Gino Ferrand
Founder & CEO
Software, Staffing, Entrepreneur
Seattle, WA, USA
Listen to Gino’s Podcast!
Gino Ferrand is the founder of TECLA, an AI-driven talent-matching platform connecting top developers across the Americas with U.S. companies. Over the past 12 years, he’s helped businesses worth over $10 billion in aggregate scale their engineering teams globally. A hands-on leader who still codes, he brings deep expertise in both technology and cross-border business. Having immigrated to the U.S. at 12, his experience of starting over instilled a relentless drive and sharp instincts—qualities that continue to fuel his mission: to unlock global talent and create opportunities that transcend borders.
Life Story
When Gino was 12 when he left Lima, Peru, leaving behind his home, his father, his friends, and the only world he knew. The U.S. was a different universe. Gino had to rebuild from scratch. But starting over has a way of sharpening your instincts and making you hungry. That hunger is still there, and it’s driven him to build and scale businesses across borders, cultures, and languages.
Gino’s journey started in Lima, Peru, where he grew up surrounded by the vibrant, chaotic energy of a city of 10 million. Moving to the U.S. at 12 felt like stepping into another world. Everything was unfamiliar—friends, culture, language. He had to rebuild from the ground up, and that drive to create never left him.
Gino comes from a family of builders. His mother would leave for work at 7 a.m. every day, returning home at 8 p.m. from one of the most dangerous parts of Lima, where she ran a steel mill and factory with her two brothers. His father owned and operated a home decor store, two businesses built from grit and relentless effort, long before Gino was even born. Watching them work, sacrifice, and build something of their own taught me what it meant to be relentless. It’s the lesson Gino carries with him to this day.
In his senior year of high school, a fractured skull from a soccer injury ended his varsity season before it even began. With sports off the table, Gino Ferrand enrolled in a jewellery-making class, an art his family had practised back in Lima. One thing led to another, and he launched his first e-commerce jewellery brand for men before he even graduated.
At the University of San Diego, Gino kept building. He launched a social network for college entrepreneurs, drawing from the same instincts that pushed me to design websites in the early days of Flash, Geocities, and the original GIFs.
But the real turning point came after college when Gino moved back to Lima. For the first time, he saw how much untapped technical talent existed in Latin America. Gino started hiring developers there for his own projects. Then for friends. Then, for fellow entrepreneurs. That’s how TECLA was born—a nearshore staffing company connecting U.S. tech companies with top-tier Latin American talent.
Over the past 12 years, Gino Ferrand has helped U.S. companies worth over $10 billion in aggregate scale with developers from all over the Americas. Today, he lives in Seattle, but he continues to stay hands-on, designing and architecting our AI-driven talent-matching platform at TECLA. He’s a founder who still codes, a business leader with roots in both the U.S. and Latin America.
Gino believes that talent is everywhere; it just needs the right platform to thrive. And that’s what he’s spent over a decade building.
Gino Ferrand is also featured on our premiere Features Page, and you can read the Podcast Interview Transcript.
