Sergio Martinez unveils the importance of turbo-charging cloud initiatives
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Sergio Martinez, Founding Partner at VEscapes Labs, was recently interviewed by leading LA-based podcaster Adam Torres of Mission Matters Business Podcast regarding the importance of turbo-charging cloud initiatives in the modern workplace.
Sergio Martinez says his primary mission is to connect the best available tech talent in Mexico with clients in the United States that are undergoing strategic cloud initiatives. He also wants to offer a professional development platform for top female tech talent. At VEscape Labs, he works hard to find and develop diverse talent from both local colleges and existing talent pools.
Mexico has long been a source for great manufacturing and mechanical engineers, and Guadalajara is now emerging as one of the top IT hubs in Latin America. Sergio believes that leveraging IT Talent from Mexico offers many benefits, including a skilled workforce, cultural similarities, cost-effectiveness, proximity to the US, and strong bilingual skills.
Prior to founding VEscape Labs, Sergio established and ran the tech hub for Kalypso – an innovation consulting firm – in Monterrey. Based on his learnings from that experience, he’s been able to quickly establish and scale a similar hub in Guadalajara for VEscape Labs.
Watch Full Interview:
On today’s episode of Mission Matters, Sergio dives into the values his firm has used to build a strategic source for IT talent in Guadalajara. He also expresses the importance of leveraging this specialized talent to turbo-charge cloud initiatives in a cost-effective way.
In this podcast, the host covers:
- How did Sergio Martinez start his journey into this industry?
- What does VEscapes Labs offer clients?
- What are some of the things that made the launch of VEscapes Labs successful?
- What makes Mexico the right place to create a tech center like VEscape Labs?
- What is it like working through colleges to source new talent?
- What is it like acquiring senior level talent through their development program?
- Why are companies moving to cloud-based programs?
- What size companies will benefit most from cloud initiatives?
- What are some challenges for companies when they move to cloud-based initiatives?
About the Podcast Guest
To learn more about VEscape Labs, visit https://www.vescapelabs.com/
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to be a part of our community, head on over to missionmatters. com forward slash community to apply. All right. So today is a very special episode. We have Sergio Martinez on the line. He’s founding partner over at VScape Labs, and we’ll be talking about turbocharging cloud initiatives.
First off, hey, Sergio, I just want to say welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. So we got, we got a lot of talk about today. So I know you were referred over to the show by Bill Poston over at Launchbox and and Amy, and I know we’ve worked with them and, and had the opportunity and the privilege to introduce many of the companies that they work with.
So we’ll get into that and talk a little bit about the history. I understand you work with them for many years, even before. So we’ll talk about all that in a moment, but you know, the drill we’ll start this episode, the way that we start them all with what we like to call our mission matters minute.
So Sergio, we at mission matters. We amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s our mission. Sergio, what mission matters to you? Thank you. So yeah, my personal mission at the escape labs and, you know, throughout my professional career has been, Two objectives, really, you know, the first one is connect all the available talent that we have in Mexico, especially on the tech industry with our clients here in the United States, you know, you know, that for some reason, Mexico has been the manufacturing background of the U.
S. companies for many years, but for some reason. They have not really tapped into the talent that there are beyond the typical manufacturing careers, mechanical engineers, especially, you know, in the tech industry. That is where, you know, I have been working for the past decade or more. That’s one. So I want to make that connection in second is to really offer a, you know, professional development platform for female talent.
I’m the proud parent of two daughters, and I think the only way to really help them to have a better life is to make an impact, you know, so. What is the best way to do it? Just my, you know own company. I’m pushing hard to have, you know, a diverse talent in the escape lab. So to have that gender party, at least it’s not a easy task on the tech industry, but we are really pushing forward for it.
It’s great and it’s great mission and I’m happy to have you here on the show today and we’re I want to go. We’ll go further in some of these issues to like I like developing tech in Mexico and like and the talent I should say and like why why we don’t hear more about this. But first I want to know more about Sergio.
So like like how did all this start for you? Like tell me a little bit more about your entrepreneurial journey leading up to the escape labs. Yeah, no, Adam. So it’s interesting just because I always wanted to be the owner of my business, right? And at the same time, owning your own business is a scary feat, right?
So yeah, it’s difficult. It’s not easy. So I took the quote unquote, easy way. I became a consultant and that’s, you know, a, you know, known way to. As you come, you know, true up the ranks, I finally become a partner in a company. You are, you know, finally owning a piece of a business, right? And that’s the opportunity that I had with a young Calypso many years ago.
I, you know, became a partner with them and it was really the first. piece of as an entrepreneur there, we had a say that you have to build the house that you want to live on. And that was basically the mantra. If you want it to have a retail practice, Bill and George, the founding partners will provide you with the support to develop that practice.
So that’s where, you know, everything started and, you know. Fast forward that and, you know, a couple of new dreams and it’s, that’s how we got with to vScape Labs. What was the original idea for vScape Labs? Like, how’d that come about? So really, you know, we have been doing the same idea of vScape Labs in a different segment of a tech industry.
In 2020, 2012, sorry, when I joined Calypso, I was approached by Bill and asked me, he’s like, hey, Can we set up a technical center in Mexico? They have tried to do these in Asia. They have tried to do these places in Latin America and didn’t work. And so let me check if we have, you know, going back to the talent, let me check that we have the technical talent that we need to offer our clients.
And, you know, In 4 months, we hire 6 engineers at the end of 2012 and, you know, fast forward that 10 years and we ended with 130 people, not only developers, we start moving also some of the back office like. marketing, graphic design, accounting to Mexico. And, you know, one of the things that we always heard, it’s, you know, creating that technical, that technical center was the second best idea after creating Calypso.
So, you know, it makes me really proud now to start moving into cloud technologies with VSK, but we’re really replicating that model that we successfully launch at Calypso. What are some of the things that made that particular launch successful versus maybe some of the other markets that you tried to do it in before or prior, like what made Mexico special?
I think that, you know, The first one will be the sense of loyalty that you find on Mexican professionals. You know, once you are able to identify yourself with the mission of that company that hires you and you develop a really exciting and challenging Atmosphere. And when I say that is, you know, we start putting these kids from, you know, newly grads from college working with companies that they buy things, right?
We start working with huge companies like Nike, like, so it was companies that they, they knew because they were going to the US for a vacation and they were buying their products or going to the experiences. Now that we’re part of that, making that reality, right? So So that’s I’ll say it in lame terms.
Like that’s a cool factor to me. Like I’m young, I’m out of college. Like that’s a lot of the things that in the United States, like you get your first job out and you’re like, Whoa, I know this company. Like, that’s awesome. Right.
And so now what, what are some of the other things? Cause there’s gotta be more than that. Like that. Okay. Culture, I know is a big piece, but like to be able to hire that quantity of people, to be able to scale up, to be able to, to execute so effectively that now you’re moving other things like marketing and some of the other things they’re like, there’s, there’s more to it.
You gotta give me some more Sergio. Yeah, no, definitely. It was, you know, the, the high level of involvement from the leadership at Calypso, you know Bill Poston, myself, all their. Partners and senior managers. We were spending a lot of time down there, coaching people, showing them how, you know, how good project was run, how good code was developed.
So it was not only just going in higher into these colleges, but it was really showing them how to do things and, and bringing. The other piece, it was really the, the relationships that we form with top tier colleges in Mexico, you know alum from a Monterey tech that is, you know, one of the, I will say the best college in Mexico, but Oh, yeah, I’m familiar with it.
That’s a famous college but we have really good talent and perfect English skills. Yeah. You know, hard skills too. So it was easy to then, you know, take those professionals and form them into, you know, high caliber people that it was comparable to the caliber of people that we get here in the United States.
So, and. In some cases, even with a little bit more hunger of success and development. So it just helped them to, you know, really come up and start making an impact at our company. What was it like working through the colleges, like, especially for a lot, a lot of business owners, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of executives that watch this show and that there, there may be scratching their heads like, huh, never really thought about going to Mexico and working through the colleges or sourcing new talent that way.
It’s, I mean, it’s so close. I’m in California. It’s just so close. Like, what was it like working through the colleges? Yeah, really, you know every college, they had a professional advancement department, right? So that they are really. Making sure that whomever class is coming out of college, it gets placed on jobs, you know, really, really fast.
And they have, you know, nice and good, you know, and decent positions on these companies. So that was. It was not, you know, I will tell you, it was not difficult to really, you know, approach them and show them that we were, you know, we were here to stay that we were investing a lot of money on setting up that new center that one of the founding partners was spending a lot of time.
With the college people, you know, with the with the person in charge of professional advancement and myself, it was something that you have to talk the talk and walk the walk. You know, there is a lot of companies that they go on, talk to colleges and say, yeah, I want to hire 20 people and then disappear.
It was, you know, you know, groundwork from day 1. We were there, we started on the career first that they do, you know, one important every year with a small booth of, you know, probably four by four book by the end of, you know, my last year, we ended with one of the biggest boots on that career for, and the traffic that we had on that one, it was, you know, I’m, trust me, it was all, you know, the other companies, there were really a little bit.
Yellows of, you know, how much people we had through that. What about the what about getting your senior level talent there? So the college side, it sounds like you, you built a nice a nice system for bringing newer talent. What about the senior level talent? Like, what was that like recruiting that, that side of the spectrum?
Really, you know senior talent is easy to hire in Mexico. Why? Because as I was telling you, we have a lot of companies, us companies, European companies working. In Mexico for a long time, there’s going to be people there is, you know, they have experience working with, I will say, remote teams or they’re leveling in a regular basis to United States.
So you need a, let’s say a country manager. there is going to be people that is available. Here for us, the key was to find the newly grads and have our bootcamp, you know, our development program to take that person and accelerate the development and career progression. Really, you know, fast, right?
So we will take them from a analyst to a senior consultant quickly, but it was, you know, that was the key for us that we had, you know, hands on projects where we were putting them on real life experience, even our interns, we had an in program that it was not the regular intern that you come and start, you know, organizing all the files on.
No, it’s an intern that is working with the client day in, day out. So by the end of his summer internship, he had real life work experience. So he wanted, or she wanted to come back and get hired the next summer of if there were on the last year of their college to get an offer extended to them, to become a full time employee, because he was that different experience that we were providing to them.
Hmm. Let’s let’s just focus slightly here. And I want, I do want to get into, you know, why companies are moving to the cloud. So I guess, I guess just to, just to kick off that part of the discussion, why are companies moving to the cloud? Yeah, I think that, you know each company will have a different set of objectives when moving to the cloud, but I think that you can, at least three of them are share across all the different companies, right?
The very first one, it will be cost reduction. Right. You know, really you’re moving to the cloud because you don’t want to continue buying physical data centers that have to be managed by you. Right. So you want to have that flexibility that we’re talking about retail companies, right? Right now is the season, the holiday season, the most important time of the year when they are making probably, you know, 50, 60 percent of the money that they make throughout the year.
And they have needs to, you know, elastic needs of that capacity. If they wanted to have, you know, to tender to that capacity, they will have to go and buy new servers right now with a cloud provider. They can go up and down on those, you know, needs. It can be memory needs, can be processing needs. As a, you know, maybe this weekend we’re getting close to Thanksgiving to a Black Friday.
They will have a peak on usage of their assets, right? So they can just tap into additional capacity without a problem and just will pay for that for that week, not for the rest of the year. That’s the one, you know, with the cost. The other one will be. Just the scalability of, you know, be able to scale up and down.
As we were discussing, you know, you, you need it for the month. You don’t need it for the full year. I just want to use it for that specific month. Right. And the other one, it will be just improved performance, you know having access to cloud infrastructure. It gives you access to the latest technology out there.
So it’s going to be able to, they’re going to be able to run their applications or access their data in a much faster and better way, right? So they don’t have to continue upgrading their physical data centers because. Cloud providers are in charge of that and making sure that they offer the best of the best to their clients.
Now, what, what size of companies are you typically seeing kind of make the move to clouds? Is it for small businesses, only middle market enterprises, all of the above? Like, like talk to me about like the size of the companies and what that can look like. Yeah, it’s really all of the above, right? You know, really.
Every company in the good thing about, you know, cloud right now and all providers is that they can give you an offer you something that fits what you need, right? Yeah, I’m going to be the one size fits all, you know, use a small company, you can come and say, I need. X amount of storage, X amount of processing capacity.
Mm-Hmm. . And they will, you know, they will have a pricing, pricing package that will fit to your needs. Mm-Hmm. . And then you have, you know, the enterprise level that they will need, you know, hundreds of terabytes of of storage. And you’ll have also, you know, the, the different providers. They will, they will pro, you know, offer that to them.
Mm-Hmm. . It will really depend also on the needs of each one of the companies, right? Some of the companies, they will be needing more processing because they have a lot of application or solutions that they are running on the cloud. So that, you know, imagine, you know, those servers on these class providers are just, you know, computers that you don’t have in a physical, you know, desktop, right?
And you will have. Processing and storing capacity that you will require depending on the workloads. That’s the information or applications that you have on cloud to run in an efficient way. What are some of the challenges that you find businesses have when they’re making their move to the cloud? Like what holds them back?
I think not spending enough time analyzing the type of workloads that they have today. And you say, we are going to move everything into the cloud. And there were a lot of companies that when they start seeing the potential savings are moving to the cloud. They say, let’s move everything. Yeah. And they realize that, you know the cloud bills are on by minute.
Right. If you have X amount of a story storage X amount of processing, it will be charged by the minute. And if you don’t do a good assessment and say, I really need these on the cloud, because I need access of to that information 24 seven 99 percent of the time it should be available. Probably is that, you know, don’t you don’t need to move everything, right?
So spending a little bit more time and doing a good assessment inventory of the type of world was that you have and what do you need to do with those workloads will give them a much better solution and optimize solution to their needs, right? And I have seen right now companies that they move everything in the cloud.
And they are backtracking. They’re saying, okay, these, we only need that information every three months, probably can leave that on a physical data centers that my I. T. department can manage, right? I don’t have that readily available. 90, you know, 24 7. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so that I feel like what you’re also describing is that there’s a, there’s kind of a set process and, and going through like making these decisions.
Maybe walk me through a little bit. So we’re a new company or we’re, let’s say a middle market company. We’re thinking about moving to the cloud. We’ve been hearing it. We’ve heard, you know, a couple of different people talk to us about the potential savings and other things that we should, and now we’re finally, all right, we’re, we’re going to the table.
We’re trying to figure this out. Like where, where does someone start? Yeah, definitely. You know I will. I will love that. They start with us, right? Giving a call to Sergio Martinez real or somebody at VSK labs. We’re ready to move to the cloud. Can you help us? Because we can help them to review those workloads and make sure that we then propose them what is going to be the best service provider cloud provider for them, right?
Because I was telling you, you know, all of them offer. Basically the same service, but they price their service in a different way, right? You know, the amount of data transfers that you have or the different, you know, data storage capacity that you want the pricing may be a little bit different. You may not have a lot of information, but you are transferring that information from your office in LA to your office in San Antonio or your office in Mexico city.
And every, every data transfer is going to cost some money, right? There are some vendors that they don’t charge you as long as you’re changing, moving that information in your intranet. So there is going to be some of those elements that we can help them to say. With the workloads that you have here and the objectives, you know, that you have, the strategic objectives that you have with your firm, we can say vendor A is much better than vendor B for you.
And in that way, avoid surprises that when you think that you want to save money, you end paying more every month because you transfer information to the vendor that it was not the best one for you. Yeah, there’s so there’s some potential landmines if you don’t do this, right? It sounds like. Yes, definitely.
What is it? So VScape Labs? I know one of the things that you’re when we talk about it, you always say, Adam, and I was waiting to get the full answer. But you say, Hey, we’re not just another tech company. Like, what does that mean to you? Yeah, you know, there’s a couple of things. So We are a value first company.
What that really means is that, you know, we, we put our people first, right? So we have, you know, six different values that that’s how we manage our business. That’s how I like to manage my team. And that’s how we manage our client relationships too, right? First of all, it’s people first, we want to make sure that our.
Employees, they’re having fun when, you know, when they’re working with us it’s not always easy because projects are difficult, but we do care about, you know, the personal interest that that person has in addition to the professional interest. Right? So we, we see it as a whole. You have to. You have to be part of the family.
And that’s the second, one of the, you know, the other values, you know, we are the family that you choose. I have received a little bit of mixed feedback about that value. So like, well, is this a business or is this, you know, a fraternity? It’s like, well, you know, re remember that time when you had, you know, the best time of your professional career, probably it was a difficult project.
And maybe the objectives you, you, you achieve all the objectives of that project, but it was difficult, but you had a nice time. And every single time that I do that, it’s like a, why I had a nice time. I look back and it’s the people that I was working with. It was people that up to today are on my quick dial myself and because are my friends.
So when, when you. Face those tough projects with the people around you. It’s, you know, nice people that they have your back You know those difficult projects they just become, you know, one of those you know, nice barbecue stories that you tell That project when we all were spending all nighters, but we at the end of the day we deliver our you know That’s why you know people, you know People first, the family that you choose, the other one they like to talk, it’s driven by diversity.
Right. You know, one of the things I’m Mexican, but I, you know, I have lived in 13 countries. So I have been, you know, really. You know, I, I’m, I’m blessed because of that, I have seen good, bad, and the ugly of diversity. Right. Yeah. What I want to do, as we were talking at the beginning of the call, it’s provide that gender parity to to this industry, at least on my company, right?
It’s not easy because unfortunately, STEM careers are not as an attractive to females as are for, for men. And we are tapping into that. We have, you know, programs with the colleges where we are driving females into this industry, making sure that we have inter programs, just dedicated for females, so we can, we can fight that battle of having, you know, achieving gender party and the diversity, you know.
It’s not only because of gender, it’s we, you know, we like to welcome, you know, any type of ideology, religious, anyone because we feel that, you know, having that diversity makes your team much more complete, right? When, when. You only have, you know, one type of ideas for, you know, religious beliefs, you’re only, you’re seeing just one slice of the pie, right?
When a team is diverse, the solutions that you put on the table to your clients are going to be much more creative and interesting. Well, Sergio, I just have to say it has been great having you on the show today, learning more about the work that you’re doing in Mexico, building this. I mean, in the colleges for the things that you’re doing to really aid diversity in tech jobs, not just by, as you mentioned, race, but by by religion and otherwise political beliefs.
I mean, lots of other things there. So I just think it’s awesome. It’s a great story and one that I’m happy to bring to my audience. But that being said, Sergio, I mean, what’s next? What’s next for you? What’s next for VScape Labs? Yeah. So, you know, definitely what is next. We’ll continue working in this space, you know helping companies to migrate to the cloud and adopt cloud technologies and continue developing their applications that they need.
So you know, we will be happy to, if you can visit us at the escape labs dot com to learn more about how we can help you or your company with these, you know, cloud journey that. At least it’s going to last, you know, another 2025 years based on what I, you know, I have read. There are some numbers out there that it says that it’s going to take 25 years to the US to migrate all the on premise data and solutions to the cloud.
And, you know, cloud is here to stay and we’re, we’re here to help any company that they want to migrate to the cloud. That’s great. And that website one more time for the audience, it’s going to be the escape labs. Wonderful. And speaking of the audience, we’ll put all that information in the show notes so that so that you can just click on the links and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters or engaging in an episode, we’re all about bringing on business owners, entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. I’m going to share their mission. The reason behind their mission, like why do they do what they do? What wakes them up in the morning and gets them fired up to go out in the world and make a difference.
If that’s the type of content that sounds interesting or fun or exciting to you, we welcome you. Hit that subscribe button. We have many more mission based individuals coming up on the line and we don’t want you to miss a thing. And Sergio, really it has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thank you Adam. Thank you for having me.
