The Future Of Tech Talent And AI’s Impact, With Gino Ferrand

Latin America’s hidden gem of tech talent takes a vibrant turn as Junior Lowery sits down with Gino Ferrand, the dynamic founder of TECLA. Gino reveals the secret sauce behind connecting leading companies with a powerful network of over 50,000 engineers across Central and South America. This episode explores TECLA’s evolution over the past decade, diving into the advantages of nearshore talent, the revolutionary impact of AI on the industry, and the future trends that are reshaping remote work and global teams. Discover how to build highly effective remote teams, adapt to the ever-changing business landscape, and achieve extraordinary success in the competitive world of international tech recruitment.

Check out the full series of Career Sessions, Career Lessons podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/gino-ferrand

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The Future Of Tech Talent And AI’s Impact, With Gino Ferrand

Founder And CEO Of TECLA, A Provider Of Latin American-Based Tech Resources

This show is brought to you by PathWise.io. If you want to take control of your career, join the PathWise community. Basic membership is free. My guest is Gino Ferrand. Gino is the Founder of TECLA, which helps some of the most successful companies in the world leverage the power of nearshore talent. In our discussion, we’ll talk about TECLA, how it got started, the benefits of working with nearshore IT talent, particularly in Latin America, where they’re focused, broader trends shaping remote work, global workforces, and the future of IT staffing. Let’s get going.

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Gino, welcome. Thank you for joining me on the show.

It’s nice to meet you. Thanks so much for having me.

You formed a firm called TECLA. Tell us about it and what inspired you to start it.

TECLA’s Genesis: Building An IT Staff Staffing Powerhouse

We’ve been around for ten years. What we do is we work with technology and software companies in the US who are looking to build engineering teams in South America. Mostly, we work with companies that are looking for profiles and software development. What inspired it was working on a different product years ago and moving back to Lima, which is where I’m originally from.

I moved back and started hiring engineers for this product that we were building. That product didn’t end up going anywhere, but all of a sudden, I had friends and other entrepreneurs from school reaching out. I went to the University of San Diego. A lot of entrepreneurs who ended up building companies while at school and after school started reaching out and saying, “How many engineers do you have now? How did you build that team?” Everyone was looking to hire engineers. That’s how I got started with TECLA.

Do you pull people from across Central and South America, or do you have particular countries that you tend to focus on drawing talent from?

We have over 50,000 engineers who are part of our network. We have engineers in every country in Mexico, Central America, and South America. We are sporadically placing engineers who are in the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica. The most represented countries are Brazil, Argentina, and probably Colombia and Mexico coming in close there. We have profiles that are in pretty much every country.

In the very beginning of PathWise, I worked with somebody who helped with some of the initial design work. He was based in Bogota. I got him through one of the big matching platforms for talent. Upwork, I think it was.

Colombia’s a big favorite for US companies. Many have heard of the great talent in Colombia. Plus, everyone thinks of it as a great place to have an office and maybe visit.

It’s come a long way. It had a pretty rough reputation several decades ago. I know it has become much more popular as a vacation spot for people from the US to go to, which is nice.

Frequently, I’ll speak to friends who are working at technology companies that have offices or teams in Medellín. Talk about that reputational change. Medellín has been huge. The city is so advanced, and there’s so much great talent. Many companies are setting up offices there. That’s to talk about a place where you weren’t thinking about software engineering very long ago.

Tech Talent: Today, we have over 50,000 engineers who are part of our network.

Competitive Landscape, Quality Assurance, And Early Challenges

I mentioned Upwork, which I happened to use several years back. Who do you see as your biggest competitors, and what differentiates you guys?

A lot of hiring managers are familiar with Upwork, but I don’t think that Upwork is one of our direct competitors. There’s Toptal and Turing. Those types of companies have done amazingly well and paved the road for companies that are looking for offshore and remote talent. Being that we’re specifically and exclusively focused on LatAm, we tend to be compared more with BairesDev and companies like Arc, Terminal, and some other companies that are, if not exclusively, have a strong focus on LatAm. For us, we’re 100% Latin America.

Also, what sets us apart besides the Latin America focus and the network that we have in LatAm is our size. We’re about 100 people. I’m still involved in pretty much every project we work on. Every team that we build, I’m involved in. We have a team that has a pretty boutique approach, which a lot of companies, especially when they’re maybe building a high-end, senior team that is three, four, or five people. The specs are pretty advanced, and the requirements are pretty tough. They’re hard-to-fill roles. It’s a different experience.

How do you ensure quality when you’re vetting people initially and in the way that you select people to be assigned to specific client efforts?

That’s something that we’ve developed over the past couple of years. That’s something that we’re constantly improving and working on. What we constantly discuss in our strategy calls every year is how we could improve that vetting process, especially because things change. With AI, candidates being able to use AI, and companies wanting them to be good with AI, but also increasing the complexity of qualifying candidates in the interviewing stage, we’ve had to do a lot throughout the years.

The number one thing for us is English communication skills, experience working with remote teams, specifically with teams in the US, and then tech skills and soft skills. Those are super important for us. Those are the three pillars. Communication, experience, and then soft skills and tech skills. A lot of companies tend to overlook how important the soft skills are, and having engineers be able to understand the type of work they’re doing and be able to explain it to other stakeholders, and things like that.

We have a multi-step process. Pretty much every candidate needs to go through this process to be verified into our network. Once they’re verified, we’ll build out their profile with them on our platform so that they can put what type of opportunities they’re interested in, what type of companies they want to work for, and their skillsets and interests. We take that to be able to match them with the right job and the right team when companies come to us.

You mentioned you’re up to about 100 people. Go back to the early days. You’ve been at this for a while. What were some of the challenges that you had when you first launched the business?

When I first launched, the landscape was a little bit different. There was less competition, but also because the market was smaller. Everyone knows about the talent that there is in India, Eastern Europe, and different places around the world, but LatAm has had this huge amount of growth. During the pandemic, that’s when we saw the biggest spark. After the pandemic, we have seen a huge growth because of the time zone compatibility, mostly, and cultural similarities, too.

Many more engineering leaders have experience working with teams in Argentina, Colombia, and Costa Rica. They have great things to say about these teams. That has been the snowball effect of everyone getting a good experience, then that translating to more demand. Things were different on the talent side as well. There were a lot fewer candidates with experience working with US companies. Now, we see a much more international market on both sides. There’s much more experience on the engineering leader side, but also on the talent that we have in LatAm working internationally.

Have you stayed true to your original mission, or have you had to pivot along the way?

We pivoted quite a bit. When we started, we were doing some staffing, but we were mostly doing project-based work. We were also building out a lot of MVPs. We were working with a lot of seed-stage startups, getting initial technology out. We were also working with some big brands in LatAm, too, like local brands. We worked quite a bit in mobile as well. We were pretty mobile-focused. This was 2014 or so. That was a big point in time for mobile.

We then started naturally changing the business to be more staffing and building teams. We realized that that’s what we were good at. We were creating this huge network of talent. We were vetting talent and building teams with a high success rate, but on the project side, that wasn’t what we were passionate about. It started pivoting. Every couple of years, we’ve gone through some business model changes a little bit, even if it’s on the pricing side, how companies want to hire, and in what capacity, whether it’s full-time, part-time, flexible, or more permanent. We’ve gone through a lot of constant iteration.

Have you pivoted more away from project work at this point? Are you doing more perm hiring for people?

Yeah. We don’t do any project work. We do a 360 staffing model. Companies will come to us, and we will introduce them to candidates in our network. We’ll do that interview and process together. Once they’re ready to hire someone, we’ll also be the employer of record for them and for those hires in LatAm. They’ll have a success manager assigned who is constantly making sure that the team is performing well and everything. We’re not managing the teams, and we’re not developing any custom projects anymore at all. We build a team and then embed it to work with our clients. Our clients are the ones managing the day-to-day of those team members.

Do you market your services? Is it all word of mouth, or do you do advertising, direct sales, and other forms of outreach? I’m curious.

Throughout the years, we’ve tried everything. We’ve done a bit of everything. Throughout the years, word of mouth and referrals have been huge. You build a team for a company and then that CTO goes to another company, or maybe they have colleagues that they met at a conference who are looking for talent offshore or near shore. Word of mouth has always been huge for us. A high-trust service is what we do. It’s pretty good for referrals.

We have also done so much on inbound and SEO specifically. If you look up higher developers in Latin America or higher developers LatAm, TECLA is going to show up 1st or 2nd. That has taken quite a bit of work. With how many people are searching for services on ChatGPT and stuff, it’s a new challenge for us to see how things are changing because we’ve always had such great results with Google and SEO. People are asking, “What’s a good company to hire LatAm developers?” on ChatGPT and stuff. Inbound has been huge for us, but we’ve done cold outreach. We’ve done a lot of networking and events, sponsored events, and gone to conferences. I do think that inbound and then in-person networking, besides referrals, are our best ways to acquire clients.

The Nearshore Advantage: Why US Companies Should Look South

A lot of these things that are in a similar position of trying to grow something that’s a platform-focused operation, I find the advertising is not cost-effective. They have to filter out so much garbage that comes in. Many garbage results, if you want to think about it that way. It’s a bit hard. The economics of customer acquisition are tough in these kinds of businesses. I don’t know what your experience has been, but that has certainly been ours.

The cost per click on these keywords is hundreds of dollars. How many clicks can you get? You can’t get enough volume to your website to drive any meaningful leads. Plus, a lot of them can be unqualified and stuff. I find that that’s the easiest thing to do. Even new companies that are one, two, or three years old, the first thing they think about is, “Let’s do ads on Facebook and LinkedIn, and then let’s do Google AdWords.” That has gotten so saturated. Also, the engineering leaders who are looking for these solutions and looking to hire developers near shore are doing it way more based on social proof and the recommendations from people that they know. Networking is super important in getting our name out there more.

What are some of the other things? You’ve been at this for more than ten years. You’ve built a successful platform business. What do you see as the other keys to success?

In terms of our business in general, this is a bootstrapped company, so it’s been persistence and time. It’s hard to do things. Even with a lot of money, it’s hard to, all of a sudden, have something that’s a traction and that has revenue and actual profit in a year or two. Even if you had all the money in the world, you need to iterate, get to know your buyers, get to know your market, and be constantly innovating. Business model stuff is what we’ve been innovating quite a bit because we’re a service-based business.

You have to adapt. Companies are very into hiring flex and being able to scale up and scale down quickly. That’s super important for companies. In terms of business, I would say that. In terms of a platform business, it is hard because it takes time to have both sides with enough traction that you need to get it going. For us, it has also been trying to provide as much value as we can to the decision-maker that we’re working with. Instead of sourcing candidates, we don’t just source candidates. We source candidates, do vetting, help during the interview process, and are also the employer of record.

We try to bundle up a lot of services that some companies sometimes look at independently. That has been good, too. Once you have a client, it’s better if you can offer them more of the things that they’re looking for. In that way, you also improve your cost of lead acquisition as well, and you’re able to upsell more. That has been important, for sure.

How about being an entrepreneur? What’s easiest and what’s hardest for you?

The easiest is waking up and being excited to try something new in the business that is exciting and easy. The hard part is sometimes staying on track with a long-term strategy. Sometimes, you’re trying things, especially in marketing. What I spend most of my time on is the marketing side and meeting these companies that are looking for talent near shore and to hire engineers in LatAm. That takes a lot of trial and error. Things are constantly changing. Sometimes, those experiments can be a little blind. If you do a lot of marketing, you probably understand what.

Tech Talent: Word of mouth has always been huge for us. It’s a high-trust service, and referrals are key.

Nearshoring Secrets: Keys To Success For US Companies

Let’s shift and talk a little bit more about nearshoring as a business construct. You’ve got a ton of familiarity with how it works, when it works, and when it doesn’t work. What do you think are the keys to success for a company in using nearshore talent?

Where we’ve seen the best results are companies that are looking for not just the quantity of engineers, but are looking for very senior people in hard-to-fill roles and engineers that can embed seamlessly with teams in the US. That’s where we’ve seen nearshore shine because of the real-time compatibility. These teams are also seeing each other face to face sometimes because travel is easier. When someone is, let’s say, in Costa Rica or Mexico, it is super easy for teams to meet up wherever the headquarters are or wherever the US company has the hub, whether it is the Bay Area, Austin, or LA. It allows for faster product development with less of challenges of offshore.

There are places where we talk to companies that are looking to build a team of 100 people who are going to be doing maintenance or QA. Maybe the budget is much lower than you can get in LatAm, the Philippines, India, and Pakistan. Some of these places have great solutions for that. We have seen that the kind of teams we work with tend to be very product-driven teams and usually small teams that are iterating quickly, and things like that. Those have been the main things.

You mentioned maintenance and QA as particular functional disciplines. Do you find that most of your clients are looking for people to solve or address a particular function or a particular software application? Where do they tend to focus the Latin American talent versus what they might have based in the US?

Comparing LatAm to the US, most of the companies we work with are looking to integrate the nearshore engineers with the teams in the US to be working on the same thing. Where I’ve noticed maybe other regions in the world get more traction is when things are decoupled a little more. It’s like, “This team here is not going to be working on the same exact projects as the team in the US.”

The type of companies we work with are Series A, Series B, high-growth startups, and mid-market companies in the US, working with their software teams. Most of the time, it has been, “This is our team. We want to build a team that is going to be fully embedded with this team. They’re going to be working as peers side by side on the same project.” Most of what we do is pretty coupled work.

In between going full captive in a geography, which takes work, investment, knowledge of the local market, and getting people in a one-off more of a body shop construct, you guys are in a happy middle ground. Certainly, having, in my own business experience, looked at doing nearshore and offshore things, unless you’re big, it’s hard to do a captive. You need somebody to help you get set up and get you over the hurdles that are required to do it. This model that you guys are in is going to be more prominent, especially as more areas of the world develop technical proficiencies to be able to do this work.

To compare the US, at least the companies we work with, we do see the nearshore team that comes on as creating an opportunity for more hiring in the US, too. It feeds each other. We haven’t worked with companies that are like, “We’re looking to build a team in LatAm because we want to let go of the team in the US.”

Things are always changing with AI and everything going on, but most of them are growing on both fronts. They’re like, “We’ve got this headcount in the US. We want this headcount in LatAm to couple it together and get to that next milestone, whatever that is, of the product or the startup, like startup funding, to then be able to do that more.” It has been pretty cool to see both feeding each other and not one replacing the other or something like that.

Global Workforce Trends: Shaping The Future Of Remote Work

On the back of the pandemic, you had to work remotely. Do you find that you still have to coach your corporate clients on how to work with a remote location with a different culture? People who are working, I assume, from home in that other country, do you have to coach them on that, or do they pretty much get it at this point?

No. There’s still a lot of coaching. What we do is when we start working with a client, we’ll have a success manager that is assigned. That person is constantly in charge of getting feedback from both parties. This person meets the engineering manager who’s managing the team in LatAm. We’re able to get this person’s feedback and then also get the developer’s feedback. We are able to help in this dynamic so that we’re successful.

After ten years, you’re not just successful by finding the engineer who has the right skills that the company is looking for. It’s not successful when the company hires the person. That’s the beginning. Success is after a year, and the company and the engineer are both happy. You’re going to get that long-term retention because the engineer is happy, but you’re also going to get a company that is happy to grow that team and go forward even stronger in LatAm.

When someone gets hired, for us, that’s great, but the work begins by making sure that we’re helping in the overall equation and helping the team be successful. There’s a lot of that. I was scared when everyone started going back to the office. The pandemic was such a spike for business. Remote was the word. That brought us so many new companies to work with.

Since everyone is back in office and so many companies are five days back in office, I did worry that that would affect the hiring decisions, too, to be like, “Let’s not go near shore. Let’s keep everything in office and hire more people in office.” That hasn’t been the case. We’ve been off to a great first half of 2025. Companies are in office, but you’re still in a lot of Zoom calls even if you’re in the office. People are all over the world. The international aspect of hiring, especially in engineering and software development, is there to stay and even to grow, probably.

There is another thing that has made a difference. You see this whether you’re traveling as a tourist or working in other countries. English language skills are significantly better around the world. For better or worse, it at least gives people a literal common language that they can use to work together, almost irrespective of where they are. There are great university systems in a lot of other countries than in the US. We’ve got the ability to couple that tech talent in your space, English language skills, which everybody has in common. It makes it a lot more feasible than it would’ve been many years ago.

I was watching the news about the Google release. I don’t know if they’re open to the market yet, but they were at least doing the keynote on them and stuff. One was a 3D experience on virtual calls, which is awesome, because then, that allows for more immersion. They also had a live or real-time translation tool. I remember when I first started TECLA. Skype was developing something that could do that. I don’t know what happened to it.

Skype is gone. It clearly went away.

Having someone who is fluent, bilingual, or has an advanced level of English, which is something that is a requirement for us, is still critical. Even with these tools, I wonder how long it will take before US companies can hire an engineer who is basic English, but real-time, everything he says is going to be translated. I wonder how long that’s going to take. It’s an adoption.

It’s not just the technology, but whether humans are going to adopt that or not. We haven’t had a company not say that they need an advanced level of English. We’ll see how long it takes for a company to say, “That’s okay. They can use the Google tool. That’s okay. They don’t need English. They can use this tool.” It hasn’t happened yet.

I can remember watching Star Trek back in the day with the universal translator tool that they had. I would joke, like, “Maybe you can hear what the person is saying in your own language, but how’s it manipulating their video feed?” That’s not a problem anymore either. It doesn’t feel like that particular aspect of Star Trek is all that far off from being a reality.

Besides being able to communicate on a call in English, having an advanced level of English in LatAm for an engineer does also typically shows that they’ve had more access to better educational resources. It is typically a more senior engineer or a more capable engineer, honestly, in my opinion. Without English, they’re mostly consuming, let’s say, Spanish content or Portuguese content. Most of the top technical content, technical tutorials, projects, and everything happening in the world around software development is in English. It’s not just a translation. The engineer typically is a more well-rounded engineer, I’ve found.

Navigating The AI Revolution In IT Staffing

You’ve mentioned AI a few times, so we should probably talk about it. How do you see it affecting your business positively and negatively?

Positively. We’ve talked to many companies where in the job description and in the initial conversations, they want someone who has good capabilities with Codex, Copilot, Cursor, and all of these AI assistance and development tools. We’re seeing that already happen. With how it’s going to impact, you can have an argument for both sides.

It could allow more hiring nearshore and internationally because of these superpower tools that are able to supercharge people, but they could also be replacing engineers. That’s something that we’re seeing with how many CEOs and Zuckerberg is coming out and saying that junior developers are already here in terms of AI and things like that. Who knows what’s going to happen with developers? It’s such an interesting inflection point for them.

Tech workers, a lot of other industries, and a lot of other job functions as well.

All knowledge workers, which is so interesting. The top career move and trajectory that you could have would be a knowledge worker, and then those are the first jobs to be AI.

Tech Talent: Without English, you’re mostly just consuming Spanish or Portuguese content, and most top technical content, tutorials, projects, everything in software development is in English.

They are running out of places to retreat to.

With plumbing and physical things, you’ll still need a little more time for robots to do that computer vision to fix your toilet or something.

What are some of the other things that you guys pay attention to in terms of global workforce trends?

AI is a huge one. I’m writing a newsletter that goes out Tuesdays and Thursdays, which is focused on how AI and AI tools are impacting the software developer market, but also the day-to-day of software development, hiring, and stuff. I’ve been able to do quite a bit of research into the things we were talking about, like what’s happening for engineering managers and how it is changing because they need to incorporate certain AI tools. Since the big tech CEOs are very bullish on AI and using AI, then typically, that means that every CEO of every startup, even the smallest startup, will be on that same bandwagon of, “Let’s see how much more we can do by leveraging AI.” It seems like the trend is to adopt AI as much as possible in your workflows.

You’ve got a lot of CEOs out there making big promises. You go down into the organization, and they’re like, “Wait a minute. What does that mean for us? How are we going to pull off what the boss is saying?” You then have public company boards going, “Do not blow up this company over AI stupidity.” You’ve got these competing forces that are playing out and are making it an interesting space.

Even since ChatGPT hit the market and took AI to a level of public consciousness, before that, I can remember studying very early forms of Artificial Intelligence when I was in school. I’m older than you are, so that was a long time ago. The tools have been consistently developed. It’s amazing to watch how much has happened even in the last couple of years since the ChatGPT Storm hit us all.

What you said is probably the most important point to realize. Integrating AI is great for CEOs because everyone wants to have a company. If it’s a public company, then it’s like, “Buy our stock because we’re so ahead of the AI game.” Even if it’s a startup, if it’s very AI-enabled, then you might be able to raise more money and stuff.

The top-level decision-makers are like, “We need AI to give us that competitive advantage,” and then the engineering managers are like, “How do I get to the productivity gains that you want from using AI?” At the end of the day, it still seems like AI can spit out a lot of terrible code or code that has flaws or that is not optimal and has security issues, vulnerabilities, and stuff like that. It’s an interesting time for engineering leaders if they’re the ones who need to make the productivity gains a reality that the CEOs and top leaders are offering the markets.

To your point, Zuckerberg’s comment about our junior developers being replaced by AI, the problem with all of this is how do the senior developers become senior developers without going through the junior ranks? At some point, there’s got to be a medium. I can’t believe, in the near term, that you’re going to have Artificial Intelligence completely taking over software development, or somebody says, “I want a program to do this.” You continue to prompt it back and forth to the point where it works the way that you want it to.

Adapting Business Models And Staying Competitive In A Changing Market

The tools will get better, but maybe that ends up meaning that rather than having to do the actual coding, you’re using English language prompts to describe requirements. That’s what software development is. The challenge with AI is that it’s taking away the more basic things in a lot of places. It’s a dislocation in what happens in terms of its impact on labor markets because people can’t build experience without having the experience. What are some of the other things you see going on in the IT staffing space?

Since the pandemic, one big trend we’ve seen, at least when it comes to nearshore and offshore, is that fewer companies are trying to do everything themselves. During the pandemic and right after the pandemic, a lot of our clients were like, “We’re trying to build an office. We are setting ourselves up in Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia. We’re trying to expand on the talent side and have bigger value on the talent side.”

This started about a few years ago. I am seeing a lot more companies appreciate the kind of model that we offer, which is that we don’t want to have to hire a bunch of HR people and deal with all of the intricacies of building a team in Brazil. A lot of companies tried that, too. Maybe they weren’t able to hire enough high-quality people, so then they ended up doing all this overhead of setting up their Brazil location, and then it was like, “We’re not getting the value out of this operation.”

We’re seeing a lot of companies come and say, “We’re looking for something that is completely integrated. You guys do everything. We need to meet high-quality people. We need to be able to scale up or scale down. We don’t want to do any of the employment or worry about any of that stuff.” I’ve seen that change, which is good. Companies are getting more profit-focused. It’s like, “You guys do that. We want good people on the team so that we can get to our milestones instead of having to deal with having a huge ops and people team.”

You look at all of these different things going on. There are different aspects of workforce trends, people working remotely, contract gig work, fractional models, and what you guys are doing in terms of allowing people to go into other markets without necessarily having to do all the work themselves. There are many different labor models, certainly, than there were generations ago.

The companies that are successful are probably the ones that have figured out how to manage their ecosystems the best. A lot of companies are still stuck in the, “We need to own this. People have to be in the office.” If you can’t crack through some of those mindset shifts, you’re probably going to get left behind relative to the companies that are more able to take advantage of a global talent pool in different labor models that allow them to be more agile in the end.

Agile is what companies are trying to be instead of building horizontally a lot.

Talk a little bit about your pre-TECLA background. You mentioned you went to UCSD. What did you foresee yourself doing? What did you do years before you started TECLA?

I don’t have many years pre-TECLA since I started it pretty much out of college. I went to the University of San Diego, so USD. It was a great experience. I was building products as soon as I got to school. Pretty much freshman year and stuff, I was already trying to put prototypes together and MVPs for different tech businesses and software stuff. I was always interested in software stuff, to be honest. Even in high school, I liked eCommerce businesses. I did start a couple of eCommerce businesses before going to college. I was always interested in building digital stuff, to be honest. Besides that, pre-TECLA, there isn’t much. This is what I’ve been doing my whole life.

You’ve made it work, which is great.

It’s good. I’m always excited by it. Every year is different. I love business, at the end of the day, so every year, you’re at different challenges. With marketing, maybe you have a bigger budget, so you’re trying new things that you hadn’t tried before. It’s still exciting for me, honestly.

What’s ahead for TECLA?

The next six months are big for us because we’re trying to set up a team in Austin. We’re trying to be more locally based. We’ve always done so great, meeting companies that are coming to us through Google and through virtual channels, but I’m bullish on meeting people face -to-face, creating old-school in-person connections, and building more connections that way.

We’re trying to bring together dinners for engineering leaders starting in Austin. We’re going to be trying to go to some higher-end, good Latin American restaurants in the area to try to bring that Latin American flavor and try to give back to the community a little bit and get people together. What we’re hoping to do is continue improving the service that we have and get more customers in the door. Our network and our vetting process, all of that is working so well that it’s continuing to open doors with new relationships and everything.

With your core team, you mentioned you have 100 people. How many of them are based in the US, and how many of them are based abroad?

We have four people in the US, and everyone else is based abroad. I’m in the US, so I’m 1 of those 4. We’re looking to start hiring more business development and relationships, but a different kind of business development, not like cold outreach, because that doesn’t work anymore. At least in the industry that we’re in, I feel like cold outreach is dead in the water in 2025. I feel like going back to meeting people and creating a community is the best way to go.

Entrepreneurial Wisdom: Building A Lasting Business

Last question. From your own experience thus far, what career advice would you give to somebody who’s tuning in?

In terms of doing anything like a startup or entrepreneurial, I give my nephew this advice. He’s always trying to get rich quickly. I feel like I’ve done many side projects while I’ve been doing TECLA. I have different interests. One of my biggest interests is video gaming, so I’ve created a few things in that space that have always been side things. That also has allowed me to then turn back and be like, “We’ve been doing TECLA for ten years.” That’s also why it’s worked out so well, because we continue optimizing and continue making everything that we can better.

Tech Talent: It’s an interesting time for engineering leaders if they’re the ones that make the productivity gains that CEOs and top leaders are offering the markets a reality.

At least in my experience, it hasn’t happened in 1 year or 2 years. It has taken many years. That’s usually what I try to tell people who are trying to get started with something. Some people seem to raise $100 million and then sell their company for $1 billion in 2 years. That’s incredible. They’re all over the news, but there is such a low number of companies for what everyone is starting in business. That’s what I usually tell people. It takes time to build something, too.

It does. Not everybody can build a billion-dollar business in six months from their garage.

I feel like that’s what every new entrepreneur focuses on. When I was in college, that was the time when the movie The Social Network came out. I feel like everyone was trying to raise money and become a billionaire.

Be like Zuckerberg.

I feel like it’s not the reality for 99% of us. If you’re going to get discouraged by not making it in a year, then you’re going to be stuck in a cycle.

There’s a reason they call them unicorns. It’s not because they’re prevalent. Thanks for doing this. I enjoyed the conversation. I appreciate your time.

Thank you so much. I enjoyed it.

You take care.

Thanks. You too.

‐‐‐

Thanks to Gino for joining me to discuss TECLA, how it got started, the benefits of working with nearshore IT talent, some broader trends shaping remote work, global workforces, and the future of IT staffing. As a reminder, this discussion was brought to you by PathWise.io. If you’re ready to take control of your career, join the PathWise community. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on the website for the PathWise newsletter. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks.

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About Gino Ferrand

Gino Ferrand is the founder of TECLA, which helps some of the most successful companies in the world leverage the power of nearshore talent. His approach focuses on making it easier for startups to access reliable, time-zone aligned talent without the complexity of traditional recruiting.

TECLA is a community of 45,000+ tech professionals from across Central and South America. They directly recruit, hire, train, and pay top remote developers who are looking for full-time remote or relocation opportunities. In their 10 years in the industry, their detailed vetting process has allowed them to boast a 97% success rate.

Gino and his steam have built nearshore teams for companies with $10+ billion in combined value in industries such as AI, fintech, healthtech, HRtech, e-commerce, gaming, real estate, social networking, augmented reality, sharing economy, SaaS, fashion, and more. He was born and raised in Lima, Peru and currently lives in Seattle.