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
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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