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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 (00:06)
Thanks so much. Welcome to this episode of Build by Humans. Today our guest is Brian. We're talking about things, everything that has to do with the human side of building products. My name is Zhenya. I'm running a company called Mirigos where we focus on helping companies hire absolutely brilliant engineering talent from Latin America and Eastern Europe. We're not an outsourcing shop. We actually believe outsourcing model is a bit outdated.
So we talk a lot about communications, we talk a lot about what it takes to manage in today's distributed world. Brian, tell us a little bit about yourself, introduce yourself so everybody knows what it's about, what's your background is.
Brian Regienczuk (00:45)
Sure. name is Brian Rogensik. I'm the CEO and founder of SpotSource and I've got a long career helping marketing and design organizations, Fortune 500 companies. Our product basically
helps large companies manage their service providers and other indirect suppliers. So think a marketing organization running all those marketing agencies or production houses that they're engaging with. How do you navigate that? How do you manage workflows around projects and bids? That's what we do. And we've been around for
more than five years doing that with some of the biggest brands in the world.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (01:25)
Cool. Well, you've been around for a while. I'm sure you over the years worked with every possible model out there. You had direct hires, direct hires local in office, direct hires remotely in the US. I'm sure you had contractors, you worked with dev shops. I guess I'll start with what was the biggest unexpected surprise?
in terms of what doesn't work as you expect, right? You go in and it's just, oops, it didn't work the way I
Brian Regienczuk (01:52)
Yeah, I would say both early in my career and then more recently, probably, you know, maybe seven years ago or so. I found that communication was.
trickier than I expected. when working with some development shops and contractors based in countries that didn't either didn't speak English as like one of their
primary languages or they spoke English but they came from a culture of yes, yes we can do that, yes we can do that kind of a thing and the watch out for me or the learning for me, kind of I learned it early in my career and then I kind of relearned it later as I was in a role overseeing a lot of different people is
you know, number one, make sure you understand the culture you're hiring from. So it's not just about the person. It's about their like, are they in a country or in a culture that, likes to say yes, even though like you have to dig deeper, like what does that mean? Yes, it's going to take you a year to do this or yes, you can do it in, you know, a day, right? Get, get much more granular with them. Like that was one learning. And then, you know, it also has influenced
⁓ my go-to when i'm hiring people it's helped me learn some of the things based on my skill set and what is easier for me to work with learn what what's more comfortable what you know who to hire what countries or regions maybe i i have to be more careful if i hire from so yeah
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (03:23)
Right.
It's interesting. You're touching on an interesting thing and it's exactly what was my experience. I come from a culture here in the US, mostly working in startups. Most of my career has been in startups. I've worked in some large enterprise companies, but most of it's from startups. In startups, everything's direct. Somebody asks you a question, you say what you think and to the point of arguing, right?
Brian Regienczuk (03:45)
Yeah
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (03:45)
you're not afraid
to walk up to your CEO and go, dude, you're nuts, right? This is not gonna work. You want to just product ship it in a week? It's not going in a week. Just get real. And then you start working with certain cultures, certain regions, and it is regional. And hey, can you do this by tomorrow? Yes. Okay, well, you said yes. And then you come back tomorrow and it's not done. And it's like, okay, well, so it's not done. I understand. Well, do think you can finish it by tomorrow or by tonight? Yes.
And then I went to the completely different region where it was the flip side. Do you think can you do this by tomorrow? And you get a 25 minute explanation of what can possibly go wrong only to add then here, yes, I'll get it done. It actually gets done, but it's like, could you just say yes?
Brian Regienczuk (04:30)
Yeah, I mean everybody's different. you know I have my set of skills and my team has a certain set of skills and and we're from you one region and you know so we've learned what works for us right doesn't mean you know there's no right answer for anyone. You you can't you know cut and paste for everyone right so everybody's a bit different so.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (04:52)
Yeah, I also find that a lot of it is regional and cultural. Also, lot of it is baked into this model that everybody worked in for so many years, which we call outsourcing. call it whatever, dev shops, outsourcing, where the person works for company A, right? And I'm talking about the middleman, right? The outsourcing company. And their entire mentality is, and the company's mentality and their mentality is, well, we have to deliver, right? If we're going to say no, then they're going to go and hire somebody else.
Brian Regienczuk (05:10)
Hmm.
Yeah, yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (05:21)
And
the person's loyalty is ultimately not to you, it's to their manager, right? It's their person who reviews their salary, right? Hires them, fires them and everything. And they have very different motivations and they have very different goals and objectives than you might. And so that creates this whole conflict. It's like, it's literally baked into the model. It's not people's fault. It's just, you know, it just doesn't work that way.
Brian Regienczuk (05:37)
Hmm.
Yeah, well, I think too that in that, you know, in that scenario too, you have some people who are incentivized by how many hours they bill, right? And so there can be, you know, mismatches, right? That you have to really be aware of when you, know, depending on who you're hiring, what type of a, you know, either an individual or a group and, know,
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (05:57)
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Brian Regienczuk (06:10)
You have to find ways to manage that successfully.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (06:13)
Right.
Yeah. It's, when I started Miricus, when I started this company, right. I was actually coming out of a large, enterprise company where I was running a couple hundred people, engineering team, and we had them all over the place. We had, I'm based in LA, so we had them here in Los Angeles, but we also had them in Europe. We had them in India, in China, literally everywhere. And we were managing all these challenges. And when I was there and then I sort of
Based on my model that I built there, I built it, you know, that's what the company was built in. And it was really solving the problem of outsourcing. Where even though we're sort of middlemen, right, my company is middlemen, but we step outside, right, we're not engaged. The person who works for you, they actually work for you, you manage them. And the motivation is not billing at hours because we do monthly salary, right? It's not, nobody gets benefit of.
more hours, less hours. In fact, you'd probably want to do more and least amount of hours. But it's really we step out and we go, you don't work for us, even though on paper you do, you work for the company. And it's the company that every day makes a decision to keep you on your own payroll or not. We don't make that decision like you as a hiring manager do. And so don't please me, please him. And it just works. But switching gears just for a sec. I'm sorry, you wanted to say something. Go ahead.
Brian Regienczuk (07:26)
Yeah.
I would say I've also seen like there is also kind of different generations of people to have different work ethics to and different expectations coming into a job. you know making sure you level set and you know keep those things in mind as well.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (07:40)
Very much so.
Yeah, no, it's, you're touching on a very important subject and I deal with a lot of younger generation and I'm, I don't know. I call, I still call myself young. My kids call me dinosaur. So I don't know. I fall somewhere in between. but yeah, there's, there's a big, big, big difference in how we used to do it and what we get today. And that's not even related to, even though some regions are better than like us.
Brian Regienczuk (07:56)
Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (08:10)
US been a big problem with younger recent grads. The whole work ethics is different.
Brian Regienczuk (08:14)
Yeah, they like to
say, oh, you're from the 1900s, right? So, you know, a little tongue in cheek, but yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (08:18)
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
You know, working again, is, you know, today you hear a lot from somebody, you know, I've worked few hours over the weekend, so I'm going to have to take Monday off because I have to recover. And I'm going back to me at, you know, 2021. Yeah, I just pulled in an 80 hour wig because we had a release and cool. That's what was awesome. That was actually good. Let's keep going because it means something. yeah. What I was going to touch on is
Brian Regienczuk (08:43)
Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (08:49)
a hot topic these days, H1B visas. So everybody's talking about it, right? You've probably heard the news. Without getting whether it's a good idea or a idea, I don't even want to touch that or let other people figure that one out. What do you think the effect is going to be or how should companies work around it or accommodate themselves or accommodate the rules? Like, I actually have an opinion, but I want to hear yours and then...
we can compare notes.
Brian Regienczuk (09:15)
I think it's interesting that we have, at least in the U.S. right now, we have this return to work in a lot of, maybe not in startups as much, depending on the industry you're in, but just in general, developers and other folks are being asked to come back to the office more days a week than maybe they, when they were originally hired, maybe they were fully remote. We run a fully remote team, but...
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (09:23)
Mm-hmm.
Brian Regienczuk (09:40)
I think that's an interesting contrast to like, well, now you can't, or like it's more difficult, right? The H1B thing is much more difficult. So does that encourage you to hire people that are already here in the US? Or does it encourage you to outsource to people who are remote?
and not ever offer them H1B, ever offer that status. So it's a strange tension, I think, that's building that may be unexpected. We know the rates in the US continue to go up, generally, for development shops. And so.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (10:03)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Brian Regienczuk (10:18)
Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (10:19)
Interesting. So you obviously gave two obvious choices, right? That's either or. But if we believe that H1B visa was there because you couldn't find local talent, taking the H1B visa out doesn't solve the problem of talent. You still can't find local talent. So now you go to remote. And I can tell you, we have a lot of clients that come in and a lot of our clients are
Brian Regienczuk (10:24)
Yeah.
Yeah, that's true. Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (10:45)
I'd say on a startup-ish side, right? We don't deal with early stage. I mean, we do, but not a lot early stage startup. mean, early stages and two founders just had an idea, just not our market. But know, 10 people company, you know, got funding or getting funding. That's very typical for us. And a lot of them come in with, we're not looking to save money. We're actually looking to hire really good talent, really strong talent. We can't find it locally.
Brian Regienczuk (10:55)
Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (11:12)
And the word can't implies or sort of takes in multiple things. We don't have technical skills, we don't have availability. We also can't get people that care enough, right? Going back to culture and going back to work ethics. It's a startup. We want somebody to work their butt off and we just can't find those people. so I often, well, lately I've been saying the whole H1B is...
not going to affect companies. As a matter of fact, it's just the new world is you don't bring people in the office anymore. You don't need to have them in the office. Everybody's remote anyway. So what does H1B do? And I'm talking about software, right? I'm not talking about this. There's a lot of H1B in universities and academia, right? That's all, that's different. I'm talking about purely from the software.
Brian Regienczuk (11:46)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sure, sure, Yeah.
Yeah,
and I think that's kind of where I was going. It's like there's this conflict of like, go back to the office, but then you have to hire more people that are remote, that are experts, that actually you might want. If you are in the office, you might want them in the office with you, right? Because then your team can learn from them, right? Or there's knowledge transfer, or you can shorten work cycles sometimes when you are working in the same time zone or things like that.
You know, I think it's an interesting challenge and I do think.
You know, it's something that startups and big companies are going to have to wrangle. So, yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (12:31)
interesting return to those who are doing it. But then I have a lot of friends that work for companies that are returning to the office either full-time or significant amount of time and a significant meaning like four days in office, three days in office and then you can be remote.
Brian Regienczuk (12:43)
three to four years
is what I'm hearing a lot, a lot. Even some of the kind of what I would say, they're like starting to break out of the startup space really, like mid-size company really. They've grown and now they're also getting people to come back to the office at least three days a week.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (13:05)
Yeah.
⁓ yeah, I, my wife actually, so this is probably my best example. My wife works for a very long, she's not an IT at all, right? She has nothing to with software, has nothing to do with IT. She worked, she works in a very large US enterprise company. I'm not going to name names, but let's just say they have about 350,000 US employees, right? So that's, we're talking about large. And they used to be in office. It was very strict. Like you have to be in at a certain time, you know,
punch in, punch out, even though, you know, no need for it, but that's how it worked. Like, they were not allowed to wear jeans to work, right? This is how crazy it was. They're not customer facing, it's all back office, but that's how it is, fine. COVID comes in, they're sent home, right? Obviously, that's the thing. now that, you know, they've gone, know, they've, during COVID, they basically said, it's permanent.
Brian Regienczuk (13:46)
Yeah. Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (13:57)
This is it, everybody stays home. And so they're home, they're not bringing back. They're all talking about the productivity increased. People are happier.
more gets done because people are no longer, they don't think, you I gotta show up at this time and live at that time. There is no flexibility and they still know they have to get their job done. So to me, that's the best example in a completely different world, in a completely different industry where, you know, it actually works.
Brian Regienczuk (14:23)
Yeah, yeah, it's a whole topic. But yeah, I think it's also what life stage you're in is a big factor as to whether it's good for you or not. find that the, and this is true in the startup world, right? When you are building that initial culture, right? How do you build it when everybody's remote? Nobody's coming together and having drinks after work or having dinner, a meal together, right?
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (14:32)
Yeah.
Brian Regienczuk (14:49)
Same thing when you're in a, you know, a big company and you have a lot of younger, younger folks who maybe this is their first or second job, right? They're still look, they're looking the place that people meet one another after college is at work, right? In a lot of ways, right? At least in Western cultures. And that has been a problem for that group. And they, also, it's harder for them to get trained.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (14:57)
right?
At work, yeah.
Brian Regienczuk (15:14)
because they their peers like the like managers and everything else, they're all remote, right? Like, so it's a little there. I think there's productivity gains and it's really good for people who have started a family or people who are technically super, you know, super experts and the there's really no need like they're not interfacing with people on a day to day basis that, you know, they're training or, know, something like that. Yeah, so there's there's
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (15:27)
right.
Yeah, it's different. I absolutely agree with you. One of the things that's missing today, and I actually have a good friend who worked from home after COVID and their company did not mandate return to office. But he asked and he said, I want to go to office two, three times a week because it's lonely at home. It's hard. He's just the type of person where it's hard. He's got kids, he's got a wife, so it's not like he's on his own.
Brian Regienczuk (15:40)
Nobody's figured it out yet, I think. There's probably a balance, but nobody knows what it is yet.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (16:08)
But like, I just can't get myself doing this. Now, me myself, since I started this company, I've never had an office. I'm in my home, right? I mean, it is an office, right? It's a separate room. It's a home office, but it's, I'm about 20 steps from my bedroom. And that's how it is. But somebody's got to figure out this building the relationships, building friendships, and building the connection, which is not there. That's very true.
Brian Regienczuk (16:32)
Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (16:33)
Although
travel, right? Bring them over, go visit them. I do.
Brian Regienczuk (16:37)
It's probably cheaper
than just having an office, ⁓
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (16:41)
It's way cheaper. So when I was,
I was a VP in Jenga Ticketmaster, right? And we build a team and, you know, basically we built a team in Ukraine and they had to put a budget together. And in my budget, we put in that every three months we take two people from the US and they fly to Ukraine. And same every three months, we have two people from Ukraine to fly to the US office. So, you know, basically, you've got four people every three months traveling.
Brian Regienczuk (16:50)
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (17:09)
directions. And it worked really well, right? It built the connections, it built the relationships, it built the friendships, so it did all of that. And believe me, the cost, if you account for salary differences, benefits, know, all of the overhead, there's a lot of overhead, people don't think about it, people just compare salary, right? X and Y, but there's, in US, the overhead is so high. ⁓ You know, you
Brian Regienczuk (17:33)
If you're in a big city,
mean, office space is really expensive. yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (17:36)
Exactly,
Medical insurance, office space, taxes, right? So all of that. That travel was a small percentage of what it would cost and it worked so well.
Brian Regienczuk (17:48)
No. No.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (17:49)
Cool.
All right, that's very interesting. So what do you think, like if you were to build a company today, let's say you're starting your own company, you start your own company, your own business, would you do remote? Would you do the hybrid? What would you do?
Brian Regienczuk (18:03)
Yeah, it's I mean, I would start hybrid, right? If I could, but if I didn't have my own, like if I didn't have a space, I could start hybrid, then I would do just fully remote. Right. So I think it's a waste of time hunting for space to work out of and things like, like if you are starting something brand new. Yeah, I would do it fully remote initially.
I mean, it helps, I think, if you're a founder, if you do have a co-founder that you guys are both located in the same city, like you can see each other, like those early stages, there is something in those first few employees being like physically present with each other. But after that, I don't know that it matters as much. It's about finding really good people that can get the, get the thing built and get the thing sold and all, you know, all those things. Um, yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (18:52)
And you can actually do...
sort of, it's not hybrid, but you can do, so let's say, right, you're starting a new company and you want to do remote. There are two options, right? You can go and say, I'm going to hire engineers from all over the world. You know, I'll have one engineer from India, one from, I don't know, Spain, one from Argentina. Or you could say, let me build the entire engineering team in one region. Doesn't have to be in the same country, but in one region. say it's in Eastern Europe or it's in Latin America. They share the time different, the time zone is the same.
culturally they're closer to each other even though they're in different countries they're closer to each other so they're operating as that pod and it becomes much easier so there are a couple of ways or many ways to address that
Brian Regienczuk (19:26)
Yeah.
Yeah, think that's smart. think what we have done is similar. have like identified for like development where we want to hire from. And we always are hiring from that country for us. Right. But even if it was regional, like that makes a lot of sense. We still fight the time zone thing a little bit, but we've we've we've found a nice flow.
You know in in over the years to where it works it works for us. Yeah
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (20:00)
Yeah,
I find, unfortunately, right, Latin America works well for time zone because, you know, you're if you're in Pacific time, then you're only three, four hours away. Eastern Europe works, even though it's nine hours away, nine, 10 hours away, but it works because they tend to work later hours. So there's plenty of overlap.
It's Asia that's killing it, right? You're dealing with 12 hour time difference. There's just not a good time to talk, right? 9 a.m. here is 9 p.m. there or vice versa and there's just no way to talk.
Brian Regienczuk (20:30)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. So somebody has to stay up late or get up early or like be ready, you know, like, so, um, yeah. So I think that's, Asia certainly is more of a challenge, but it depends on where, what stage your company's at, right? That may be hard when you're just starting out, but once you're 10 or 12 people, um,
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (20:35)
or get up early, right?
Brian Regienczuk (20:51)
maybe that team is doing stuff that is more specified, right? It's easier to hand off in stories and they just do their work and they check in and that's, you know, that's, you know, that's one model. And I think in Europe as well, I think it's similar, like, you know, it may be a little trickier if you're in those founding stages, but as you get to that 10 plus person company, I think,
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (20:56)
Mm-hmm.
Brian Regienczuk (21:18)
you've kind of got a base product, right? And you're expanding, innovating on it versus like coming up with it from the beginning. So, yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (21:21)
Definitely.
All right, well, thank you so much. Thank you for joining. Thank you for taking the time. I think it was a very interesting conversation. It's firsthand experience of what works, doesn't.
Brian Regienczuk (21:30)
Yeah.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's good to talk to you.