Like rushing B on Dust II, life behind the scenes at Refrag can be very fast-paced. The team is on a mission to help countless CS2 players improve every day, and is constantly finding ways to tweak and innovate the services they offer.

In this, the first of a series of interviews with key members of the Refrag family, I was lucky enough to be able to tear Stefan away from his hard work and ask him the questions we all want to know, so we can all get some insight from behind the curtain!

Hi, Stefan! Tell us – what is your role within Refrag, and how did your journey with Refrag start?

I am co-founder and CTO of Refrag. The CTO part basically means I’m responsible for managing all of our tech, except for our mods. I manage our servers, think through our infrastructure, and help develop all new features that aren’t CS server mods. Being one of the three original founders, I have a lot of extra things I’m responsible for. From hiring and firing to managing any legal issues, etc. We’re a small startup, so as a founder you end up doing a little of everything. That’s also what I like most about startups, I’m never doing any one thing for too long.

My journey with Refrag started roughly 6 years ago, when Jimi, Casey, and I decided to create Refrag. We started with selling access to Restrat to pro teams, which allowed us to continue working on Refrag without needing to invest any real money. We simply took whatever money we made and gave it to Jimi so he could continue to work on the mods that made us what we are. Meeting Casey and eventually helping him build NetcodeGuides was what really started this journey though, but that’s a story for another time, maybe.

Awesome! So, what does your day-to-day look like?

Well, no two days are the same, really. Most days start with checking what happened while I was asleep, since a part of our team lives in the US and it’s important I know what’s going on and what I missed. After that, I normally work on helping the web dev team with whatever features we’re working on, writing code when I have time. Some days I never get to write code as other stuff gets in the way; marketing, business decisions, ideating new ideas, etc. I tend to start working at 10am, and then at 4pm my second work day starts because the Americans get on. Some days end at 6pm, some end at 10pm, it really depends on what’s going on in the company. 

So, how has the transition from CSGO to CS2 impacted Refrag’s technical infrastructure?

From a technical perspective, it hasn’t changed much. Of course, we had to completely rewrite all of our CS mods from scratch, and we were able to do that with all the knowledge we gained from doing it the first time for CSGO so we did it faster and at a much higher level of quality than the first time. The biggest difference CS2 made is that we simply gained a lot of users, meaning we could hire more people and focus on larger projects. Stuff like Bootcamp, Routines, and Coach would not have been possible without hiring developers, and most of our users wouldn’t have even been here if it wasn’t for our marketing manager Kyman, our video team, our writers, etc. All people we couldn’t have hired if it wasn’t for the CS2 launch.

Talking about new modes…how do you guys approach the constant innovation with the modes Refrag offers? Is it a major challenge, or does it come quite naturally to you and the team?

Everything we make is based on our original vision. We decided that we wanted to be a full-featured platform that gave our users everything they needed to improve at CS. We knew what we wanted that to look like, and every feature follows those guidelines. I think creating the Creator Studio, and then scouting people who were making good use of those tools was imperative for creating constant innovation; that’s how we found Czaaje who has incredible ideas for training modes. When you have people like him, and someone like Casey who has been teaching people how to improve at CS for twenty years, it’s not too tough to constantly innovate.

At the end of the day, the only thing that really matters is your team, and I think we have the best team out there.

You mentioned your original vision. Here’s a fun one for you. If you could go back in time to when your journey with Refrag was just starting, what advice would you give yourself, knowing what you now know?

Keep. Going.

After doing this for 4 years and not seeing much growth, I got close to giving up on it a couple of times. I think every startup founder gets to that point if they’re not instantly successful. Fortunately, I put my trust in Casey, who has what I like to call American Confidence. He said we could be huge and I wanted to either prove him wrong, or reward his confidence, so I kept going. Obviously, looking back on it now, it was all worth it, so if I could tell myself from 6 years ago that this is where we’d end up, I would.

Okay, time for some more random questions. Outside of CS, what are your favorite hobbies?

I started making house music about two years ago as a way to spend my time doing something useful that wasn’t work. This grew into my favorite hobby and I try to do at least a couple hours of this every week. I still have never released a song, primarily because we put so much focus on releasing features in Refrag, I didn’t want too much of my focus to be elsewhere. The learning process is what I enjoy so much, so I hope I never finish learning.

Outside of that, I have a wonderful girlfriend and an awesome dog, who I love spending time with, playing board games (with the gf, not the dog), but also playing video games that aren’t CS. 

Also Magic: The Gathering. Love a good commander game.

What’s your all-time favorite movie?

I love the engineer’s mindset, so my favorite movie is The Martian. There’s something about watching someone solve problems that just really does it for me. If we’re talking non-fiction, I’ll say AlphaGo, which hits a little closer to home, even if everyone on that project is a hundred times smarter than me. 

Okay…other than CS, what’s your favorite game?

That’s tough. I am one of the most ADHD people I know, and that kind of makes me switch games often. CS is one of the few games that I’ve been playing for pretty much my entire life, the other being World of Warcraft. I don’t know if that’s my favorite, but I do seem to keep going back to it so I must like it at least a little bit.

I honestly don’t have much time to play games these days and whenever I do, I try to play something with my brother or my girlfriend. 

Alright, here’s a classic CS question. Who’s the GOAT?

It’s hard not to mention S1mple while answering this question and if this was only about CSGO, that would absolutely be it. For CSGO & CS2, mechanically it’s probably NiKo or ZywOo, while Karrigan and Apex have shown ridiculous knowledge of this game.

With all that being said, Elige is my goat. No bias at all.

Good answers all around! Right, I’m stealing the concept of Desert Island Discs for this one. What are the three songs you’d take with you to a desert island?

ONLY THREE? Shit.

In no particular order, probably Snow by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Little Wing (the Stevie Ray Vaughan version) and Ben Bohmer’s “Begin Again”. If it’s an “I’m definitely going to die on this island there’s no hope” type of situation, then I’d want Gang of Youths’ cover of Both Sides Now, because at least I can just spend my last couple of hours ugly crying into a volleyball with a bloody hand on it.

Okay, coming back to Refrag for the penultimate question. If you had just one singular mode to show off, which mode would you use to convince a new user to join Refrag?

Xfire. It’s my favorite single training mode. I honestly believe that if you play that on .smart, you can go from being a complete noob to reaching Faceit level 10 much faster than with any other tool. New users and pro players alike can massively benefit from it.

Thank you for your time! I’ll let you go now, but before I do, I have one final question…without knowing who it will be, what’s a question you want to ask the next interviewee?

“If you had all the money and people you’d need, what one thing would you add to Refrag that doesn’t yet exist?”

And with that, Stefan returns to his work. Time to hunt out our next interviewee soon!