For many years, SiliconValleyForum.com was the website of Silicon Valley Forum, an organization that ran events and programs connecting startups, investors, corporations and universities with the Silicon Valley ecosystem. The domain now belongs to TMS Outsource, a custom software development company with engineering offices in Belgrade and Bucharest. We are not affiliated with Silicon Valley Forum. If you came here looking for its events, this page isn’t connected to them.
The audience the forum served, founders and teams building products, is the one we work with every day. So this page covers a question many US startups face once they move past the first few hires: how to grow an engineering team when hiring in the Bay Area alone is slow and expensive.
Ways to Build Engineering Capacity Outside the Bay Area
There isn’t one right model. Most companies end up combining two or three of these, depending on stage, budget and how much of the product they want to own in-house.
| Model | Time zone overlap with Pacific Time | Hiring speed | Management effort | Works best for |
| In-house in the Bay Area | Full | Slow, highly competitive market | High: recruiting, onboarding, retention | Core product leadership and roles that need to sit with the founders |
| Remote hires across the US | Full to partial | Moderate | High: each hire is managed individually | Companies with a strong remote culture and engineering managers in place |
| Nearshore partner (Latin America) | Most of the working day | Fast, the partner already has the team | Lower: the partner handles hiring and retention | Work that needs a lot of real-time collaboration |
| Partner in Central and Eastern Europe | A few hours each morning (Pacific) | Fast, the partner already has the team | Lower: the partner handles hiring and retention | Well-scoped projects, dedicated product teams, work that benefits from overnight progress |
For a wider comparison of locations, including costs and talent pools, see The Best Countries for Outsourcing Software Development. If you’re still deciding whether to outsource at all, Outsourcing software development versus doing development projects in-house lays out both sides.
Making the Time Difference Work
Belgrade is 9 hours ahead of Pacific Time and Bucharest is 10 hours ahead for most of the year. For a few weeks in spring and autumn the gap shrinks by an hour, because Europe and the US change their clocks on different dates. Against Eastern Time, the gap is 6 hours for Belgrade and 7 for Bucharest.
In practice, the working day overlaps in the morning on the US side: 8 a.m. in San Francisco is 5 p.m. in Belgrade. Teams that work well across that gap usually:
- keep a short daily overlap window for questions, demos and decisions, instead of trying to share the whole day;
- write specifications, acceptance criteria and handoff notes before the European day starts, so work moves forward while the US team sleeps;
- agree up front who can approve what, so a missing answer doesn’t block a whole day of work;
- run sprint reviews and planning on video, and everything else in writing.
What to Check Before You Pick a Partner
Most outsourcing problems come from things that could have been checked before the contract was signed:
- Ownership. The source code, designs and documentation should belong to you from day one, with no fees to access your own work.
- Team continuity. Ask who will work on your product, how long they’ve been with the company, and what happens when someone leaves.
- Communication. Agree on the meeting cadence, response times and who your day-to-day contact is.
- References. Talk to past clients, and read independent reviews on platforms such as Clutch.
- Contracts and data. Intellectual property, confidentiality and data protection should be spelled out.
It’s also worth reading how large projects have gone wrong. The Biggest IT Outsourcing Failures You Can’t Miss collects well-known cases and what caused them.
How TMS Works With US Companies
TMS Outsource was founded in 2014. Our 40+ engineers work from offices in Belgrade, Serbia and Bucharest, Romania, for clients across Europe and North America. We work either as a dedicated team that joins your product long term or on fixed-scope projects, and most long-term clients start with a scoping phase first.
Our services cover web application development, mobile app development, UI/UX design, QA and testing and ongoing support. We also build and run our own products, including the appointment booking platforms Amelia and Trafft, so we know what it takes to keep software working after launch. You can see more of our work in the portfolio, or contact us for a free consultation.