Scott Kenyon, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer, Applaudo

Partnerships don’t hold up on video calls alone. A monitor works fine for a stand-up, a demo, a status update. It’s the wrong tool for the conversations that actually shape a partnership: where a client wants to go, what outcome they’re actually chasing, what’s keeping them up at night. Those conversations need a room.

That’s the argument behind Tech Summit, and three editions in, the evidence backs it up. This September, we hosted our third edition in San Salvador. Over two days, our clients sat with leaders from other industries facing the same problems and solving them differently. A retailer and an airline don’t usually compare notes on how they’re running their operations. In this room, they do, and both leave with something a call never would have surfaced.

We used those two days to show clients how we engineer today, what we’re shipping now, and what’s coming next, including a first look at a proprietary system our engineers have been building. Which we can’t wait to bring it to clients when we launch officially.

But the two days that matter most aren’t the ones on the agenda. They’re the dinner conversation about a client’s kid starting college. The story about how someone got into this industry in the first place. The thing you only learn about a person when you’re not staring at a shared screen.

We treat client projects as our own. Our team shows up with the same commitment and care whether the deadline is theirs or ours, and that shows in the quality of what we ship. That consistency is its own kind of trust-building: it tells a client we’re not just delivering a project; we’re protecting a relationship. That only works if the relationship is real to begin with, not transactional. Even with clients we no longer actively work with, that closeness hasn’t gone anywhere. That’s not something a contract can produce on its own. 

This was our second Tech Summit of 2026, a very successful one. Thirteen years into building enterprise software, that’s the lesson I keep relearning: the work holds up longer when you know the person across the table, not just their project.

Find out more about Applaudo here:
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