The Human Side of Tech: Leadership, Culture & Growth | Built for This Podcast

About this episode

In this episode of Built for This, host Carly Pepin sits down with Carlos Diego Cavalcanti, CEO/CTO of Valcann, EPI-USE's Latin America cloud services division. Carlos shares how he bootstrapped Valcann into a trusted regional partner, why he believes you can't scale a relationship, and how the company navigated the pandemic month by month before joining Group Elephant and EPI-USE in 2023. He also reflects on resilience as a discipline rather than an innate trait, and how AI is reshaping the professional services model.

Key Takeaways:

Why Diego believes trust and relationships can't be scaled the way processes can, and what that means for growing a services business
How Valcann navigated the pandemic by making decisions month by month instead of betting on long-term certainty
Why resilience is a discipline you build deliberately, not a trait you're simply born with
How AI is reshaping the professional services model, and what that means for firms like Valcann and EPI-USE

Presented by:

Carly Pepin

Business Growth Strategist | Host, Built for This

Carly Pepin is a Business Growth Strategist who helps organizations align leadership and execute growth strategies at scale. She works with founders and leadership teams to close the gap between ambition and consistent, scalable results.

As host of Built for This, Carly brings that same lens to conversations with founders and operators across industries, digging into the real, often unglamorous work behind sustainable growth, from building teams to navigating setbacks to making resilient decisions under pressure.

Through the podcast, Carly surfaces practical, grounded insights for leaders scaling their own organizations, pairing her strategic background with genuine curiosity about the people and decisions behind every growth story.

Carlos Diego Cavalcanti

CEO & CTO, Valcann, an EPI-USE Company

Carlos Diego Cavalcanti is the CEO/CTO of Valcann, EPI-USE's Latin America cloud services division, where he leads strategy and technology direction for one of the region's most trusted SAP and cloud services partners.

Carlos bootstrapped Valcann from the ground up, building the business on a simple philosophy: you can't scale a relationship. Client trust has to be earned individually, even as the company grows. That approach included launching a university internship program in 2019 to develop local talent and build an engineering pipeline grounded in Valcann's own culture rather than hiring purely for headcount.

When the pandemic hit, Carlos and his team navigated the uncertainty month by month instead of committing to long-term bets, a discipline that carried Valcann through to its 2023 integration into Group Elephant and EPI-USE. He views resilience less as a fixed trait and more as a discipline built through consistent decision-making under pressure, and is now focused on how AI is reshaping the professional services model for firms like Valcann.