Why Verzes exists
Nothing about me changed. Somebody American just finally looked.
I am European. I studied in Portugal. I could write software, and I could not get anyone to let me write it for a living.
Then some American founders came to Lisbon on holiday, and I got talking to them. They looked at what I had built. They hired me as an intern within weeks, and three months later I was full time.
Nothing about me had changed in those weeks. The only thing that changed was that somebody finally looked.
I am European. I studied in Portugal, I graduated able to build real things, and I spent a long stretch afterwards unable to get anybody to pay me to build them.
It was not that I was getting rejected at the last round. Mostly I was not getting a round at all. Applications went into systems that never replied. The roles that did exist wanted three years of experience for a job that taught you nothing, at a salary that meant living with your parents, in a company where the most interesting decision had been made a decade ago by somebody who had since left.
America was not a plan. America was the thing you assumed was for other people — for people who had studied somewhere famous, or whose parents knew somebody, or who had a visa waiting. I never seriously thought about it, because everything around me quietly agreed it was not available.
A few American founders were in Portugal on holiday. I got talking to them the way you do. At some point the conversation turned to what I was working on, and instead of being polite about it they actually looked.
What happened next still seems disproportionate to me. They were struck — their word — by how hard I worked and how much I had taught myself, and they said plainly that it compared well to a lot of people they were hiring at home. They took me on as an intern. Three months later I was full time.
Here is the part that matters. In the weeks between being unhireable in Europe and being hired in America, nothing about me changed. Not my skill, not my portfolio, not my work ethic. The only variable that moved was that somebody on the other side of the Atlantic finally looked at my work.
I got a career out of a holiday conversation. That is a wonderful story and a terrible system. There are thousands of engineers across Europe in exactly the position I was in — good, hungry, invisible — and almost none of them are going to happen to meet the right person at the right table.
Verzes is the attempt to do deliberately what happened to me by accident. We find European engineers who can actually build, we get them ready for the way American companies interview, and we put them in front of those companies ourselves. Starting in Lisbon, because that is where this happened and where we are.
None of this is because European engineers are worse. The evidence of my own career is the opposite, and every American founder I have spoken to since says some version of the same thing: the work ethic is there, the fundamentals are there, the hunger is conspicuously there.
What is not there is ambition on the employer side. Europe has spent a decade being careful while the interesting problems were solved elsewhere, and it has trained a generation of its own engineers to aim low and wait. We are not going to fix that. We are going to route around it, one engineer at a time, until enough of them have proved what they are worth that the question changes.