The Tech Talent Hub of The World with Gaga Darsalia, Founder & CEO of Redberry

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:01) Today, we're talking to Gaga, founder of Redberry, all about the booming tech talent hub in the country of Georgia and more. You're listening to the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:15) Hey, Joel. What's up, guy? Look at that. You got a nice microphone and everything.

(Gaga at 00:00:20) Yeah. Yeah. How are you? How's it going?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:22) Excellent, man. How are you doing?

(Gaga at 00:00:24) I'm good. I'm good. Thanks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:26) So alright, man. I'm excited. So I definitely wanted to get your thoughts on what happened. Elon Musk just bought Twitter. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) Yeah. And he's going in there. There's claims that he's going to let 75% of the staff go. He's already fired the CEO, the CFO. Do you, first of all, do you think he's going to actually fire 75% of the staff? And then do you think that's going to flood into the market? Are you going to try to go hire some of those Twitter people?

(Gaga at 00:00:50) I really doubt that he's going to fire 75% of the staff, but he already started by firing the CEO. Yeah. But it's interesting to see what Elon is going to do with Twitter because, yeah, when he's doing stuff, it almost seems a bit crazy all the time. And also there's a lot of drama and scandal around stuff that he does. But in the end, stuff turns out to work really well, really great when he touches it. And I don't really know what his strategy is going to be with Twitter. But, yeah, it's interesting to see how things will unfold once Elon starts to execute on Twitter's future steps and developments.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:42) Oh, yeah. He's hilarious. I love that he brought a sink in to the lobby of the building. This morning, there must be thousands of engineers sitting around like, what do we do? Right?

(Gaga at 00:01:54) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:54) I know. Well, the answer is simple. Listen to this podcast, come work with Gaga, and change the world at Redberry. So you know a lot about the tech talent landscape, and you're specifically focused—you're in Georgia. Can you tell me a little bit about Georgia?

(Gaga at 00:02:11) Yeah. So in Georgia, tech has been growing for the past couple of years. A lot of people have been moving to tech professions. Also, with the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, a lot of developers from the region have been relocating to Georgia. So Georgia is kind of turning into a hub in Eastern Europe for tech talent. And basically, what we see is that this trend is accelerating. And, I mean, Georgia is probably very similar to what has been going on in Ukraine in 2015, 2016 in terms of development in tech. And there are a lot of international software companies opening up, delivery centers in Georgia. There are a lot of Georgian companies starting to work on technology products, both software products and also, in terms of services outsourcing, a lot of companies are trying to start with software outsourcing model. So I think even today and in the future, tech is going to boom in Georgia.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:25) Yeah. No. It sounds like tech's booming absolutely everywhere. That's why there's such a talent shortage. Right? Yeah. I'm curious. What—why are people outsourcing? Why is Twitter not just hiring their own people? Why do they outsource to companies like yours?

(Gaga at 00:03:39) Yeah. First of all, it's about the talent shortage because it's hard to find good talent everywhere. I mean, especially on the developed markets, the Western markets, it's very hard to find the right match with the talent needs. The other factor is about cost efficiency because outsourcing to Eastern Europe and specifically to Georgia is around two to 2.5 times cheaper than hiring locally. And that makes huge sense for people, especially now because with the looming economic downturn and the venture cooldown happening now, it really became the major topic to become efficient, to increase the runway. And actually outsourcing gives companies opportunity to do just that, to cut costs, to increase their runway, and to accelerate their product development capacity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:45) Yeah. And obviously, that's a huge driver, right? Cost is a huge driver. What's the quality like? What's the culture like around quality in Georgia?

(Gaga at 00:04:53) Yeah. In general, I would say that the quality is on par with what's happening in the West because we've been working with dozens of different companies in Europe and in the US. And what I can say is that at least for Redberry, the quality of developers is on par or even in some cases higher than our colleagues in the West. And in general, I think Eastern Europe in general has a good reputation for quality development talent, and Georgia is no exception from that. What's also important other than the technical capabilities and technical expertise is the communication skills, which is super important, especially when you are outsourcing because you are working with somebody or a team which is on the other side of the world maybe. It's very important to have good communication skills, and that's probably the first thing that we check when we do the hiring locally. But in general, young population—Georgia speaks decent English, and that has been very helpful for software outsourcing as well. In terms of culture fit, I think people in Georgia in general have the same culture as the Western culture. So it's also a good match in terms of culture fit. And what's also important in Georgia that has been happening for more than two years now is that the government has introduced tax benefits specifically for companies that do software outsourcing from Georgia. And that has been a huge driver for the tech boom that I've been talking about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:42) Is the tax benefits on your side or both sides? How does that work?

(Gaga at 00:06:47) Yeah. Tax benefits is on the Georgian company's side. So basically, companies that do software development services exports from Georgia can have those tax benefits if 98% of their revenue comes from service exports. So that has been a huge driver to increase the service outsourcing industry in Georgia for the past two years, and that has also attracted a number of international software development service providers to enter Georgia and open delivery centers here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:26) And so is that working pretty well as a country for a strategy?

(Gaga at 00:07:30) Yeah. I think the strategy is very similar to what other countries have been doing in Central and Eastern Europe like Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, et cetera. They have, at some point, all introduced different kinds of tax benefits and initiatives to support the industry to grow because that's one of the major growth vehicles for the economies in Eastern Europe in general, and I think it's becoming more and more important growth vehicle for Georgia's economy as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:07) Now I know I kind of jumped ahead in the conversation because we've gotten to know each other over the past couple weeks. But can you tell me a little bit, what is Redberry? You're one of the founders of it, right, of Redberry. What is it that you do?

(Gaga at 00:08:22) Yeah. So we are a software design, development, and growth marketing agency located in Tbilisi, Georgia. So what we do is divided in two major parts. One is that we help companies design and build software products. And then we help them also with go-to-market and with the growth of the product. So basically, we try to accompany our clients and partners all across their journey, starting from idea to prototyping, to designing, to development, and gradually to growth. We started as a four-person agency in 2014 and gradually grew into a 200-plus person company now. Now we are the biggest digital agency in Georgia and also one of the most successful ones probably because we won Georgia's Agency of the Year two times within the past four years. We got maybe 150-something awards from international festivals for our work. And that has helped us greatly both with talent acquisition and also with the market access. We've been working with mostly local companies for the first six years, mostly enterprise companies in many different sectors—in banking, insurance, telecom, healthcare, retail, et cetera. Also with a lot of international brands that have presence here like Zara, Bolt, McDonald's, KFC, et cetera. And we have not really focused on any particular industry in the past because Georgia is quite a small market, and we mostly try to be industry agnostic and grow. And actually, during the past two years, we started focusing to export our services in the West, in Western Europe and the US. And we've been quite successful at that because over the past two years, we have shifted 100% of our software development and product design services to export. So now all of our clients are international companies that we provide services to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:42) And are you a local company? Do you have an office that people come into? Are you spread out or is it hybrid?

(Gaga at 00:10:48) Yeah. We have two offices in Tbilisi near each other, and we work in a hybrid model. So after COVID, we switched to this hybrid way of working. But most of our staff is in Georgia, in different cities of Georgia, but probably around 80% located in Tbilisi. And we have several employees outside of Georgia as well. But, I mean, 97% of our employees are located in Georgia.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:20) When we were talking about enterprises and them doing this outsourcing, cost was a big factor. So I'm not an expert on this. I get to talk to companies that do this, and I get to talk to tech leaders who have talent shortage problems and all of that. But one of the things that I see happening, and you can tell me I'm wrong, but one of the things I see happening that I don't hear talked about a lot are the fact that these companies, they'll get big. These enterprises will get big. And when you're at scales of thousands or tens of thousands of people, culture is a hard thing. Right? And then you get these interesting, creative, really driven, get things done people, and they tend to kind of collect at the agency level. Right? And then it almost seems as if one of the reasons why they're outsourcing is to get the creativity of this different population that's not working inside of the enterprise. Is there any truth to that?

(Gaga at 00:12:16) Yeah. I think in some cases, that's true because getting outside help with innovation really makes sense in terms of getting an outside perspective on stuff that you are in. I mean, with innovation, the execution really depends on talent. And when there is a huge talent shortage, that very much hinders the innovation at different companies. And that's basically—the talent shortage and costs are the main drivers for outsourcing. But of course, there are different aspects to it, like in some cases, getting outside expertise that you do not have in-house, for example. And that has been the case for us as well on different topics and fields because I mentioned that we've been industry agnostic, but we've been very technology specific over the years because our core technologies are Laravel on the back end—and we are one of 20 official partners of Laravel—and Vue.js and React on the front end. And we are one of 10 official partners of Vue.js worldwide. And basically, we have this deep expertise in those technologies because our strategy for all these years has been to go deeper in terms of—be vertical with technologies and go deep in terms of expertise rather than grow horizontally. And that has given us an edge. And in some cases, where companies need help with those particular technologies, they might approach us because of our deep expertise and not because they have a talent shortage or they need to cut cost per se. But basically, I think all of those come into play when you are outsourcing with the right vendor. And what I see as probably the major problem with outsourcing is finding the right partner with outsourcing because I see that a lot of outsourcing initiatives or projects go wrong at that stage of discovery of selecting the right partner, right vendor. Because if you find the right outsourcing partner, it's like discovering a gold mine because you can accomplish so much more with so much less resources, basically.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:49) Yeah. Now I'm curious to know about—well, a couple points. The first point is that do you ever get takeover projects? Maybe somebody's running a Laravel framework or Vue framework and something happens whether they lose their team or just something bad happens to where they need someone on demand who's an expert there. Do you ever do any of those types of brownfield projects or takeover, quick, save-the-day projects?

(Gaga at 00:15:15) Yeah. We call those rescue projects.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:18) Okay.

(Gaga at 00:15:18) And we've been doing quite a lot of those because there are different projects that were maybe abandoned at some point, or maybe the past vendor who the client company has been working with has been underperforming or not delivering the software as expected. In those cases, when they have approached us, we have taken over the development process, and we have even created our own framework for the rescue projects on how to take the rescue projects over and then execute on it. Because that has been one of the significant segments of our portfolio within the past two years. And basically, it all starts with doing a preliminary audit of the code base and checking how things have been implemented with the existing code base in order to understand what needs to be fixed, what needs to be done, and how we can move forward from where the code base is right now to where the client needs to go. And we've been very business-minded over the past years. I mean, probably from the very beginning. Being business-minded is one of the major edges that we have had. We always try to not be just the executors and just on the execution part, but we also try to understand the client's business, understand what needs to be done in order for the client to meet their objectives. And that mindset is also embedded with the rescue projects because with the rescue projects, sometimes even starting from scratch makes more sense than continuing. But of course, there are a lot of cases when you need to continue development with the existing code base, which might be of low quality. And then we always need to elaborate a plan of gradual refactoring and development because then the refactoring and development go hand in hand with each other for the next couple of months until we start to reach the objectives that the client set for us or we set together with the client.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:41) Yeah. No. That always makes a difference when the people you're working with have an understanding of how to keep the end user close, keep the customer close, but also make sure that you're building things that drive financial outcomes as well. You said you became official partners with Laravel and Vue. What does that mean? How do you do that?

(Gaga at 00:18:01) Yeah. So we've been doing Laravel and Vue projects from 2015. So it's been more than seven years now. We've done several hundred projects with those technologies and have a very solid team on those technologies. Actually, both Laravel and Vue have this partnership programs for agencies like us. And then there is this process of due diligence from their side to check whether we meet the standards for official partnerships, and we went through that process. But of course, our huge portfolio helped us to get through that process successfully, and then we got the status of official partners. But what that means basically is that we are quite well connected with the community because both are open source projects. So the communities—the community drives both of the projects. That has also helped us to attract the best talent locally in Georgia on those technologies. And that has helped our team greatly to even increase our level of expertise with both of the technologies because we have the very close access to the most recent developments that are going on with both of the technologies, and both are very actively developed even now. I mean, the community is super active, super helpful for both technologies, and it's been a great experience and a great journey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:38) Have you ever gotten to meet the creators of Vue or Laravel?

(Gaga at 00:19:43) Yeah. I mean, virtually. Not in person, but virtually, yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:47) Nice. Did you do, like, conference, or how did that work out?

(Gaga at 00:19:50) Yeah. We did a conference and email exchange. So, yeah, it was remote communication mostly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:58) Nice. While I don't have direct experience with Laravel or Vue, they're obviously incredibly popular technologies, especially Vue. I would say Vue started to get real popular right at the time I stopped writing code on a daily basis because I had seen that Stack Overflow report, and it was like one year Vue wasn't on the list. The next year, it was number one on the list. And I was like, woah. How did that happen?

(Gaga at 00:20:24) Yeah. The popularity of Vue grew dramatically in a very short period of time. Probably, it was around 2016. Yeah?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:32) Yeah. Yep. Uh-huh. Yep. Now now I don't wanna go too deep into the technical details, but from a high level engineer perspective, why do you think was it just so much easier to use, or was it like jQuery where it did so many things for you so you didn't have to script out as a whole page to make something do a basic interaction? What was it about Vue that made it take off so fast?

(Gaga at 00:20:57) Yeah. Compared to jQuery, I mean, all the front end, modern front end frameworks have been revolutionary, I would say, for a lot of reasons. Because once the web applications started to become more interactive, yeah, it became impossible to build those applications with the approach of jQuery. I can't imagine how modern applications could be built with jQuery. It would be a lot of pain. But what really distinguishes Vue from other frameworks is that Vue is very intuitive. I mean, once you start to get in touch with Vue, it just, everything feels very intuitive, and you can get onboarded with the technology very easily. And you can start to see the first results of using Vue.js really quickly. Of course, the community means a lot because, obviously, it's an open source project, and it's been maintained and developed further by the community. And there are a lot of different tooling that is built all around Vue.js that you can make use of within the projects. I think what's really important in terms of Vue and also in terms of Laravel, and Laravel is quite famous for it, is the developer experience overall. Because when Taylor Otwell started to create Laravel, I think the developer experience was the most important thing that he had in mind. And it's embedded into the culture of the community and into the framework very, very deeply in terms of documentation. Laravel's documentation is fantastic. The framework is, the structure is very elegant. And once you delve deeper into Laravel, you just understand how much attention has been paid to the details of polishing the framework and making it as developer friendly as possible. And that's why developers really love Laravel and Vue. I mean, there are a lot of developers in our team because our teams, technical teams, are hiring 10 people right now. And there are a lot of developers who also do other technologies, but they still prefer Laravel and Vue over others mostly because of the development experience that they get. But what's also very important from the business side is the ecosystem that's built around Laravel. Because basically, there are a lot of half baked or ready made solutions, out of the box solutions for a lot of common features and functionalities that you might require in different software applications like multitenancy, invoicing and payments, authentication, administration panel, queue management, roles and permissions, localization, etcetera. When you are building with Laravel, a lot of those features and functionalities come almost out of the box with the ecosystem of third party packages that's built around the framework. And that means that you can accomplish what your development objectives are in much less time that it would be required with other technologies. And that's a really great point for a lot of companies because especially when you are starting a new product, a new startup, and you are building a product from scratch, probably the time to market is the single most important thing when you are building a new product because the sooner you can launch it, the sooner you start getting feedback from real users and you start iterations on product development based on the real user feedback rather than your own assumptions. And the sooner you can get to that point, the better. And Laravel is probably unrivaled at that, at the speed with which you can launch your product to market if you are starting from scratch. And even for the projects that are farther down the line, Laravel is really good at, basically, for development team to maintain and even increase the speed of development, the velocity of development over time because its structure allows you to do that. And once the code base gets bigger and bigger, if you know how to use the framework and the ecosystem in the right way, you can keep it simple for onboarding for new developers, for example, or to add new features, etcetera. Basically, it's an I mean, in terms of the development of velocity, speed, and development friendliness, I think the framework is really unrivaled.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:13) Now if people wanna see some of these projects, do you post case studies online?

(Gaga at 00:26:19) Yeah. Some work from our portfolio can be found on our website, which is redberry.international. Yeah. There are many different cases of different products that we have built starting from some fintech products going to mobility products and different software as a service products as well. So, basically, there are some of the projects showcased there, but, yeah, of course, there are a lot more. And we are, time by time producing the content on those projects. And, yeah, we'll add those to our website as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:59) Tell your designers that I say good job because I was looking through the projects. And first of all, I think it's cool that on the project page, you make each case study page designed around the project. So it's like a unique design. And also, I'm just a big fan of design, and I'm hard pressed to find one that I don't like. Looks good, man. I'm looking at it right now. I'm sorry. Can I share my screen? There we go. Like, the Santa one, Secret Santa one? That looks so cool, man. The the city and everything, it's just beautiful. What was this project about?

(Gaga at 00:27:34) Yeah. This project was for Bank of Georgia, which is the biggest bank here. And we did nationwide Secret Santa in Georgia together with them. Basically, yeah, Secret Santa is a very office thing, I would say. People played it in the office, but we turned it from an office game into nationwide Secret Santa. So we did it for three years, and we developed the platform for three years. It started in 2016, and then we did it again in 2017 and in 2018. In 2018, around 10% of Georgia's population participated in that game and were users of the platform. And, basically, what the platform did was that people could register there, write their gift wish, and then we had a small NLP module that would analyze the content of the gift wish, and we would derive programmatically what the user wanted as a gift. And then we selected Santas for each user based on different factors like their interests and stuff. And also, on the other hand, it was like a two sided platform, two sided network platform because on the other hand, we created the platform for small Georgian businesses which produce gifts for Christmas and they could register on that platform and get all the marketing insights of what people want to get as a gift for Christmas. And they could even target different gift wish keywords as if you would target ads in Google search, for example, because they could produce new products targeted on specific demand keywords that the users had. And then the Santas on the consumer side of the platform would see suggestions of different gifts that our algorithms thought that the user that the Santa had to ship the gift to would appreciate. And yeah, it generated a lot of demand for Georgian small businesses. And we actually integrated Georgian Post very deeply with the platform because the shipping was done through Georgian Post. And we kind of redesigned how Georgian Post accepted orders for shipment, basically, because it took around three, four minutes to register an order for shipment. And then we reduced it to several seconds because we integrated their software with our software. And, basically, when a person arrived to the branch office of the Georgian Post, they just need to give their phone number to the operator there, and the shipment order would be created automatically in their system. So it was quite a big platform with many different aspects. And, yeah, around 10% of Georgia's population participated in it, and were the users of the platform.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:50) That is pretty—and—

(Gaga at 00:30:50) There is also a very nice video case there on the right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:55) Oh, that's a video. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how well it'll play on the call, but people can go they can go to Redberry International, look at the projects tab, and then click on the Secret Santa. Will Secret Santa be operating this year, or was it like a one time project?

(Gaga at 00:31:09) It was a three times project, so to say, because we did it for three Christmas seasons starting from 2016 to 2018. Thanks for all the kind words to our designers, Joel. They'll be happy to hear that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:25) Yeah. I'm glad you have great designers. It makes my job easier. I'm curious now to know about how you structure your teams. Do you structure your teams based off of competency or how do you do that?

(Gaga at 00:31:38) Yeah. So our teams are structured based on the needs of specific projects that we engage with. So, basically, there are two options for engagement models. One is standard outstaffing or staff augmentation. That's basically when our client company has a request for one, two, three, or several developers, or maybe designers, but in most cases, it's developers. And they provide the specific request to us, and then we select who's gonna match from our team to those requests best. And then there is this process of technical interviews, maybe some kind of assignment, etcetera. And then our team members start engaging directly with the client team to work on the product development together. Another option for engagement is dedicated agile product team. And in those cases, we set up a full functioning scrum team on our end. We work with scrum framework with all of our projects. And this scrum team consists of developers, designers, QA, DevOps, project managers, scrum master, etcetera. So it's a full functioning product team. And the client in those cases acts as a product owner. So it's a very collaborative way of building software together with the client because the client shares the product in the right way, brings the business insights, brings user feedback, etcetera. And then our product team helps the client execute on that vision and steer the product together in the right way. And the teams get set up based on the needs of the project because we pay huge attention to preliminary analysis of the project's requirements in terms of expertise and skills that are gonna be required for the project, and we do that during the discovery phase. And once we have a good understanding of what competencies, expertise the team would need to accomplish the client's objectives, we set up the right team and configure the team in a way to match that needs, basically. Yeah. That's probably one of the most important aspects for the success of the project to configure the team in the right way from the very beginning. And we've been paying huge attention to that for a long time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:13) When people are new to using outsourced or team augmentation. Right? Yeah. There's so many options. There's all around the world. There's, you know, nearshoring, outsourcing. There's a million words for it. There's a lot of different things. What should people that are new, what should you be looking for? Whether we use you or not. Right? Like, what should, if I were a potential customer, what should I be looking for in the company I'm going to work with?

(Gaga at 00:34:39) Yeah. I think, first of all, it starts with the technology and in some cases, also industry expertise. But if you already work with particular technologies and you just need to increase the capacity of your team with those technologies, it makes a lot of sense to start looking for outsourcing partners which are really deep into those technologies. And that's what we have been doing with Laravel Vue.js, for example. Another thing is to check the reviews from the past clients and the track record of the agency. There are several good places to do that. Clutch is probably the most important of those where you can really check what the past clients of the agency say about the agency because Clutch conducts interviews by phone to verify with the clients to verify that the reviews are right and honest. Also, to just check the past work of the agency, see maybe on LinkedIn how many employees they have to verify through LinkedIn so that you check the agencies telling the right story. I think selecting the partner for outsourcing is probably the most important and also the most difficult part, especially at the early stage, but that has huge consequences even when you start partnering up with the outsourcing vendor. Because, yeah, if you find the right vendor, then life will get much, much better. And if you make a mistake at that stage, it might also cost a lot. So it's very difficult to select the right partner in a way because there are a lot of outsourcing companies all around the world, and the selection process needs to be very educated and informed with real facts, checking different stuff around the software agencies and make the decision, an educated and informed decision after that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:04) I wanna talk a little bit about leadership stuff as we come up to the time here because you're a founder, and that's rare, and it's important that we share that information with the world. So I'm curious. You know, you founded the company, age 23. What's the most difficult thing about starting a business?

(Gaga at 00:37:24) Yeah. Starting a business, I mean, at the age of 23, I think it's easier than, for example, at the age of 33 or 43 or whatever, because the older you are, the more trade offs you have to make to start a new business. So it gets more risky. At the age of 23, it was like a playground. Let's start something, see how it goes, that kind of stuff. But what's been probably the most challenging part for me was handling the growth because we've been growing very rapidly over the past years, and that has required a lot of changes in the organization structure, management approaches, and different stuff because I myself love building stuff and doing stuff very hands on. And even now I'm quite hands on with different projects all the time because I really love building stuff and also engaging with and communicating with people who are doing the work and actually developing products. And one thing that I found difficult was to start delegating a lot of stuff as we started to grow. Because as we started as a four people agency, I developed first probably around 10 projects myself. But then we started to grow, to get traction, to acquire more clients, etcetera. And as the team grew, we needed to change a lot in terms of delegation, in terms of structure, in terms of approaches, operations, etcetera. And even now, we are growing quite rapidly, although we are over 200 already. We are hiring around six to 10 people a month. So, yeah, the growth is very, very substantial even now, and that requires a lot of change management over time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:31) Are you having to go like, I'm in Nashville, Tennessee, and one of the things that I've gotten to see happen here is Nashville's a big music town. Right? A lot of music here. And since there's a large service industry. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:45) People that are servers and things of that nature. So what's happened is the government-type programs in Nashville have collected together to help drive the service industry into different free code camp type things, different digital skills. And so they'll open this up, and then a bunch of people will apply, and then they'll pick some of the people. Right? And then they will get this free education, and ultimately, everyone's incentivized in the ecosystem by this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:16) Right? The county's incentivized. The businesses that are hiring from that pool are incentivized, and then the people themselves are incentivized for a better life. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:26) Is there something like that happening in Georgia?

(Gaga at 00:40:29) Yeah. There are a lot of community initiatives in Georgia and also some government-sponsored initiatives as well to help people who are trying to get tech education and move to tech professions to get on track, get education, training, help, et cetera. There are several groups with different open source tools and open source content that have tens of thousands of members in Georgia. And we at Redberry have started our own bootcamp program, which is a free of charge program, and we do that in partnership with USAID to support new talent to enter the tech market in Georgia. And our program is focused on Vue.js and Laravel mostly. And it's been quite successful because we are already doing the fifth batch of the program. And the demand has been mind blowing because for the last batch, for example, we got a thousand applications, even more than that, and we had to select 20 people out of a thousand applications, which is less than 2% admittance rate. Because there's a lot of demand, and the supply side of education market has not really been able to catch up with the increasing demand for tech education. But our bootcamp program is probably one of the things that we do that makes us proud and makes us happy because we see a lot of new talent entering the bootcamp program and then coming out as solid junior developers who we can then assign to different projects under the supervision of more senior team members there to continue their development and to move forward with their professional and career development long term. And yeah, actually, our core development team has been with us for a long time.

(Gaga at 00:42:39) And in Redberry, a lot of developers have gone through this path of starting as juniors and then becoming seniors and team leads and engineering. One of our engineering directors even started as a junior at Redberry seven years ago. So actually, we tried to identify based on our own experience how we could shortcut some of the time of professional development for the developers and also to identify what are the main pitfalls in terms of professional and career development for developers and how we could give them the right skill set as the foundation for them to grow quickly after they graduate from the bootcamp program. And our bootcamp program was designed based on those internal experiences and feedback that we got. And I think it's been quite successful because we are training around 100 people per year right now with the bootcamp program. And then trying to offer job opportunities to as many juniors as we can. But, of course, we cannot do that in an unlimited way because after the juniors graduate from the bootcamp program, we need to assign them to the teams where there are more senior developers in the team so that they can continue learning, and they are not overwhelmed with the complexity of the tasks that they have to deal with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:22) Yeah. And it sounds like, I don't want to speak for you, but for me, what you were describing was making me think about how if you would have talked to me ten years ago, I'd say the most satisfying thing is building and launching a product. But now I think something slightly better than that is watching people grow over time within a company that you helped start. Right? And that sounds like when you speak about that, you know, your face kind of lights up and it's a pretty cool thing that you're doing. You are literally shaping the Georgian landscape within your country. That's pretty cool.

(Gaga at 00:44:59) Yeah. Thanks for that. Yeah. Actually, yeah, I think that's one of the most rewarding things when you see people grow within your company because especially when you see people starting from the very junior positions and gradually moving up to senior positions. It's a very rewarding thing to observe.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:24) Yeah. This is great. I want to know what is the best piece of leadership advice that you've ever received?

(Gaga at 00:45:34) Yeah. That's a bit tough question, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:37) I know it's a hard one.

(Gaga at 00:45:39) But yeah. Generally, caring for people and generally taking their interests at heart of what the company does and what you do is probably the most important thing if we talk about high level leadership stuff that you can do for the people in the company to be happy and also to grow and develop. And basically, what I think is that people need to have challenges that are really interesting for them. And with their work, they should feel that they are making a good impact on their surroundings and on the environment in general. And also, doing stuff that makes good use of people's skills is very important. And we really try to match the work that people do at Redberry with those kind of requirements. So that people are working on really challenging and interesting problems for them to solve. People are making good use of their current skills. Also, people are feeling that they are making impact on the environment and we try to get those kind of projects. And I think when people are doing work in that kind of environment, it's what brings satisfaction and happiness and the feeling of fulfillment in the end from the job you do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:20) Well said. Gaga, people want to learn more. They want to see these projects. They want to work with Redberry. What do they do?

(Gaga at 00:47:27) Yeah. You can go to our website, which is redberry.international, where you can see our projects, contact us, see our vacancies as well, job openings, and in general, see how we work and what we do. So yeah. And also, you could probably contact me directly on LinkedIn as well. Yeah. I'm quite responsive to the messages that I get there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:54) Perfect. Gaga, we made a podcast. How do you feel, buddy?

(Gaga at 00:47:58) It's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:59) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.