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Honest conversations with the engineering leaders, CTOs, founders, and engineers building real software with real teams. No fluff, no hype — just the messy, human side of getting great products out the door.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (00:06)
Hello, thank you very much for joining this episode of built by humans. This is where we talk about the human side of things of what it takes to build products, get them out of the door and make them successful. Everybody talks about technology, latest and greatest tools. There's so many podcasts, so many information out there. And sometimes we tend to forget that they're still people as of now, they're still people. They're writing that code, they're developing those products and
That's what we're talking about. That's what we're discussing. A lot of this now remote, a lot of this people all over the world and it takes some interesting skills and it's a challenge. That's that, I'm turning it over. Ryan, thank you so much for joining. Introduce yourself, tell us who you are, what you're doing.
Ryan Johnson (00:52)
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me on. So I'm Ryan Johnson. I'm the Chief Product Officer at CallRail. Been here about eight years. Been in product development, both on engineering and product a little over 20 years now. And really focused on building products that actually bring value to customers and utilizing the latest and greatest technology available to us.
Obviously AI is on our doorstep every day. And so not only how do we bring the power of that to the products, to call rails customers, but then also as a product organization, how do we adopt these things to efficiently develop product in new and exciting ways, I'll say that I feel is almost changing every day.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (01:35)
Absolutely. So you touched on something, right? You said you've done product and you've done engineering and then you said you want to bring out products that actually used valuable and needed. And I've been in this business for now 35 years and I've seen way too many times where people are building products for the sake of products. And a lot of that comes from engineering versus product who owns it, who makes a decision. You've been on both sides. Where do you think
There's friction, right? Let's be honest about it. There's always friction. Why and how do you typically resolve it? And I'm asking you because again, you've seen both sides.
Ryan (02:03)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So in my experience, having some of that healthy friction is good, right? Because you're challenging each other, assuming that it's in respectful ways through the different lens that you have, you know, whether it's the design lens, truly the product manager lens or the engineering lens. So I personally, as a leader, like some of that healthy tension because I feel it pushes everybody to better outcomes.
You know, asking the question things like, is this actually delivering value? What are you going to measure? Um, what is the impact you have to have? Um, you know, how are we holding ourselves accountable? I think to make sure that there's more alignment, um, it, you know, from the get-go is really just making sure in, you know, here at call rail, like we operate as engineering product design. at EPD, like that we have the share, the same shared goals. Um,
And so we talk about our strategic projects and the things that we're going to accomplish. We don't say, you know, products focused on this and we'll get us here and engineers focus on this and we'll get it here and then marketing gets it and we'll get it here. It's very much a cohesive story. And so that's how we talk to our teams. Like it's the goal is this. And we all have a part to play into it even beyond EPD. And a matter of fact, we do that even at the board level, which I enjoy. And so a lot of the discussions we have
during our board meetings is that same mentality where the CTO, myself and our CMO, CRO, we're interweaving a story of this is the strategy, this is the goal, and we play all these parts, but we're stitching it together for them so they don't have to. And so I think, you know, how we talk to our teams and how we set those expectations with those shared goals, and then how we actually talk about it at the very top. So like reporting how we're doing to our board.
We've just embraced it that way. I'm fortunate enough to work with our CTO here for, gosh, almost 15 years now across two companies. And so there's a lot of trust there too in challenging each other. to me, that's like, I don't think it's secret sauce or formula, but I feel it's really needed. And I think even more now than ever because things are changing so fast.
challenging each other in different ways is even becoming more important because your time to get something out is just compressed so much. If you're not doing that, you could end up shipping a lot of things that don't provide value and things that you got to clean up to your customers.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (04:22)
Right.
Yeah. And I think you're absolutely right. There's no secret sauce. I've seen it from both sides myself. I ran engineering teams. I was in the product side. I was an executive, not side, I guess, but executive level where I had to deal with both. And I think it's very important to remember it's a common goal and we're building products for customer, not for ourselves. And people tend to forget that, right? Sometimes.
Ryan (04:56)
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (05:02)
I think it's getting better, but I've seen too many times when engineering builds a product because they like it and let's do this and let's do that. And they forget, but what's the benefit. And that said, I've seen product that says, but I need it in the healthcare. Right. And like, well, you can get it. I could, but you got to understand that comes at a cost. It's not going to work tomorrow. You'll get it today.
Ryan (05:16)
Yep, exactly right.
That's right.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (05:27)
So everybody talks about AI. It's hard. It's amazing. It's hard to have a conversation with anybody, work-related or not work-related, that is not around AI. Some of it is positive, some of it is fun comedy, some of it is negative. There's a lot of fun comedy around it. We all have it. We all use it, right? We're technology people. We're the...
Ryan (05:43)
Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (05:50)
storefront of it, right? We're a forefront, right? We're doing this. There are a lot of people that haven't touched it. I still talk to people that go, AISBS. I go, why? It lies. I said, define lies. Well, I asked that question, gave me wrong information. said, have you ever done a Google search and didn't get the right data? Yeah.
Ryan (06:06)
Yeah,
all the time!
Zhenya Rozinskiy (06:08)
Hmm. Hmm. Did you see it? Did you not see what's going on? So don't use AI as a search engine hoping you'll get the right answer. But that's a whole different kind conversation. But everybody talks about productivity and how AI improves productivity. And it does. Again, I can take it to the extreme, or I can take it as a really it helps us. How do you?
manage it? How do you manage expectations? I'm sure people at work today are somewhat worried. At the same time, we realize AI is not going to replace everybody. It's not like, you know, I don't know how many people you've got in the engineering department, but let's say it's 50 people. Nobody's going to one tomorrow that operates AI, right? It's just not going to happen. You may not hire as many, but so how do you manage it?
Ryan (06:37)
Mm-hmm.
That's right.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (06:57)
How, from the leadership point of view, how do you do that?
Ryan (06:59)
Yeah.
So I think one is like addressing noise as you hear it. You you have block that came out said, Hey, we're laying off, you know, over 50 % of the company and, it's because of AI. And then, you know, even that night I actually use AI and said, well, you know, tell me about their employee count, you know, in 2019, like before COVID there were 3000 people, another 10,000 people. did two acquisitions. I think they did one small layoff at 300 people. So you're like,
They're right sizing. They over hired. Like it's, real obvious. So is some of the efficiencies come from AI? Of course it does. but I think you have a lot of polarizing people that by the way, if, if they talk that way in the market, it also affects their stock price. get benefits for it. yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (07:44)
But also, and I apologize for interrupting,
but also, who said that? Jack Dorsey? Huh. Let's just remember that. Okay. I mean, that's part of it. You gotta know that that's part of it. Yeah.
Ryan (07:49)
Right. Of course. Right. Yes. Yes. You have to. You absolutely have
to. So I think part of as a leader, like I try to have those open conversations in my team and say, hey, I saw this. This is my point of view. Like it's, you know, the it's the personality, it's the person, it's, all this stuff in the market. So like, there's going to be noise like it, and this is not going to be the last one.
And so then I try to bring it back into like my philosophy and the company's philosophy. And we actually just had this discussion at the leadership level yesterday, a really great conversation about it. It said, you know, we we've seen this huge jump just in the last three weeks with Claude Cowork. It was like a month ago. We didn't think about it today. It's all we can talk about. Everybody's sharing stories and, you know,
both the good and the bad, right? Like not everything is great. And so I think the way we talk to our organization and philosophically how I feel is it is my job as a leader to make sure that you are equipped to be successful in your career here and after your career, where else you go. And if I don't prepare you for that, I feel like I've failed as a leader. Certainly I want the benefit of the company that's selfish, but like as a leader,
I want all these people, it's not going to be their last job to be prepared and be successful for whatever's next. And that includes AI and it includes the adoption of AI. I think secondarily, I also tell them we have to be able to recruit the latest and greatest people that want to work for companies like that too. So if we don't push ourselves to work in new ways and adopt these tools, no one's going to want to come and work for us, know, recruiting wise. You you think of
Zhenya Rozinskiy (09:11)
Absolutely.
Mm-hmm.
Ryan (09:26)
When Google came out, everybody wanted to work there. was because of their innovation and the food and the convenience and all that. You got to have a part of that. If someone interviews here and you go, well, we're kind of testing this thing out, we're not holding people accountable or we're not pushing the boundary, they'd probably go, well, they're not an innovative company. Maybe they won't be here in three years. That's what they'll jump to. So I think that's grounding the employees that way. And then I think it's still a
crawl, walk, run with this of how we deploy it. So have a small group of engineers and PMs and designers like start to iterate through these tools, see what works, what doesn't, let them experiment and then take those learnings and then start to package it up in a message to the rest of organization. Here's what worked, here's what doesn't, this is what we wanna hold you accountable for. This is approved, assuming you have all the approvals for security and compliance and all that fun stuff.
But I think that's the way we've approached it is really to say, it's a part of our future. We're not the polarizing thing that says everybody should be fearful for your roles, but it is going to change each one of our roles. It already has, right? It certainly has in my role as a CPO, I utilize it daily in a variety of ways. And I think the very top level message we hope is that
Zhenya Rozinskiy (10:33)
Absolutely.
Ryan (10:45)
AI just makes us so productive that we can focus on the more important strategic things to operate the business versus the actual doing of, you know, a PRD or a ticket or the actual code that those individuals can be unlocked to go and have a bigger impact in the business and honestly deliver better product to our customers because now they have this time to actually think and make better decisions from a strategy perspective where I would say,
Zhenya Rozinskiy (11:04)
Yep.
Ryan (11:10)
you know, six months ago, you know, 80, 90 % of your time is the doing and they all complained that they wanted more time to do the strategy stuff. And so I think it's actually really aligning with that in the future. And anyway, that's kind of how we've started to approach it. And then certainly we've narrowed the list down. We've tried all the different types of tools out there across the board, engineering product. And I think based on the organization, it will start to
Zhenya Rozinskiy (11:30)
Right.
Ryan (11:34)
you know, put you down a certain path for a certain reason. And then you kind of all, um, you know, it really starts to snowball. Like I said, in our case, it's been Claude and in coworking Claude code, but you know, months ago it you know, a lot of, GPT and, and, you know, other things. So, um, and I think it's going to continue to do that as well too. I mean, that's the hard part. I think in all this is, you know, I always think about, I always joke, you know, the transformation is going from.
you know, if you think of waterfall to Agile, at least we knew like what Agile was. had like a, we had a, a, arrival, right? And what's interesting now, which I think it's creating a lot of angst is we don't have that arrival yet. Like we're not going from two weeks and the end game is two days. Maybe it's two hours. Like, I don't know. And maybe the tools and processes that get there six months from now are just
Zhenya Rozinskiy (12:04)
Yep.
Yep.
Ryan (12:23)
even better than what we are utilizing today. And I think that makes it difficult in the conversations that you have is can't really point to that North Star yet because we don't really know what it could be.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (12:34)
Yep. So we very, very much agree. I'll actually, you know, think I'm aging myself. I started in the industry, we still shipped software on floppy disks. And then, you know, went to CDs and then went to DVDs and then, you know, it was all online and now like,
Most of the kids in the industry today never held a floppy disk, never seen a floppy disk. Many have never probably seen a CD or DVD, maybe for music, but not even sure. And we changed, right? We changed, you said, from waterfall to agile. We went from, how do you do this?
Ryan (13:00)
Yeah
Zhenya Rozinskiy (13:08)
the whole process of packaging your software and shipping it to, well, it's not mine. If something's not right, we'll fix it tomorrow. That whole concept, right? It changed and we survived. And so this is just another change. We do change. So my company, Mirigos, we're an interesting business. We are a service company where we help people hire high level engineering talent from Latin America and Eastern Europe.
Ryan (13:16)
Right?
Zhenya Rozinskiy (13:34)
And so our employees are divided into groups. There are people that work for our clients. We don't get involved. We're not an outsourcing company, so we don't manage their work. really, we don't get involved, right? It's a, we're in the business of recruiting. We're in the business of screening. We're in the business of making sure the person is really high caliber. And then, you know, they go through the interview process with the client and then they work for the client. We take care of all the payroll and legal and stuff like that, but we don't get involved. But then.
We have our internal employees, right? There's somebody that's gotta make the engine work, right? So we have marketing and technical people and everything, coordinators and everything that comes with that. And so the conversation about AI and where it goes is very different. Some is engineering, some is not. And I'll be honest, right? Some things that we used to do is now AI. We've...
Ryan (14:18)
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (14:24)
improved dramatically. We do things that used to take, know, two hours now take two minutes. We, you know, we review every resume. Somebody reviews a resume and then they'll go on a call and a screening call and you know, you're a hiring manager, you've done this, right? So you go and you know the position, you read the resume and you go, okay, what do I want to ask? And then you go and ask.
Well, we now have AI does that, right? So AI runs through the resume and says, well, here's the interesting points of this resume that are a good match. Here, where I see the risks, that's what you want to talk about. focus on that. We purposely don't use AI to filter out resumes. Some get filtered because it says, here's the big risk. But somebody looks and says, yeah, it's a big risk. And it goes out. But we don't. And we could. We chose not to. But it really helps.
Ryan (14:56)
Yeah, focus on that.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (15:13)
That preparation now is two minutes. I know exactly what I need to ask. I can jump on the call and ask.
But going back to people, we're international, right? So we are over 20 countries, probably. It changes day by day, obviously. A lot of people, and everybody's remote. I don't know, are you guys remote, or are you guys all centralized?
Ryan (15:32)
Yeah, so we're like
70-30. So 70 in our headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, and then the 30 coast to coast in the States. And then some small subset overseas, but yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (15:43)
Do you see a difference in acceptance and being comfortable with the change, whether somebody is in the office, remote, in the US, outside of the US? Do you see that?
Ryan (15:57)
I don't think now, I obviously observed it most in the office. I think it becomes infectious and people are kind of pulling people in, hey, look at this. I have my own team that just comes running into my office and with the laptop open and be like, look at this prototype we did. It looks just like our app and we were able to do it in two minutes and it replicated it. We had all of our design systems and libraries and look at what it can do.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (16:15)
Yep.
Ryan (16:23)
I think if you're remote, I haven't seen the distribution. think we have some really good remote folks and they're just as excited. think it's just information sharing is important to make sure that they're getting it. we actually have this like great Slack channel where people are sharing all those anecdotes. Hey, I woke up today. I did this. I did this. Or, hey, I tried to get it to do this. It didn't work. Does anybody have any experience it?
We're trying to keep those channels open. I haven't noticed anything regionally to say, hey, know, someone in California is much more leaned in than someone in Iowa or something like that. Probably because we're a tech company. I would definitely assume if we were a different type of business, you may see that where, you know, different parts of the country or international, ⁓ you know, if you're in accounting, maybe you're not touching it anymore.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (17:02)
Yeah.
Ryan (17:11)
So I think our data is a little bit skewed just because of the business that we're in. But I would assume that there's pockets of that out there. Do you all see that in your world as far as the distribution of folks that you work with?
Zhenya Rozinskiy (17:18)
Sure.
We see it not necessarily based, mean, it is somewhat based on regions. It's not country specific. It's not like I can go and say this country is this, that country is that, but I can sort of say in the US and it's not only location, right? It's a location, it's your job, it's your level at that job. So it's that combination, but it is a bit different based on region. So I'll give you an example before I answer that. I live in Los Angeles.
Ryan (17:37)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (17:53)
And, I go to Bay Area to San Francisco quite a bit and San Francisco's got Waymo, right? The self-driving cars. And, you know, first, I remember probably a year, two years ago when they just started, you can get in, like, this is really cool. You know, just let me try it, right? So to me, the second I could get in, that was something that I did. And today, I don't know. I mean, I know a few people that are like, I'm not sure, but everybody's like, yeah, it's really cool. But I travel and I talk to people.
Ryan (17:58)
Yeah. Yep.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (18:19)
outside of IT, right? I'm not talking about developers, I'm about IT. And we talk about it, it comes up, and in other regions not in California, I'll never get in a self-driving car.
Because they're not surrounded by technology. Yeah, like where I live, I live in LA. And so they only operate in one area because they don't get on freeways yet. So in LA, you can't get anywhere without a freeway. like where I live, I don't see them. They don't come here. But in other areas like Santa Monica and stuff, they are. So I don't see them day to day. But in San Francisco, I was there two weeks ago. I think there's now more Waymo cars than any other cars combined. I mean, there's just.
Ryan (18:30)
They don't say, yeah, that's right, that's right.
⁓ right, that's right.
There is, absolutely.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (18:56)
Like, it's just crazy.
Ryan (18:57)
I was there in the fall last year in the same thing. was actually the first Waymo I ever took, but there were more Waymos on the road than there were regular Ubers or lifts or any of that. Way more convenient. Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (19:09)
For sure, for sure. It's way more convenient. So I was
there, I was there with my family, and we did this. Part of it was fun for kids. But even when went there, just with my son, and he's done this many times with me, we got into Weima because I don't want to talk to somebody. I just want to sit in the car and talk to him. don't want to, like, I don't need a driver. Take me there. But I think that explains. So we see.
Ryan (19:26)
Yeah? Yeah?
Zhenya Rozinskiy (19:35)
You know, when you're in office and you are part of the water cool conversation, you sort of know what's going on. But when you're remote, you hear noise and you don't necessarily understand and know where it's coming from. And so anything somebody says, you're like, my God, I don't know. So I see that. Now that, if you overlay it with say, Eastern Europe, they're very
Ryan (19:40)
Yeah, yeah,
Gotcha.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (19:59)
techie, right? They're, hackers at heart. mean, they give it to me, I'll break it and I'll put it back together. So they're more, that's really cool. Let me try this. Where some other areas maybe, I don't know, am I going to have a job tomorrow? Right. And then so there's, there's a bit of that. but yeah, you, you definitely, what I find is you need to actively manage the expectation right now, because people
Ryan (20:14)
Right.
Absolutely.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (20:23)
draw their own conclusion, and it's always a lot worse than reality.
Ryan (20:25)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah? Yeah?
Zhenya Rozinskiy (20:29)
You
mentioned your remote, international, your very small portion, mean 70 % in office and remote. Is it by design? Is it why? How did it happen?
Ryan (20:42)
Yeah, so CallRail originally, it's actually, I didn't even realize it until today, it's a 15 year anniversary. And it was started by engineers at Georgia Tech, right? So the three founders all went to Georgia Tech, they're engineers at heart. So when they started the company, it was very central to Atlanta. I would say even more centralized than other tech companies I've worked for in the past.
And so everything was here up until COVID, which I would even say was kind of unique before that. would assume there would be some level of remote employees, you know, even before COVID. But there's so much talent here. They were able to recruit. A bunch of us worked at another tech company together and all that. So it was not really a need at the time. And then COVID happened and then certainly opened up the aperture because
You know, other companies started recruiting from Atlanta. So they were recruiting our backyard, taking those people. And so we opened, you know, we opened it up then and, you know, now it's, you know, a good mix that we plan on doing going forward of that split. And we do things to keep people together too. Like matter of fact, this week we have quarter, we have quarterly in-person weeks. So we fly in all those remote employees to Atlanta, spend a week together. Sometimes there's a lot of fun.
pomp and circumstance, like the kickoffs to the beginning of the year. And then there's other weeks like this week where it's like very spend time with your team, know, do more smaller types of things. Certainly a lot of like learning on, you know, all this, all this AI stuff right now. But, but yeah, that was kind of the journey to, to CallRail, which was, I think a little bit unique in the tech space that we didn't have remote employees before that.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (22:17)
It's interesting you said that. So when you fly people in, even international, do you fly them in?
Ryan (22:22)
No, so they're separate from like their contract folks at International. So yeah, we don't, they don't come in for that. Just the domestic.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (22:29)
God,
I worked for it. So before starting this company, was VP of engineering for a very large, very well known company. And I launched this model that is now my business. I mean, that was sort of experiment and that's just how it happened. Where we were hiring, they're all contractors, right? International. but we treated them as employees, meaning treated as in not legal and payroll ways, but in just
We talked to them and we involved them just like we involved our old employees. And when I had to put the budget together and it was approved and there was a budget for travel and it was very high. And the travel included us from the US flying there and them flying here. And people were like, well, let's cut the travel. This is ridiculous because it was expensive. And this is way before COVID, this is 2012.
Ryan (23:14)
Of course. Yeah, that's right.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (23:19)
And I said, no, if we're going to make it work, we got to talk to them. They got to experience how we live here and we got to experience how they live there because otherwise we're talking. And this is right, Zoom didn't exist. So you still, you know, had video calls, had Skype and stuff, but it was all different. Like you got to understand culture. And we're like, no, but this is so much money. And they said, really? Look at the overall budget and compare it to what it would cost to hire these people locally.
Ryan (23:32)
Right, yeah yeah.
Very different, yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (23:45)
And if you still tell me it's a lot of money, then we'll talk. Because it was like less than half of what it was. it was ridiculous. And everybody's like, ⁓ OK. And so that was actually built in. was baked in. We had, so the team was large. was about 50 people on team over there. And we had two people, if I'm not mistaken, two people from US fly there.
Ryan (23:48)
Of course.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (24:07)
every four months and two or four people from there fly to US every four months. So there were eight travels, right, going both ways. And it was then slowly rotated through everybody, right? So just gave opportunity to everybody to do this. But it was a lot of fun. It was very motivating because somebody who lives in Ukraine, they get to come in for two weeks and spend time in Los Angeles. That's a pretty good deal. Anyway.
Ryan (24:09)
okay.
Yeah. Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (24:33)
Cool. Well, thank you. I guess I'll ask one more question. If you were to start a company today, let's say you're building this from scratch, your next thing, would you do more or less of remote international? And the reason I ask that, so there's the trick to that question. We see that.
Now with all the communication and people, you really get really high talent that just happens to be not here. And like if I were to build a company, ⁓ I did build a company and we're fully remote, but I'm curious how other people feel about it.
Ryan (25:08)
I think it would depend on the business. And I think there's two phases to it. I think the bootstrap phase, would be, I think greatly accelerated might be local and it would probably be relationships. And it probably wouldn't be, it would probably be the co-founders, right? It wouldn't even be hiring employees. It would be like, okay, we can do this stuff together. We don't need as many people to start.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (25:20)
Mm-hmm.
Ryan (25:30)
And then I think as you expand, I think it's easier than ever to do that, right? And from the technology we have at our disposal to what anybody can use, like this isn't tech that is, especially on the AI front, like it's scalable, it's affordable, all those types of things. And as long as people are adopting that, it doesn't really matter where it's at, right? And so I...
Zhenya Rozinskiy (25:48)
Mm-hmm.
for sure.
Ryan (25:53)
I think more than ever, you can really scale in different ways, even faster. Having a smaller centralized team and a external team in a variety of different ways. I think the options are like very, way more flexible than they were in the past. think they were, you would probably, would say, two years ago, I'd probably say, hey, we'd take a lot longer, because the.
the zero to one would take a lot longer. I now zero to one, you know, I listen, I met founders from other companies that are small and you know, one founder lives in Chicago and the other guy lives in Sweden and they, know, and, know, one's working all day and the other one gets up time-wise and they work all night and they use these tools and they're highly efficient. So I think it's probably like the relationship side too, right? That matters, but like,
Zhenya Rozinskiy (26:20)
Yeah.
⁓ for sure, right?
Ryan (26:45)
You know, they're doing it, you know, really bootstrapped. And I think they even had another few people working for them that were distributed as well, too. And, you know, they're they're flying. They're they're going really fast.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (26:55)
So I have, I'm based in LA, right? And I'm the only person from my company that is in the US, everybody else is, somewhere else. And I do travel, right? So I get on a plane and I travel and I get to meet with people. And when I meet, right, we make sure that we spend time talking. It's not, it's never work meetings in terms of...
Ryan (27:15)
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (27:16)
let's talk about this. We can talk about this on Zoom. It's more philosophical. How do we do this? How do we do that? And it really helps. I consult, I sit on boards for some companies, and I advise companies, and it's all remote, but we do get together every once in a while, right? Because sometimes there's value, just close the door and just talk. So I think the combination is there. We have clients that are...
Ryan (27:35)
Absolutely.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (27:41)
We have several early stage startups that are fully remote, everybody, like the first hire is remote hire and that's how they do it.
Anyway, well, thank you so much, Ryan. Thanks a lot. Thanks for your time. It's a great conversation. I've enjoyed it. I think it's important we remember humans. We remember people. AI will not do it by itself.
Ryan (28:00)
Absolutely.
At least not yet. least hopefully not for a real, real long time.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (28:05)
That's true.
It's a while.
Ryan (28:08)
Yeah,
yeah, exactly.
Zhenya Rozinskiy (28:09)
All right, thank you.
Ryan (28:10)
Thank you.