Transcript
I'm Sebas. I'm originally from Argentina, as you probably heard before. I'm now living in Barcelona. I founded Remotely with the same founders that I worked with before at Olapic. My co-founders were previous founders at Olapic. It's a New York based company, and I was living in Argentina. They hired me as their first engineer. It was my first real job, to put it in a way, because I worked before, but it was more like freelancer type of developer. And I dropped out of school actually, because I never finished school, to fly to New York and work with the team from there. And then I went back to Argentina. I built the engineering team up to almost a hundred people. And then the Cordoba office became an overall office, we had operations, sales, and all that. So I was managing the main office in Argentina.
Then all of it got acquired and the founders each went their ways. And a couple of years later, they called me and said, hey, we want to build something, we want to build Remotely. What do you think about it? And I loved the idea, so I jumped in and we started. I started from Argentina and then I moved here in the process.
Matthew: Let's go back. We usually don't do this, but tell me how many years ago and tell me what it was that made you say, let's go forward with this. Because there is such a difference between I'm gonna take a job and I'm gonna start a company. So you must have had these crazy, I don't even want to say visionary, but like these crazy "the world needs to be this way, not the current way it is" beliefs. Tell me how many years and why you were like, I'll jump on this crazy rocket ship that might totally sink, because starting a business is hard.
Sebastian Alvarez: So we started Remotely I think five years ago. And before that we worked together with co-founders for nine years, I think. So I knew them very well. I was not enjoying the work that I had at my previous company. We got acquired by a company that was not fun. It was a big company, a lot of processes, they were public, so with everything that means, a public company, a lot of scrutiny. The revenue was not going well. So we were getting cut and cut and cut until it was a very small team. It was not fun.
And when Paul called me with the idea of Remotely, it was not called Remotely. The original idea was to build teams. The whole idea was that at Olapic what we did was they founded a company in New York and they hired the engineering team in Argentina. And the whole concept, it was not normal for startups from the US to have their engineering team abroad. And even investors would frown upon the idea, because it's like your whole team is abroad. How do you know they're doing the proper work? Do you even own whatever they do?
But we were able to build a very good engineering team, actually top people from Cordoba, the city we were working in, because we were the only startup. And not only the only startup, but the only American startup. And by the way, by that time, the whole Silicon Valley TV show was going on, and we were playing the Silicon Valley idea from Cordoba, right? So it was new, it was fun. We had incredible salaries for being in Argentina. So we were the cool kids back in the day.
But the whole learning that we did was how do you make sure that the engineering or the product team delivers value from a bazillion kilometers away from the main office, and where the clients were and where they were having conversations. So that was our value, to put it in a way. We were able to build products for less money, being abroad. So the whole idea was, can we teach other companies to do the same? Can we teach other US companies how to have their team abroad, but do it properly and build value from Latin America based in the US? And that was the original idea.
And I think we proved we can. And the whole spin-off right there was also doing it remotely. The original general way of doing it was you fly to Buenos Aires or you fly to Lima, Peru or whatever city, Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo, and you would set up a whole office, you would hire a bunch of people, and then set up the desks and ask people to work from there. But that was basically you would only tap into the talent that was in that city. And I was like, we should do it, but do it remotely. Also because I didn't want to have an office. I didn't want to manage an office again because I did that for nine years and I was the worst. And I wanted to travel the world. My biggest regret in my previous work was that I made it so that I was not able to live anywhere else, because I had to manage the office right there.
So I was like, I don't want to manage a team that is tied to a city. And so the whole idea was doing it remote and it worked. And something that helped us, I would say, is that by month eight, I don't remember exactly, COVID hit. So the whole idea of remote work became cool. And from that moment on we grew.
