Howdy y’all!
Who we are
We’re Jacqueline and Frank from Howdy. We met many years ago while working as leaders at the same tech company, Jacqueline in sales and Frank in engineering. As more and more capital kept coming to our city, Austin, we struggled to build our tech teams: we found it very difficult to compete against top tech companies for talent. So we decided to broaden our search beyond Austin, Texas.
The problem we wanted to solve
After working with various partners in Latin America, we discovered this location was a great talent market because of the strong talent pool, great English, and US friendly time zones. However, finding and retaining engineering teams in LATAM was a challenge. The only solutions were one of three options: old-school outsourcing firms designed to keep us in the dark and disconnected from each other, recruiters that helped with the sourcing but nothing else, or online job boards that enabled us to build a team of distributed freelancers with a mercenary culture. All three of those options were icky to us.
We wanted them to be our employees so we could provide bonuses, salary raises, our benefits & perks, and extend our culture to our teams in LATAM. We wanted them to be product stakeholders and help drive our company forward.
We wanted something better for us. We wanted something better for our team. But nothing existed that could do all these things.
The Epiphany
We ultimately went to work at different companies, but continued to experience the same pain points. Finally, in 2018, after commiserating repeatedly on the same issue many times over beers, we decided to stop complaining and build the company we kept looking for: one that could solve all of the international complexities (payroll, benefits, procurement, legal compliance, to name a few), but also a company that helps people and creates meaningful relationships.
The beginning of our story
We named ourselves Austin Software, and over time we got really good at helping US companies build their teams in Latin America. Our gut told us we could only attract top talent if we built attractive developer communities for tech-leaders, open source contributors, speakers and other great developers in the cities our teammates live in. We launched offices all over Latin America, starting in Uruguay, followed by Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Perú, and México.
Today
As we’ve grown exponentially over the years, and just like we’ve outgrown our office spaces, so too have we outgrown our name. We are in a new era and we’re super proud of what we’ve accomplished so far and are even more thrilled for what is to come. We put developers’ well-being at the center of every decision we make. We truly embody a developer-first culture. We’re not afraid of firing bad clients, because our ideal partners love and adore their teammates and treat them as core members of their product teams, not temporary “horsepower” or 2nd class contractors. That is the experience we need every developer to have.
So what initially started in Austin helping Software companies, has now evolved into so much more.
We want to be home for our teammates not just for today, tomorrow, or the next couple of years. We want to be home forever.
So today we want to say, “Howdy, welcome home.”
Introducing Howdy
Howdy is an informal greeting used in Texas, which perfectly captures not only the essence and values of our company but also our roots. Howdy reflects everything that we are: open-minded, friendly, warm, and a little bit weird. Everything we are and strive to be.
Howdy cradles both a fact and a dream at the same time. The fact is that we are bigger now and can deliver services on a different scale. The dream is to preserve that little thing we will never change: that each individual matters.
Welcome home, welcome to Howdy!
