Meet Jesus "Tito" Salas, our DivInc alumnus featured in this month’s Founder Spotlight series

Jesus "Tito" Salas is a passionate entrepreneur with a motivation to connect developers from developing to developed economies. His entrepreneurship experience started in his teens when throwing parties for thousands of patrons in Mexico to acquiring multinational working experiences in the US and China. Doing that job, Jesus discovered the huge need of qualified tech-talent that tech-companies in the United States have and created CodersLink with the purpose of helping the Mexican developer community by connecting them with job opportunities with leading tech-companies in the United States.

Below, Tito shares with us a bit about his journey to building a company from the ground up.

So I was born and raised in the northern part of Mexico. And from the beginning, I was very energetic and creative in finding ways to generate money. When I was 16 years old, I used to organize thousand-people parties and charge $10 as an entrance fee. I would always find ways to make money.  When I was 19 years old. I came to the US to study my bachelor's degree at The University of Texas-San Antonio, and I was not allowed to earn money since I was on a student visa at the time. So, I did internships for free to gain professional experience, and stand out from other students graduating with me, and ultimately find an employer who would sponsor my visa.  Finding an employer who was willing to sponsor my visa was way harder than I thought it would be. I applied to nearly 200 jobs all over the US and I got no interviews at all since I was being disqualified in most Recruitment Applications due to the fact that I needed a visa.  Then, luckily I got a call from a friend that was going through an accelerator program, in San Antonio, called Geekdom inviting me to a job interview. The job interview was to be the project manager for an international project connecting top tech startups from Mexico to the accelerator in San Antonio.   I got the job, and while connecting both tech ecosystems in Mexico and San Antonio, I started getting requests from startups in San Antonio to connect them with top developers in Mexico, and that is how CodersLink was born in 2015.  

Share your journey to becoming an entrepreneur.  

Initially, I worked with two tech startups in San Antonio connecting them with top developers in Mexico. I helped them through the whole immigration process processing their developers’ visa. They got an amazing experience so they started referring me to other companies in San Antonio. That was 5 years ago, now we have helped more than 70 tech companies such as Rackspace, J2 Global, Linio grow their tech teams in the US and Mexico.

What advice would you give to someone thinking about starting their own business?

Look for people that are more experienced than you, who are smarter than you, to give you advice in different ways.

To learn more about CoderLink visit http://www.coderslink.com