Originally featured on the Streams to Impact Podcast with Dr. Allen Lomax | Guest: Brian Samson, Founder of Plugg Technologies
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Dr. Allen Lomax opened his conversation with Brian Samson by asking about Argentina, and the answer had nothing to do with cost arbitrage or engineering talent pools, at least not at first. Dr. Lomax got a story about phones staying in pockets during three hour dinners, a detail that turned out to explain more about how Samson runs his company than any spreadsheet could.
Samson had spent five years in San Francisco living, in his own words, with his phone in front of his face constantly, fueled in part by meal replacement shakes engineered so coders wouldn’t have to leave their desks. Moving to Buenos Aires to launch his first company was less a business decision and more a personal reset. Dinners there stretched three hours past the meal itself, with no one’s phone on the table, just conversation about the day, politics, and art. That contrast, between a culture optimized for speed and one built around presence, shaped nearly every leadership lesson Samson shares in this episode.
Samson has spent 11 years in nearshoring since that first move, making more than 500 placements and building that original Buenos Aires company to 80 engineers before exiting. He has since founded three separate companies that each reached $4 million in annual recurring revenue, and today runs Plugg Technologies, connecting U.S. companies with Latin American tech talent from his home in Hawaii.
The Dinner Table Lesson That Shapes How He Builds Teams
The contrast Samson drew between San Francisco and Buenos Aires wasn’t nostalgia. It was the foundation of a real belief that human connection gets lost the moment a company optimizes purely for speed and efficiency. Samson described San Francisco’s culture of nonstop notifications and desk bound productivity almost as a warning, not an achievement. Buenos Aires, by comparison, forced him to relearn that people, whether customers, employees, or hires 3,000 miles away, respond to being treated as people first.
That lesson became the backbone of how Samson approaches nearshoring itself. Companies that offshore or nearshore work, he explained to Dr. Allen Lomax, often slip into treating remote teams as low cost resources rather than full members of the organization. The fix isn’t complicated. Give nearshore hires the same onboarding, the same tools, and the same respect you’d extend to someone sitting down the hall, a principle that guides every placement made through Plugg Technologies.
You Don’t Have a Business Until You Have a Customer
Before nearshoring, Samson’s first entrepreneurial attempt was a company called HR for Startups, run out of San Francisco with little more than himself and a couple of freelancers. He remembers being awake at two in the morning editing commas on a website and debating whether to form a C corp or an S corp, decisions that felt urgent but accomplished nothing. The real lesson, delivered plainly, is that none of that matters until an actual paying customer exists.
That mistake repeated itself in a different form once Samson started raising capital. He initially believed he could hire experienced salespeople and let them manufacture revenue on his behalf. It didn’t work, and he now argues founders need to run their own sales process early, not because they’re the best closer in the room, but because customers extend a level of grace to a founder they’d never extend to a hired salesperson. Saying the wrong thing on a call matters less when you’re the person who built the company.
The Bias Baked Into Your First 10 Hires
One of the sharpest insights in the episode came when Dr. Allen Lomax asked what high performing leaders still get wrong about hiring. Samson’s answer drew on his own background running talent functions for San Francisco startups: companies wait far too long to bring on a recruiter, and that delay matters more than most founders realize.
Your first 10 to 12 hires set the culture, tone, and thinking patterns for everything that follows, and those early hires almost always come from a founder’s own network, meaning the same schools, same backgrounds, and same biases get baked in from day one. Samson used Google and Facebook as an example of two very different, equally valid hiring philosophies, one built around academic credentials and large scale technical thinking, the other around scrappy hackers willing to move fast and break things. Neither approach is wrong, but founders rarely examine which bias they’re actually hiring for. Bringing in recruiting help earlier, even on a fractional or contingency basis, widens the pool beyond a founder’s personal network and introduces genuinely different thinking. “I think there’s a lot of egotism in the United States,” said Dr. Allen Lomax, reflecting on how U.S. companies often underestimate the skill and judgment of talent based outside the country.
Confronting the Discomfort of Global Wage Gaps Honestly
Rather than smoothing over the economics of nearshoring, Dr. Allen Lomax raised the uncomfortable part directly. “I often feel very guilty about it actually, kind of taking advantage of their situations,” said Dr. Allen Lomax, describing his own experience outsourcing work internationally. Samson didn’t dismiss the concern. Instead, he redirected it toward action: the discomfort is worth sitting with, but the actual fix is treating international team members with the same onboarding, tools, and respect given to any domestic hire, rather than defaulting to a mindset of cheap labor. “That is a critical part of building any business, once you have the customers,” said Dr Allen Lomax, tying the hiring conversation back to the episode’s earlier point about prioritizing revenue first and systems second.
What Foster Care Taught Him About Leadership
The most personal section of the conversation had nothing to do with business strategy directly, though it shaped how Samson leads. In 2020, Samson and his wife attended a presentation at their church in Oahu about the foster care system, learning that roughly 440,000 children are in foster care nationally, with about 2,000 in Hawaii alone. Samson describes his own upbringing as stable and fortunate, something he didn’t choose any more than a child in foster care chooses their circumstances.
He and his wife became licensed foster parents and eventually adopted a daughter they had fostered for nearly two years. Samson connects that experience directly to how he views the people he works with professionally, particularly nearshore team members navigating economic and political instability they didn’t choose either. Empathy, in his framing, isn’t separate from leadership. It’s a prerequisite for it.
What to Do Next
1. Audit who influenced your first 10 to 12 hires, since those early decisions quietly set your company’s culture and blind spots for years afterward.
2. Bring in recruiting help earlier than feels necessary, even on a fractional or contingency basis, to widen your candidate pool beyond your immediate network.
3. Run your own sales process as founder before delegating it, since customers extend patience to founders that they rarely extend to hired salespeople.
4. Apply the same onboarding standards, tools, and respect to nearshore hires that you would to any local employee.
What Dr. Allen Lomax pulled out of this conversation is a reminder that scaling a company and staying human are not competing goals. Samson’s path from a hustle driven San Francisco lifestyle to three hour dinners in Buenos Aires, and eventually to fostering and adopting a daughter, all feeds into the same underlying philosophy: treat people, whether customers, hires, or family, as people first, and the business results tend to follow.
🎧 Listen to the full episode: Brian Samson on Nearshoring, Bias, and Building With Purpose
🔗 Learn more about nearshore hiring: plugg.tech 🎙 The Nearshore Cafe Podcast
Frequently Asked Questions
What is nearshoring? Nearshoring means hiring talent in a nearby country within a similar time zone, rather than offshoring to a distant region with limited schedule overlap. Brian Samson, founder of Plugg Technologies, built his first company around this idea after noticing that Latin American talent could collaborate in real time with U.S. teams, unlike more distant offshoring destinations.
Why do U.S. companies choose Latin America over Asia for nearshoring? Time zone alignment and cultural familiarity make Latin America a practical choice for many U.S. companies, according to Brian Samson. He has pointed out that U.S. businesses often underestimate the skill and judgment of talent based outside the country, a bias that Plugg Technologies works to counter by matching companies with experienced Latin American professionals across a range of technical and operational roles.
What roles can be nearshored to Latin America? Companies commonly nearshore software engineers, recruiters, sales professionals, and operations staff to Latin America. Brian Samson’s own background running talent functions for San Francisco startups shaped his belief that recruiting expertise, not just technical skill, should be part of any nearshore hiring strategy from the start, which is the model Plugg Technologies follows with its clients.
How much can companies save by nearshoring instead of hiring domestically? Cost savings vary by role and country, but the wage gap between U.S. salaries and Latin American talent remains substantial. Brian Samson has been candid that this gap can create discomfort for business owners, and he argues the responsible response is not to avoid nearshoring but to treat international hires with the same respect, tools, and onboarding as any domestic employee.
Why does Brian Samson say your first 10 hires matter so much? Samson has explained that a company’s first 10 to 12 hires typically come from a founder’s personal network, which means the same schools, backgrounds, and biases get built into the culture from day one. He recommends bringing on recruiting help earlier than most founders do, even on a fractional basis, to widen the candidate pool and introduce different thinking into the organization.
What does Plugg Technologies do differently from other staffing firms? Plugg Technologies, founded by Brian Samson, focuses on treating nearshore hires as full members of a company rather than low cost resources, an approach rooted in Samson’s own experience building a company in Argentina. With more than 500 placements over 11 years, the firm emphasizes proper onboarding, cultural understanding, and matching talent to a company’s actual needs rather than a generic labor pool.
Brian Samson is the founder of Plugg Technologies and host of The Nearshore Cafe Podcast. This post is based on his appearance on Streams to Impact.