Why Costa Rica Is Latin America’s Silicon Valley for AI & Data Solutions

Welcome everyone to another episode Welcome to another episode of the Nearshore Cafe podcast. I'm Brian Samson, your host. This podcast is sponsored by Plug Technologies, plugg.tech. Great way to, great way to connect talent from all over Latin America to growing US companies. If you are interested in life sciences, regulatory, healthcare, and how it connects to Costa Rica, Wow, this is going to be an awesome show for you. Let me introduce Arturo Garcia out of Costa Rica, the CEO of Dynamic. Welcome, Arturo.

Thank you, Brian. Thank you for having me here.

So as we talked about, you're, you're building a company from Costa Rica that impacts healthcare in the States. That's a lot in itself. How did this get started? Like, and even maybe even pre-company, like, you've had a really interesting journey in your life, in your career. I think our audience would be fascinated by that. Could you, you share more how, how this all came to be?

Well, yeah, thank you. And, and I would call it kind of like unusual. So, so here's the thing. When I first went to college, I was trying to become a doctor. So I did medical school for 3 and a half years, uh, and I loved it. Like, I absolutely loved it. The science, the hospitals, the technology for diagnosing patients, all of that, right? But after like 3 and a half years, my younger brother and co-founder of Dynamic, our CTO, Andrés García, came to me saying, "Hey Arturo, how about if we start a technology company?" It sounded super exciting, man. And he eventually convinced me. So I was like, "All right, let's do this." So I was super excited about switching to software engineering. Now my dad, on the other hand, who had been paying for medical school for 3 and a half years, wasn't so thrilled about it. So he said, you know what, Arturo, if you're doing this, you're paying for it. So I got myself a job and I paid for software engineering school, which I, uh, I ended up dropping at some point, but that's a topic for, uh, for another time.

Cool. What was the vision? You know, you're, you're with your brother Andres.

Yeah.

Help us. Understand like the day one vision. We all know in entrepreneurship sometimes things pivot, they change over time, but day one, what were you guys trying to build?

Yeah, no, so I was, as I was saying, you know, I got myself into software, software engineering and started working on, on tech projects as a quality assurance person. And then after that, project management and then leadership in general, and then sales. And that's when things got interesting, right? We started paying attention to the US market and the boom in the mobile applications world. And so the vision was, let's serve the New York market, which we, where we had most of our connections back in the day, 2014, when we started Dynamic. Let's focus on serving the New York market with the best mobile applications on earth. And that was the vision back then. I mean, this is 2014, like mobile applications have been booming since 2008, right? and we had a lot of experience building mobile apps. So that was the initial vision, but then at some point we started doing web development, project management, digital production, all of that. And eventually at some point for the past 3 years, we switched to data and AI so we can focus on a different, different niche.

Yeah. Did you, um, find a client and then kind of work from there or were you and your brother?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So because we had been working on IT services from Costa Rica, you know, since the early 2000s, we built a good network of connections, you know, especially in New York. And so we got ourselves our first project. We started Dynamic in 2014. Back then it was me, my brother, our co-founder in California, by the way, Soufiane, and of course a few old laptops and a lot of Red Bull, man, a lot of Red Bull. In that week, we took this company, like working hard, not getting that much sleep, we took this company from $0 to $1 million in just one year. Awesome.

That's incredible. You don't hear that very often. How about the early software developers that you brought on? I'm assuming these are all guys from Costa Rica?

Yes, yes. The beginning of the company was focused on Costa Rica and then we expanded to other regions. But at the beginning, we started bringing the people that we knew and trust, people that would deliver the level of quality that we wanted to offer to our clients. And so we brought close friends and of course family. Dynamic is a family company, so we brought on board family. And then, you know, at some point it was 10 guys, then 20 guys, then 30 guys, up to the point in which nowadays we're more than 100 people.

So I've been lucky enough to visit Costa Rica, but as a tourist, so I wasn't thinking any business that went there. You know, we, uh, you know, quickly were in San Jose, but otherwise Manuel Antonio ended up proposing to my, uh, now wife, you know, way back.

You did that, right? You proposed to Manuel Antonio?

Yeah, proposed to Manuel Antonio. So it's got a special place in my heart. But I, um, you know, and I think we saw Cloud Forest and, you know, like where they, where they have the coffee. But Arturo, we're, um, We want to give our listeners a great sense of Costa Rica as a business hub.

Yes.

But maybe even before we start there, just tell us about Costa Rica overall.

Yeah. So Costa Rica is this beautiful green country in Central America, very peaceful. The country abolished the army back in 1948, I think, and ever since we invested all of that money into education. And so Costa Ricans were not used to an army, not used to seeing guns and all of that, right? So we're a very peaceful country, generally speaking. 3.5 hours flight from major cities in the US, so not that big of a long trip, right? And then you'll get to meet these just friendly people, highly educated, in this beautiful green country. Generally speaking, Costa Ricans tend to be good at making conversation. We're good at becoming friends and building just genuine relationships, right? As you can see, we have an accent. Like most people in Costa Rica, I had an education, basic education that includes English lessons, but that's not usually that great to make conversation. So we have to take courses additionally. There's lots of higher education institutions and generally speaking, we have great universities, actually the best. And this is a fun thing about Costa Rica, a fun, fun fact about Costa Rica. The best and highest quality higher education institutions in Costa Rica, universities, are free and mandatory. Did you know that? I can hear you.

That's right. And, and, and Arturo, what are some of those universities that, that are maybe some of the ones that you personally like to recruit out of?

Right, so we don't really pay that much attention to which college you went to and we don't really pay that much attention to degrees, generally speaking. Essentially at Dynamic, we wanna hire people with the right knowledge. We vet them properly. They take technical tests with us. We focus on values and we focus on their ability to be creative. The degree or what college they graduated from It's not that big of a deal for us.

Yeah. Tell us more about what the staff looks like. So you've got about 100 or so people. Are they all software developers, UI/UX, DevOps, QA? You know, what are, yeah, what kind of roles are they doing?

Yes. So in Costa, but keep in mind that we expanded to Mexico as well, right? So nowadays we have resources across Latin America, but mostly Costa Rica and Mexico. In our company, most of our developers are nowadays full-stack developers, data engineers, data scientists, DevOps people for sure, lots of them UX/UI people, project managers, technical leads, like you name it, right? Everything you need to grow an IT consulting company. But see, that's the thing. For the past 3 years, we've been specializing more and more and specializing in specific niches, including healthcare and life sciences. We no longer do that much work when it comes to mobile applications, but we want to focus more on data engineering, data science, AI solutions, those kinds of things for the healthcare and life sciences industries.

Yeah, that's something I'd love for you to dive in deeper. Um, uh, you know, Southern California, San Diego area, huge place for life sciences.

Yes.

And, um, I'm sure there are people listening that have maybe never offshored or nearshored, and they're thinking like, wow, you know, I'm in a very regulated space. Is that, is that even allowed? Like, how, how does that even happen? Can you break it down, like, what this, uh, ecosystem looks like and the regulations, the compliance? Like How does this all come together when you're working across borders?

So, there is information you're not allowed to take across borders, but there's ways to work around that, for sure. It's not an impossible, you know, not an impossible gap to bridge. And so, as long as you have the right controls in place, good VPN connections, security training, great security practices, encrypted data, and you have people accessing that information in a secure way, that should not be a problem. So companies that think, you know what, can I do this or can I not? There's definitely information you don't want to get out of your country because of local regulations, and each country has different regulations, especially when it comes to healthcare and life sciences. But then again, there are certain projects you can dissect, outsource, and collaborate with people as long as they have good HIPAA compliance training. And the right encryption methods.

So thanks, Arturo. That really helped me understand how you guys are doing some of this cross-border. And you're working across different industries too, you know, life sciences, pharma, and so forth. Can you share a little bit more about like maybe how that might differ from industry to industry and how nearshoring can, can make it happen?

Absolutely. So keep in mind that we serve all kinds of clients, right, from the earliest stage of startup all the way to mid-sized companies and then very large pharma corporations. They all have different regulatory controls and policies, right? So your early-stage startup wants to take care of the data. They want to control the data. They want to share it with you in an appropriate manner. So they want to be in control of it and you accessing it remotely. They want to encrypt that information and then want you to use a VPN. And then mid-sized companies who use things like monitors to keep track of patients' healthcare, those kinds of things you cannot share. You want to keep in the US. And then large corporations like pharma, pharmaceuticals, they, they want to keep things very, very tight. And so they set up very specific controls and checkpoints and security controls for you to access their information. And you have to sign additional NDAs with them. Again, it's all doable. It's just a matter of the size of the organization and how they structure their security controls.

Totally. Arturo, I, I'm imagining the culture of your company is, is excellent. You're a great leader. Um, can you talk about how, um, maybe like advice for other companies, like how to build a great culture where you're able to work across borders and make your clients happy? And, and then also, you know, Costa Rica is a more laid-back place than maybe, you know, some other places in in the US and how you're able to keep a great culture, make your clients happy, but then also, you know, kind of match the right energy.

Right, right. And I think you, you already mentioned some of that, Brian. It's all about keeping things simple, like the most simple you can, you can keep things. I mean, you have lots of things you want to take care of, right? Security controls, training, those kinds of things, right? But you have to establish a good company culture in which you keep things simple and people understand that and they know that. So take for instance, at Dynamik, we do have offices, places that we go to work to, but then again, most of our work is remote. Our guys just meet every now and then to share experiences, to focus on a specific project, but they get to work from home. And actually at Dynamik, we call it work from happiness because our guys are allowed to work from wherever they have internet connection. And so we've had people working from Europe, from the US. We've had some of our guys going to South America and just work for a month or two because we allow that. And so as long as you keep things simple and you focus on the important things like quality, deadlines, good communication, your client will feel happy. Brian, it's all about keeping things simple. You know, you want to— there's many things you have to do in a company. You have to serve your clients, but you also have to give services to your people. And so as long as you focus on the right things like quality, deadlines, budget, people, your customers will appreciate that you're keeping things simple. And so for instance, at Dynamic, we have a policy that we don't call work from home, we call it work from happiness, meaning that you get to work from wherever you, you're happy, as long as you have good internet connection. And when you have happy people collaborating with you, they have the appropriate, the appropriate training and the right values, they deliver on time, high quality work, and your customers will be happy.

Amazing. In, um, in, in your company, um, could you give us a little more idea on like the structure of— you see you've got leads and maybe architects and VPs and so forth. Like, like how do you kind of put all that together? Is there client-facing roles, hands, hands down, you know, heads down roles?

Yeah. So keep in mind that I'm an extremely practical person, Brian, and we can come back to that in a moment. But then again, I try to keep Dynamic as lean as possible in terms of company hierarchy. We don't think a project manager is a more important person than a developer or a quality assurance engineer. We're all the same, right? We're all contributing to successful projects. And so yes, we do have people doing the development. We have a leadership structure. We have project managers, but then again, some of our projects tend to be more lean in the sense that at some point a technical lead could be acting as a project manager and we don't really need a full-time project manager. Sometimes we're building a project for one of our customers and we only need the intervention of a project manager every now and then to set up the right project infrastructure or the right best practices. And then after that point, we continue on our own.

Yeah, I wanted to come back a little bit on Costa Rica as a business destination, um, you know, one of the unfair things is Latin America sometimes gets lumped in like it's one singular country, right? And, um, problems that maybe another country experiences, you know, has nothing to do with another country in Latin America, you know, from internet outages to, you know, inflation and unstable currencies or governments. Can you talk about some of that and then, you know, if there are any challenges that you're trying to manage within Costa Rica?

Right. So that's a great question. I mean, let's split that into 3 parts, right? So the country is— has the— Costa Rica has the longest democratic record in Latin America, over 200 years of democracy, which is great. Lots of political stability. The currency is super stable as well. Those are good things for companies to set up their own team or their own branch in Costa Rica. That is the reason why we have companies like HP, Alienware, IBM, you name it. Lots of large corporations in the US have operations in Costa Rica. So that's one part. Then the other thing is, I mean, yes, across Latin America, we have 650 million people, and roughly half of them are part of the workforce throughout Latin America, we have thousands of great universities, very old universities with great practices and great teaching programs. Costa Rica has the same as well. And then about the culture. So, so the culture in Costa Rica is very laid back. We're very friendly. But then again, just great values overall. If you talk to Costa Ricans and you have collaborated with Costa Ricans, you know that we're friendly people. And we want to learn continuously. Now, in that part, I would say that not only Costa Rica, but all of us, because of these AI changes and these new discoveries we're seeing on AI pretty much on a daily basis, we have, we have to train ourselves to learn more and more and in a faster pace nowadays.

Yeah, tell us more about that, about AI. Like, the— I mean, we're in the middle, it's changing so fast and every day. What does that mean for you, for your company, for the vision of your company? How is the, you know, what are you, what are you trying to do to make sure you're, you're ready for these new changes?

Right. So, I mean, there is so much to learn in AI, in data and data science, these kinds of things. You're seeing discoveries on a daily basis, as I was saying. So you, so essentially the way you address all of that is by having the right company culture. And a set of small good practices. So at Dynamic, we have different Slack channels for different topics because if you try to address everything in AI in just one Slack channel, it's going to become like one of those newspapers that talk about everything and no one's really paying attention to anything, right? That's one. And then the second thing is having that new learning mindset. And so that has to come from the upper management. So for instance, I made it a personal challenge for me to learn as much as I can about AI for the past 5 years. And so that's part of the reason why I don't really write emails. I actually don't type. I try to keep my keyboard away from me as much as I can because I talk to my computer. Like, if you think about it, speech-to-text technology has been available since 2017, and most people, they're not really aware of this. So you no longer need to write emails. You can talk to your computer, and speech-to-text technology will allow you to do way more than your fingertips could ever do, right? Uh, that's one. And then continuously have built-in and deployed programs in your company to encourage people to learn more. And of course, lots of gamification and just highlighting people who has either gained a certificate or a new, a new ability, a new skill set.

Yeah. Now for the fun stuff, Arturo. Um, let's talk about tourism in Costa Rica.

Absolutely.

People that are, are visiting, what do they have to put on their must-do list, their bucket list, when they visit Costa Rica? Where should they go?

When you come to Costa Rica, you definitely want to spend some time in San Jose, get to see the city, uh, get to know the people. But then if you have some good time, say, you know, 5 days, 6 days, go to the mountains, go to the beaches, uh, just enjoy the relaxing environment in Costa Rica. And we have As you mentioned before, Manuel Antonio is a great area with lots of nature. To the south of Costa Rica, in one specific region of Costa Rica, we have 6% of the world's biodiversity, which is just amazing. I mean, it's just impressive. In natural reservations, you'll see crabs, monkeys. Like, it's very usual for you to be in a restaurant and have a monkey stealing your food, which is fun, but not that fun if you paid a lot of money.

Yeah, that's great. Um, Tell us about the food. You know, what, what should someone expect food-wise when they visit?

Right. So in Costa Rica, we eat a lot of rice and beans and combinations of those things. Actually, the thing we usually have for breakfast in Costa Rica, it is a combination of rice and beans, which we call gallo pinto. I think it's the same, very similar in Nicaragua. They have their own version. And throughout different countries in Central America, they have their own version of these dishes. You, you have to try the pinto with eggs, beans, and then a little bit of meat to have some fun. Sour cream for sure. When you come to Costa Rica, you have to try the chifrijo, and then the local cheese in different, in different towns in Costa Rica. Man, you would love it. And of course, the coffee. Like, Costa Rican coffee is top coffee on earth.

It really is. I live in Hawaii, as some of the listeners know, Hawaii coffee is quite good, but Costa Rican coffee is—

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And I'm glad to hear that you proposed to your wife in Manuel Antonio. It's a very romantic beach town for sure.

Yeah, absolutely. And then ziplining, of course, is a very popular thing.

Of course, you have to do it and you have to just sit in one of those little local bars, have you know, see the sunset, enjoy a beer or some drinks, man, it's just beautiful.

Amazing. Arturo, this has been a fascinating conversation. I've learned a lot more about Costa Rica, Costa Rica as a really great business destination, a place to put your developers, other people, the laid-back vibe, English speaking. Anything else that I missed that you'd like to add?

Yes, yes. I would say Costa Rica is known as the Central American Silicon Valley, which is a good thing in terms of reputation, but also in terms of the challenge it represents for us in Latin America, in Costa Rica. So definitely a place you want to check out. Great place in terms of stability, setting up your own operation, and then just, you know, grow and have a beautiful, fun place to go and visit your team every now and then.

Amazing. This podcast was sponsored by Plug Technologies, P-L-U-G-G. Tech. Great way to connect talent all over Latin America with growing US companies. Arturo, thanks again for being a guest on our show.

Thank you so much, Brian.

All right, thanks everyone. We'll see you next time.