Carlos Quirarte (00:00:31):
For me, it comes down to three things. One is cultural alignment with global leadership. The second one is talent strategy. And the third one is scalable operations.

So like, for example, in terms of cultural alignment with global leadership is understanding the company's expectations and translate those into locally in Mexico, right? So as I was saying, how is it culturally speaking, is it that we can merge and make this work? Because the company already has its own culture and coming to a brand new region with, again, a different culture, different language, different ways of thinking and doing things. That's the piece that is also, like, very, very important for me in acting as a kind of like a mediator and as a translator in terms of how is it that things work in Mexico and how things work with the company in other regions or if it's coming from America. How is it that we can combine the strengths and the abilities from both sides and make it work, right?

Then in terms of talent strategies, building strong new grad programs and partnership with the universities, which is something that I did with these three companies — with Uyala, EPM, and C3AI. Because this gives the companies the opportunity to work with this talent that is eager to learn and to apply everything that the students learn when they were at the university. And how is it that we can kind of help them just go through the right processes and the way that the companies really work and how's the real life from a professional standpoint, right?

And then in terms of scalable operations, establishing processes early that can grow with you — like KPIs, delivery governance, documentation, and strong onboarding frameworks — are key. This helps us to build a very strong foundation, and then from there we can grow, and this will help us to scale. If you don't have these components, it would be challenging or harder for the company to be successful in any landscape.

Manuel Martinez Herrera (00:00:08):
Yeah, we debated that a lot internally and that was at a board meeting that we decided with the entity because we were looking at the two models, right? Do we just like hire them through like a third party — like a Deel or a Remote or whatever one of those? Or do we go full-fledged and open our own entity and all that?

And because we knew we were going to hire, we were going to grow very quickly. We wanted to have like 40 people within six months. Talking to the board, one of the board members was very adamant. She said: “If you're hiring five people, whatever, then yeah, you can do either and it's going to be fine. But if you're going to have so many people and you want to have your culture and you want them to feel like they're part of the company, you're better off doing your subsidiary and they're not employed through someone else. You can kind of give them the same packages that you give in the US, just makes them feel better.”

And then the other thing is, if you do the contractor model, if after a while you want to turn into your own entity, you're going to have to pay the fees of the breakup fees. So knowing, like, you know, that's a long-term thing for you guys and you want to grow quickly, it makes more sense to do it that way.

And it took us like four months to be ready to hire someone with the entity and the social security number and the tax number and the whatever. But because we started in December of ‘22 and we wanted to be able to hire by May, June of ‘23, it was all within the timelines we had. So that worked out very well for us. Great.

My advice would be, I think it's similar to that. If you're just testing the waters and for now you're just going to hire one engineering team and you're going to have seven to eight people, then I think doing the third party thing is fine. If you are all in and you know it's gonna be important for you, then I think the sooner you have your own entity, the better it's gonna be for you.

Juan Pablo Chapa (00:01:59):
Sure. Yeah, I agree with that 100%. I think we, at Connect 33, we see a lot of companies that go into it with the contractor model and say like: “Well, if it grows to a certain number…” But I don't necessarily... I think you're working at a disadvantage by going. I think if you just commit to the entity up front, you're likely to hit that 10 much faster than if you don't.

Manuel Martinez Herrera (00:02:26):
And you put the pain up front and then it's smooth sailing versus in the middle of like having to switch everybody from one thing to the other and explain what's going on. And it just becomes more burdensome, I think, in the long term.

So what we call L1s and L2s. We divide our engineers as kind of like L1, L2, L3, then you become a senior, then you become a staff, and then you will become a principal — kind of like L4, L5, L6.

So that L1, L2, we were very successful very quickly. Same with managers — very good pool of managers.

Where we struggle a little more — and there's good talent, it's just harder to find, you have to pay more — is that mid to high level individual contributor: those senior, staff, principal level. And I think that's... there's again there's the talent.

Where we struggle is because, A, we have a requirement of: you have to be in the office three days a week. Which for us was very important in order to open the office, create the culture, enable the teams quickly as we were hiring a bunch of people together at the same time.

And some of these more mid to senior talent, many of them don't want to come to an office.

I think that's changing again — more in office. I think especially, obviously, in the US, it's become very prominent now in office again. And I think Mexico, little by little, more people are getting comfortable coming to the office.

But yeah, the sheer number of software engineers in Mexico is huge, right? You have UNAM, where like 5,000 of them graduate every year. There's a bunch of American companies coming here. So the talent exists. You just need to make sure you have a successful proposal for them — I mean, attractive proposal for them.

Carlos Vela (00:00:35):
That's a good question. First, what we are trying to do is we are trying to build these new capabilities, right? Because as a software firm you cannot say “I can do everything,” because — I don't know — maybe the client will be like: “I don't believe you.”

But if you have different capabilities — “Okay, I'm an expert building integrations or Gen AI or with Cloud” — I can sell those services. You know, it's going to be expensive, because that is like a — you're an expert in that specific area. I think that is one thing that we are doing very good right now.

And also we are partnering with different clients. For example, we are building a couple of AI projects in which we help them to build the product. What we also try to — how can I say this? They have a lot of AI engineers, and they are training our engineers with AI. It's like: “I will give you this and you will give me that.”

And that is great for us, because sometimes it is hard to find AI engineers or to train them. Sometimes you can see a job description: “I'm looking for an AI engineer, 10 years of experience.” AI is not 10 years — like Gen AI and stuff like that. So sometimes it's difficult to train, but you can ask for help from different companies that maybe they have that expertise and then can help you.

So I think that the capabilities are great. I think that we are trying to improve our recruitment process, because maybe in the beginning we were more like: “Okay, we need to fulfill this position and we will hire anyone that could fit that position.”

But right now we are looking more for specific skills, because sometimes a senior developer is not about knowing how to code or be the best coder in the world. It's about soft skills. You need to have communication skills. You need to have leadership. You need to know how to communicate your ideas with the client. It's not about coding. That's something the AI cannot do right now.

So we are trying to improve different areas inside the company in order to become that 500 developers in five or seven or three years — I don't know. That's our goal. But yeah, it's going to be hard, but I think that we can do it. We are very confident that The Codes has a lot of potential.

So we are trying to encourage them to learn new technologies. Even if the client is not willing to pay for that, we push a lot, because this is an investment for us. Because for us, it would be great to have 200 developers with great AI experience, because we can sell that. You know, it's expensive to hire someone with that AI background.

So for us right now, it's about training developers. It's about implementing AI solutions. And maybe at the beginning, we found some pushback. They don't like to change the way they work. But right now, they understand that this is the future.

Today, they have a job that maybe in five years will not exist anymore.

So for example, we do a lot of training for developers, for project managers. We try to use ChatGPT, for example, to — I don't know — analyze RFPs, for example. Or we use Copilot to improve the code from some developers. Sometimes you can improve the performance 2x, 3x time, you know, the time that the developer needs to develop something. So that's what I'm doing right now.

We are also working with a lot of clients with GenAI. So they have this problem inside the company that they don't know how to solve it using AI. So they come to us and they say: “Okay, help me solve this kind of solution.” Or we can build a chatbot, we can build an AI automation, or we can build something that could give value through GenAI.

So right now for us, GenAI is one of the most important things that we need to do inside the company. Because I think that right now we have 10 leads, for example — half of them is about AI. And if you are not well prepared, someone else is going to take that for you.

So we are trying to — for example, we have weekly sessions with developers to talk about new trendings, to talk about new models. For example, OpenAI just released this new version of the API — how we can apply that to this client or to that client of evolution. We compare: “Okay, OpenAI has these advantages, but maybe Anthropic has these advantages, and maybe, I don't know, Cloud or whatever.”

So you need to be always, you know, trying to understand how AI is evolving.

Kenneth Lopez (00:06):
So that goes to kind of like what we provide as an Equals11. We are a post-implementation and optimization consulting firm, which means that we do not implement. So we like to take the current implementation and take it to the next level. This could be optimization, automation, and fixed implementation.

And now in these cases, as you said, what's next? For example, all the AI wave. And I'm not saying this just as a flop — I mean, we're going very tangible, like with Agentforce. So what we're creating right now is how they can apply it.

Because of course, you have the huge companies that they need a very complex implementation because their needs are different. And then you have the small ones that they cannot afford and they can just use out of the box.

But in the middle, you have a huge market space for you, because those are the companies that they cannot hire one of the Big Fours and they have the budget. So that's our sweet spot, because with those clients is where we can leverage the effort of Salesforce.

Which means they need things almost out of the box, but with an implementation. That's where we add value to our customers.

Because this is chicken and the egg: they are too small for the big ones, but they are too big for the small ones and too small for the big ones. So nobody wants to work with them in a very efficient way. And we were able to master that.

Kenneth Lopez (00:11):
I think every single one in different ways. For example, one of the last areas where we're seeing a lot of requests is from digital marketing agencies. Just because they realize that, yeah, they are getting data from all the social media, but they don't know how to process that. They don't know how to work with the CRM.

And at the end, if you're paying for social media, you need to have an accountability of like: “Yes, I'm seeing a number here, I need the same number here. Otherwise, who do I believe — the CRM or the campaigns from Google?”

So that's one of the areas. As I mentioned to you, in every aspect, Agentforce — that's the objective. It's trying to put it in every single vertical.

Now, saying more, we have again the big players that they need something specific. But in general, all these Agentforces that we can implement, we can do it in different ways for all the other verticals.