Building the Finest Software Engineering Teams With Maritza Diaz of ITJuana

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, Tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper cappings counting beans Contador Quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos el gordo the tacos standing puesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean watch the sunset la Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the moon SD Tecos with your host, Neil Bloom. Startups get the party Startups get the party started.

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom, and I'm thrilled to have you here. On the Tacos and Tech Podcast. We interview builders of technologies, of companies, of communities, and we do it weekly, so thanks for tuning in. Every Tuesday, a new interview and on Fridays we talk about what's new in the San Diego tech ecosystem from a news perspective. So make sure you join us there as well too. We also have a tech newsletter that comes out every other week@freshbroodtech.com you can subscribe to listen to it without further ado. Enjoy this episode. I am thrilled to have a repeat guest. Maritza Diaz, CEO of IT Quanta. Hey Maritza, thanks for being back on the pod with me.

Hey, Neil, it's a real pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Absolutely. I was just looking back, we had your episode went live February 20, 2020. So we know what was happening then. We were all pretty unaware of what was going to happen within the next week or two. I'm pretty excited to talk about what's all the wave that you've been riding since, obviously the good and the bad that Covid has given all of us. How have you been? How are you doing over the last few years?

Yeah, crazy to think that was the last time we saw each other and the world changed on all of us and for us in tech, it has been absolutely a game changer. It has been phenomenal. You know, during COVID there were winners and losers, and thankfully we were on the winners. So not everything was so negative about COVID at least for tech.

Yeah, for sure. You want to give us a quick one minute overview of what IT quanta is? We're going to link the past episodes so they can kind of understand the beginnings. But we want to know still, for any new listeners, what you're building right now.

Yeah. So it Juana's mission is to enable our customers to deliver their digital innovations by helping them create technology centers of excellence in Latin America. We are headquartered in San Diego, but our main operation is in Tijuana, where we are hiring all the software engineering for San Diego.

Awesome. And I remember last time talking through this a bit. This came originally from a previous company you were working at who said, let's go find another office to build right on the other side of the border. And you were part of that initiative to go and help source and locate both talent at an office, correct?

Yes, that's correct. I used to work for a company local to Carlsbad, California, called Thermo Fisher Scientific. And in that capacity, I was helping the company build their digital capability. And so that meant hiring 1,000 engineers in India, in the US, Europe, and finally Tijuana. And that's where I realized, wow, what an opportunity Tijuana represents for companies in San Diego.

Was that where you met Mark Fields, CTO at Thermo Fisher?

Yes, he was my boss. He was the CTO for Thermo Fisher. And so together we built this office in Tijuana.

So, I mean, yes, you built it, but even more, you made substantial commitment and investment Right. In a whole new talent pool that, you know, like you said you worked in, you had talent from other places in the world. But now sourcing talent in Mexico and Latin America was a whole new thing. What did it take to talk Mark and the team into making this investment?

It was definitely a high risk. Like, if you think about Tijuana, Neil, what's the first thing that comes to your mind?

I mean, I think of my college days. I think of good surfing, food and wine and happy people.

Exactly. A lot of people tell me, oh, I've been to Tijuana 15 years ago, and that's the college time. And so that's the perception of Tijuana. You will never think of Tijuana as a tech hub. And that made it a high risk. Imagine back in 2014 when there was no success story for software in Tijuana. And so I remember clearly presenting this option in front of the Tamo Fisher board of directors. And they looked at us like, are you crazy? Right? It was something that nobody really was, Yay, let's go do this. So we started as an experiment, and that was truly the word we use internally. And I was touched with that. The CIO told me, Maritza, run this experiment, try to hire 30 people in Tijuana, and when you're done, come see me. And you have to remember, I am a software engineer. I am not a business person. I never been to Tijuana before that. And so I had to learn the hard way hr, finance, legal, and all of the implications that requires to hire people in Tijuana. It's not just, hey, come work for me. Long story short, that experiment was very successful. We hired 30 people. But more importantly was the quantity, the quality of the engineering that we were getting. And it's not because these engineers are smarter than anybody else in the world. It's location, location, location. Why? Because we are able to connect with them every day in the same time zone and most of the times face to face. So understanding of what is it that we're trying to build is great. And so they deliver closer the quality of that you expect instead of going on the other side of the world trying to get this information across and perhaps miscommunication. So Thermo Fisher went all in after that result, and today they have close to 200 engineers in Tijuana.

Wow, that's amazing. It's incredible to hear. I think the bigger piece also that I want to make sure we highlight here is that a lot of people outsource, even near source to another company, to run like a development shop. But these are actually employees. So you're building an office for the company, which is an investment in its own regard, but they're employees, right? So they're coming into the culture of the company, but also having. Bringing their culture in and making that office's culture its own local as well too. Under the Thermo Fisher brand or another brand that you're building out, I think that's a big deal in terms of what a lot of people are doing in Mexico and India these days, correct?

That is correct. So you see, my objective in life, if you will, is that I want to generate as many jobs as I can here in our region. And that means, you know what? We're not going to do it with a traditional outsourcing. We're not going to be an innovation hub by having thousand people working for Itjuana. What we need to do is create this ecosystem of companies that are located on both sides of the border. And we drive that innovation across different industries and different companies. And that can only happen if the companies themselves invest and hire their own people. So what it Juana does is this bot build, operate and transfer. So companies that want to hire today, they do it through me. Through it Juana. But they're going to be getting ready to actually operate themselves. And when they're ready, we transfer everybody to their books. Right. And so so far in these three years we've done that. One of our customers last year transitioned about 200 employees that we helped them hire from the beginning. And so that's up to me is mission accomplished because we generated fabulous jobs. We are actually making an impact with companies that drive highly innovative products in the life science space. And it's a win win. The engineer wins, the company wins and we win in the region. So I love that.

Yeah, that's a great kind of stair step model too. Right. Because obviously it is a big investment. So you're kind of onboard both company and talent and get them ready to become fully employed with each other.

Yes.

How did you kind of, I'm guessing you learned that from the Thermo Fisher days when there wasn't an IT quanta and it was just look for talent, see who will come join Thermo Fisher, which was a brand new brand in Tijuana, Correct?

Absolutely. And particularly for tech. Right. You hear Thermo Fisher Scientific and you don't think that, oh, this is a tech company. Right. Thermal Fisher is one of the largest companies you never heard of. And so it was a challenge for us to tell them, hey, come work for us when they didn't know who we were. But I found that once they know it is, it's a winner recipe that the employee has the ability or the option to work directly for the company because that drives that engagement. And I really want to do this. I love working on X product is that engagement that doesn't exist if you are offshore or outsourced through third parties and you just kind of like detach from the company.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, take us through the transformation that kind of happened with COVID and a few ways. I'd love to hear what happened with talent, especially in Latin America, because what I believe, and I'd love for you to correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe a lot of Latin American talent kind of migrates north headed towards the border. I'd love to hear that. Kind of aspect, because Tijuana isn't the only place where there's tech talent, obviously in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. So take me through what's been going on for the talent and then how, how has that helped Tijuana grow?

So we met in February and then Covid hit and honestly, like everybody else, I was super afraid of, oh my God, what's going to happen. I just left my full time job to go to this. It was a. And then boom. Little that I knew the problem we were trying to solve even before COVID was a real problem. Before COVID only in the United States, there were about 250,000 open jobs for software engineers alone. Jobs that we couldn't find people in the US and so typically companies will go to India or China or the other side of the world to find that talent. During COVID that number multiplied by five. So right now there are 1.2 million open jobs in software. And why that is because during COVID companies realize that if they're not digitally ready to interact with their customers, with their partners, with their vendors, they die. It's no longer an option of, oh, it will be nice to be Digital in 2030. They need to be digital today, otherwise they not survive. Even us. Right. We are in the podcast via technology that's enabled through software. And that's why software jobs increase five times in one year. And so the problem, that's exactly the problem we're trying to address now, talent. Obviously this increased the number of job offers across the world. And so software engineers have the upper hand on negotiations. They have two, three, four times the number of offers for the same job. And to me, that increased the opportunity for talent that was sometimes overlooked in Latin America. Again I mentioned India and China were the prime locations for software with COVID Now we are making a change to look at Latin America as the hub for additional talent. Mexico particularly, fact that not many of us know, is graduating more engineers than the U.S. wow, that's great.

Really?

That's crazy. Yeah. And unfortunately, when you look at the trends five years from now, how many more engineers will the US graduate versus Mexico, the gap is bigger. So that's a topic in itself for another conversation. Yeah, but however, when you think about it takes four or five years to graduate an engineer and we need those engineers today. So what we have been doing at IP Juana is, yes, we are looking for this talent in unlikely places in Latin America, but also we are investing in folks that perhaps can be ready with a little bit of a Change. And so we've been investing heavily in bootcamp hackathons. We're actually hosting a hackathon in September with companies in San Diego in medical, device and biotech to solve some of this life problem. We also do a lot of online training and we do trainee program which is my favorite that is essentially partnering with universities. Hire the students that are still in one year for graduation and we bring them with us for one year where they learn by doing. Hopefully by the time they graduate they're ready to have a full time job with us. 200 students in three years. Students that now are full time, they're new engineers that are on the industry now. So we've been really investing time and effort in talent development rather than trying to poke people from other companies.

That's super smart. I mean I think a lot of like you mentioned, people very much focus on I need talent right now and don't make that long term investment. But this is your business. Your business is to source the best talent and why not train them yourself to make sure that they are up to your standards for your clients. So it's great to see. Are you, you building your own bootcamps or are you utilizing other third party bootcamps and partnering with them?

We built. We have hired about 700 engineers in this last three years and so we have a ton of people that actually want to do something good and give back. So most of the content is generated by us internally with volunteers, talented engineers that want to share their craft, if you will. So they prepare the content, they prepare the classes and off we go. So far every bootcamp occurs every other month and we've been getting a lot of interest. We have about 200 people attending every time, so it's great. And we train them in the topics that we know our customers need. So it's really just in time training.

Oh, that's great. I love hearing that. You know the startup community in Tijuana I have some experience with previously. You know, pre Covid we used to start San Diego Startup Week in Tijuana actually at. I think we did it a few times at Arcus Nexus's office. Another for more of a development shop in Tijuana. What do you perceive as the local tech community? Obviously way more talent. Are people also starting companies more and more in Tijuana as well too?

You know one of the trends that I see changing recently and I'm not going to talk about politics because I don't know anything about that in Mexico, but the government of Tijuana that's right. Now they actually realized for the first time, in my opinion that Tijuana needs to be more forward looking into innovation and technology and not so focused on manufacturing, which has been the traditional job for Tijuana. And so the hackathon I mentioned earlier in September is co hosted by Itjuana and the government of Baja California. I find that they are truly doing something about driving innovation. They have other programs to invest in startups in Tijuana in Baja California, which is something new. And they most recently opened an office in the Silicon Valley for Baja California. So just a few examples of how the government itself is investing more in the technology innovation areas. And the startup program is there to provide them with means and funds and support to grow. So it's new, new meaning in the next, in the last few months. So I have yet to see what's the end result. But I'm really hopeful that things are starting to change for Tijuana particularly, and they're focusing a little more in innovation and tech.

Absolutely. Those are great signs, especially if talent gets, you know, local. More chances to, you know, kind of craft their skill. Right. If they get to experience both big tech, say at Thermo Fisher, startup tech at a new local startup, those are all things that kind of craft an entrepreneur, an engineer. Right. Who can be ready to help other companies. So more opportunities there is great that regard.

Yeah, absolutely. It's exciting. And we even seen people who are coming back to the region. So think of 10 years ago, there were no great jobs in software or tech for folks in Tijuana. And so they will migrate to Guadalajara or Mexico City because the jobs were there and now they're coming back. I hired a few that are coming back from Guadalajara and said, hey, I want to go back to tj. And how awesome that we're working with life science companies, which is actually very unique to our region. You don't see that much in other parts of the Latin America. And that's the point for me between San Diego and Tijuana, you know, San Diego is super rich in life science. Right. Innovation and talent. During COVID Life Science received 9 billion new venture capital. Right. That's record. And so I think we need to accelerate that growth utilizing talent in Tijuana and really become this mega region that we talk about. Really should be the biomedical tech valley of the world. Right. Not the Silicon Valley is the biomethech valley of the world. We can do that. We have everything on our hands to make that happen.

Absolutely. And to be building technology that's life changing, right? So something pretty to be proud of, that's for sure. What's so think us through like an entrepreneur who's listening, building his company, his or her company. What's the right time to be thinking about investing in a multi office talent like this and maybe opening an office off the border. Like what's the right prototype for someone to be thinking through it?

So honestly I would say if you're a startup and you have a product, focus all your efforts on your product, whatever that is, right? And if you need software, you got to move fast. So opening an office and getting all the legal stuff is going to take you a few months. So my suggestion is find a partner to do it today or yesterday. You need those software engineers yesterday. So use somebody like Itjuana or other that can actually get you in the door today. At the same time start working to establish your operation because in the long run you do save money, right? When you do it directly, but also requires effort. You need to have your operations in place, your legal, your accounting, blah blah blah. Do that at the same time, but don't wait until you're established, otherwise you lose seven, eight months.

That's great taking through. So you had a startup as well too. What were some of the things you did when all of a sudden you realized you were growing so much faster? What were some of the tips and tricks that you had to learn kind of by doing to grow your business?

So for me was to really be creative about how you do things. Hiring is a typical example where in big companies the candidate comes to the door and he goes through probably seven interviews. The interview with everyone in the company and guess what, every interview takes about two, three, four days because people's calendars and all of that, right? So by the time you make a decision, maybe a month went by and in this market that candidate is gone because there are other companies interviewing him as well. So one of the changes we made from the beginning was let's cut that month process to one day. So what we do is we bring all candidates to one day. We make sure everybody who's going to interview is ready that one day. And we call it the hiding date. From 8am to 6pm all we do on both sides of the border is interviews and meeting the candidates, meeting the companies. At the end of the day, everybody who interview comes and gives a yes or no, right? There is no okay, I need to think about it is yes or no. And that's how we've been able to extend offers on the same day. Obviously there is a lot of preparation for that. Right. We not just want to make a call with 30 minutes, but we also do in advance coding, test and behavior assessments, all of that in advance to the day of hiring. So we've accelerated that way. That's how we honestly hire 700 people.

Wow. Wow. That takes quite the infrastructure to do it all in a day. But also pretty fulfilling for the candidates. Right? Like you said, to circumvent that push pull that happens over weeks or months, but it takes a machine to build that. So kudos to you in growing that for sure. How many people now at it, Juana?

So with reaching 750 hires in three years, you know, I did 200 for thermo fisheries. It took me four years. So definitely this is a record. Yeah. And I did mention I transferred 200 of them to one of my clients earlier last year. So it's, it's, it's great.

Yeah. Well, congratulations. One piece you did mention about was a lot of the focus on manufacturing in Tijuana though. Feels like with the supply chains of China that more manufacturing might be coming to Tijuana. So it'll be interesting to see, you know, who all the new talent that is needed in everywhere from both local manufacturing, but it's different kind of manufacturing because I'm even hearing like biomanufacturing. So that feeds into this biomega region that you're talking about as well too. Bringing you know, vaccine production closer to home and away from, you know, political areas that may stop us from getting access to it in the future too. So it really great to hear that the whole mega region in general is growing in that regard.

Yeah, no, for sure. And that's one lesson learned, right. For Tijuana is like be careful what you wish for. I'm a member of the Tijuana Economic Development center and I've been influencing them with hoy. We got to move into tech. We've got to bring this job for the future. However, to your point, supply chain and all, they are at capacity bringing new manufacturing moving closers to home. The unemployment rate in Tijuana is below 2%.

Wow.

And they're running out of land because obviously manufacturing requires a lot of land. But yes, there's absolutely moving up. It's no longer the manual repetitive type of job. It's more of an advanced manufacturing molecule. I heard the other day, molecule manufacturing. So they're starting to bring some of the biotech stuff and this testing. So it's great to see that they are evolving. And even though manufacturing is at the core of Tijuana, it's also moving upwards to be more automatic and more really value added.

Yeah. And this is something we talk about a lot for our mega region, as well as the upskilling of talent, giving everyone bigger and better skills for kind of the new. The new economy, which is digital. Right. Even in menu, even in a digital economy with hardware and other things like that, there still is this software component as well too. And so even with 2% unemployment, I can see how you're saying, hey, let's take existing talent that, like you said, who's already employed, but give them a chance at a better earning potential and better life as well too. And so investing in that has been pretty important for you, I'm guessing.

Absolutely. You know, I'm an immigrant and it's always in the back of my mind, right. I want to give back to my community forever within the third world country. And it's pretty hard to have opportunities. Right. I live there. So I want to bring those opportunities to folks who are hungry, who really want to do a good job and finally be prosperous like everybody else. I think the more we do that, the less we're going to be talking about immigration and how horrible it is. It's taking jobs, yada, yada. Why don't we generate jobs like this so people don't have to come here and they're proud where they are and they want to contribute to the local economy. Right. So that's the mindset I have and that's why I love what I do. Because we are making an impact on people's lives by bringing these new job opportunities.

Absolutely. Well, last time we talked about a bit of your favorite tacos and I think we talked about me coming down and doing a tour with you. Obviously that didn't happen because of COVID so we still need to make that happen. But what's the taco scene like in Tijuana? Has it changed? Are there new ones, better ones, or you still have your favorites?

You know, Covid, that was the downside of COVID Right. I couldn't really go to Tijuana and try many new places. So I would say Taco Nasso still continues to be my top. However, Telefonica is doing a great job. They have quite a few food trucks there and the tacos that are fabulous. Now my best kept secret is Valle de Guadalupe or Wine Country. If you've never been there, that is the place to go for any food, tacos included.

I haven't been yet, so it's definitely still on the list. Yeah, it's become quite the foodie place just as much as rivaling the wine too, right?

Oh, yeah. So let's do this for real this time. Let's go to Valle Guadalupe and taste all of that fabulous food.

Let's do it. Yeah. Let's bring some of our tech friends with us. We'll make a little tech trip out of it.

That'll be cool.

That'd be great. Yeah. Well, Martza, it's great to hear you're doing well, but even more great to hear how much more you're investing in the community to build great talent which builds great companies, which benefits all of us. So your success is our success. So thank you and keep it up and I'm looking forward to seeing you soon.

Thank you, Neil. Thank you for giving me the chance to share the awesome things that are happening in our region. So I really appreciate it.

Absolutely. Thanks a lot. Cheers.

Bye.

Thanks for tuning in to Tacos and Tech Podcast. You can find all of our episodes on freshbredtech.com as well as on Twitter at Tacos and Tech Pod. Also follow FreshBrute tech and all of our social platform platforms and make sure to share and give a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify or Google Play. Thanks again.

You know we got it.

Hey.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, Tacos in tech. You know we got it.

Hey.