Synolia LATAM's first year anniversary

2018: my wife and I were expecting our son. My company (Donga) wasn't going as planned, so I decided to get a job. That's how I joined Synolia 4 years ago as a Project manager. Plain old truth. No glitter.

I'm not sure Synolia knows (they will, now) but I was actually looking for a job as an integrator at first, hoping, one day, to become a web developer, an old dream of mine. I starter my career following the wrong path, as an Art Director. I liked it for a little while, but not enough to keep doing it full time.

And so I failed some interviews and at some point, I got one for the wrong job: Product owner. I had no idea what it meant until I googled it and realized that somehow, I had the profile. It could even be fun, so why not? No experience nor formal training, but does it really matters when you feel like you can do it?

That's how I joined Synolia, in Lyon's headquarters in april 2018. And until this day I remain grateful of Adrien, Pascal, Emir and Yann to have trusted me. My resume was super weird and it probably tasted like a bet to them. On my side, I liked their personality and the vibe there: it felt like a family, caring and positive, not mentioning the company itself with lots of experience and nice references.

The big plus I found out quickly is that there was plenty of room for growth and initiatives. A job can get monotonous as much as you let it become monotonous. In there, it was really easy to add some spice to it: technologies waiting for someone to push them, growing a team, pushing for unusual projects, pushing for projects outside France, content writing, conference and events... you name it. I loved having those side challenges on top of the daily satisfaction of being able to work with developers.

And one day, while we were at a company event, Pascal told me "I always dreamt of opening an agency in Argentina". - Me: "send me there, I'm your man.". To be honest it could had been Vietnam, Russia or Uzbekistan, I would have signed. A promise of adventure! And Argentina also happened to be very near where my wife is from: Chile. So it would make her happy too: even better.

We dug into it, made some researches, but it dried out by lack of time. But a few months later my wife and I decided to move to Chile for good. That's how we put the plan back on the table with Pascal and shifted our focus a bit more to the West. Those 10 months of building that plan were a challenge: from gathering metrics, market studies, trying to make contacts there, placing job offers to poke the market, drafting a business plan and... learning spanish with lots of flashcards.

It would had never worked without the support of Pascal, the help of Yann, the trust of Vincent and Stéphane and the energy of Katerina, my wife.

We flew there on January 14th and arrived on the 20th... a story of its own... The first challenge was to find the first employees quickly, without having an office, an open business or even a translated website. Everything happened in March: office, employees, bank account and company.

I'll always remember when Jorge and Miguel joined me on March 22nd in the tiny office we were renting in a cowork: a french guy, a venezuelan and at last, a chilean!

Without proper knowledge of code myself, I was counting on the french team to capacitate them and work hand in hand with them like if we they were in the same room... They did an amazing job! <3 Thanks to you guys, Florent, Maxime, Axel, Ludovic, Cédric... They are too many to mention them all.

And we grew, from 3 to 8 people. We changed offices two times. As planned, we spent a year working almost entirely with France; to know each others, to learn the methods, the technologies... and to truly be another Synolia agency, with the same spirit and caring atmosphere: humans first. Even though the motivation behind the plan never was to do offshore development for european clients, working this way was a necessary step to take flight. And by the way, it also brought a cool bonus to our customers by adding an extra 4 to 6 hours of time coverage everyday. A win-win situation.

Two months ago, we signed our first chilean customer. A month ago, we signed our first full scale e-commerce project (I have to thank ORO Inc. for their trust here), 100% produced in Chile. Last Friday, we celebrated our first year and ended up in a French restaurant :) And on Monday, for the third time, the Chilean team will train a new lead developer, without help from France. This means a lot to us: we took off.

To everyone that helped us get there, thank you.