this people in the middle because culturally they're okay pushing back, right? Because they've got all this passion. Uh-huh. If they think your architecture or design or— and I'm making the software specific, but this could be anything. This could be your business operations workflow. This could be how you're setting up your call center, the tools you're using, whatever. These guys have an opinion and they're very comfortable sharing it with you. Opportunity, bigger population, a lot of English speakers. So it really depends on like where you are maybe in that bell curve. And the more open to risk, the more upside and potential arbitrage that you have. Get into this arms race with Google and Meta and Amazon. We help them understand the dynamics of Latin America. Where even though wages were going up there too, not nearly at the rate of the US and these hot tech markets. We introduced this VP of engineering to engineers from Brazil and Argentina. These were full-stack developers that experienced with React, JavaScript, really strong, savvy, creative thinkers, problem solvers. So I've been lucky enough to visit Costa Rica, but as a tourist, I wasn't thinking any business when I went there. You know, we quickly were in San José, but otherwise Manuel Antonio. Ended up proposing to my now wife, you know, way back Yeah, yeah, I proposed to Manuel Antonio, so it's got a special place in my heart. Uh, 60% of M&A transactions now involve companies with people in 2 or more countries. So I'm trying to think of this maybe from the CFO standpoint. There's the cost-saving standpoint, which is kind of obvious, everyone talks about, but there's the back-end side of What is my company valued at down the road? And I think the argument can be made that it's either a neutral or a positive impact to valuation by doing the BOT model and just having, having these people as your employees. And, you know, you're, you're in multiple countries now.
