Luis Derechin
Founder & CEO
Entrepreneur, Author
Miami, FL, USA
Listen to Luis’ Podcast!
Luis Derechin is a serial entrepreneur, global talent strategist, and the founder and CEO of Nir-Yu, a nearshore staffing company that helps US and Canadian companies hire full-time talent across 12 Latin American countries. He is the author of the Amazon #1 bestseller The Offshore Team Deathtrap and the creator of the REMOTE Intelligence framework. He started his first company at 18.
In the early 2000s he co-founded JackBe, the first Mexican technology startup to land US venture capital funding — enterprise mashup software that let businesses build dashboard applications out of scattered data sources. JackBe made the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 and was acquired by Software AG, one of Germany’s leading software companies, in 2013. The part Luis didn’t plan was the team. Out of necessity, JackBe ran a distributed workforce drawn from both Mexico and the United States — not a US company with an offshore back office, but one team built from both countries and structured to work as a single unit. It turned out to be their quiet advantage: high-quality, missionary-minded people at sustainable cost. And, as Luis puts it, they got lucky. There was no framework. Just a handful of choices that happened to avoid the mistakes that sink most cross-border teams.
After the sale, Luis spent years consulting for companies trying to repair offshore initiatives that had gone sideways. Different industries, different countries, different budgets — and the same seven failure patterns, over and over. He named them the Death Traps. What struck him wasn’t that the patterns existed. It was that every one of them was preventable, and not one of them was anybody’s job to prevent. The recruiter is paid when you sign. The platform that legally employs the hire is paid to keep payroll and compliance clean. Everything in between — onboarding, integration, performance, retention, the seven places it actually breaks — lands on the client, on top of their real job. Roughly 73% of offshore hiring initiatives fail to meet expectations, and almost none of them fail because payroll ran late. They fail in the gap nobody owns.
REMOTE Intelligence is Luis’s answer — a six-part system engineered against those seven failure patterns. Across more than ten years and 100+ companies, it has produced a 95% success rate and average retention of 3.2 years, against an industry norm closer to fourteen months. Born in Mexico and educated in the US from second grade, Luis studied engineering in the United States and earned his business degree in Mexico. He is fully binational, and moves between Mexico, the US, and Latin America — living the borderless model he advocates. Ask him why he built a company around other people’s failures, and the answer runs three words: because failure sucks.
Luis Derechin is also featured on our premiere Features Page, and you can read the Podcast Interview Transcript.
