John Graham-Cumming, a British software engineer, cuts an endearing figure in the world of computer science. He was thrust into the limelight in 2009 for having launched a petition that resulted in the UK government giving a posthumous apology for the treatment of famed mathematician Alan Turing; the government’s condemnation of Mr Turing’s sexuality ultimately led to him taking his own life nine years after the end of the second world war.
As chief technology officer of US IT services company Cloudflare, he explains why the company’s fastest growing office is in Portugal, why being in the same time zone as the UK is beneficial and why artificial intelligence (AI) does not pose a risk to the local talent pool.
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Q: Why did you choose to come to Lisbon?
A: We saw an effect from Brexit that was a slowdown in our pipeline of new candidates coming from Europe, so it made sense for us to have an office in Europe that was more than just sales. We looked at 45 locations, all over Europe — from Iceland to Estonia — and two cities bubbled to the top of the list: Lisbon and Barcelona.
Both of them are in southern Europe, very attractive places to live in and cheaper than London. At the time, there was quite a lot of political instability in Spain because of the Catalan independence movement, while Lisbon had a lot going for it.
Besides cost, it is a very attractive location due to the talent base, good connectivity, excellent internet and the same time zone as the UK. It seems silly to say that, but we’re headquartered in San Francisco which is eight hours behind London. In Spain, it’s nine hours, which actually makes a difference when you're trying to coordinate with an office in California. We opened in 2019. Six of us came and now we’re 250 in Lisbon and another 50 in the rest of Portugal.
Q: What surprised you about setting up operations in Portugal?
A: The talent has definitely been broader than we anticipated. It’s a small country, so you do feel a difference in terms of recruiting locally compared to, say, the UK.
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We came here very much for the engineering and linguistic talent, but what’s really blown us away is Cloudflare’s finance department here, which now has more people globally than anywhere else, and that’s because a lot of European banks had operations in Portugal. So that has been a nice surprise.
Q: What are the risks that AI poses to the talent pool?
A: I’m not worried about AI. From a tech perspective, it just enhances what engineers are doing. They’re able to programme quicker and it serves as a booster. From a business perspective, despite the ChatGPT revolution making the public realise what AI was capable of, the actual business applications of AI have not yet arrived.
Q: Are you concerned that the talent market will become even more competitive as more multinationals enter the Portuguese market?
A: We’re here to stay. We’re actually going to move into a much larger office because we need the space.
For us, it’s been a great bet to come here. I worked in Silicon Valley before here and I worked in the UK as well. The difference is that here it’s just a lot smaller, so we would welcome more companies to come here because it creates job mobility and a more vibrant ecosystem.
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This article is part of the Special Report:
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