Growing a Tech Startup (MemSQL/SingleStore) in Portugal to 40+ Employees
When I joined SingleStore back in 2016 (the company was still called MemSQL back then), the entire Engineering team was based out of San Francisco, with a couple of people in Seattle. Our culture and processes evolved around everyone coming to the office daily. So, when I decided to move back to my home country Portugal in late 2017, I was very worried about becoming much less impactful at work. However, despite a lot of initial struggles, I was able to grow my impact and also start an engineering hub where we now hire 40+ people (mostly in Engineering).
Over the last seven years, I've learnt a lot about expanding engineering teams abroad. And not just from our experience in Portugal, as during this period we've also started hubs in Ukraine and India. Furthermore, plenty of discussions over the years with peers in the space have also broadened my perspective.
With this in mind, I've been wanting to write down some notes on the topic of "expanding teams abroad" in the context of startups and scaleups.
