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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)
Marko, thank you so much for joining us for this podcast. The podcast we're doing is really what we call business of software. We talk about technology, we talk about teams, we talk about what it takes to put out software, to put out products in different shapes, forms. It's not technical, we don't get into technical details. There's plenty of that out there. We just talk about what it takes to get it done.
And obviously, you know, we talk about trends and what's happening and what people are using and what we think is going to happen to technology in the next, you know, I used to say in the next year, now it's saying the next week with everything going on, but it's an interesting conversation that we can have. Why don't you introduce yourself a little bit, tell us what you do, who you are.
Marko Vasiljevic (00:54)
Absolutely. So my name is Marco Vasilevich. I'm currently a CTO at a company called Ghost, which is a B2B inventory marketplace. And I've been there for almost two years now. My background is I've been involved in startups for most of my career, everything from starting my own companies
some, you know, turn into complete failures, some kind of in the middle, you know, managed to manage to sell a company as well. I've been a part of a number of different startups and kind of different stages. I've been in the kind of last few startups I've been involved in kind of really come in at a stage where the startup is starting to scale and grow really rapidly. helping around with
with that kind of phase of the company and kind of getting from a few people to a thousand people kind of range. But yeah, so I've been kind of like spending a lot of time in marketplaces, both on the consumer side and as well as B2B side. So that's kind of been like the last probably 10 years plus of my time.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (02:00)
Good.
Yeah, so you've seen it all. I've been in technology for myself for 34, 33 years. And same thing, I've had my own startups. Some succeeded, some failed, or I like to say successfully failed. It's always fun. Done some.
larger enterprise as well, but now I run a company, we do team augmentation, out staffing, so it's not outsourcing, we say we've solved the problem of outsourcing. We really help companies hire really talented engineers from Latin America and Eastern Europe.
but we don't manage them. So we don't get all the projects, companies do directly. We just provide people and take care of all the requirements, everything that it takes to run people. But that's not the point of the conversation. So first I wanna talk a bit about changing world of teams and changing worlds of how we interact.
You and I have been around for a while. We all remember everybody sitting in the same room or at least in the same office, on the same floor, constant communication. We've then moved to wild, wild west of COVID where everybody's remote. Nobody knows what they're doing. And now we're in definitely post-COVID, but some of that remained. So tell me what you see, what works for you, what doesn't, what's the success to get
teams, people, not so much teams, but people interacting, communicating, and be one team, as funny as that sounds.
Marko Vasiljevic (03:27)
Yeah, think it's, as you said, it's been quite a kind of a journey and a lot of changes along the way. I think that we're kind of, think that people are slowly starting to settle into a bit of a pattern. I think there is a bit of a push, especially in like the larger enterprise side to like bring everybody back in office.
firsthand from everybody I know who is in those situations. Nobody's a fan of that because, you know, people getting pushed to come to an office so that they can actually like get on a call to talk to people who work at other offices makes very little sense. So there's a lot of like kind of nonsensical stuff happening on the kind of larger kind of end of the spectrum. I think that to me, it's always kind of like, what are you trying to achieve and what is the right tool for the job? Right. So
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (04:04)
Yeah.
Marko Vasiljevic (04:17)
I think when it comes to certain types of companies, and my current company is sort of included in there, I think that it's certain groups of people who are interacting in a very kind of ad hoc way, it makes sense for them to be close to each other. So more like on the leadership side of things, and potentially certain teams that are kind of like very, know, working like physical side of the equation from like ops and potentially sales and so on.
It might make more sense for them to be physically close. And that doesn't mean every single day. I think there's a good sort of balance of like how often you want to be sort of in person and kind of having that kind of a bit more of a unplanned sort of interaction versus not. I think for specifically like technical teams, like engineering teams, data teams,
design teams, product teams. Again, it varies, but I think that you can get a lot done by kind of getting the best of both worlds, which is really allowing people the flexibility to avoid wasting time and travel and sort of inconveniences, but at the same time, figure out ways to bring people together in productive ways. I think there's kind of, and every team is different and every level within a team is different, but I think there's...
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (05:25)
Definitely.
Marko Vasiljevic (05:32)
kind of certain patterns that I'm seeing that, are starting to work well, which is, you know, kind of like on the kind of general team level, like you want to be bringing people together, you know, at least a few times a year and give them, yeah, give them a way to interact and spend time together and work together. just to kind of, it's like professional, also personal relationships and trust is really important. for some people who might be working closely with like specific customers, both internal and external.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (05:44)
for sure, absolutely.
Marko Vasiljevic (06:01)
might make more sense for them to actually be with those customers if they're, you know, available. So it's bit of a mix, right? And I think every company also is different. I don't think there is a formula that works for every single company in the world. And so I think there's
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (06:14)
I agree. So funny,
my company, we've been remote, fully remote, never had an office since 2014. So that's when we started, this became a full-time thing, right? Really became a company, 2014, never had an office a day in our life. We had offices for engineers before COVID, don't have them anymore, we don't need them. But as a core team, we're across borders, we're...
Marko Vasiljevic (06:20)
Mm-hmm. Right.
Thank
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (06:39)
I joke there's no two, now we have it, but it used to be no two people were in the same country, much less in the same city. And it's been successful. And so what we've done is, you know, lot of this, we overly communicate, right? We talk on, we have a lot of Zoom calls and, know, so our thing is video must be on. We chat, right? We have our chats where we chit chat and we encourage to make it a friendly chat, right? Not make it...
Only come here to ask a question, get an answer and walk away, but make it a friendly conversation. Same as you would if you were sitting in office, somebody made a joke, somebody said something, it turns into a 10 minute conversation and everybody goes back to work and that's perfectly fine. So I wonder if there's some secrets that you guys do to get to the same point where again, obviously, we do get together, I travel a lot, people travel a lot, so we get together a couple of times a year.
But most of the time it's all in my head.
Marko Vasiljevic (07:31)
Yeah. Yeah, I think it's, again, it's sort of like, it really depends on like the types of people that you interact with and you work with. And some people like to have, you know, a lot of informal conversations, other people are a bit more focused on the work. I think it's like, I think creating opportunities for those things is really important, but not forcing it, right? Like it's, it's, there's got to be some level of spontaneity to it. ⁓ And I think, you know,
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (07:55)
Absolutely.
Marko Vasiljevic (07:57)
We kind of like, think in general, sort of like if the team culture is constant, open, transparent communication, you know, being very kind of helpful and respectful of each other, but also, you know, bringing things up when there are problems and kind of directly attacking those problems, the thing that goes a long way and that kind of spurs on these conversations that happen. And like what I've noticed is like,
This is like team quirks, but what I've noticed in like our, know, we use Google Hangouts for meetings, but like in the calls, you know, there's always like a little side chat going, you know, and it's like, it's always, you know, people are like very interactive and they send, you know, these emojis and like in the, in the call and, know, they ask questions, there's like a lot of kind of side jokes happening. So like, I think those are all the things that kind of make those things. It's not just like a dry, you know, join a meeting and.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (08:29)
Yeah.
Same thing.
Exactly.
Marko Vasiljevic (08:46)
and sort of like sit there and wait till half is like it just makes it a little bit more fun. And I think that goes a long way of just kind of allowing and encouraging that, you know, just that type of interaction.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (08:56)
Yeah,
I absolutely agree. So I'm glad to hear that others are doing sort of similar things. Are you guys all US based or you have international? Like how's your teams?
Marko Vasiljevic (09:07)
⁓ Yeah,
vast majority. we have an office in LA. We have an office in New York. The LA office is mostly sales and operations. And then we have some people from EPD on there too. I'm in LA, so I go to the office a couple of times a week. But then like basically the rest of our engineering data team, half of our design team are all remote. Currently,
Pretty much everyone's in the US. We do have one person who's in Central America, but kind of the philosophy has been around kind of building the base team in the US and then kind of moving from there and kind of bringing in more people kind of near shore, specifically in like Central South America. So we're still kind of like in the...
you know, foundational sort of building phase. but you know, we have, we have, you know, you know, explored and talked to people and sort of like, you know, planned out kind of like next steps in that direction too. So there's, yeah. I think there's the, it's not like one size fits all. think it just for the team kind of size and makeup, there comes a time where you can be like, Hey, we can probably throw in, you know,
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (10:08)
Mm-hmm.
Marko Vasiljevic (10:14)
you know, 10, 20, 30 % of the team in here that are not necessarily US based and expect the same level of performance because now their foundations are solid and we have, you know, we can bring them into like an organized environment.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (10:24)
Right. ⁓
And I'm glad you mentioned a few times, there's no one size fits all. We started this service, it was all Eastern Europe. Originally the first country we were hiring from were, so I'm based in Los Angeles, I live in LA, we're neighbors. But so we started hiring from Ukraine and then very quickly expanded to other regions or to other countries in Eastern Europe. And then several years later, we expanded to Latin America. I call it Latin America, really it's everything from Mexico.
all the way down to Chile, Argentina, Brazil. So we cover the entire Central South America, Mexico, North America, obviously. And a lot of people ask me, so when they come, they go, so what's better? You should have an opinion. What's better? Is it better to do in Europe? And is it better to do or is it better to do in Latin America? And they're always surprised when I say there is no better.
Marko Vasiljevic (11:00)
Okay.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (11:16)
It depends on what your team is. It depends on what you need. And I usually give them use cases where I say, well, in this use case, that may be more beneficial. In this case, this would be more beneficial. In this case, you may want to do this. I don't know what the use case is, but there is no one solution that fits all for sure.
Marko Vasiljevic (11:33)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think it's, you know, in, in general, if the team is sort of working, you know, relatively synchronously, and they kind of, you know, especially if there's like regular meetings and interactions, pairing and stuff like that. And that's why we find that sort of, you know, Central South America works really well. Just because of the time zone, and Europe, Asia.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (11:44)
Hmm?
Marko Vasiljevic (11:54)
in general doesn't really work that well. even though we actually have some people in Europe randomly who were in here and then they sort of moved and they stay on the team and we're making it work and actually works decently well. But I think, I think for us, you know, being primarily sort of US based, central South America kind of like the right fit for the stage work.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (12:12)
Yeah, what
I find that if you have an existing team that works and you're getting people to compliment that team, right? So you have a team of five people and you want to hire five, 10, whatever number is, and you want to hire one, two, three, four people to integrate, you definitely want to go for Latin America because of the time zone, because there's more, it's easier. Now Europe, Asia is hard. Asia, and there's reason we don't touch Asia, but Asia is hard. Europe, can still, there's...
Marko Vasiljevic (12:29)
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (12:38)
plenty of overlap and especially when you have team in New York, it makes it so much easier. So only six, seven hours depending on where you are in Europe. But if you are building a self-sufficient team, so let's say, you know, we're gonna have build a brand new team, we're gonna have its own team lead and it's gonna function more in isolation and only communicate with us occasionally, then I'd say Europe may be a better place to consider just because of different engineering approaches, different engineering levels and talents.
Marko Vasiljevic (12:44)
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (13:04)
But from a communication point of view, yeah, absolutely, Latin American. That's how we got into it. Before that, I was actually fighting it for a long time. I didn't want to do it. I wanted to stay in Europe until I realized it doesn't matter what I want when my customers want something else. So cool. I want to touch a little bit on latest and greatest, technology.
Marko Vasiljevic (13:20)
Right. Yes.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (13:27)
sort of where things are going. Obviously AI is taking a main seat right now. Everybody's talking about AI. and I in LA, we see the self-driving cars. I've actually tested, you when I go to San Francisco, I exclusively take VEMA just for fun, right? I just want to play with it. I don't, you I drive in LA, so I don't take Uber. I don't take cars in LA. But, you when I go to San Francisco, that's a good opportunity. And it fascinates me.
right? It absolutely does. I actually can't wait to own a car that I do not have to drive as much as I love driving. I just want to get in the car, relax and do my own thing. And that thing will get me where I'm But cars aside, we see tremendous progress in AI over the past, I would say six months, three to six months, right? It's been around longer, but sort of
The way I say it, nine months ago, it was a hype. Now it's part of life, right? We use it all the time. Where do you see this going? How do you see this affecting teams, engineering teams? How do you see that affecting hiring and everything?
Marko Vasiljevic (14:28)
Yeah, I think so we're, you know, we've been leaning into AI tools kind of various from very early on and are really starting to see some like, significant impact now. And I think it's kind of like, there's a before and after and I think that there is no there's no going back. I think anybody who
starts using these tools, especially like on the software development side of things, you just, you just become more productive and you can just work faster and, and, and do better things. And I'm seeing every day on our team, just people doing crazy stuff. That's just, you know, you would have taken days. can punch stuff out in the, in a matter of hours. Right. So I think like, when you kind of look at the, think, I think I look at it into two phases. It's sort of like, what's the medium term kind of short to medium term, and then what's the longterm effect of this.
I think short to medium term, what we're seeing is that really good engineers just become multiplied by X and it could just do a lot more with less time. And also be able to do things that would, in the past, if you need to onboard into some new tool or new system or something, would just take time and effort to build that kind of skill. It's just a lot faster to do that nowadays.
I can see over in the in the kind of medium term.
At like different levels, very different things. like in the kind of very early stages when someone's going on, like building something quick and dirty like that, you can now, you literally just need one person who kind of knows what they're doing and you can get a lot done. And it's, it's pretty amazing to see, right. Whereas before you would have to like go on, you know, a backend developer, find a developer and maybe a designer to get something. you can sort of almost punch that out by yourself. And that's, that's
Incredible that's all the stuff you kind of see because that's the flashiest most interesting kind of stuff So like that's that's I think one when it comes to teams That are actually like working on some, know, relatively complicated convoluted Or you know more more kind of you know real business type use cases I think There's a very different level of that tool usage
And it's adding a lot of value today and it's going to add even more value tomorrow. think what's happening there is that you're actually, again, you can do more with less, more senior people seem to have a bigger impact in the short term. What I think is going to happen there, it's actually going to affect hiring in the sense that I think, and I've already heard this from multiple people, a lot of companies are...
either slowing down their hiring or kind of stopping it temporarily to see what the effect is of some of this some of these tools. And I think that it's a smart thing to do. I think that there are opportunities to just scale together with the company without hiring for a period of time.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (16:57)
Mm-hmm.
Marko Vasiljevic (17:09)
but then again, like, know, if, if you, companies grow and beyond a certain point, it just means that the new people do you bring in just need to be, you know, kind of AI first. Right. So you want to bring an engineer that engineer has to be an AI first engineer who can like do probably. You know, X amount more work than they used to in the past. So you just need fewer of those people. Right. So I think in the medium term.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (17:18)
Absolutely.
Marko Vasiljevic (17:31)
The effect is going to be probably in the kind of in the mid range, sort of like high growth companies, probably like slower hiring. Um, and then I think on the top, the top end of the spectrum, I think you're kind of seeing two things like people who are like early adopters, they just go in and like literally letting people go and probably overdoing it. Uh, maybe overplaying it a little bit, just to kind of save money. Um, they'll probably settle into some.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (17:38)
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Marko Vasiljevic (17:57)
a more of a stable environment where they're going to be like, okay, we like, yes, we can reduce people in certain areas and then we can just use the people that we have in a better way. So I think like overall, like I think in the short term, the impact is going to be like more, most likely for these kinds of established businesses, like less hiring. Now, what does that mean for like smaller businesses or like kind of like, you know, early stage startups? It just means a lot more people can do, you know, with, with very, you know,
a lot less knowledge and experience. So there's going to be some more activity in that space. But I think overall, it's probably going to have a depressing effect on the hiring in general. ⁓ But I think it's also going to elevate the profile of the person that you're looking for to hire.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (18:35)
I can tell you.
Yeah,
so I can tell you from both my professional experience, I deal with hiring day in day out for different companies in different regions and everything. And also talking to my peers, friends, I've spent so many years in technology. I absolutely agree. Many companies went a bit overboard with not hiring or even letting people go, then it bounced back.
Marko Vasiljevic (18:48)
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (19:03)
And now I'm seeing a more balanced, if you will, approach. What I did see, and it sort of made me think, so I was talking to somebody, it's a mid-size company, they always did summer internships for college students. This year they canceled it. And they canceled it because they said, listen, we always got these people to take care of stuff that nobody wanted to do.
Marko Vasiljevic (19:19)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Right.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (19:27)
And
we always knew that it takes a toll on us because we have to train them, manage them, right? We have to explain them. It's not easy, right? There's a price. It's not free. There's a price to pay, but we always got a bit more out of it than we put in. And that was a way for us to find future hires when they graduate. So that was their approach. They canceled this year because they said everything that they do and more can be done by AI.
Marko Vasiljevic (19:38)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Right.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (19:53)
because it's low level stuff, right? It's not advanced. And they didn't do it, right? So they said, that's good. And then the conversation went on to where I said, okay, so what are you gonna do with your hiring in five or 10 years? Your senior engineers are there and that's fine, but how do you let junior engineers become senior? If you're not gonna hire them and relying on AI, then...
By the time senior people are retiring or moving on, moving to management, whatever it is that they're doing, who's going to replace them? And they didn't have an answer.
Marko Vasiljevic (20:24)
Yeah, yeah, I think it's, it's because normal does have an answer. think I think like, you know, as I was saying, like, think different time horizons, it's sort of like different answers, I think, kind of three to five years out. It's really hard to predict what's gonna happen. And I think that, you know, depending on how fast things move, you may actually like cease to need
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (20:37)
⁓ yeah.
Marko Vasiljevic (20:46)
specifically software engineers, right? You might be looking for product engineers or product people who are like technical product people because of that. At that stage, you might actually the execution of like writing code or even architecting or even like setting up infrastructure, even like all those things might be sufficiently good or sufficiently well done by by AI where you actually can. Most companies will be able to get away with without having
like deep technical expertise that's like just purely software focused, right? Like that's it. Who knows? Like it really depends on, you know, which way it can go. But so I think like, you know, for those companies, like I, it's really hard to worry about like hiring five, 10 years from now. It's like, I think that's an unknown problem. And I think it's like, you know, the smart thing is to just kind of focus on like what you can do today instead of like the next step, because it's too much. There's too much uncertainty, but
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (21:16)
Mm-hmm.
No, I agree. I agree. ⁓
Marko Vasiljevic (21:39)
I think one thing is definitely for sure, and that's like AI is coming and it's going to disrupt this industry in a major way. It already is. ⁓ And I think it's only going to accelerate. if you kind of like are in tune with it and know what's going on and are able to understand kind of like what the next couple of, hopefully next couple of steps are going to look like, then you can get ready and prepare for it. Yeah, definitely. think like
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (21:46)
Yeah.
Marko Vasiljevic (22:01)
a being a junior or mid level engineer today is not a great place to be. You know, it's unfortunately, I think it's like, unless you really, really, really lean into these tools and become incredibly good at using them and leveraging them, they're going to be fewer and fewer opportunities for people at the bottom kind of end of experience scale to like really build that experience up. And that's, know,
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (22:21)
My son
is a junior in high school. And so this summer or come September is the time for him to apply to colleges. And a lot of conversations we're having as to both what schools to go to and more specifically what major to pick. And he's not an engineer. That's not what he wants to do at all. That's not that there's no risk in that. But it's let's evaluate.
Marko Vasiljevic (22:26)
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (22:45)
if this job, whatever job we're talking about, will even exist by the time you graduate, which is five years from now or so, because of AI. And it's very difficult to predict. And it's very difficult to plan your future for kids today because they don't know. And we don't know, right? Nobody knows. There is no answer to it.
Marko Vasiljevic (23:04)
Yeah. Yeah. I think it's like one, I don't know, to me, it's sort of like the trend that I'm seeing is that execution is getting commoditized and trending towards zero costs. So like anything that is repeatable, that's like they can create a system around is gone. You know, if you're applying rules, if you're doing like that's all gone, or will be gone very soon. But what is not is it's the more kind of like
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (23:21)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep.
Marko Vasiljevic (23:28)
number one creative side of things, but number two is just kind of like more of a visionary side of things. It's like, if you know what you want, and you can, you can build the skills of understanding how to get there. Executing the steps will become cheaper and easier over time. So like, you just I think, I think those are the kinds of skills that like just tuning into like the real needs and tuning into problems, understanding problems and being able to do that, it's going to be even more valuable in the future.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (23:42)
for sure.
Marko Vasiljevic (23:54)
So I think like those are the things that I think people should lean into. And then obviously relationships, interpersonal relationships. And I think we kind of go back in time a little bit, like where, you know, human relationships are going to become like one of the most important things that you have, because that's what's going to differentiate you from everybody else. Because when everybody can build anything they want in zero time, you know, what's the difference between you and the next person, right? So.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (24:03)
Absolutely, yes.
Agreed?
Marko Vasiljevic (24:19)
I
think things are going to kind of move in some weird ways. In some ways we're going to go back in time and in some ways we're going to go forward in time.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (24:27)
My show, yeah. All right.
Well, Mark, thank you so much. Thank you for your time. This was very interesting conversation, I think, and I truly enjoyed it. Thank you for sharing and good luck.
Marko Vasiljevic (24:40)
Thank you. Thank you. I enjoyed it too. Appreciate it.