How I Took a Vacation and Launched a Company

Andy Hill vacationed in Cuba in 2018, and while the beaches were great, he’s not one to hang around. Instead, Hill went around saying “¡Hola!” and — with the help of a friend who actually speaks Spanish — peppering the locals with questions about business opportunities. He is, after all, a guy who has founded 12 companies since his college days. (He also runs those startups while holding down a day job as chief revenue officer for City Furniture, a nearly $1 billion company near Fort Lauderdale, Florida.) All of which explains why, as he kept hearing “software engineering” in Cuba , Hill started a firm to staff American companies with Latin American software engineers. He called it Siono, posing a recurring—and somewhat rhetorical—question from that trip: “You want another beer? ¿Sí, o no?” The refrain has become central to the company’s culture of growth, with Hill and team constantly asking, “Are we the best partner they’ve ever had? Yes, or no?” With $5.5 million in 2021 revenue, the Delray Beach, Florida, company appears to have its answer. –As told by Steven I. Weiss

Others have hobbies like skiing; I start a company. I dedicate 50 hours a week to my full-time job, but I have breakfast, dinner, weekends, and then I grow my company — it’s my hobby. I build companies because I just can’t. I know there are better ways to make money, have a stronger work-life balance, or leave a more lasting impact. But for me, I love bringing things into the world and empowering my team to grow. That’s what drives me.

My second start ended badly. When I was 23, I quit a job to start a good social startup that went through a seed round and a Series A round, but then the Series B failed; August 2015 was the worst month of my life when I had to tell 30 of my closest friends and family that we are at a three month burn rate and out of cash.

Fast forward to 2018: After my trip to Cuba, I started looking into it and realized that all of Latin America had incredible software engineering schools. You have quality software engineers in the Eastern Time Zone, speaking English, doing the work at a fraction of the cost you would in the U.S. My friends and I began to realize, frankly, that we had found gold — in the market below value . We can identify talent, handle the first parts of the interview process and place them as external talent in US companies. We started reaching out to friends and family in business in the US and found enough demand to start the company a month later.

I was in lean start mode to find our first customers. There is no magic formula. It’s the same exercise for every entrepreneur – personal alignment. About half were not interested. We learned our word with our early clients and found that our secret sauce was around the fit and culture fit we could promise through our more people-centric hiring process. When we got it right, the rating and retention factor was high. And that’s where we’re focused.

One reason our business model works is because hiring is disgusting. It’s tedious, time-consuming, and most people can’t do it well. The average recruiter spends 20 seconds looking at a resume, which is an accumulation of 20 years of someone’s life.

Hiring is especially bad for tech recruiting companies and candidates. We fix all of this with a better process that’s faster and more human-centric, and finding a fit based on who’s already on the team. A typical software engineer hiring process doesn’t take into account the skills and focus of the existing team, and candidates face lengthy coding challenges that often don’t match the actual work they’d be doing on the job. If our candidate is hired, clients pay the engineers through us and we handle payroll and everything else for that offshore talent.

Now that we have 100 engineers and remote work is so popular, we’re ready for what comes next. I am transitioning us to a growing company. We’ve made massive investments, hired an executive team, and are expanding our services beyond software engineering—adding offerings like graphic design and bookkeeping. We are expanding from Latin America to 20 cities in 10 countries around the globe.