Cesar CantuYou can always learn a new trick or two, even when you’ve spent several years at the top of the corporate ladder. That’s the philosophy behind a group of entrepreneurs and academics in the tech ecosystem of Guadalajara who have planted the seeds to turn one of Mexico’s most important cities into the country’s capital for tech know-how.
It’s been two years since Jalisco’s Institute of Information Technologies (Ijalti) and Alinnco (an educational institution specialized in post-graduate degrees for workers in high-tech industries) launched a PhD program for top tech executives in Guadalajara. The first generation, composed of some of the city’s most accomplished IT decision-makers and entrepreneurs, will be graduating this year, giving the industry an opportunity to evaluate the results of the program.
We had the chance to speak with one of the soon-to-be graduates of that first generation: Guillermo Ortega, Improving’s President of Operations in Mexico and a businessman with over two decades of entrepreneurial experience in the ITC world.
In the following conversation, you’ll find Mr. Ortega’s thoughts and experiences as part of Guadalajara’s PhD program for tech execs, his expectations and concerns for the Mexican IT industry and his take on Guadalajara’s often used moniker of “the Mexican Silicon Valley.”
NSAM: Why did you enroll in this PhD program?
Guillermo Ortega: I was naive… Nah, I’m joking.
What caught my attention were the people who had signed up already. They’re people I’ve known for years; people whom I respect and admire. When I saw they had signed up, I spoke with Francisco Antón, the director of the PhD program, to have a better understanding of its reach, the format and the courses. We talked on the phone for like two hours, on a Saturday.
After thinking about it for a while longer, I considered the experience of being able to examine the key points of topics related to industry growth and the administration of a technology business with the people who would be coursing the program. That became the most appealing part to me.
Sometimes the names of courses or titles themselves don’t say much. But the topics, the people, that’s what convinced me of giving it a try.
NSAM: Is this PhD program aiming to build a group of, let’s call them “hybrids”, with the qualities of both a tech executive and an academic researcher?
Guillermo Ortega: I don’t think so. There is knowledge being generated in our research projects. New, innovative concepts have been coined during the two and a half years of this program.
Nevertheless, academic research isn’t my thing; business is. I think the aim of Benjamin Huerta and the other people behind this PhD program is to develop a set of doctoral and research capabilities, of know-how in a group of outstanding tech executives from Jalisco. All of us in the inaugural generation of the program are either country managers or entrepreneurs. I’m both. Carlos Gutiérrez is both too.
The objective is to develop knowledge that is very much oriented to the tech sector and leave behind a pool of accessible know-how. That’s faithful to Jalisco’s tradition of sharing experiences and knowledge. We want to concentrate the experiences of this first group of tech executives, filter it through a system of doctoral research, give it form and make it available to the world.
NSAM: This knowledge, it will be used for what?
Guillermo Ortega: For what? That’s not a doctoral question, necessarily. The application of this knowledge will depend on who’s reading our research projects. The question of “for what?”, I think, goes beyond the purposes of the PhD program.
We want to concentrate the experiences of this first group of tech executives, filter it through a system of doctoral research, give it form and make it available to the world.
I, as Improving’s President of Operations in Mexico, do have a clear answer to the question of “for what?”. I enrolled in this PhD program to identify the situations and elements that have an impact on Mexico remaining competitive in the tech sector. I’m inspecting this to better understand what we need to do to stay competitive in the sector of software development services.
NSAM: There’s quality and abundance of tech talent in Mexico, but never enough to satisfy industry demand. Could the same be said about tech executives? What’s the situation?
Guillermo Ortega: The so-called “Mexican Silicon Valley” –a name I dislike, by the way, because the conditions that allowed the emergence of California’s Silicon Valley are not found in Mexico, and perhaps nowhere else– has existed for four decades. It existed since Kodak landed in Guadalajara; when Motorola, IBM and HP landed. All of those companies developed executives like Jaime Reyes, Alfonso Alba, Julio Acevedo. These people were professionally developed, in their leadership capabilities, by these big multinationals.
That’s the thing, though. These are global companies. I think we need executives developed by, perhaps, the [local] providers of HP, Intel, Motorola, Kodak.
This is not a very doctoral answer: I’m convinced that we are well-positioned, but we need a clearer picture of where we stand. In my opinion, we have a very interesting base of experience among our executives, but I would like to see a group of executive-entrepreneurs. That’s my case, I think; I’m both things. I have experience creating companies and now work as a top executive, even though Improving is a mid-sized company. We can’t compare to Intel or IBM, for example. Jesus Palomino, from Intel, is another great example [of an executive-entrepreneur]. We don’t have many of those.
Let me ask you: where’s Mexico’s Motorola? Do you know about the Mexican Intel? An Intel-like company with five decades operating and which sells chips all over the world? Could you name it? I couldn’t. I’m being sarcastic, of course, because that company does not exist.
Where’s our Mexican Intel? Our Mexican HP? When will we break away from that inertia of being very good but preferring to work for multinationals?
Why did these companies come to Mexico? To make use of the conditions of this particular market. Know-how was developed, yes. There are patents issued by Mexicans working at Intel, at HP. But who owns those patents? Who generated that know-how? Is there a Mexican spin-off of these companies that belongs to a Mexican and which has generated a software development firm of global caliber?
What have we exported from the Mexican Silicon Valley? Talent. Yes, we’re very capable; we’re hardworking and ingenious. But, again, where’s our Mexican Intel? Our Mexican HP? When will we break away from that inertia of being very good but preferring to work for multinationals? And people can say: “Guillermo, you had a company and you sold it to a PI group from Dallas.” Yes, but that was my company. I can do as I please with what’s mine.
I wish we would see a spill of know-how in Mexico. I have yet to see it. There is a spill of experience, yes; we have top-shelf executives for tech. But are we creating tech executives with experience in entrepreneurship?
NSAM: All of this you’re saying ties into two topics. One of them is brain drain. The other is something I’ve spoken about with Benjamín Huerta: the fear of Mexican software going the way of maquiladoras.
Guillermo Ortega: We [tech in Mexico] come from maquila, which began offering greater value services in a way that made maquila itself less relevant. We have to keep evolving. If we stick to software development, which is a commodity, we’ll go the way of the maquilas: we’ll become non-essential.
We’re moving away from that already. Some companies offer important services, like AI and ML, but as services. We need even more sophistication, and to generate know-how, and our own companies. It should be us who decide where those jobs are going.
We are a mid-cost country […] There’s an unhealthy relationship between supply and demand, and it is making our services unnecessarily and artificially expensive.
That’s the great challenge. And moving away from low cost. We’re not a low-cost country in maquila, nor in services. We are a mid-cost country. And we need more engineers. We’re turning into a more expensive country because we don’t have enough engineers, and the ones we do have believe they can earn whatever they please. There’s an unhealthy relationship between supply and demand, and it is making our services unnecessarily and artificially expensive.
NSAM: You said that Mexico has no success stories comparable to those of Intel and other top players in tech. Can we find those in the rest of Latin America? I can only think of Globant; perhaps Mercado Libre and a couple fintechs.
Guillermo Ortega: Successful companies are one thing. Those companies you just mentioned are successful. Globant is a successful company, but not on the level of IBM or Tesla.
Tesla’s coming to Mexico, and we’re building cars for them. What else is there, though? Besides job creation, the spill of know-how and the development, in the long run, of top executives. Are we getting a Tesla spin-off? Many of Google’s ex-employees became entrepreneurs and founded their own companies. Same thing goes for Facebook and other successful Silicon Valley businesses.
Successful companies have always existed, and they’ll keep existing. I’m speaking of businesses that generate know-how and intellectual property of global consequence. Globant is a very successful company, but we can’t put it on the same level as Intel. Where is Latin America’s Intel? Show me.
I don’t mean to come off as negative. I believe my message is one of optimism; one that envisions a future, not too far from now, in which we have a success story that can make us proud and that will allow Mexico to position itself globally as a country not only of intelligent, hardworking people –which we are–, but also of people capable of changing the world. Intel chips changed the world. Apple products changed the world. HP ink injection printers changed the world. There’s a before and an after.
Mexico has the capabilities to achieve that; I believe it, and I wake up every day aiming to wow the world with Mexican talent. That’s the spirit of this PhD program: acknowledging where we stand in order to, hopefully, move speedily towards the future.
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