A software company can prepare for the United States in many ways. Switch Software’s preparation included bringing two young people to Uruguay through AIESEC, letting them learn the business, and giving cultural differences time to become ordinary conversation. In Nicolás Zangaro’s later telling, the experience involved football, shared mate and hugs that required a little adjustment. International expansion had acquired a social curriculum.
Zangaro called the approach “total immersion.” His account gives an unusually domestic texture to a commercial ambition. The team wanted to understand American expectations while preserving the personal warmth of its Uruguayan working life. Thomas, known as TJ, became an important participant in that learning. There were obstacles, slow stretches and frustration. Zangaro remembered the exchange with affection. Even the football belongs in the story: understanding colleagues sometimes requires finding out how seriously they take a friendly game.
A company begins with other people
Born in Montevideo, Zangaro studied Systems Engineering at Universidad ORT Uruguay. In 2009, he left a senior technology job to help establish Switch with people he knew through university and work. His daughter was a newborn. The venture had no clients. His brother Juan offered encouragement at the moment of decision; his brother Federico helped bring financial order to the new company. The founding story contains both a leap and a support system.
Switch’s team later grew from 45 people in 2019 to 180 in 2021. Those figures give the early decision some perspective. A small group that began by finding projects had become an organization large enough to require a different sort of management. Growth would put the founders’ preference for close relationships under a much larger workload.
The university connection matters beyond the introductions. Switch’s roots included Cártago, a final project by Álvaro Vázquez and Neri Custodio that simulated financial trading using real data. The early venture also received ANII support through its young entrepreneurs program in 2009. It emerged from a place where technical work, business advice and an actual customer problem could meet.
Zangaro’s advice to future entrepreneurs was correspondingly practical: share the idea, discuss it and seek guidance. He credited the university’s entrepreneurship center with opening doors and helping people connect their abilities to opportunities. A promising idea, in this account, benefits from leaving its owner’s head and meeting someone who knows the market.
“Para desarrollar un proyecto es fundamental el apoyo.”
Nicolás Zangaro, advice to ORT entrepreneursSupport is essential to developing a project.
An office with room for a conversation
By February 2019, Zangaro was explaining another decision with consequences for everyday working life. Switch had moved into a larger property in Punta Carretas, Montevideo. He described better facilities and a deliberate effort to create room for social exchange: open spaces, a large playroom and a pool. The amenities were attached to an explicit purpose. He wanted people to interact.
In the same discussion, he spoke about establishing a stronger commercial presence in the United States with the company’s own sales staff. The two ambitions sat comfortably together. There was a business to develop abroad and a working community to build at home.
His description of the actual service was equally grounded. Switch developed custom software around a client’s business needs, bringing specialized talent to the problem. The office could accommodate a game; the work still had to answer a customer’s requirements. A pool is an agreeable addition to a workplace, but it has yet to write a useful specification.
Learning the client’s side of the border
Zangaro’s reasoning about the US market included three practical advantages: demand for technical talent, nearby time zones and the availability of bilingual people in Uruguay. These are advantages that become useful during an ordinary working day. People can speak, clarify a problem and return to it while their colleagues are still at their desks.
He also described adding native US staff to understand how people worked and what they valued. The question extended beyond language. Knowing the words in a meeting leaves plenty of room for misunderstanding what the other person expects to happen next.
His view of expansion had limits, too. When discussing China as a possible market, he identified cultural and time differences as potential disadvantages for the service Switch wanted to provide. The logic was selective. A large market still had to suit the way the company intended to work. Geography mattered through its effects on relationships and delivery.
What a candidate remembers
There is another way to test the importance Zangaro places on people: listen to someone recalling a specific encounter. In November 2021, Florencia Bonifacio wrote about joining Switch after connecting with him on LinkedIn. She described discussions that felt conversational, with attention to what she could contribute.
Her account emphasized potential. Zangaro had seen possibilities she was struggling to see herself, she wrote, and had been willing to support the training she needed. She described an invitation to build something together. Collaboration, feedback and transparency were among the values she associated with the experience.
This is one colleague’s recollection of one hiring process, with the enthusiasm of a new beginning. Its value lies in the detail. A claim about company culture becomes more concrete when a person remembers being asked about their contribution and being given room to learn. Recruitment is one of the first occasions on which a growing company’s promises encounter someone else’s expectations.
Thirteen years before the CEO title
Zangaro’s appointment as CEO was announced on July 25, 2022. He had previously led commercial activity for the United States. By then, his experience covered more than twenty years in software, including technical and commercial positions. He described roughly a decade in development followed by another in leadership and business activity.
The appointment addressed a changed organization. Expansion had brought new leadership responsibilities in operations, human resources and marketing. Zangaro explained the need for a broader strategic view, more agile decisions and the internal capabilities required for the company’s next stage.
Culture appeared in that explanation as a responsibility to transmit values across a larger team. It is a different task from demonstrating them in a single conversation. As CEO, he would have to help create conditions in which other leaders could carry them into their own decisions. He described the role as a substantial learning opportunity, supported by the team. The experienced founder was still assigning himself homework.
The ambition, with a date attached
In December 2022, Switch introduced a new corporate identity. Zangaro connected the change to an intended repositioning and an ambitious growth plan: approximately 50 percent annually over the following five years. The focus would remain the United States and large Latin American companies.
That number was a target. Its significance here is what it reveals about the scale of the task he had accepted. He also discussed building the US team and expanding recruitment in Latin America. A new identity accompanied plans that depended on people, commercial presence and delivery capacity.
The company’s service model gives those plans a practical shape. Switch works through specialist studios covering areas including user experience, mobile and enterprise applications, cloud operations, testing, security and data. Its development base is Montevideo, with commercial offices listed in Illinois, Texas and Colorado. The relationships span several places; the work requires several kinds of expertise.
A practical question for the next technology
More recent public appearances have taken Zangaro back to the subjects of expansion and learning. In July 2025, Switch announced his participation in CutiTalks’ “Descentralizando Mercados,” alongside leaders from Markenetics and Nareia Software. The discussion was framed around the experience of entering Latin American and US markets.
In April 2026, he promoted an online event with AWS about putting AI to work. The agenda centered on simple implementations with measurable effects, opportunities to automate existing processes and a clear method for choosing priorities. For a founder whose career crosses technical work and sales, the emphasis is consistent: identify the business problem and decide what a useful result would look like.
Switch’s AWS AI Services Competency recognition supplies another piece of that picture. Zangaro described it as external validation of the company’s ability to create, design and scale AI solutions for clients. The recognition concerned technical capabilities and implementation experience. For him, the point was the connection between what the team could build and what it could deliver to customers.
The company also promoted its Innovation Lab as a place to turn business challenges into AI proofs of concept. That puts experimentation close to the work of choosing a problem. A test can make a proposed application easier to discuss: what is being attempted, what has been demonstrated and what still requires development? It gives a client and a technical team something specific to examine together.
His appearance in IT Builders’ The Leader’s Vision series, shared by Switch in September 2024, covered technology’s effects on everyday life, the skills and outlook needed in the industry, and the company’s contribution to client businesses. The subjects stretch from the individual entering the field to the organization buying its services. Zangaro’s working life has included both sides of that conversation.
The tools available to Switch have expanded since 2009. Zangaro’s public questions continue to concern how people use them together. A customer needs to explain a problem. A developer needs enough context to understand it. A new colleague needs a chance to contribute. His career has gradually widened the circle of people involved in those exchanges. Keeping them close takes work of its own.
Follow the conversations
More from Nicolás Zangaro and the people he works with.