Founders Everywhere: Jose de Cabo
Jose de Cabo is the co-founder of Remotely Works, which helps hundreds of startups scale their remote teams with top AI engineers to achieve rapid, competitive growth.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
Most staffing firms operate on a simple formula. They sit between companies and talent, mark up rates, and make money by adding more billable headcount rather than by improving how work gets done. Pricing is usually opaque, so neither side fully sees who earns what or how much margin sits in the middle. Senior AI-enabled engineers are some of the most difficult and expensive roles to hire and oftentimes, a significant slice of what the client pays never reaches their pockets. Remotely is a platform that helps startups with access to top-tier global engineering talent, seamless hiring, and improved retention. They use a lean, AI‑driven model and transparent pricing. The company charges a fixed monthly fee, and 100% of salary goes to the engineer.
Co-founder Jose de Cabo has been building companies with the same core team for more than 15 years. He and Pau Sabria met at Columbia Business School and moved to New York as first-time founders, where they built and scaled Olapic to a successful exit. After Olapic, they created Clara Partners, a holding company that now houses Remotely, as well as Clara Ventures, a community‑driven VC that supports immigrant founders landing in the U.S. Through that journey, they met their other two Remotely co-founders, Pau Suris and Sebastian Alvarez, who both grew out of earlier roles at Olapic into long-term partnerships. Together, the team brings a long shared history of building, scaling, and shipping products across multiple companies and continents.
They will be hosting a live webinar on Monday, April 20, where they’ll dive deeper into how they are using AI agents at Remotely.
Why Remotely and why now?
When we were building our first company, Olapic, we experienced the pain of scaling high-quality engineering teams in a fast‑growing tech business. We solved the problem by working with exceptional Latin American talent. What stood out was not just talent quality, but also how naturally teams worked together. Shared time zones, clear communication, and strong ownership made collaboration feel easy from day one. For us, it was the difference between hiring people and building a real team. We’re now building to provide a solution at scale with transparency and better alignment for both companies and developers. The timing matters because AI is fundamentally reshaping how work gets done, moving away from headcount-heavy services toward smaller, high-leverage teams powered by software and agents. We’re building Remotely from the ground up for that new reality.
What’s Remotley’s North Star?
Our North Star is using the smallest team possible to run the highest‑quality operation with as much AI and operational leverage as we can. When you strip away the overhead that traditional staffing companies carry, you can pay developers more, charge customers less, and everyone stays longer. We think most of this industry is going to get rebuilt around that idea in the next five years.
How does Remotely inspire “customer love”?
VCs and PEs introduce us to their portfolio companies without us asking. (Many Everywhere portcos already partner with Remotely). Customers refer us without us asking, and that only happens when the experience is good. We have 8,000+ senior developers in our network, so we can move fast. We obsess over developer quality and client fit the same way a product team obsesses over user experience. When a developer isn’t working out or when a customer needs to scale, we move fast. Speed and quality compound over time, and that’s what turns a vendor relationship into a partnership.
The other thing is we don’t have lock-ins. No contracts forcing people to stay. So the bar to keep customers is higher. When they stay for three years and keep growing, that tells you something.
What’s on the horizon for Remotely?
We’re building an advisory board of executives who built and sold massive IT services companies, people who ran multi-billion dollar businesses. When they hear our team size relative to how many developers we manage, they can’t believe it. They see us as the young guys playing with AI, and we see them as people who’ve built at a scale we haven’t reached yet. Bringing those two worlds together is how we build something much bigger than a staffing company. We have the ambition to build the next-gen IT services business.
What makes you a unique founder?
I’ve been through the full cycle: management consulting, founding, scaling, an exit, and now building again from scratch. But the thing that probably makes me different is the immigrant founder lens. My co-founders and I came from Spain and figured out New York as first-time founders. We were lucky it worked. Now through Clara Ventures, we’re helping the next generation of founders from Spain and Latin America do the same thing. We run a WhatsApp community for immigrant founders, help with immigration, make angel investments, and do intros. We used to be the young ones. Now we’re the old guys, soon with grey hair, and that’s actually pretty great.
Fun fact:
My wife and I are both entrepreneurs building our businesses from the mountains in France, while raising five young children.
Listen to Dylan Lew with Scott Hartley, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Setting the Ecotone. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out to all our past episodes here!
