He always liked mathematics and as soon as he touched a computer he knew he wanted to do it. So when he had to choose between professional basketball and computer engineering, he opted for the latter. Since the beginning of 2017, Leonardo Loureiro has presided over the chamber that brings together more than 370 companies dedicated to information technology, in a vocation that came naturally to him because of his time at the Engineering Student Center. He believes that his sector, with more than 12,000 professionals employed in our country -in which 54% are under 34 years old-, "has no ceiling" and has the capacity to "transform the country".
In this second installment of the series of interviews with business leaders, the president of the Uruguayan Chamber of Information Technology (Cuti), Leonardo Loureiro, 48, 23 years old, married and with three children - two girls and a boy - received the daily in his office in downtown Montevideo.
He was born in San Carlos, but he is not a Carolinian. "I went just to be born," he says, and explains that "at that time it was the sanatorium with the best doctors in the area, because it was a center in the passage between Montevideo, Maldonado and Rocha". Later he returned to Maldonado, as the fifth child of the six that his parents would have.
He says that his childhood was "normal: bicycle, soccer, basketball, beach". Until the third year of high school he went to public school and did high school at the Sisters School. He remembers being told that he was a "weirdo", "the classic nerd", but with a different component because he liked to study and did "very well", but he also did basketball, athletics, Olympic gymnastics, and also went dancing. "It's more of a preconception", he reflects, and adds that it is a stereotype that today - from the place he occupies - he is trying to demystify because "mathematics is not teaching you to count, to multiply or to do a function but to teach you to think, and abstract thinking is what opens up the possibility of being freer".
He never had any doubts about what he was going to study: "I was between economics and engineering, and in the fourth year of high school, when I touched the first computer, I made up my mind". At 18 he emigrated to Montevideo and started Computer Engineering at the University of the Republic (Udelar). He also took up professional basketball again, which he had started with the Maldonado national team in Montevideo Básquetbol Club, but after a few games he retired due to a fracture and the difficulty of reconciling practice with his studies. "I took advantage of the injury, let's say", he confesses.
He started working when he was 12 years old, helping his father, who was an employee of the National Breweries, during the season. "At that time, you were allowed to be a minor and you had to work to be able to do things," he says. When he came of age, already in the capital, he started working in a bank and in 1992 he turned to teaching, while "mutating" in different jobs in the technology sector.
As for teaching, he worked in the private sector: from 1992 until 2010 he taught technical subjects and from 2004, after having completed a master's degree in business, he started to teach about it. "I went over to the dark side, as a friend says," he jokes. When asked about his classes, he says that "they are all different, even from year to year; I always try to add new things to them: I have a formal structure but a lot of telling and transferring experiences". In this sense, he is not worried about whether he teaches "well or badly", but he is comforted when people tell him that they have applied the methods or processes he presents. As a teacher, he says that he is "quite a button" -especially when he taught technical subjects-, and that nowadays what he wants his students to do is to question the direction of their lives: "If I achieve that at least a little bit, I achieve my goal", he adds.
Arrival at the chamber
He joined Cuti in 2002, invited and encouraged by Luis Stolovich, the then general secretary. Having been a counselor for the student order in the faculty, he maintains that it was "quite natural" for him to join the union activity, since "the struggle for the objectives and the common good always came to me.
For a decade he participated uninterruptedly, until 2012, when he started working at Quanam, a federation of firms specializing in professional services for consulting and management, as a manager. "I took a four-year break and then I had to come back with everything", as vice president of internationalization during the last period of Álvaro Lamé.
By then they were already "very close friends," but when he met him in 2011, "they didn't have such a great feeling," he recalls. "When he ran for president, during Enrique Tucci's last presidency, I was treasurer and he asked me to stay on if he won. The first thing I said to him was: 'Look, Álvaro, I know you're the right person to speed up a lot of things we have to do in the chamber, but I'm going to get in and be with you so that you don't run into a wall. The first thing I told him was that I was going to say no to everything, and I did, but he ended up convincing me of many things, and now I realize that he was right. For example, I didn't agree with moving to the Latu [the chamber's current headquarters] because it seemed to me to be a very big derogation and that we had to take care of the members' money. I didn't see it, but he did, and a technology center was created, an ecosystem, where the most important companies in the sector are located. It's big.
Management priorities
In the middle of this year, when the mandate inherited following Lamé's death in January 2017 came to an end, he ran for the post with a number of priorities: training, territorial decentralization, inclusion of women and internationalization.
Many say - by way of illustration - that the sector is the only one with negative unemployment, on the understanding that it could employ more people if they were qualified to work in it. In recent years and as a result of strong state support, there has been a strong commitment to training, but he says the reasons go "beyond" the market. "I'm not looking for more people to work so that companies can earn more money. What worries me is that Uruguay is a country where we can all live well, that my children can decide to stay here, and several members of the chamber share this. The IT sector is the only one that has no ceiling in Uruguay; the only ceiling we have is the people, the availability, so we depend on them deciding to study this and wanting to work here".
He confesses that some people tell him that it is "enlightened selfishness", and explains: "You think of others but it also benefits you", but he assures that he can be "a transforming sector of the country" and that "there is plenty of room for everyone". "To me, earning money for the sake of earning money doesn't help me if later I see that there are people who don't have enough to live on," he insists.
In this search, he proposed to enter on two fronts where he saw imbalances: the interior of the country and women. Regarding territorial decentralization, she says that it arises because "the bug of those who were born outside Montevideo bites. He says it jokingly but also seriously: he shares "the issue of uprooting: living alone, being away from the family," and says he aspires "for people to be able to live where it makes them happier, because there is something that is very clear: the happier people are, the better they work and the more productive they are. Also, although it is something invisible to many, he assures that "in the interior there are many people interested in working in this" that given the scarce supply of work or end up working for other countries remotely or underemployed, turned to industry or commerce. "When you were trained for something and you don't have the opportunity to develop in that job, you get frustrated, and that's what we want to avoid," he says.
On the other hand, she is "frightened" by the low participation of women in the sector: less than 25%. She thinks it is due "in part to stereotypes" of gender, and on the other hand, she maintains that there is a study that indicates that "women consider that it is a sector in which a lot of work is done". In any case, it is a trend that she intends to reverse because "it is unthinkable to have any activity with a gender imbalance, whichever way you look at it. I don't know where I stand when gender issues are discussed, but what I am convinced of is that men and women are different and that in our industry in particular, in which innovation, creativity, human treatment, qualities of women are important, we are missing out on a lot because they are not working".
Flexibilities
Perhaps the computer science is one of the few fields that enables remote and freelance work, a quality that for Loureiro "does not help" the sector. "For us, as companies, these freedoms complicate us because we work as a team and it is complex to coordinate; it is better to work in person because of the transfer of knowledge that occurs between people when they are in contact," he explains.
Beyond that, he understands those who choose it because he assures that "the freedom that comes from working the way you want and at your own biorhythm is not given by anything else". He says he does not share "at all" the statement of the president of the PIT-CNT, Fernando Pereira, that this flexibility "impoverishes people's quality of life". Loureiro, on the other hand, believes that "people who work in this way are not happy, but very happy", and finishes: "I would be happy: go for a run, work three, four hours, take a nap, pick up my son from school and then continue working".
The informality that this form of work can bring "does not worry him" because "today, in a sector like ours, with all the regulations that exist and electronic invoicing there is no way it can happen, not even working abroad, because all the money that is received has to be justified.
The minister, the ministry and the other industries
When asked if he considers the chamber he presides over to be "progressive," he responds by asking how to define that term. After a few laughs and a few seconds of reflection, he says that maybe that image is due to the fact that "we are more about doing than complaining". "The industry was born without anyone's support, driven by academics from Udelar, who brought the first computer and innovated in the creation of this career, and by entrepreneurs who took the risk, like Genexus in 1989", he adds. And in the same line, he argues that there is also a factor of "giving back to society what society itself gave", which is manifested in "support of initiatives, training and social activities" that "perhaps are due to the fact that many of us were trained at Udelar and that permeates the entrepreneurship".
Beyond these beginnings, he values the "leading role" taken by the government and the different institutions, because they have found an echo in the promotion of the sector and the activities. About the Minister of Industry, Energy and Mining, Carolina Cosse, he says that she helped to open the vision on the relationship with the rest of the industry and the comprehensiveness of the digital transformation. "We saw ourselves from the point of view of being a support for other industries and she saw us from the point of view that the industry itself, whatever the activity, understands that technology is part of it and that it does not have to rely on it. That, which seems like two very similar ways of seeing things, implies an important nuance," he says.
Although it is not among the founders of the Confederation of Business Chambers, the CUTI joined later. The reasons? "Because they don't touch on short-term issues, but on things that are understood to be important for the country, such as education, and we understand that, beyond the road ahead, there is no doubt that we have to improve in this aspect. For us in particular, who are the knowledge industry, high school dropouts are what affects us the most. It seems circumstantial, but in reality we are analyzing the issue of competitiveness in itself, in general".
Boundaries and ethics
On his computers - his personal and work computers - he has the cameras covered. He says that "you have to be careful and overcautious" and that "it's important to understand that you have to make good use of things, and social networks and our digital footprint are part of that".
Beyond the fact that technology is advancing at a dizzying speed, Loureiro is "concerned and preoccupied" with the development of certain forms, such as artificial intelligence. "It seems to me that it always has to have a purpose and prioritize the human being over the machine being," he says.
For him there are two visions of man and machine working together: "The technonegativist, which would be the apocalyptics, who see it as Skynet and Terminator, and the technopositivist; I do not rule out either one or the other, I think it is up to us to understand what is happening and form a position with respect to that".
Mission
Yesterday, the delegation of government authorities, institutions and entrepreneurs of the sector that since last Saturday was on an official visit to Boston and New York organized by CUTI and the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Mining returned. This is the second trip to the United States, a country that acquires more than 60% of the exports of this industry, which in 2017 sold abroad 379 million dollars.
However, more than "going in search of concrete results" this year the trip had the purpose of "exploring and understanding" the technological ecosystem there: "Many say that Silicon Valley is overheated and are migrating to Boston -a city that has had the initiative to attract technology companies-, so we wanted to do an exploration that would serve as a learning experience to understand the position of the companies that are installed there, the concept of accelerators and networking spaces".
For Loureiro, being a "Silicon Valley" implies a number of things, and he considers that "what we lack the most is money, not the money they generate, but the venture capital" that revolves in that underworld. In terms of logic, he says that the Uruguayan case in terms of its relationship with academia is "paradigmatic" and "incredible", and perhaps the most representative of this is the Software Testing Center, a company created by CUTI and Udelar with the aim of developing software quality and testing and managed jointly for more than 12 years. In this sense, he says that "we could say that we could be a Silicon Valley", but he clarifies that he is not sure "if it is an aspiration of ours" because "it is like wanting to be someone else", and also "we have our own particularities". For now, the goal to which he aspires is to "be an important center of technological development.
Source: La Diaria
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