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Nybble Group: A People-
Gustavo Castenetto
Founder & CEO
Nybble Group
Contact:
Gustavo Castenetto
+1 (786) 224-
gustavo.castenetto@nybblegroup.com
Interview conducted by:
Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor
CEOCFO Magazine
Published – March 13, 2023
CEOCFO: According to the Nybble Group website, “You are driven by the true belief in the transformational power of technology.” What does that mean for Nybble and how are you helping people with making changes?
Mr. Castenetto: This means everything to us; it is our foundation and the reason why we do what we do. We always challenge ourselves to think as a team not only in what we do -
It does not have to be flamboyant, with big things like developing a new phone like Apple or the kind of revolutionary things you see in the news from Google or Tesla. It can be just changing small things to make things better and more sustainable for our customers and being aware of the ecosystem that we are all a part of. Using technology is our way to connect to the world and make it a little bit better, and that is what we try to do -
CEOCFO: Who is turning to you for services, and would you give us an idea of the range of what you help companies change?
Mr. Castenetto: We present ourselves as a digital transformation company and that is probably a good summary of what we offer. We focus on using technology to transform the world and how we live, how we work and how we do business. When we meet with potential customers, we start by exploring what we can do together. We see every project as an opportunity to collaborate and innovate together on making something better: transforming processes, transforming tools, transforming systems, transforming the experience or the products. We try to offer a wide range of services and products that can support this transformation. It goes from thinking together and understanding the goals to be achieved and then working together to find the best way to do it. It is a combination of third-
What we do from there is applying the transformation in the form of advanced software applications, mainly for business solutions. We have worked on some consumer-
Our focus on custom software development, business solutions and intelligent automation is currently the combination of offerings or services that we leverage to define a final solution that fits our customer´s needs and empower them to reach their business goals.
CEOCFO: What is your secret sauce?
Mr. Castenetto: Our most important ingredient is recognizing that besides the technology, tools and framework methodology, it all comes down to people. People make the difference. We use a lot of tools that many of our competitors and customers use as well, but the real difference is in how our teams combine them and the way that our people think, how much our people engage, and their level of commitment. The way in which we find the best solution is to really understand what the customer is thinking when they first come to us, and again the interaction with our people is key for that. We consider ourselves a people-
The other ingredient is always staying ahead of the pack, trying to be aware of every new technology, new ideas, new methodologies, and bringing innovation as part of our way of doing things. We do that in different ways. One very specific way that is not so common, especially in companies the size of Nybble, is our Nybble Labs, which is a concept, a place and a team that is constantly looking, exploring… and playing. That is the best way to say it: playing with new technologies. For example, we are currently starting to play with the concept of the “metaverse,” augmented reality and virtual reality, along with other concepts like AI-
CEOCFO: Did you recognize the importance of company culture from day one, or was it something that developed over time at Nybble?
Mr. Castenetto: I think it developed over time, especially because culture is a dynamic concept. Culture appears from the team and the path that the company has been taking. We do have a set of core values that I as the founder, along with close partners and core members of the team helped to crystalize, put in words, and put forward. Once we were happy with that foundation, it was just about trying to improve it. Knowing that we have these foundational values and ideas that are important to us but also always being open to adapt and mature them as we grow. A culture is a living creature. I do not think anybody can impose a culture. And Nybble Group’s dynamic, flexible and adapting culture is a testament to that.
CEOCFO: Would you give us a typical project example, and one where you needed to think outside the box?
Mr. Castenetto: An example of a typical project may be to build web portals with specific and normally advanced functionality. We have an in-
And on the other hand, something that is relatively different and that usually makes us think outside of the box would be some of our intelligent automation projects. For example, we were working on an comprehensive digital transformation project and during the discovery phase we found out that the customer had all these manual processes going on for ages and their teams were spending weeks and weeks of manual work trying to extract data from these documents and then moving these data points from one Excel to another, and then having to scan them again into the system or manually doing all the consolidation of the different accounts. We proposed to implement automation tools with embedded intelligence, and in this case for example, we implemented an AI tool with intelligent optical character recognition capabilities. Instead of having somebody reading a document and manually importing the information into the system, this software robot took the document from the email, opened it, read it, and interpreted document content with the ability to understand the context and the location of each data point, without having to rely on a predefined template. It was able to identify the different aspects of the document, export all the necessary information and import it into the system with no human intervention whatsoever, and with a very high accuracy rate.
On top of this we created a very specific software application particularly tailored for this customer, which along with the automation components really empowered their people. We like how it changed the company. Before we worked on this implementation there were some people on the team that were thinking of leaving their job because they were bored out of their minds from all the repetitive and manual work. With this new solution in place, they found a new way of working, feeling much more productive as they were able to focus on tasks that added tangible value. It was good to see.
CEOCFO: Would you tell us about your global reach and how you are reaching out to new customers?
Mr. Castenetto: We actually are already a global company. We started as a company from Argentina, offering services from there to the world, mainly in Latin America and the US. However, over the past five or six years we have grown a lot, and we are now a global company that happens to have some of its operations in Argentina. Today many of our operations teams are in Latin America because we started there and we believe in the advantage of the excellence of the talent and the cost effectiveness of Latin America, allowing us to be more efficient in a market like North America which is one of our main targets. The company was started in 2005 with customers in North America. That was our main target from the beginning. We are now opening operations in Europe (by the way, I am now speaking to you from Madrid, Spain).
We are also reorganizing the company because of our growth. We have all these individual companies in Latin America, and we have the company in the US. Therefore, we are looking to establish a holding structure to keep things more organized. We have already been approached by investors and potential partners and we want to have things better structured before going down that road. We are just starting to explore the opportunities that we have in Europe, and we already have a couple of customers from North America that have operations in Europe, and we are talking to them about expanding our teams in the EU with a similar model.
We believe in the advantage of being on the same or similar time zone, which is one of the things that compared to the original offshoring that companies from North America used to do with India or Eastern Europe or the Philippines, but with several hours of difference. That made it very difficult to work together at the same time. However, when you work in an agile way, being on the same time-
Our model is working very well in North America and LATAM as well. We are looking to replicate the same model in Europe. We are not only looking at Spain as one of the options to set up the holding of the company, but also for it to become the central operation center for the rest of Europe. We are planning to have our development teams and operational teams working from Spain, servicing England, Germany, Netherlands, and the rest of the European countries.
CEOCFO: What is the key to staying focused as CEO when you have so much opportunity, so much going on and so much growth potential?
Mr. Castenetto: In my case, it was recognizing at some point that you have to let go. There comes a time when you realize that even when you feel that the company is your baby and you are used to having things done in your own way, you have to understand the key is to develop a strong team with people that are smarter and better than you in what they do, people you can trust and then you rely on their skills, their expertise, and just let them do their job. Not so long ago I was doing everything: human resources, sales, finance, going to the banks and writing the checks and everything that was needed to run the company. We started our transformation path by creating a finance and administration department, we then added a human resources department, and then we structured our operational teams.
The company is owned by two partners, myself, and my partner Leonardo Rodriguez, who is our CTO and handles everything on the technology side. He enabled me to really focus on the growth of the company, the strategic thinking and empowering our people to do their jobs. That is my role, to support everyone in the organization to do their best possible work and #BeRemarkable -
CEOCFO: Nybble Group was recognized in the Inc. 5000 this year, which is how we came upon the company. Why should companies choose Nybble Group and what might they need to understand when they first look at Nybble that is beneath the surface?
Mr. Castenetto: I think it is difficult to put into words how important our culture and our team is, and how they can positively impact the work that we do. There is also the obsessive dedication to define the processes that we have put together guiding our teams on how we do things the Nybble Way. Something that we always ask our customers when we first meet them is to give us something small to do, so they can get a taste of how we will work. Give us an opportunity to really see how things can be done in our way, with our ‘people first’ approach, with people who are highly committed and engaged to use their passion for technology to transform how we work, how we live and how we do business.
Nybble Group | Gustavo Castenetto | Custom Software Development | Digital Transformation Solutions Company | Nybble Group: A People-