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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 - Mirigos (00:07)
Hey Jason, thank you so much for joining us on this podcast. We're recording this for business technical leaders. This is for people that are involved with software development, not purely from the technical point of view, but from a business side, meaning we talk about how to get things out there, how to get your teams producing the best, how to communicate within the team, between the teams, outside of your company, et cetera.
So this is everything that's sort of behind the doors of getting good software out. My name is Zhenya Rozinskiy I am a CEO and the founder of a company called Mirigos. We are a services company and our interesting tagline is we fixed what's broken in outsourcing. So we're a team augmentation out staffing company where we help our clients hire, bring on board really the best engineering talent from Latin America and Europe.
We're not outsourcing shop as you can imagine, but we try to make it as much as possible, just like if you were to hire full-time employees and we are pretty successful at that. So that's a little bit about us. Please introduce yourself. Let us know who you are, what you do.
Jason Dover (01:14)
Thanks a lot for hosting me today. So I'm Jason Dover. I'm Chief Product and Technology Officer at FileCloud. We're in the enterprise file sharing and sync space. Basically we help customers solve this simple problem. Well, simple to state, but sometimes difficult to actually solve. that's, I've got tons of content that I need to collaborate on internally. I also may need to extend that collaboration.
externally outside the bounds of my firewall. But I need to keep track of who has access. I need to make sure I understand when it's accessed. I need to be able to revoke that access if required. I may also have requirements for things like data sovereignty, data residency. Maybe that content can't leave the bounds of certain countries. Maybe that content needs to be on premises inside of my own ecosystem.
I need sharing, I need synchronization of that content, but I need a higher level of control. So that's ultimately the problem that we help our customers solve for. My background is in enterprise IT. I did quite a bit of work in the finance space for a bit, helping customers with directory services integrations, email and other system integration work. And then at some point I went to take that background I had, the empathy I had of actually being a customer.
and use that to drive building technology solutions that other customers are leveraging. And I've been doing this for the last decade or so, helping companies create products that customers like to use.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (02:43)
Cool. So I know one of the things you're responsible for at File Cloud is agile transformation. So you came in and you're doing a lot of work to do this. What's been your experience? What's been more difficult or challenging, tools or people?
Jason Dover (02:58)
That's an interesting question. Just taking that first part. What's been my experience? I think the most important thing is that you've got your team aligned. If everyone is aligned on the same goal, they know there's a lot of difficulties on both of those fronts. Getting all of the troops on the same page, introducing new tools, new processes, new methodologies.
You can be successful. As far as what's more difficult, I think it kind of goes without saying. It's much more difficult to align people than to implement some new tool or new technology. The typical approach I try to take wherever I'm working, if we're trying to change something, it can be small or large, is don't even worry about the tooling at first. Sure.
You may need to implement tools to implement new processes, but let's just start with how would we do this if we were using a spreadsheet or napkins as it were. If you can get things aligned there, it then becomes a lot easier to implement new tooling on top. I think sometimes we as technologists get that flipped, right? We think that having
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (03:55)
Yep.
Jason Dover (04:09)
all the right tools in place are gonna solve all the problems. There's a saying, a previous CTO and business coach I worked with would often say is that a fool with a tool is still a fool. Right? So I think it's fundamentally much more important to make sure that the people that you're working with and your teams, you're aligned and clear on the objectives of what you're trying to do. Big picture, you have that now broken down to what
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (04:19)
It's still a fool, correct. It's still a fool, yes.
Jason Dover (04:36)
each individual subgroup needs to do to move the ball forward. Once you have that, it then becomes a lot easier to figure out which tools you need to support you on that journey.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (04:46)
Yeah, I've actually seen it myself in my previous life when I was on the engineering side, was this VP of engineering, CTO, some of my own startups where two things happened. Number one, people try to, they bring a tool or they, usually it's a new person that comes in or somebody sold them a tool. And now they're trying to adjust the entire company process to the tool. And that may or not work because the tool is just a tool.
And I always said, you know, let's figure out what the process is and then figure out what tool can help us get through that process. But another one, it's just agile transformation. I'll never forget I was hired by this one company as a VP of engineering. And the idea was company been around for a long time. A lot of people worked there for a long time. It was one of those places where when you heard somebody say they've been there for 10 years, it was like, you're a newcomer.
after 20, it sort of turned into like, you've been here for a while. Yeah. It was very, very interesting experience. And, I came from startups where somebody has been here for two years. Wow. What are you still doing here? Two years. Wow. And I got there and it's like, yeah, we're going to transform. And then the most common response from the team that are hurt, we can't do this. Why? Because that's not how we do it.
Jason Dover (06:00)
Hahahaha
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (06:01)
And that was the most interesting conversation I've had repeatedly over and over again. Sometimes it was the same people, but it was interesting. You came in into this organization as a CTO. What were the secrets or what did you have to do to gain the trust of the team? Because when you take over, when you build a team, you sort of, you build to your own liking.
But when you take over a team, first have to establish that trust, the open relationship. What's the secret?
Jason Dover (06:28)
Yeah, that's always a challenging objective when you're coming into a new organization. I'd say here I had a bit of a luxury when I first came into the organization about two years ago. I came in as Chief Product Officer, working closely along with one of the co-founders that was CTO. That gave me an opportunity to get some experience working with the broader group. My focus was building
a product management function, bringing some practices around user experience, and also focusing on some of the strategy and direction, getting a roadmap established, and also some of our &A and corporate development tasks. So with that, I had an opportunity to get to know the team and start to build trust. The first thing I did was make it clear that I don't have all the answers, right? I'm actually here to learn initially.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (07:17)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Dover (07:20)
There's it's very easy to come in and look at things look at decisions that was made and say That doesn't make any sense. We're having this problem now. Why did we do this six months nine months twelve months ago? We should have done that I Tried very intentionally and always will do this to try to understand why what what is the background context that led to? decisions that we've made It's just helpful with normal
human nature, if you now have some empathy, you understand how we got here, you can now have more productive conversations about how do we move here. If we know how we got here, we agree that here is the future state we want. You can now have a conversation based on respect and based on trust because you actually have an understanding. So I had this luxury of doing that. We then, as we spoke about, did go through some organizational changes.
I took on the rest of the engineering organization just really a few months ago and now have the technology and the product part. So I had this opportunity to build that. Now, if I was going into a new space, really would take the same approach, intentionally take some time to learn what's the operating context. What are the challenges? Why has the team made the decisions that they've made? Get clear on what you want to do next.
figure out where there's some opportunities to get some quick wins together. And now you've got a foundation to build on top of and get that relationship of trust.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (08:42)
Is your team all in the same location or they're distributed local, international? What's the team like?
Jason Dover (08:48)
very distributed. You know, it's interesting, it was before remote work was cool, but the original founding team had this vision, let's hire the best people that we can where they are, right? We're not going to say everyone has to be in an XYZ radius of a central location. And with that, they started building a team of talent. We did get some pockets where you do have some concentration in certain regions because as
Let's say they hired their first developer or quality person with a certain skill set. Well, that person, of course, knew other people, had a network, and maybe went to school with other folks with similar skill sets and know they would have brought in a few others as well. But we're currently distributed across tens of countries. That presents some challenges, right? Just not having as many central locations where you have a concentration of people.
To make that work, you just have to be intentional with getting out there into the field, making some time for meetups at a larger scale, and then also the smaller teams that work together, working to try to get those folks together intentionally so that you are getting at least some face time.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (09:55)
Yeah, I
think it's more intentional, right? It's the very right word and this you do need to do this. So my company, we've been remote ever since we started. Fully remote. I am the only person physically based in the United States. Everybody else is all over the world. And we've been like this since day one, 2014.
And when COVID came, was interesting, right? Everybody was very challenging, right? People didn't know how to deal with that. And I was sitting there sort of laughing, like nothing changed for me. I still walk into the same office, right? I'm sitting in my home office and this is the office I've been in since 2014. So was very, very interesting. But yeah, I agree. Intentional is the right word. And I travel, like I'll jump on the plane and I'll go and I'll meet with the people that work for me.
Jason Dover (10:23)
You
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (10:40)
and we'll get together in small groups, sometimes in a larger group, but we do that. Also, we over communicate through video means. Usually Zoom, but whatever it is, and it's video. It's not just, I mean, we chat all day long, the chat is just going on, which also helps. It breaks the boundary, it builds that.
Jason Dover (10:50)
Hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (11:02)
camaraderie, right? Sometimes it'll be business and then all of sudden it'll go into some jokes and then it'll go into life and then it'll go back into business. But then, you know, we do everything on video and sort of my policy is you cannot talk to somebody else. if you're talking, the video must be on because that's the next best thing to seeing somebody.
Jason Dover (11:09)
Mm-hmm.
I'm a big believer in that as well. I've having a conversation with someone on my team and I said, you know, not having your camera on. like, imagine we're physically in the same place and you come into the conference room with a bag over your head. That's kind of how I see the concept of showing up without your camera on. And look, there's going to be situations here and there that make it not feasible, but you know, that's it, right into our operating principles, in fact.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (11:35)
So I'll...
Jason Dover (11:48)
on how we communicate, one of the things there is we generally will have our cameras on unless there's a reason not to. And it helps, because you need to see those visual cues for effective communication. You just don't get that if you can't see the other person.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (12:04)
funniest thing is, and my wife will kill me for this. So my wife works in a completely different field, right? She's not in tech whatsoever. And it's a remote team and it, they became remote after COVID, right? So they were in the office and then it went, you know, they went home and that's it. It's now full-time remote. Everybody's remote. And obviously a lot of people have been hired for the team since that. Most of them, she has never seen their faces. They never turn on cameras as in.
Jason Dover (12:24)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (12:31)
ever.
I go like, honey, why are you not on Like, gotta do hair, I gotta do makeup, I gotta look good on camera, I'm just not gonna do that. And I'm like, hmm, I just don't know my camera, I don't care. So it's interesting, like different businesses, different cultures, guess.
Jason Dover (12:46)
Yeah, it's definitely a different working world than I think most of us started in. So, been a lot of adjustments over the last few years for sure. Especially like you said, hiring people that you never meet in person. You know, that was a pretty foreign concept just a handful of years ago that you would hire someone without meeting the person in person. But it has been a positive too, right? Because it has opened up.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (12:55)
Yeah.
Right. Right.
Jason Dover (13:10)
some opportunities, right? People are getting roles they may not have gotten in the past and now organizations are getting access to talent that maybe historically they wouldn't have considered. So there certainly is some positivity to the shift that we've seen as well from my point of view.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (13:28)
So 100%, and I can tell you both from my experience and from our client experience, I hire internationally because it is the right combination of talent, access to that talent, time we can hire, and obviously, know, price points. A lot of our clients, they will pay internationally almost the same that they would pay locally.
Jason Dover (13:44)
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (13:50)
because they come in and they go, yeah, we're willing to pay a lot because we want to get access to the best talent. So what we do is I honestly never thought of that when I started this business. And I came to this business because that's how I run things from the other side. And then was successful. It was working better. It was just doing a good job. like, huh, why not do this as a business? Why not?
know, a of my friends were coming to me asking for help. was helping them. I go, well, if they need this, somebody else may need it and never look back. It's the best thing I've done. But one of the things that we do is we provide access both ways. So a lot of these guys and girls that are remote, be it in Latin America, be it in Europe, doesn't matter. We focus just on those two regions. They always work either for local market
Jason Dover (14:26)
Hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (14:37)
or for outsourcing shops. And the problem when they work for an outsourcing shop, they're a widget. The manager tells them today, well, for the next three weeks, you're gonna be on this project, or for the next three months, or maybe even for the next three years. But ultimately, they work for a company, and that company decided to place them somewhere else. There is no buying, there's no ownership, there's no loyalty, there's none of that. What we do is we give them the opportunity
to be part of something bigger, be part of the team. Because when they work for you, when they work for our client, they don't work for us. Well, on paper they work for us, but they work for you, right? They deal with you day in, day out. As I tell them, a lot of them still ask, well, whose name we should put on LinkedIn? I'm like, of course the client, right? That's who you work for. That's the knowledge. Like that's who you work for. And that builds that trust and the relationship.
And people in the team, don't think of, well, this person is an employee, that person is a contractor through an outsourcing shop. It's one team. And so it does it both ways. so, yeah, I think it's mostly done for the access, for the opportunity access for candidates and talent access for employers. And it's been just really great and successful and it just works.
Jason Dover (15:33)
Right.
Yeah, for sure. That's certainly important. think the phrase you used there, that the ownership is important, right? Especially in product organizations, that's a key driver for me. How do we build teams that don't just feel, oh, I'm just working on this project, right? That has this finite beginning and end, and then move on to the next thing.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (15:52)
So.
Yeah.
Bye.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (16:13)
So
long term, right? You want you want that connection, you want that you want them to wake them up in three o'clock in the morning and you ask them what who they work for, right? You want them to say they work for you, not for somebody else. So that's sort of where we are. But I mean, it's great to hear. we
are in interesting times. And, you know, we've been around when internet took over, right? It took over, it became reality. It first was like a toy and then, you know, now it's sort of part of life. Now we're seeing a lot of developments with AI and as a result of that, it's not just AI, it's not just the agents that we use, but we see it used in other things. you know, I live in Los Angeles and we now have self-driving cars driving around all over LA.
know, Waymo, taxi or Uber, whatever you want to call it. But you push it up, the car pulls over, you get in it, there's no driver, and it gets you to where you want to go. And we're going to see more and more of that. How do you see that affecting your day in, day out life? How do you see that affecting employees? How do you see that affecting hiring? How do you see that just in the work related daily life?
Jason Dover (17:24)
That's a good question. I think it definitely is going to have a big impact on employees because the requirements for base skill sets will change. I'll give you an example. I don't go through an interview ever anymore without at some point directing the conversation to at least what is the individual's opinion.
on how AI can be, should be used within whatever their specific craft is. Do they have any experience, at least toying around with it, even if it's not mainstream in the organization that they're coming from? Do they have some level of curiosity around it, right? My expectation is that in time, it's going to be more than a cherry on top, regardless of what
role you're in within the tech space, but there's going to be at least a base level of requirements of having some levels of efficiency of co-working and co-creating with AI enabled tools, right? And it's close behind, of course, everyone can use chat, you'd be to your Claude and so forth. Even there, right? There is some art in being able to craft prompts in a way that gets useful information out or prompts.
that is able to transform data into a useful way. But also just the tools that we go about leveraging for our practices. Most of those vendors are starting to see how they can accelerate and differentiate with AI. And so our employees capabilities to interface with that is going to be important as well. And so for my own teams, I'm always recommending.
Hey, spend some time for your own future marketability exploring, right? You've got the space, of course, we've got to have some boundaries. can't go put our source code into the chat GPT or anything like that. But hey, you should explore because there might be something that we're not taking advantage of for our own operations internally, but it's also something that likely is going to be important for you as you think about future roles.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (19:14)
Right.
Absolutely.
Jason Dover (19:28)
We saw this with cloud, saw
this with virtualization, we saw this with the age of software defined where now what people were looking for in their potential employees started to get augmented. The difference is that the rate at which this is happening is a lot faster than those prior shifts. So think it's going to have a huge impact, even more than what we're seeing now over the next few years for really everyone.
that works in the text space.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (19:56)
Most definitely. I hear this, everybody says this, which I'm not the one that came up with this phrase. In the next several years, AI is not going to replace you, but the person that knows how to use it will.
Right? Yeah. And I think that's very critical and important to understand. I can tell you from our side of things, right? We're in a recruiting business.
Jason Dover (20:08)
Exactly. That's a good way to put it. That's a good way to put it.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (20:20)
I had this conversation with somebody yesterday as a matter of fact. Recruiters are going to go away because AI will replace recruiters. No, recruiters will not go away because the human touch, the human factor will never go away. We have about 30 recruiters that work for us and we rely on them assessing an individual, on personality, on how they're to fit to particular position, how they're going to fit to the particular client. It's not just technical skills.
So we're not anywhere close to AI replacing them but I can tell you that we've built in-house, I've actually done it myself, I built some agents that process resumes and they process transcripts of interviews. So the interview is still conducted by person, right? Person then says, the screening interviews, I saw we do our screening interviews. The interviews are still done by person, but then the AI will...
Jason Dover (20:56)
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (21:11)
process, so resume first, then AI will say based on this resume and how it fits to this position and how it fits this company and what we know about it, and it'll give a scoring system. And we now trust this enough that if it gives below certain score, we don't even bother. Now, if it gives above that score, then it's a human that looks at it and verifies. sometimes, most of the time it's accurate, sometimes like, nah, not really.
Jason Dover (21:24)
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (21:34)
But then we do the same thing after the interview. load the transcript, it's loaded. It's not a video, right? It's just a transcript of text. And it can assess not only technical knowledge, but actually assesses even communication style, how the person communicates. And same thing, right? If the score is below certain, then it's a no. If it's above, the human look, well, the human looks at it right away because they are conducting the interview, but they're sort of using that as a fact.
Jason Dover (21:47)
Hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (22:00)
And I think more and more of that's going to be happening. I think more and more of that will take place. Funny enough, we've tried, and this was a test. So everybody that did it knew that it's a test, but we tried AI video agent. So instead of a human, it was an AI avatar showing up and asking questions. That did not, that did not work. That just did not work.
Jason Dover (22:21)
How'd that go?
I've read some articles about some organizations that's tried and I haven't read any success stories yet.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (22:34)
No, it
didn't. Every single, and again, we didn't do this for, a process. We did this with a few people. We did it with some internal people. We also did it with some of the people that, you we talked to say, Hey, do you mind trying this for us? And people are like, yeah, sure. I'll try it. So coming in, they knew exactly what it is. Every single one dropped off within about two minutes. Like I can't do this anymore. I'm done. Like this is crazy. Just done. Like, so that did not work.
Jason Dover (22:41)
Mm-hmm
Hmm.
Wow.
I think what you
described is... sorry, good.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (23:00)
No, I was going to say that just didn't work. Yeah.
Jason Dover (23:02)
I think what you described is a really good example though of this kind of co-working model. There's a class of tasks and work product where leveraging AI is gonna make sense, but it's going to also require potentially even higher skilled individuals working along with it. The bar, think the...
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (23:26)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Dover (23:31)
base bar will go up over time where you need people that maybe have a bit more speciality in that specific craft to course correct and get the most value out of it. As you typically would in any physical craft, right? More complex tooling is going to require more training, more capabilities to actually get value out of it. And so let's say you think about development itself.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (23:53)
Absolutely.
Jason Dover (23:56)
And of course, yeah, already you can build code with AI. It's getting better all the time. And over the upcoming next few years, the gap is going to close quite a bit. But still to solve really, really complex problems, let's say going back in legacy code, which is the majority of code that exists in the world, that's going to take someone that actually understands at a depth.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (24:16)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Dover (24:20)
What the system is actually doing and is it sound or not is it testable or not is it maintainable or not to be able to augment the output so The bar doesn't go down the bar of what's expected of the people that are working with it goes up now sure the bad news is that Your entry level folks there is going to be a higher moat that covers over the base right that that is the unfortunate thing that's going to happen but
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (24:25)
Bye.
Jason Dover (24:45)
it's going to create opportunities for people that have the curiosity, the patience, the wherewithal and the will to actually go a little bit deeper than maybe we've historically had to over the last decade or so within our space. And this is with every shift. There's a change, but those who prepare for it, those who have the curiosity can actually create new opportunities. And that's what I'm expecting.
that we'll see over the next couple years.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (25:12)
Well, Jason, thank you so much. It's been a great conversation. Thank you for joining. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and best of luck.
Jason Dover (25:20)
Thanks a lot, it's been great. Thanks for having me and I look forward to chatting again