but if you ever go to Valencia, I recommend you to order something different called arroz al orno. It's rice from the oven. It's something very special. Well, OK. So I'm a solutions engineer in Carto. I'm managing also the support team. I'm a cartographer and geodesy engineer

that end up doing GIS. For the last two years, I've been working at Carto. And I'm going to talk to you about how we do technical selling and support for a different kind of support, as Randall was talking about. This is a different context where we have a software as a service.

So we have, instead of so local interaction, this is for us is totally different. So it's kind of a different aspect of helping people. I'm going to talk first a little bit, well, mixed between how we do in the team. I will also explain about the company

and then about how we do support and solutions engineering. Actually, I'm going to do something. Let me see if it works, because I want to show you the last slide.

So this is a slide that shows the evolution of the number of people per department of the company. So what I'm going to explain is the history of this evolution and how we started being a product company just from developers. And then the salespeople came by, the marketing people, and how the, let's say, the demographics of the company

evolved. So I hope you will find this interesting. So let's go back to the beginning. OK, so Carto started not as Carto or Carto Divia, as you may know. It was called Visuality.

It started as a consultancy firm, as a company that did projects for very different clients. It was started by Javier de la Torre, Javier de la Torre and Salaiba Sergio in 2008, more or less. So they started doing projects for many different kind of clients.

The focus of the company was on biodiversity. So it was mostly focused on, and because biodiversity is obviously geospatial, most of the projects were also with a very strong geospatial company. Some of the projects were funded by Spanish or European institutions.

And since the beginning, they were just only using FOSS4G software, only Postgres and type renderers and so on, and PHP and all kind of open source in general. Yeah, they were just a few people. So development was fast, frictionless, quick.

Everything was happening in the same room, in the same office. So it was a very fast, let's say, a very fast car. Because they were like this, they were working together in a very small place, and doing a lot of stuff, creating things very quickly.

Then what they realized is that this very same stack that they were using over and over, it can be converted into a product. So they changed direction and get into a different kind of company. So instead of a consultancy firm, they evolved to a product company. And then they started being like what we normally

call a startup, where you are looking for funding. So they released a product as a software as a service with a freemium model, where you have some features for free users, so you try to get as much free users as possible. And then we will know in the future how we make money.

At the beginning, it was all about having a nice product for people to create maps and these illustrations for everyone. So this is the only picture I have from the product, actually. This is the first version of Cartok. By that time, it was just one table, one wizard to create automatic mapping, and that was all. That was the first interface that they developed.

OK, so between 2011, 2015, it was just basically everyone developing and Hattore selling, or trying to sell the product in the wild. By the end of that year, it was just nine

old-made people in the company. And they were like this. They were having fun, creating things, and working in a very technical or very geek or nerd environment. So how was solutions engineering, and understanding

solutions engineering as helping to the technical aspect of selling? Well, there wasn't any salespeople. There wasn't any solutions engineers. So it was basically the founders and the CTO that joined in 2013, or no, 2011, Jadis Santana.

There wasn't really any formal process or anything. It was just a bunch of technical people helping when there was a meeting or there was a prototype to create or whatever. And actually, there was also no support, as is understood normally. It was just the developers helping. They had a TV viewer that they were passing around.

And each week, they have a TV viewer that was passed to someone in the company. And that engineer was supposed to be attending clients or users in a very informal way. So 2014, this is the year where you see the step growth of the company in terms

of how many people. We have the first sales reps, the first operation managers. And then we created a United States team here in New York. We started to have enterprise clients.

And the company gets the typical organization where we have a technology team where they are creating their business to consumer product. We have a community team where they are trying to engage, to provide support, to do research also. We have also the small sales team that we are trying to reach out for new clients.

The operations that to this day, they have their motto is keep us out of jail. So that's their main purpose. And then we have two solutions engineers that joined in 2014, Sander Pica and Jorge Arevala. But they lived quickly.

They didn't stay for too long. By the end of that year, we were 30 people with seven female. Those are Sander and Jorge. They are not anymore with us. But Jorge is actually a good friend. He's in Madrid. OK, so in 2014 is when the support team, let's say,

it's established. Basically, Carla was hired as the first support engineer. She was the first woman in the company. She was inside the community team. That was led by Andrew Hill by the time. But the thing is that she was in Madrid.

Obviously, we had support clients here in the States. So she needed help because she couldn't attend everyone. So Michelle and Stephanie, they were both together in the Brooklyn office. Now Michelle is in San Francisco. But by that time, they were together in New York. So now we have this team.

We have these three support engineers and that they were starting to help users. OK, so by 2015, then we start meeting solutions engineers. So Chris and Andrew. Andrew is around. And as for Chris, he had a talk this morning.

They joined in the New York City office. And Danica, Ryan, and me, we joined in Madrid. So those are Chris and Andrew. They are here in the conference. So if you see them, you can have an interest and talk with them. And Danny, he's on holidays, actually. He's in Norway. He's the boss.

So then from the support side, we had two engineers, Janine in Madrid, Oriola and Ernesto. And then two more new sales engineers, Abela and David from Denver, David Bryson. So those are Oriola, Ernesto, Abela, and David.

And by the end of the year, we were 84 people, 20 of them. OK, so by that time, how the team was doing? What was our duties? We were helping to our sales representatives to help them on the sales process.

We were also doing prototypes and integrations with whatever crazy technology we were asked to connect. For example, the first thing I did when I joined Carto was to try to connect to Amazon Redshift, for example. That's a huge storage repository. Then we were also helping support, which was on a different team, because solutions

is part of sales. Because we were more senior, we were helping them on the difficult tickets or things that were too hard for them. So we were helping them. We were doing our rotation every week. Basically, it was me doing most of the time the solution, the own code for them.

And then we were also doing training for partners, trainings in Europe or mostly in Spain, and also some post-sales, helping clients to optimize queries to improve their code, et cetera. And actually, well, anything else that couldn't be

talked about by technology people. And last year, the company evolved, because we were growing and growing. And we needed a little bit more of a structure. So the community team was split. And from the community team, it started the research and data team. So basically, the R&D happening mostly in the Brooklyn office.

Community or the most community roles were integrated into the marketing team. And then support joined solutions. So solutions get all the support. And basically, it was me becoming the manager of the team.

Then, well, technology was also reorganized. By the end of the year, we were also still same number of female, 20, but 85 guys. So for the solutions team, from this small team that started the year before, we were into three different groups.

So there were the people doing technical selling, the people doing engineering, so process concepts or developing, and then support. For example, me, I was on the three teams. I was doing all of them. Depending on the week, I had to do one or other, because we are still not a lot of people.

And yeah, we had to multitask a lot. And we were also the most distributed team of the company, because by that time, we have San Francisco, Denver, Philadelphia, two in New York, three in Madrid, me in Valencia, and the boss of the team in Valladolid in the north of Madrid. So we are across three time zones.

The biggest thing is just three in Madrid, so that's not happening in any other group in the company. OK. So now we are also doing support. We start also doing what was called enterprise support, which

is basically an on-call, where we can get out of the bed at 4 AM if someone is needing us. So we had this on-call. We had to improve our processes. And we had to more or less stable here where Chris left the company and Ramiro joined.

That was the only change in the company, so Ramiro joined as a solutions support engineer. OK, so what happened in this year? This year, one of the things that are happening in Cartos is that we are getting big clients. And big clients normally have some very specific needs.

And we don't have partners that have so deep knowledge of the technology. So if we don't do it wrong, we lose the account. So we need to do it alone. So that's why we started a small group that was Inside Solutions. So we started to do what is called professional services. We are not competing with our partners, just to be sure, with Abgeo.

We don't try to get any deals from our partners, obviously. We are just growing in places where our partners cannot reach. So for that team, we hired Alberto and Alejandra. They are both developers. So they are not working on any other thing than doing projects.

Alexander from DC, he joined. And then we had four new people on the presales, doing just presales. Danny in New York, Steve in UK, Ximena, she's in St. John's, Newfoundland, but she will come to Madrid in September, and Rodrigo from Sao Paulo.

So those are Alberto, Alejandra, Alexander, Danny and Steve, Ximena and Rodrigo. So what is happening with the team? We are kind of settling and stabilizing. We're not stabilizing but getting more clear responsibilities. And we are also the people that translate sales conversation

or sales needs into something that a product can understand and back. So I'm also the same for the clients and for everyone. So trying to help to convert all those needs and all those issues into something that product can execute or fix.

And now we are trying to get less into the jack of all trades kind of role, as I was. We are focusing more in specific needs. Support is basically designing on the team. Support is basically attending everything except the most difficult things that are past the product. We are doing better trainings and trying to also improve

in our communication. Well, also the team in Madrid is doing some community thing, and we're improving that way. So the team is basically with a geospatial background. As I said, I'm a cartography and geodesic engineer.

We have GIS people. We have also some computer science engineers. Some people come from precise experience or like me from consultancy. Some are seasoned, especially in the process. Support people are younger, except me, a little bit one from them. But basically, support is a very good place for new people

to come to the company. Regarding sales engineering, well, we are improving our processes. We are trying to get only into these when they are properly qualified. So because we have a lot of work, we need to be sure that we are only working on things that matter. We work very closely with our sales reps

to help them to understand clients' needs, whether we are a good fit or not. Let's say that we play the good police when we have a conversation, and the sales rep is always seen as the bad one because they are speaking about money and so on, and we are thinking about technical things.

So normally, clients trust us. And still, we are still doing some development in the team. Regarding support, it's totally opposite to what Randall was talking. I try never to get into phone or chat with clients because that doesn't escape. We are working across, well, we have work coverage,

so we can only work in an asynchronous way. It's the only way we can work being efficient, even with our own people, even with our own guys in the company. We don't accept that chat with anyone unless there is an urgency. If there is an urgency like playing falling from the sky or most of our revenue being in jeopardy,

then yeah, we will talk with you by phone. I will go to your desk or whatever that is needed, but only on that situation. Otherwise, it's everything on asynchronous. Obviously, for us, we are chatting all the time because we are so distributed that we need a lot to be in continuous contact.

And when we have to do audio-video, well, Google Meet and Slack are our normal communication channels, but we work with sales, we work with clients, and they take Skype for business, whatever they need. Our inputs are the ticketing, basically,

but we also attend the GIS Stack Exchange Carto tag. We have, as a Google group, we're basically mostly for product people because we attend our open source offering, obviously. So that's where normally we have people asking for questions, how are you installing Carto, upgrading it, and so on.

Finally, the last part, or the last thing that we have deployed, it's what is called the response team. It's a rotation of the product people where it's every two weeks, right? Yeah, every two weeks. They change the team that are helping

directly us to fix things. So the rest of the team are focused on their milestones and their sprints and their development and their features and this team, every two weeks, is switching just to try to help us prioritize everything and so on.

Yeah, just to close, as I said, this is more or less the evolution of how people, when we started, it was just engineering a product and so obviously we did it since the beginning, someone to pay the payrolls and to help on the paperwork but then we have the research

and especially since the first funding round, we started to grow the sales team. That actually became the most, the biggest group in the company just three months ago when they overpassed the sum of product and engineering people.

So that's up. This year is where it's rampant and now we are hiring a lot so that's why I also put the jobs URL. That's all. I hope you like how it is. This is our team. If you are interested in more talks about Carto,

tomorrow Javi is going to talk about spatial plumbing and of data and we have also on Friday, three more talks. That's all. Thank you. Well, thank you, Jorge. Are there any questions? Yeah, we have some questions. One and two and I've got one too

so there's three at least. I'm curious, what is your ticketing system? We are using right now a ticketing system called Superbee. Superbee. It's a, basically it's a shared inbox but I'm getting unsatisfied with it.

We will probably move to something that is integrated with our CRM because people can be like a very high paying client but they write to whatever support and it is, you don't have, well, for the big clients, we know them and we know their emails and so on and we have the history but sometimes,

imagine that someone coming from a big client writes to the free account support and we tell them, okay, you need to go to GIS Stock Exchange and then the safe rep says, oh, are you telling that to them? We need to, yeah, to engage him and so on. So they are trying to work with something better, yes. Jessica?

No, no. We are, we are like this. My question actually relates to that growth. It must be a challenge to maintain your culture

and the camaraderie so like when you went from nine people to over a hundred, did you have to get like a bigger dining room table or something, how did you do that? Yeah, well, for example, now the Madrid office is for 60 people. When I joined, we were 40 people in the full company. So growing the technical team especially

was something very hard because sales, well, sales also evolved and the processes but keeping the culture, well, that's basically impossible. So you cannot work and behave in the same way when you are seven male people in the same room than when you are 130 as we are now,

spread over four time zones and so on. We won't ask how you behaved when it was that small. No, well, there are pictures. If you go to the, there's a URL where you can go to a Tumblr where you can see pictures from 2012 and they are very funny. You can see very funny pictures there. Other questions?

Why is that? Why? Because we cannot, we need, the way that support engineers are going to work better is if they focus on one ticket

and when they finish, they go to a queue and that queue needs to be asynchronous. We cannot have a queue of people wanting to chat with them or to have a call. So we need to work in a way that, and for example, many, many times we have Michelle in San Francisco trying to get over something and she can finish it.

So she needs to pass that work to 9 a.m. in Madrid, to Oriole normally. So we need to work in an asynchronous way with clients and with us. So only working in that way, we are effective. And we only accept talks or meetings when we are

arranging and scheduling something and so on. So that's mostly for, you know, supports, doing support. Yeah, obviously I'm talking about support there. And in a solutions engineering aspect or in pre-sales, we are with a cesarean and we are doing calls and meetings all the time, of course.

Yesterday it was almost two hours with someone from New Zealand on a call explaining him something on a post-sales or with a partner. But that needed to happen because that was the only way to help him to understand something. But that was after some emails to be sure that he really needed that call. Well, one more question from a person

who's going to speak the question, and then all the emails Jorge will deal with. No, I will be in the booth for the rest of the evening so you can synchronously talk with me. Yeah, well, there is a clear measure.

There's a clear measure if you get the deal or not. So yes, that's connected to the serum. So we know exactly the rate of the sales engineer's access or the rate of the deal's success when there is a sales engineer and where there isn't, that's also measured.

Yeah, obviously we help a lot on the way we are. But yes, yeah, we need to measure that, of course, because we need to be sure that we are working on the proper deals and at the best time, with the best timing, or we enter in the process at the best moment, yes.

We track the use case for the deal. From there, well, we track who we are talking to, because obviously a sales engineer normally talks with a CTO or a technician. It depends on the size of the deal.

And we only work with enterprise clients. So with small clients, it's just purely, they just sign in and get the account. But the Saferips and, yeah, and solutions engineers work on their own enterprise accounts, yes. Thank you very much.