Dr. Jeremy Weisz 15:30
Yeah. And will someone will you only hire full time or do you hire part time as well?
Roger Eintoss 15:39
Full-time but full-time. Because all of these years working with different kind of companies and helping them to create their engineering teams and digital products. Talk to us that it’s very difficult for a developer to have like a split focus in 2 or 3 projects. So it’s unreal that you can say to a person, okay, you will work for this project from nine to, I know, to noon or to 1 p.m., and then just switch because it’s not always a matter of time, it’s a matter of focus. And maybe a developer can solve something in two hours, something that he had been working for eight hours without no solution.
And then in one hour you say, wow, I get it. So it’s a matter of focus. And also from the client point of view, the amount not related to money, but effort of, of investment that they want to do if they are willing to say, okay, I need a person for this project. It’s not the same that you say, okay, I need ten hours a month. It’s a matter of segmentation of clients also.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 16:55
I want to go back to what you said, interested about the interview process. And you mentioned, you know, there’s technical interview portion, there’s a cultural interview portion. What are some of the questions that you ask maybe for your company? From the cultural interview point of view?
Roger Eintoss 17:15
Yeah, it’s an interesting question. It changed between each role and each interview, but we also interview using a methodology that is called learning Agility. Basically it works, asking the candidates about situations that they needed to go through. So it’s not the same to say, give me three examples of leadership. For instance, if you are interviewing a project manager, then saying, okay, tell me about the situation when you have to give negative feedback to someone so they can tell you how was that situation of giving negative feedback to someone or maybe firing someone, and then you start asking questions about that to understand if, if, if that is like a real situation that the candidate went through or it’s like just a story that, that, that is that just read in ChatGPT, you know, so always putting them in situation of something sometimes like a role-playing, like, okay, imagine that now I’m your developer and I did something wrong.
How do you tell me that? So we understand if they just like feeling nervous or many times in English, for instance, we start our interview in Spanish, but then from one moment to another we say, okay, from this moment we will start. We will continue the interview in English and maybe we ask the same questions again to understand if, if they use two minutes to, to respond something in Spanish, but then in English they say okay, yes, no. So the language skill is a must for us.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 19:16
I do want to talk about culture for a second. I’m just going to share one of my favorite parts of your website. Roger is your about page and specifically your values. And can you just talk about coming up with some of the values? You know, we have people-centered.
Actually this is my favorite part. I really stuck on this one and watched it like ten times because I think it’s hilarious with The Office permanently on beta, because I actually have seen this episode where Kevin spills this whatever it is, chili or whatever it is, talk about how you came up with some of these core values. People-centered permanently on beta. With great freedom comes great responsibility. Let’s have fun with it. There’s no place like home, and this is also fun. You picked out some good gifts here. This is hilarious. Yeah. So talk about coming up with these.
Roger Eintoss 20:14
Yeah. The story about People’s Center comes because with one of my business partners, and we met each other working for another company, and it was I. I know how to say it, but it was like a sad job. You know, it was not people-centric. So since the moment we started thinking about creating a company, we always thought, okay, we want to create a company where people want to just wake up every morning and come to the office or before Covid.
Now we are fully remote. And just get the job done. So we always told the people in the middle of everything because it’s more than a phrase. I mean, if you want to have like amazing results, you need people that it’s full compromise with the projects and with the company. Otherwise it will fail.
So that’s why every decision that we make even fighting someone. It’s bad on people central and the other values and the continuous beta. It’s interesting for us because I always tell to the people that we are engineers and we didn’t know how to create a company. We just started and trying to do things. And even today, after almost 15 years, we are still trying things and new things.
And that’s the best part of my job. I mean, you know that all the people say that if you see the S&P 500 over the years, the companies changed because if you can’t have the ability to change your business, model your values many times and the way you get things done, you will probably die as a company. So it’s one of our core values to always be testing and trying new things. Even the developers with our clients and also we, we try to find clients that share that value with us. I mean, we can assign a developer that maybe have like a performance problem.
It’s obvious that that can happen, but it’s not the same to say, okay, I will kill you and I will fire you because you have like a bad week that having a good conversation with the client saying, hey, I think this guy should start doing this, stop doing that, and we can talk about it and make things work. So that’s one of the core ones. And having fun. It’s part of people-centered. I always like to say that it’s a place where if you get your job done now, they will be asking you like, okay, why did you, you know, went out at 5 p.m. instead of 6?
And we believe that it’s obviously a matter of time because we sell like a full-time service. But it’s more a matter of quality and delivery. At the end of the day, if we get things done, that’s the important thing on this.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 23:48
On that point. And you mentioned obviously the team’s virtual. What are some ways that you help you manage a virtual team and what’s been successful for you? And other people can think about that.
Roger Eintoss 24:04
Yeah. It’s challenging. We used to have home office before COVID, but then during COVID, we just went fully remote. We have people all over Argentina. Argentina’s a big country, so we have people maybe four hours away from Buenos Aires, which is the main capital.
So we have two physical meetings a year, once in July in the middle of the year and once in December. So we organise a party and we bring people from all over the places just to see each other, to spend an entire day talking about work, but also about our personal life drinking beer, mate, eating an asado, which is something really traditional here in Argentina. And then we have one to ones twice a month with every single person in the company, no matter if it’s assigned to a staff-to-staff augmentation project, which we don’t lead that people directly or not. We asked them every two weeks, okay, how are you feeling? Are you happy with the things that you are working on?
Do you need me to talk with the client because I know something is treating you bad, or you are not happy with the kind of tasks that you are working on. And obviously having an open communication, not having fear of talking about or having difficult conversations, not only from us to them, but also from them to us. So I’m a big believer that if you talk things, everything is possible.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 26:01
I want to talk. You know, when I think of your company, I always think of tech companies, but you help a lot of different types of companies. So we’ll get to a tech example. But there was one which I didn’t expect. I’m going to pull it up here in a second. Here’s your core values here. Which is Newbook. Can you talk about what you do with Newbook and then it’s newbookmodels.com. What’d you do with them?
Roger Eintoss 26:31
Yeah, well, new book. It’s a really interesting project because they founded the company before COVID and they sold the company before COVID. But then the new owner during COVID, he didn’t know how to make things happen in the new world. So the original founders, they got the company again. They bought the company again.
And the first time when they founded the company, they raised money. They did like the venture capital path. But the second time they, they, they thought, okay, at this time this will be like a bootstrap. And that was the time where we met them and started working together, you know, and I think that they were working with the team in India, but they it was difficult to deal with the time zone difference and the cultural thing. So we were like a perfect mixture and a perfect match.
And I always, I always like to, to tell the story about new book, because it’s a perfect way of showing how things between the states and Latin America can, can perfectly work, and also how they take advantage of this thing, of the cost-efficient of hiring people in Latin America because they were bootstrapping. So obviously every dollar it’s even more important. So it’s a story. And also they are one of my favorite clients because we have been working together for, I know, four years now. So every now and then we go to the States and visit them.
And also they come to Argentina. Last year they spent two, 2 or 3 months here. We went to the river. We ate asados. So like you, I’m also a big fan of personal relationships and develop and that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 28:35
Yeah this is interesting because so it’s a marketplace for models. So like you know I don’t know Disney Lululemon Nordstrom needs people for their commercial or some video or an ad. They can go to this marketplace and look. And then so you’re augmented staff will help kind of, you know, just make sure all the features and bells and whistles and the platform is functioning and adding new features and things like that.
Roger Eintoss 29:01
Yeah, yeah. In this case we have a squad, an entire team working with them. And we help them to execute the roadmap to get the things done and create new features. Also give support to existing features. So it’s a nice example.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 29:21
Another example is a health tech which is more of what I originally expected. But obviously these days all companies have some kind of, you know, website presence and tech behind it. What did you do with the health tech company?
Roger Eintoss 29:36
Yes, we have another client in healthcare or health tech space. We can’t say the name because of the NDA, but the challenge there was that they were looking for a developer who could work with augmented reality in unity. I think that they were looking for the person like for four months, six months. And they, they, they weren’t able to get it. So they came to us because of the referral and we told them, okay, and we promise you that we can do this in a month.
I don’t know why we promised that, but it was something that we know that, okay, we have these people in the pipeline. We have some people with this like unity skills, which is something really hard to get. So we will do it. And we did it. And that person has been working since a year and a half or early, early last year.
Yeah. And a year and a couple of months. And they, they are, they fall in love with that person because not only we were talking about this thing of cultural thing, we not only find developers but also find people that want to be involved in the business. So the success story about this is not only the amount of time that we took to find the right person, which was a month against the six months that they were looking for, but also the kind of person that we assign that now they love him and, and they want him in, in different kind of projects. But obviously he only has a day. So it’s a nice story too.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 31:38
Yeah. I love to hear some of your favorite tech right. It could be software you use as a company or any apps that you use. What’s some of your favorite software tools in your toolbox?
Roger Eintoss 31:52
Well, you were saying about Zapier and Pipedrive are. I’m a heavy user of both. I like Pipedrive, but when it comes to Zapier, I can’t believe the unbelievable work of engineering that they have behind the scenes. It’s unbelievable. And they founded the company maybe ten years ago, I don’t know.
So they have been doing this for many years. I love Zapier, definitely. And when it comes to day-by-day applications, I use Todoist, which is to do and to-do list application. You know, I’m an engineer, so I’m a big fan of having everything organized and having my lists, so it helps me a lot to keep track of everything that I have to do. And so I use no matter if I have to go to the To the dentist or do something for a client.
Everything is in Todoist. It’s even more useful than calendar for me. I also use calendar, obviously, but. But having everything writing down there, it’s amazing.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 33:11
Any other favorite apps? It could be business or personal.
Roger Eintoss 33:15
I also use Slack. I’m a big fan of Slack. And now in the last four months, I became a big fan of the health application from the iPhone. I started like, I’m doing like a personal change in my life, trying to eat, like in a healthier way, walking the 10,000 steps a day, those things. So I’m a little bit obsessed about the health application from the iPhone, tracking my sleep cycles and my daily steps.
Everything, and I’m looking for a good application for that. So maybe if someone in the audience is listening, I know a good application for that. I’m happy to hear it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 34:05
Yeah, I have a whole folder on my home screen that is just dedicated to health apps because I geek out on that type of stuff. So yeah, I have some suggestions for you there. Of course I use Oura Ring. I don’t know if you’ve used Oura Ring before.
Roger Eintoss 34:22
No. So I have the App, I have the Apple Watch. Okay. But I think next step is.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 34:28
I mean the Apple Watch is great. I mean, I don’t have an Apple Watch, but from a sleep perspective, I’ve heard it’s just more accurate with the aura ring. But you know, tracking all the stuff you need is probably on your Apple Watch I imagine, as well. Yeah. Roger, I have one last question for you before I ask it.
I just want to point people to Braintly, as you’ve seen on the screen, if you know someone or you are looking for, you know, engineering talent, message them, right. So last question is about mentors. Now this could be actual mentors in business or it could be distant mentors. Meaning there’s just books or resources and people that you’ve, you know, learned from. Or it could be both.
So who are some of the mentors that you consider and that’s been helpful on your business journey?
Roger Eintoss 35:31
That’s a good question. I don’t have like one person, one mentor. I have different people that I used to talk with to share ideas. You know, that I’m part of, you feel this network of entrepreneurs and something I learned in the last year, year and a half, it’s to ask for help. Like knowing someone that you admire, or maybe you just say, hey, I saw the things that you are doing.
I really love the way you are running your company. And I just want to ask you for I know 30 minutes of your time to ask some questions or understand how you think business, your company, people, issues, whatever. And I learned to ask for those moments without being shy or without thinking, okay, he, he or she will think that I’m a stupid guy because I’m asking this or that question. So I ask everything. And if the other person thinks that okay, this question was stupid.
Okay, it’s a problem of that person, not mine. And I also like to be a mentor for early-stage startups. For early-stage entrepreneurs. Who wants to learn about my journey or my experience and always trying to be really transparent and trying to help them, you know, like not going through the same mistakes that I made. Being humble and trying to say, hey, this is the thing that worked for me.
Maybe it will work for you or not, but just take it. And, you know, and that’s the same approach that I take when I ask questions to a mentor, but I don’t I don’t have like one.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 37:39
Talk about that, that kind of hits on it. I mean, you know, if people don’t know it’s Entrepreneurs’ Organization, it’s all over the world and it helps, you know, founders talk about whatever is going on to work through them and have that network in collaboration. Who are some interesting businesses in EO Argentina?
Roger Eintoss 38:00
Yeah, there are too many interesting businesses in Argentina. We are more than 100 members, 120, I think, and you have from digital marketing agencies, software agencies through I know people from the healthcare spaces. There is someone who I know is running like food businesses, like McDonald’s. But it’s another one called Mostaza. Here in Argentina, there is another one who built airports and routes in Argentina.
So it’s a nice chapter because it has a good mixture between people who run real-life businesses like, I know, building an airport and digital businesses like mine. So it’s a chapter that and it’s growing. It’s growing. It’s growing fast and it’s full of really, really interesting people. Many people from the chapter live in the US, in Miami, in New York, but they still are part of the Argentinian chapter because they have their forum and they want to be in contact with Argentina.
So many of them are part of both. I know the New York chapter and also the Argentina chapter.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 39:35
Yeah, I found Roger one of the most important things in my business, in any health business is just joining a group of like-minded people who are doing what I want to do and pushing me to do more. So I love that. You know, whatever it is for someone, you know, I’m in Chicago. Also, I’m in a specific one just for digital agencies. I also have a group that just talk about health-related things, you know?
So I love that. Anyways, thank you for sharing your stories everyone. Check out Braintly.com and we’ll see everyone next time. Roger thanks so much.
Roger Eintoss 40:20
Thank you very much.
