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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)
Thank you so much for joining us in this episode of Build the Humans, podcast that we started recording talking about the human side of building great software. Everybody likes to talk about technology. Everybody likes to talk about the latest and greatest invention, the greatest and latest tool. We like to talk about the people that are behind all of those tools and that technology. I run a company called Mirages. We're a services company. We help our clients.
hire absolutely amazing talent from mostly Latin America and Europe, Eastern Europe, Europe. Those are two areas we focus on. Our tagline is we really solved the problem of outsourcing. We fixed what was broken and continue to do so. That said, I'm my mic over to Derek. Please tell us about yourself. Tell us what you do.
Derrick Franco (00:53)
Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. So yeah, my name is Derek Franco. I'm a director of engineering at a company called Counterpart, yeah, in the insurance technology space. And yeah, I was actually the founding engineer at the company. I've kind of built it up. And yeah, we've got a global team that we've built up on our engineering side over the last six years.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (01:11)
Cool. So you were a founding engineer and
I've been a founding engineer myself. I had my own startups in the past. One thing that I'm going to ask, you know, I'm curious, what was your experience? I know what was mine. When you start, you know, to start up, it's very hard and then you sort of hope it will get better, but it doesn't.
What are those things for you?
Derrick Franco (01:32)
Yeah, yeah. It's interesting because ⁓ I've done it in multiple phases in my past. So my expertise has always been in that ⁓ early stage, zero to one to series A building, building those teams up. And so I've seen things go very well and I've seen things go very wrong in multiple different occasions. Yeah, I think the thing that we tried to do this time around was
Luckily, in this particular moment, ⁓ our CEO also had started multiple companies in the past and scaled those up. And so one of the first things that we did when we sat down was to kind of make a list of what were the things that we screwed up before? What were the things where, hey, when I was doing this last thing, I did not think about and it just cost us over time. And putting together that list, even as a bullet point list, kind of helped us not make a lot of the serious mistakes we had made in the past. So ones I had messed up in the past.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (02:10)
Yeah.
Derrick Franco (02:24)
not investing in just infrastructure for just the next, call it a couple of years. Every single one of us, we build up a project, we get it deploying and it's like, perfect. Like this is completely fine. But then the second you have three engineers, four engineers, all of a sudden you're spending more times for some features, just making sure the thing is deploying and the infrastructure is working properly versus building things out. And so that was one of the first things I wrote down. so rather than us trying to just build something that deployed, we...
went out to a consultant and we said, hey, we're going to put money aside for going to a DevOps consultant that can build this up and get a system together that can be used. And to be perfectly honest, we probably went three years before we even needed them to start adjusting the infrastructure that was there. And not even because it was going down, just because we needed to tweak things for just better usability for the future. And so, you know, that's one thing that we messed up in the past that we put together.
⁓ And then the other one that I think we had messed up in the past at other companies that I think we did really well here was we took a look and said, okay, one of the things that we did really well on at other companies was moving fast on these ideas and running. But eventually you start hiring people really quick and you start missing those updates or there's a misalignment on what the goals are. And so one of the things that we did early on was we said, okay, let's get kind of the, not only just the goal of the company on paper,
but what are the main values at this company that we want to kind of make sure that we're aligning on as a team. Because this allowed us from a hiring perspective to make sure that whenever we were hiring, even though the culture hadn't been built yet, we knew that we wanted people that would fit these values. And the second thing was we started to just continue to have these weekly updates. It would be quick updates, PowerPoint updates of just like, what are you working on right now? And kind of what's the goal?
And it seems really counterintuitive when you're such a small company and there's two people, maybe three people. It's like, can't I just give you a quick message? But by starting that process, as we started hiring people and those three people went to eight people and those eight people went to 20 people, we had to adjust how those meetings went. But that standard and that practice was still there to make sure that people were getting the updates to learn what was happening. So, you those are just a couple of the things that we had messed up pretty early on that we...
we're able to adjust over here. And not to say that we didn't make any mistakes after that, but just trying to learn from as many mistakes as we had in the past.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (04:43)
Yeah, it's interesting. So you touched on something I spent many years and I still do advising used to be called consulting really. I think there's a difference between advising and consulting. So I do more of advising role and a lot of people you talk to. So my sweet spot is not the zero to 20. It's probably more like 20, 30, 200, 200, right? It's taking it to the next level. And people come in and they talk to you and they go,
we have this problem, my God, and you're listening and I'm smiling. And sometimes they go, you're smiling. Like, yeah, because you think it's a problem. I hear this every single day, right? It's not unique. It's exactly what you touch, right? It's the pain of not planning before. And funny, know, at Mirigas, at our company, we talk a lot with, you managers, and we want to make sure we understand what kind of person they're looking for.
And that goes with values that goes with, is it a hands-on role? Is it a design role? Like what are we really looking for? Stuff that you can't put on paper. just not, it doesn't go on paper. And I hear this a lot. We're a startup. We can't spend too much time in planning. We got to move things fast. And then I go, sure. What are you going to do in six months? What are you going to do in a year?
Derrick Franco (06:02)
Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (06:02)
Are you gonna just throw it away?
Derrick Franco (06:04)
Well, and that's the thing, there's the balance. It's you need to know where you're running at. Everybody needs to have a shared goal in mind of like, hey, we're trying to get here in three months, six months, 12 months. Those are probably going to change the longer they're further out. But yeah, you need to be able to at least have that short term goal aligned on. And yeah, because people mess it up. And it's funny that you say, you've done advisory roles as well.
That's one thing that I always recommend to people and we did as well too, is we leaned on the people that had been there before because in hindsight, the answer is so simple. In hindsight, the answer is just like, yeah, don't do this because I've messed this up before. And so that was one of the things that we really did was, we reached out to a lot of people and we had a lot of really good advisors that had done this before where even something as simple as me being asking a question that I'm overthinking about, like you said, where I'm like, hey,
Should I split the front end and back end as separate repositories and when? And he's like, hey, you're thinking too far. Like just keep them in one, move on. And it's like just something as simple as that where it's like, I could have spent a day or two just, you know, mulling over that little choice. And it's like, well, that's really not that big of a deal until later on, like just move on.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (06:58)
Right.
It's actually an excellent point. People think of consultants and advisors as if they're going to come in and they're going to make our life miserable, more difficult. Where in reality, sometimes all we do is we say, just move on. Don't waste your time on it. It's not important.
Derrick Franco (07:21)
Yeah, exactly.
know exactly. And I think that's the main thing is, I think one thing that people underestimate is the amount that most people really kind of want to help others and help them not make the same mistakes that they did. And so, yeah, even if you don't have that network, like we were very lucky to have a network that we could reach out to for people that had done this before on the technical side. But I mean, there were people where, there were people where,
especially as we started going to product roles where I had a lot less
on, I started reaching out to a lot of people that were just in second connections on LinkedIn or people that were kind of posting things all the time to be like, hey, we're hiring our first big project person. What should I be looking for? And I was able to reach out to a couple of people that I had never met before. And they were just willing to take 45 minutes of their time to kind of talk me through what we should be looking for, what we shouldn't be looking for.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (08:09)
Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Derrick Franco (08:10)
And yeah, so I've done that multiple times too. And it's something I recommend to people, especially as they're building, which is if you're not a hundred percent sure, you know, it may take a little bit of email, it may take a little bit of kind of reaching out, but you can usually find people that are willing to sit down and talk and yeah, help you if they've been there before.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (08:25)
You touched on something interesting. And when you start talking about building the team where the culture wasn't built yet, but we knew what our values were. Cultures and values are not the same thing, even though they're directly related. How do you find defining those values, defining that foundation and later building culture around it, especially when you're dealing with distributor teams?
And I'll make it more complicated, right? I'll let you talk through it. When you're dealing with international, right? Even within the United States, there's a difference between the East coast and the West coast, right? There's just fundamental difference. But now you go international, know, be it Europe, Asia, Latin America, doesn't matter. That adds on to it. How do you do that? How do you manage it and build that?
Derrick Franco (09:12)
Yeah, it is ⁓ very interesting and it's something that we've had to go through multiple times. I would say that when it starts out and we were putting just the values on paper, it was, okay, what are the things that we just the people that are here agree on that we should be focusing on? So this was, you and you know, not to go into all the values, but just focusing on, you know, being, being entrepreneurial, you know, focusing on over communication, focusing on, you know, making sure that we're not
burning out, like this is a marathon. We're not trying to kill each other through all hours. Like just putting those on paper was enough to kind of set the base tone to make sure that we have a check-in. And then, yeah, as we hired it was, okay, who would fit within the people that are here, the people that are working with? So, you know, for me, I had worked with some people for lack of a better term that were just complete assholes in the past and it made work horrible.
And so that was my big thing is like, as I'm hiring, I'm like, I'm looking for this person. Are they someone that like needs the attention and needs to do this or are they trying to be collaborative? And so that kind of became the built piece of like what I was looking for and built our fundamental team around. Now, the interesting thing going to your point of like, how do you do it across cultures? That's something we really had to learn over time because like, for example, when we hired, you know, just as you said, if I hired somebody in New York and LA,
we could speak to each other really, really well and you could have a lot of honest conversations versus like if I hired somebody that was like born and raised in the South, like they may have things where it's like, like they may not feel comfortable saying this or feel comfortable doing this. And so you got to kind of work to like, no, no, no, we need that, that honesty piece. And you see that in other cultures as well too. You know, we, we learned that in some places like, know, the Brazilian culture, you know, you, you never want to kind of give the bad news. So it's like, yep, things are going great, even if they're not. And that led to us really having to...
kind of put in in our hiring process, the multiple times that we had to kind of reinforce, hey, we want you to be open and honest here. Like you are not going to be in trouble by saying something is wrong. I just want to know something's wrong as early as possible. And the way that it was hard at the beginning, but it helped as we hired more people because then I could show this, like I could say it a million times, but it had to be shown that that is the culture that we were building. So a lot of times when I have new hires,
I, the people that have been with us for a minute, they will, they have no problem telling me, Hey, you're wrong. Or that's a bad idea. And so seeing somebody else from that, you know, area that they are from and that culture that they are from say, yeah, he is wrong. Here's what we should do. And they hear me just go, yep, that sounds good. Tell me why that reinforces the idea of it's okay. But this is kind of the interesting pieces I need to, to really ask a lot of times, especially if we're hiring in a new area, Hey,
what is that culture? Like I have to do my own research at that point to figure out what is that culture? Is it more of an honest culture? Is it more of a culture of kind of, I'll say like people pleasing in some moments? Like, you you get a lot of, you know, I've heard people that even have worked in Japan where it's like they have really hard time working from a Japanese company to an American company because of that structural piece. And so, yeah, and so it's kind of taking all those pieces into account. you know, especially when you're hiring not only to hire people from them, but then to manage those people.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (12:05)
Yeah, the communication, right?
Derrick Franco (12:16)
the manager that you have to have into account needs to be able to be aware of those differences, those cultural differences and how to communicate across those. And it adds another layer to it, but it's something that I think is extremely powerful because when you are able to have, mean, there are people that are incredibly talented all over the world. And when you're able to hire these high performing people from all over the world, it really does give you a superpower if you do it right. But it all comes down to kind of setting those base foundations from
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (12:38)
you
Derrick Franco (12:44)
over communication and understanding the culture across the spectrum.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (12:48)
Absolutely. It brings up so many memories of people not knowing how to communicate or not culturally being able to communicate. Even in the US, right? It's not even, I remember I was a VP of engineering for a larger company. was one of the few jobs I ever had for larger Fortune 500. And, you know, so I had directors, managers, the whole thing, and we hired a new director.
and we're sitting in this meeting and I'm coming up and like, hey guys, I think we should do this, this, this sort of giving them ideas. And this one person who just hired recently. Yep, yep, yep, yep. And there are three other people directors that have been with me for a long time. One of them worked for me before. And they're like, nope, nope, nope. That's not gonna work. That's not gonna work. And slowly I noticed this guy just irritating me. He's saying yes, we're.
Now I know it's not a yes, right? I got it, right? This guy's all right and I didn't think through it. So what they told me later after the meeting, he walked over to one of them and goes, is that really okay to disagree? Is that okay to say he's wrong? He's my boss. And the guy, this was the guy that worked for me before, he was like, he doesn't need people to say yes. He knows he's right already. We need to tell him he's wrong so we're gonna convince him he's wrong and he's fine with that.
Derrick Franco (13:46)
Yep.
100%.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (13:59)
But that's in the US. Other cultures, without even going into specifics, it's very different. I find Eastern Europeans, they're the opposite. They'll say no to absolutely everything. Yeah, they're like, no. Why? Because we can do it better. OK.
Derrick Franco (14:07)
Yeah. yeah. They'll tell you. They'll tell you right away. Yeah.
Well, and that's the piece. It's like understanding and knowing those pieces that that's really the unlock. like I said, it is a superpower because then as you bring those cultures together and you have somebody that can manage those pieces, it helps unlock both of those sides. Like, you know, we've worked with people that, like I said, have been in a culture of like, okay, hey, we just got to say yes to them. And we've been in people, just like you said, Eastern European that are more of like, no, they're going to be more direct with you. You know, New York, they're going to be a little more direct with you. And
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (14:36)
Yeah. Yeah.
Derrick Franco (14:38)
putting those together and showing and leading by example, this is what we wanna do. You see those kind of align and everybody feels more open, but it all kind of comes back to your original question of like, how do you build that culture? It starts from the top. Like as you are hiring it, you have to really, really be, you have to really be focused on making sure that, this culture that we are building needs to be open. And they need to be able to communicate this. And anybody that I'm hiring, if they're...
not going to feel comfortable doing it, or I'm trying to hire a manager that's going to run this team, they need to be able to set that tone and to show them that it's okay, not just start micromanaging and every little mistake, point the finger and yell at people, because there are those managers. And so that's where it really comes down to, you have to set that tone to know what you're hiring and what you're doing in order for that to scale. yeah, it starts with the people. It starts with...
understanding the culture. And then it also at that point turns to how can we empower them? And that's where it comes to building additional culture of over communication as well too.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (15:39)
Yeah, I actually think finding that right people with the right values is a lot more critical than finding the right people, the wrong people with the right tech skillset. When I was a hiring manager back in the day, I remember somebody from the team who is maybe not a senior, they go to the interview, they come out and they're like, no, we're not gonna hire this person. I will never forget this, this is a true story. So a guy who worked for the company for a long time, but it was his first job.
was there for maybe four or five years. So he was relatively senior, knew the company, but that was his only exposure after college. And we interviewed somebody and this person comes out. So everybody comes out like, yay or nay, right? We'll talk later, but yay or nay. And he goes like, absolutely no. There's no way we're hiring this person. I'm like, why? And it was a free QA engineer. I said, why would I hire this person? And he goes, well, she doesn't know Jira. And I looked at him, I thought he was joking. I seriously thought he was joking. I said,
Okay, what else? No, that's it. Everything else she knows fine, but she doesn't know JIRA. That's what we use. Then I looked at him and said, well, we brought in JIRA into the system, but the year, maybe two years before, did you know JIRA before that? How long did it take you to learn? So why would that be even an obstacle? Why would you even think about it? Like, I don't care. But you know, somebody, you can train a skillset, right? You can train smart person to do anything, but once an ass, always an ass.
Derrick Franco (16:55)
Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (16:59)
I just, that's the check.
Derrick Franco (17:00)
Yeah. And
it also comes into like even just, yeah, looking at that if they're holding that standard and doing it there, but also just as you're focusing, part of what you look for, and it changes from company to company, but part of what you look for is adaptability. And to be honest, the ability to work at that company size. Like I know some extremely smart people that have worked at very, very large tech companies, but that's been the majority of their...
of their experience is tech, big tech companies. so them coming down to a startup if they've never done it before, it's a huge culture shock because it's like, oh my God, we're moving faster. I don't have a perfectly written spec. I don't have to get approval for these things. Like I have to make the decision. If you've never been in that environment, it may be a little rough. Vice versa myself, I've really been at companies that have been under, you know, 150 people and moving fast and kind of changing these things and adapting over time. I know I would struggle going to a big company right away because
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (17:35)
Mm-hmm.
Derrick Franco (17:54)
I would look at it and now it's like, wow, it's gonna take me how long to get this decision and I've got to go talk to these people and I've got to go get the perfect spec written. And so that's the other piece that people kind of have to think about when you're hiring, which is what is this culture that either I'm applying to or that I'm hiring for and am I going to fit in that and knowing what those pieces are? Because like you said, in that scenario, you want to hire more for adaptability. If you're hiring an adaptable person at a smaller company,
they're gonna need to, because who cares if they know JIRA now, you may switch to linear, you may switch to Asana later. You need to be able to adapt and learn over time.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (18:22)
Exactly, exactly.
Technology changes, right? I mean, do you really want somebody who, you I know I write in COBOL and that's it, I will never learn anything else. Like, okay, you're without a job, you know, a few years down the road. When I started, so Mirigas was actually the history of how Mirigas came about. You know, I was a hiring manager, you know, was, started as an engineer, grew up, right, run my companies and always had a challenge with outsourcing.
Derrick Franco (18:35)
Yeah, no. Exactly, exactly.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (18:54)
And the challenge was always the same. The problems were always the same. And you try to change a vendor and the problem is the same. And you talk to your friends and they'll tell you the problem is the same. And it's a different country, it's a different vendor. It's like, okay, something's wrong. It's not vendor specific. There's a fundamental issue. So, you know, I started figuring that out. I was working for a company where I set it up in a completely different way. It was just, was just, it was magic. It was doing better than local teams. I figured, hmm.
A friend started coming over, hey, can you help us? Can you help? I'm like, well, there's something in it. So I left and I started mirror this. But one thing that we do, and it's a big, big fundamental difference in how we approach it. We do not have centralized recruiting. All of our recruiters are at a locations where we hire from. So I've got recruiters pretty much in every country, or at least most definitely in every region. But almost in every country we hire from Argentina, Brazil.
Ukraine, Poland, Mexico, all of them. We have more than 20, close to 30 recruiters right now. And the idea is very specific. There's a reason why we do this. It costs us a lot, right? It's a bigger overhead. It's more difficult to manage. But we do this because of the cultural component. They work with us. They understand how we approach things.
We understand how our clients approach things and now they translate it to the local market and they'll talk to the person and go, this person got great technical skill but they're not going to fit the environment or vice versa.
Derrick Franco (20:23)
Yeah, Yeah,
well, and then you can also figure at that point too, know, they can kind of find those little fundamental pieces a little bit easier too. So, you know, I often joke that, you know, myself, I've kind of moved all over and so I can adapt very easily. And so that's been something that's been really easy versus like, you know, I've met some other people where, you know, they're like, I have a little bit of a harder time trying to figure out...
Is this just a cultural thing as I'm talking to somebody or is this a skills issue? And so that's the other piece too, is like by having those localized regions there or having people that have gone to a bunch of different places, it makes it much easier to understand, is it an actual skill problem or is it something that I don't personally understand? And I think that's where people really mess up is a lot of times it's the internal that you have to look at. You have to internally look and say, am I able to do this? And if I'm not able to do this, like I may need help in that regard.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (21:11)
Yeah, I see this less now, not that I don't, it's still there. But I do see a lot of these issues where, hey, we are the core team, right? Whatever, we're based in the US and before it was we're all based in the same office. Anybody outside, they're outsiders. You talk when we ask you, and that creates a huge cultural barrier because those people are as smart, they're as
as scaring, why do you put the barrier at the borderline?
Derrick Franco (21:40)
Yeah. Well.
And this is where I think we did a really good job early on, was like, was the first thing that we, when we started hiring everywhere, that was the main thing that I said coming in is it's, we're not hiring people and being like, okay, well, they're only getting the crappy tickets, which I feel like a lot of people do. Like they're gonna get the stuff that we don't want to do. That was the opposite of what we wanted to do from day one. Cause I knew companies, even bigger companies that had done that where it's like, hey,
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (21:57)
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Derrick Franco (22:07)
We have a team that's based over here. Just send them the stuff that you don't want to work on and they'll work on it. We did the exact opposite. We said every single hire, irregardless of location, is the engineer that we are hiring here. And we are going, it doesn't matter if they are right next door to me or if they are halfway across the world, we are going to build this team up with everybody being equal on how we will build these, how we will train these, how we're pushing for the longterm in the future. know, we have engineers that have worked with us. I mean, going on.
six years at the company now. And you know, it's not because, you know, it's not because of chance, it's because we're really trying to invest in the people. And that's where it really comes down to, you know, taking it back to like, you need to be willing and know what you are investing in to do that for the long term. And whether you're an international team or, you know, you're just building something locally. Like if you do not invest in the team, you are not investing for your long term.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (22:58)
when I, this is again going back to before I had the company, we opened an office. So we had, I was working for, I was working for Ticketmaster. And I guess anybody can look it up and it's on my LinkedIn. And they had, when I joined in, when I came in, they brought me specifically to fix the problem, That's distributed blah, blah, So they had a team in India, they had a team in China and it wasn't working. Not for any specific reason, just wasn't working because fundamentally it wasn't set up right.
Derrick Franco (23:10)
Yep.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (23:25)
So long story short, we set up an office in Ukraine. This was my second exposure to building an office in Ukraine. And we did that, we set that up. And one thing that happened very quickly, so we had to work through some communication issues. So we said, listen guys, we're building a US based company that just happens to be in Ukraine. We're not doing outsourcing where you ask and you're Ukraine. It's one of the same. Back then,
Derrick Franco (23:43)
Yep. ⁓
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (23:50)
hiring talented resources was very difficult. was very hard. The market was hot. We pretty much didn't do a of recruiting. We time into it. We had a pile of Razumest that was sitting and waiting for next open position. And there was only one reason. And we asked everybody, why do you want to work for us? Why? You applied. You don't have an open position. You came in. You sent us an email. You're asking for something. And they said, well,
Derrick Franco (23:53)
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (24:15)
People talk, right? Everybody knows it's a small community. Everybody knows each other. We're tired of the outsourcing mentality, whether it's directly for a company or through outsourcing company of this, here's the widget, here's the ticket, go do this, don't ask questions. What you guys built is one team that works together and solves problems together. The next step was we had managers in Ukraine managing resources in the US and vice versa.
Derrick Franco (24:28)
Yep. ⁓
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (24:42)
And people were asking like, what do you mean? Like, why not? Why not?
Derrick Franco (24:45)
Yeah, no, exactly. And
it comes down to just setting them up for success. And I tell people this all the time, whether it's even if people that are trying to return to office or these other pieces, which I always say you have to set it up as if, to set everything that you build out for success, irregardless of if you're in person or scattered across the globe. I've mentioned a couple of times this idea of over communication. I am basically, and we have a value around this. ⁓
It's a term called a motenashi, which is basically a term that basically means like put the customer first. Well, the customer in this case can be anybody. Like you could be my customer if I'm working with you and you're my product manager, you're my customer. I got to get as much as I can. Yeah. And vice versa. Like if you are the product person for me, you should be doing as much to get things together so we can work with it. And that comes down to this idea of over communication. If I write something just in a ticket and send it off, well, what if you miss that ticket?
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (25:19)
Yeah. Your customer, absolutely.
Derrick Franco (25:37)
Like what if you didn't know to check that ticket because you're going to five other places? Okay, so if we're in a completely remote environment and someone's eight hours ahead of me and I've got a question I've got to ask them and it's late at night my time and they might be able to answer the next day, okay, well, I'm going to write up this summary. You know what? I wrote up the summary. Let me just put a quick video together asking him all these different things. And then I'm going to send him that link as well and say, hey, I put a thing in this ticket. Here's the video of it. And here's kind of the description. Can you add your comments into here?
you're setting those pieces up, but you also have to have those structures built for a success. Because like you said, if you have your manager in these other time zones, it works if you put in those structures. But if you just threw somebody and the company did not have those structures set up or wasn't willing to invest in the tools, the structure to do it, it's going to fail.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (26:22)
It's funny, you just touch on something and I never thought of it that way. So I use Loom. I don't know if you know what Loom is. It's a Loom plugin. And I use it and it does two things. First of all, I don't have to spend time writing long email where I can spend two minutes sharing my screen or sharing a particular window and just saying this is what needs to be done, this is happens. But also it allows me to be myself. I can actually make a joke. I can actually say something and it goes out.
Derrick Franco (26:28)
yeah, big fan of it.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (26:50)
It's asynchronous. don't have to get on a call, then hit send and then get something in return. It's amazing, right?
Derrick Franco (26:55)
Yeah. yeah.
Yeah, yeah. And for anybody
that hasn't used it, Loom allows you to just record video, to save voices, send these videos, these links out. yeah, mean, we've even, the running joke is I, years ago, for some of our team, especially in the insurance space, the insurance can get pretty complex really quickly. I created just about like eight videos quickly on Loom to send it to some of our engineers of like, hey guys,
Here's like insurance for like layman insurance, like from an engineer who had to learn this. Here's what these terms mean. And I created a bunch of these videos. I have to redo them because these are still used to this day, like three years later for like an intro for engineers, because they were like, my God, like it makes so much more sense now. And so like, we still send those videos around and you know, at that same point, you know, the tools have only gotten better. You know, I've done it where I've done these loom videos now.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (27:23)
Right.
You
Derrick Franco (27:45)
and they have all their stuff there and they'll give me an LLM summary of what was talked about. It's really easy for me to post these between different channels. And I think that that's one thing that people... It's all about the tools. There are many tools out there that can be used that just make it easier to use and you have to find what works for you, not just apply what was there at all the companies. For example, one tool that we use that I think it might still be in beta, but...
We use a tool called Roam that basically is like a virtual office. And it doesn't sound like anything new until you start using it, which basically it's kind of like we use it for our video calls. And you can kind of see little bubbles of who's talking to who. So it doesn't seem anything different than, what about Zoom? What about just Slack and you call somebody? But the interesting thing is it's just a small shift in dynamic. If you're in the office and you need to talk to somebody and you're walking by,
conference room and you see, there's two people I got to talk to. Oh, let me knock on that door real quick and talk to them versus if I'm digital and I'm just looking at the calendar and I'm like, ooh, Dave's talking to someone. I don't want to bother him. That's the small differentiation where like a tool like this allows me to see the same thing. I see two little chat bubbles talking to each other and I go, oh my God, I need to talk to both of them. Let me just knock on the door and see if they're available. And so like I said, little tools like this, there's more than just Roam, but those little things and investing in those tools pay dividends for the long
If you do not invest in the right tools, you're just setting your entire team up for failure if you're trying to go for a global team.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (29:12)
Absolutely. I think what you're touching on and so important when you're running a global team, distributed team, regardless whether it's one country, you know, distributed, one city distributed or across border distributed, you have to use tools. You have to use things that are different from what we used to do sitting in the same office. You know, I keep talking about it, right? But the water cooler conversation.
just like you said, you walk by, see two people in the conference room, walk in, it's gone. A random interaction in the kitchen, yeah, and you talk about something, that's gone. So now it's all intentional, but if you do it, if you remember it, and you actually put effort into it, it becomes your second nature.
Derrick Franco (29:53)
It does, it does. And the way I look at it is twofold. You know, when people look at these tools, they add up, they do, 100%. They add up month to month as you're signing up for different tools, but you have to get perspective on it. Okay. How much, if you're doing this in person, are you paying for office space? Okay. So that's an expense that you're paying month to month. So even if you're paying for people's coworking spaces, not everyone's using a coworking space, number one. So, okay. The additional expenses on using these tools would be equivalent to your rent. That's how you can consider it. So you still have to be smart with the number of tools you're using. You can go overboard.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (30:19)
Absolutely.
Derrick Franco (30:22)
you can select the wrong tool. So you just, you have to be smart with that. But the expense is similar to your office expense, number one. And number two, the other piece that we highly recommend, we do it at least with the whole company two times a year, is we get the entire company together at least twice a year for an onsite. And because you still need those people to people relationships, you know, and it just doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be every single day. In fact, I am very adamant that every single day does not get you the best results.
I can have the arguments with people. I've debated it back and forth with people, but especially as a person that just has to be in my own zone to be in that deep work mode. When I'm around a lot of people, it's incredible we have these great conversations, but then I need that time to go into deep work. And as the company's grown, we've actually extended this out where, yes, we still meet twice a year with the whole company, but we've also made it where it's team specific. The engineering team will also meet in between that and maybe once or twice.
Same with the product team, same with the underwriting team. And so we're building those pieces over time. There is more in-person over time. However, in between those, we've set it up with our tools where it's easier for us to communicate. And even going back to the beginning of it, from the cultural perspective of that initial meeting of like, we're going to have a kickoff at the beginning of the week. The kickoff still involves the entire company. Like, you know, maybe it's not everybody jumping in and it's just your top level managers giving the update that you've pushed up.
but you still see what's happening with the team. There's still that sense of like, am part of the team and it's not just these like five people that I'm working with all the time in isolation and like, yeah, I think I'm part of this company. So it all comes together for this to kind of go forward, but yeah, it's all relative and it is something that is a superpower if you do it right.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (32:00)
Well done. I really want to be conscious of your time. This has been a great conversation. Thank you. I'm so, really, as somebody who's been in this for years and really been pushing for let's make a change, I'm so glad to hear that there are people out there that get it and, you know, buy into the same mindset. It's amazing.
Derrick Franco (32:18)
yeah, no, great conversation, loved it. And yeah, it's just one of those where, yeah, if you had to summarize it at all, it's, yeah, investing in people is definitely the number one thing. And if you get that wrong, you get everything else wrong too. So taking care of your people is the number one thing you can do.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (32:34)
Thank you.
Derrick Franco (32:34)
Thank you so much.