The Pursuit of Scrappiness

#21 - Carlos Paniagua 🇪🇪 🇬🇹 🇺🇸 (Glia) on the role of a CTO in a startup that has raised $107 M, ease of doing business in Estonia & revolutionising digital customer service in USA


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Carlos Paniagua is the co-founder and CTO of Glia - one of the leading digital customer service providers that to date has raised $107 million in VC investment. Coming from Guatemala originally, Carlos has spent a third of his life in Estonia, where he also resides currently and runs the technical team of Glia, while his co-founders and the rest of the team are based in the US. 

In this episode, Carlos shares his experience in running a US-Estonian organization in terms of operations and fundraising. We also have an in-depth discussion on the realities and challenges of a startup CTO as well as a look into the role of digital channels for sales and customer service in the pandemic era.

The topics covered in this episode with Timestamps

[03:35] - Digital communication in customer service

  • The impact of the pandemic on customer service
  • Digital sales and support channels becoming mission-critical for most businesses

[09:45] -Being based in Estonia and the US, operations, and fundraising

  • Choosing Estonia for engineering talent
  • Advantages of the time zone difference
  • Establishing enough overlap in work hours between offices
  • Communication and socializing information that is important
  • Ease of relocating to Estonia
  • Living, working, and running a company  in Estonia as a foreigner
  • Hiring abroad vs. relocating
  • What VCs look for from the technical perspective
  • Making sure the licensing is figured out throughout your whole tech stack
  • Considerations in picking VCs to back you
  • The value that VCs bring for the tech side of the business
  • The mechanics of the technical due diligence process
  • Making past and future tech decisions digestible for investors
  • Presenting a US-Estonian company to investors

[34:10] -  The role and reality of being a CTO in a fast-growing company

  • Practical involvement of the CTO in various parts of the business (product, sales, engineering)
  • Choosing fundamental priorities in development to drive all product decisions
  • How to determine if you want/can be a CTO
  • Implementing team onboarding practices
  • Scaling the team
  • Planning of development process and managing expectations
  • Product education for customers
  • Making feature decisions from customer feedback
  • Prioritization in the development process
  • Being a technical founder of a startup without significant prior work experience
  • Competing for tech talent

Find out more on https://www.pursuitofscrappiness.co/ 

Support for this episode comes from Nexpay > https://paynexpay.com/

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