Why we started Matilda Explorations

By Jonathan Gheller

I love to start and scale technology companies. 
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I have started a couple of companies in Silicon Valley, with distributed teams of engineers in Latin America. In these companies, I have had the honor of building high-quality products with incredibly talented, hard-working, and mission-oriented engineers. Today, many of these engineers and others I have partnered with via Matilda Explorations are working at places like Facebook, Airbnb, Evernote, Newfront, and many fast-growing startups. My personal experience and that of these companies show that Latin America is home to outstanding technical talent.
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I am particularly interested in connecting engineers who want to build products and companies for the long term with mission-aligned companies that will provide opportunities for them to grow professionally. For talented freelancers, there already exist many companies helping them find gigs with companies in the USA and Europe. To anyone looking for a freelancer to fix a bug or building something of secondary importance, I always point them to the many places offering remarkable talent for short periods of time.
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Matilda explorations does something else. We work and collaborate with engineers who are ambitious, talented long-term thinkers. In the process, Matilda helps companies build distributed teams that are talented, motivated, competitive, diverse, and highly retentive.
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Our mission is to create a more flexible and liquid global labor market. This is the most important effort we can do to create a more equitable and sustainable market economy. If we want markets to work for everyone, labor should be able to move as freely as capital. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. While money can be invested in capital markets across the globe, labor is fenced off by closed borders and insurmountable immigration challenges. The nations who have young, well-trained populations suffer the most: while their local markets are open to foreign capital, their most valuable export - competitive talent -  is not allowed to connect with the best opportunities.
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Remote work is a bridge that rises across borders, allowing the best talent to work on the most important problems. When an engineer in Latin America works for a technology company in the US, she is not only getting a competitive salary, she is also immersing herself in a set of new challenges and best practices that can be disseminated locally. All while being close to the people and land she loves the most. Remote work is not only the right job for the right person, it is also a way to create prosperity.

I believe the best thing I can do for Latin America is to export Silicon Valley to the region. 

That’s why we started Matilda Explorations.