On this episode of Distributed, we dig into the good, the bad, and the karaoke-filled history of Automattic meetups. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, our annual Grand Meetup brought the entire company together for a week. The time spent together — along with team-specific meetups scattered throughout the year — helped us strengthen relationships with our colleagues located around the world. Now, as companies and workers grapple with returning to the office, it’s a perfect chance to consider in-person time as an important complement to the autonomy and flexibility of distributed work.

We spoke with Automatticians about how to stay connected in a distributed work culture. You’ll hear from Toni Schneider, Automattic’s first CEO, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Executive Director of the WordPress Project, and Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, along with a wide range of Automatticians.

The full episode transcript is below and has been lightly edited for clarity.

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MATT MULLENWEG: Howdy howdy. This is Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress and the CEO of Automattic, and you are listening to the Distributed podcast, which is back after a – I’m embarrassed to say – 500 day hiatus, roughly. I wasn’t as drawn to do more Distributed episodes last year. One because I got super busy and, you know, 2022 I started running Tumblr directly and WordPress.com. 

So, things at work got pretty busy, but also just felt like everyone was doing it. Everyone had kind of figured out the remote and distributed thing. And it was going fine. So like, the reason I started the podcast was done so the purpose, the goal I set out to accomplish was completed.

However, recently there’s been a lot of news about companies who are rolling back their employee flexibility and forcing people back into the office 2, 3, 4, 5 days a week. Sometimes, they might be doing this as a way to lay people off. It’s hard to tell the motivations of some of these executives.

But some, I think, in good faith are saying that they were missing something when people weren’t getting together and that employees that joined during the pandemic maybe weren’t as productive as employees who joined prior. It got me thinking and I started to wonder if what they were missing was meetups.

So there is something magic, some frisson that happens in person, that’s impossible to recreate. At Automattic, we just don’t think that needs to be 52 weeks a year. Just like a little salt makes the dish, getting together in person a few times a year is a key ingredient of Automattic’s culture. So I wanted to share with the world and podcast listeners who are now seeing this pop up after 500 days.

How we do meetups at Automattic and why it’s so key. So, I tapped my colleague Chenda Ngak to gather some stories and best practices from Automatticians of how we do meetups. We’ll also put together some guides on the distributed.blog website, after this episode is up. But please get together. Seeing people is important.

And without further ado, I’ll pass you over to the Chenda.

CHENDA NGAK: Grand meetups at Automatic are the stuff of legends. We paused them because of the pandemic and have slowly restarted smaller meetups over the last year. Meetups have been an important tradition ever since the first meetup in 2006. Now, I’d never been to a grand meetup, so I wanted to hear what it was like from Automatticians who have attended.

I started with Lori McLeese. She leads our global people team from Asheville, North Carolina. I couldn’t think of a better person to give me a crash course in meetups. She’s been at Automattic for a decade, and her team is connected to every Automattician around the world.

LORI MCLEESE: So, the different types of meetups that Automattic are our Grand Meetup, which is when the whole company comes together. Unfortunately, we have not had an all company meetup since the end of 2019 because of the pandemic. However, when we were having them before that, it usually lasted about seven to eight days and we usually held them in September or October, and it was a week when the whole company could get together.

We could learn from each other. We could do projects. We could hear amazing speakers, you know, spend time together, both as teams and with people that maybe you don’t work with on a normal basis and just have fun and build relationships. So, that’s one type of meetup.

A second type of meet up is team meetups, which is very similar to the Grand Meetup, but on a much, much, much smaller scale. So, team meetups are usually anywhere from four to 10 people. The team actually decides where to go, what to do, what type of social activities they want to be involved in.

And as a company, we give them a budget and then the teams make all that decision. And we ask people after their meetups to actually write a summary on our internal, we call it Meetomattic and it’s a P2 or a website where all the teams record experiences of their meetup and actually rate the location about whether it would be good for other teams to go.

CHENDA NGAK: So, for those who don’t know, Lori is talking about an internal network of blogs called P2. The recaps on P2 are like a mini city guide with best restaurants, activities, the team’s itinerary for the week, and the average cost of throwing a meetup in cities around the world.

LORI MCLEESE: And then a third type of meetup is a division meetup, and that’s when several teams within the division get together. And I would say that those depending on the division run from like 75 to maybe 200 people. So, it’s a little bit of a mash up between team and Grand Meetup.

CHENDA NGAK: Why do you think that meetups are so important for our culture?

LORI MCLEESE: While it’s great to work from home, work distributedly, work from anywhere, there is something missing when all you ever have is either text communication or perhaps even video communication and I think one of the best things about meetups is that that’s where spontaneity can occur.

CHENDA NGAK: I wanna expand on that and see if we can talk a bit about what meetups mean for team morale and inclusion.

LORI MCLEESE: For team morale, there is an excitement not only of being at the meetup, but also planning the meetup and talking about what do we want to do together? Whether that’s the work activities or the social activities, and learning about people’s preferences for inclusion. It’s also really important because we have a pre-meetup survey that we ask each attendee to complete as the team members are planning the meetup.

And you know, it’s not just dietary needs, which are important, but it’s things like how far are you comfortable walking? Are you comfortable speaking up in public or would you rather have the questions beforehand? And so it gives you an understanding of people’s work styles, which are very different and helps the organizers to really plan a much more inclusive event.

And those learnings then carry over after you get back from the meetup when you’re working online so that you can remember like, oh, this person doesn’t like to be called out on the spot. They like to have questions in advance so that they can think about it before presenting an answer.

CHENDA NGAK: Now that Lori has explained the different types of meetups, I thought it would be interesting to get background on why we started doing them. So, I caught up with Toni Schneider who joined Automattic in 2006 as its first CEO, just six months after the company was founded.

TONI SCHNEIDER: I think the reason we started having meetups right away and they worked right away is because there was a meeting of the existing team that was already distributed and working together via open source and really liked meeting in person every once in a while.

So, that was already a pattern that was established and in my background, coming from other startups and spending a little bit of time at Yahoo, at a bigger company, kinda seeing if we fast forward this, if WordPress gets huge and we have a huge team, how can we make this work at scale? That’s gonna be different than those big companies. 

And the big companies I saw were, when they were doing meetups, it was really offsites and they were awkward, in my opinion, because people were already spending all day together at work. And they’re like, “How do we have to now go somewhere else and spend even more time?” And they’d be very scripted and all about the product roadmap and all these things. And I knew we didn’t want that at all.

We flipped it upside down and said, what if we had a meetup and did essentially no work, nothing extra, nothing scripted, purely focus it on social time, purely focus it on bonding because that’s what we need more of.

And then we saw things that came out of the meetups that I don’t think would’ve arisen otherwise. And I think that’s why we kept doing them too. Things like P2 came out of the meetup and that became hugely important for the company.

We had town halls and we had flash talks, things like that. I think, are examples of things that just happen when you get together in person and just kinda see what arises for people. WordCamps were another example. You know, the first WordCamp was essentially a brainstorm in one of our meetups and said, “Let’s try it.”

CHENDA NGAK: Do you have any practical advice for startups that wanna throw a meet up today?

TONI SCHNEIDER: Yeah, I think it’s important to set the expectations. And we have to be pretty explicit and say, “No, this is part of the job. This is part of your expectation. You can’t skip these.” And it’s really important to say that up front to people and say, “Look, there’s 52 weeks in a year. You know, you’re gonna maybe work, I don’t know, 40-some of those. And most of that’s gonna be at home and you’re totally in control, but you know, probably two or three weeks a year, you’re gonna participate in these types of activities.”

CHENDA NGAK: Another thing that I was curious about is if you’ve noticed meetups come up in other conversations with any startups that you’ve been working with, or in the tech industry in general.

TONI SCHNEIDER: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I am now with True Ventures. We have ours, a little shorter, usually three days every quarter, four times a year. Most of the startups I work with – we have over 200 in our portfolio. At True, everybody is at least partially remote or fully remote, and everybody’s trying to figure out how to spend time together.

So, it’s on everybody’s mind. I think a lot of people are adopting these kinds of, you know, best practices that fully distributed companies have come up with. I think it’s working. I feel like there’s a whole set of tools in the industry growing up around it. Right? There’s a lot of people going, “OK, we can host some of these meetups and retreats and be a great place for people to get together. We can be a platform where people can organize their meetups.” 

And I think one of the companies we invested in called Happy does that. And there’s a huge demand for it, especially from big companies who are saying, “OK, all of our teams want to meet in person and we’re not set up for it, help us figure out how to do these things.” And I think we’ll just see more and more of it. 

I have friends who are essentially building retreat centers around this notion and saying, we don’t need more hotels. We need more places where these teams can gather and spend several days and be creative together. It’s really nice to be in a place where you feel like, “Oh, it’s just us. We get to do our thing.”

I think all of our initial meetups were like, there was like a ranch in Arizona where it was just us and there was like a bed and breakfast in Mexico where it was just us. And we could bring our Wii and play Wii tennis and be goofy and stay up till two in the morning and nobody cared. And I think that’s important too, to pick venues that allow for that to happen versus again, the more scripted, “Here’s, you know, a place with good wifi and good presentation system.” And let’s all sit in a conference room. We’ve always avoided that.

I see a lot of teams gravitating towards the more retreat type setting. And I think hopefully there’ll be a lot more of it. I think there’s still, there’s a huge untapped market for it because it’s still hard to find something that’s like a retreat, but also has really good internet and you actually can be connected. We would find these places like, “Oh my God, this looks amazing.” “Oh no, we don’t have internet people come here to disconnect.” “Oh no, that’s not us.” We’re gonna be the opposite. We’re gonna get there and you know, 20 or 30 laptops are gonna open and your internet’s gonna come to a halt.

CHENDA NGAK: What do you think our legacy has been for remote companies today?

TONI SCHNEIDER: Yeah, it’s hard to tell, but I always assumed that it’s amazing as WordPress is. I think our long term impact might be just as much that we showed that a remote model can work. I definitely remember the early days and it was very, very different when we tell people that we were distributed. A lot of people didn’t like the idea. 

They wanted to argue why it was a bad idea or they just didn’t think it was ever gonna scale. There was a lot of like, “Oh, that’s great, but you’re just 20 people just wait till you’re 50 people just wait till you’re a hundred people. It’s definitely gonna break at 200 people.” So there was just a lot of disbelief that this actually works. I think we kind of chipped away and it’s not like we started the company to prove that distributed can work. It just worked for us and we thought, well, let’s keep going and let’s make it work even better. And let’s really lean into it.

And just leading by example, I guess, other companies now look and go, “Oh yeah, that’s an option. It’s not the only option. There’s lots of ways to build an organization, but this is a real option. This can work.” We’re 2,000 people now and it’s working and it’s a great organization. So, I really think it has helped tremendously to just make it available to other entrepreneurs and, and be able to say, “Oh look, they did it, WordPress did it.”

It’s funny to think back, but there was a lot of skepticism. We even had employees who would say, “Can you send a message to my parents and tell them that this is real, this isn’t like some weird scam?” Even the employees were like, “I love it, but like my friends and family think I’m crazy.” So, we’ve come a long way. I’m proud that we’ve been able to help this model gain more mainstream acceptance. And obviously with COVID, it kind of kicked into hyper drive and 10 years of adoption happened in like 10 days.

I think all that work of slowly perfecting the model and showing that it works, sort of, at the right time was all available for people to go, “Oh OK, let’s try that.” And then I think the other thing that happened is we had less to do with all the tools that started to become available.

In the beginning we built all our tools ourselves, and then we realized, “Oh, now we can use Slack; now we can use Zoom.” 

I think a lot of companies when COVID hit realized that they were already using all the tools. So, I would give a lot of credit to those companies, as well, for popularizing tools that companies didn’t even totally realize you already have all the infrastructure in place. And I know a lot of companies I worked with were shocked how easy it was to just work from home. They’re like, “Oh wait, we don’t even have to change anything. We just already have it all in place.”

And I think that was huge. So, that lined up really well as well.

CHENDA NGAK: I wanted to hear more about the vibe and social aspects of meetups. So I rounded up a few members of our house band, the Automusicians. There are hundreds of musicians in this group. They discuss songs and set lists on our internal blog system, P2, and then they sign up to perform at the Grand Meetup. I could only get time with Matt, Leif, and Paul who are based in South Africa, Germany and Austria, respectively. Paul works with me on WordPress.com while Leif and Matt work on WooCommerce. 

How does the band prepare for a show when all of the members are distributed?

LEIF SINGER: For me, there’s two things to it, right? The practice week together, where you get to know everyone, you make music together which is just fun and makes people bond. Right. But you’re working towards this goal, which is the last evening, and that is an evening where you get to be a rockstar for one day a year.

PAUL BONAHORA: I guess everybody managed it differently, in their own way, but I recall there was like a spreadsheet where we would put in who would want to practice. Because we had a couple of practice rooms. There were two or three, at least at the one meetup that I’ve been to two of them.

And there was a spreadsheet where everybody would book their slot. So, we had these practice slots where the band would show up for their practice slot and we would get to get the instruments and just practice the songs, which would be a really cool way to bond.

CHENDA NGAK: I would love to hear more about the vibe of a Grand Meetup.

MATT COHEN: Yeah, there’s, there’s definitely an energy to it. Compared to a smaller team gathering of five to 10 people. That’s one thing. Coordination is really straightforward there. You’re all kind of in the same room or nearby to each other. At a big event, like a Grand Meetup, there’s several hundred people. Maybe even a thousand people or more.

It’s electric, you’re not always seeing people that you work with day to day. I think most times you’ll actually see a lot more people that you don’t often see, which is somewhat intentional in some contexts like around meal time and things like that.

But it’s nice to embrace every aspect of the meetup as an opportunity for that kind of connection. So, standing in a buffet line at a meal, for example, and you look across the table and you see someone you haven’t seen in three years, who’s now moved to a different division in the company and you say, “Oh wow. So nice to see you. How are you? How’s your kids? How’s, you know, how’s life on your end of the world?” You know, being that we’re in 90 plus countries as well. It’s powerful.

LEIF SINGER: The magic starts even at the airport, like, especially coming from Europe, for example. There’s usually one or two hubs that basically everyone goes through.

So, as I have headphones on at the airport, I listen to music and I walk to the gate from my previous flight and I sit down. And then suddenly I realize I sit among a dozen other colleagues whom I can identify through their backpacks with WordPress logos and stuff. Right?

And, they’re like, “Oh, you probably belong to us. We have never met before, but ‘howdy.’” 

That’s where it starts, right? And then you start to see other people trickle in that, maybe you’ve worked with before that you’ve met. And then you have these, “Oh, we haven’t met in two years. How you been, good to see you again.” Then after the full day of travel again, coming from Europe, when it’s usually in the U.S., there’s like 10 hour travel and quite some time zone difference, right?

So, when we arrive there at, say 8:00 pm, we’re super tired, but there are so many people from the events team, welcoming everyone. It’s such a buzz in the air. Like you feel instantly welcome and among friends. That’s super touching.

PAUL BONAHORA: Yeah, I can totally relate to that feeling of getting excited there. And then after being on the plane, you know, for 10 hours that kind of simmering down, but then going back up when, when, once you get to the venue and you start meeting more and more folks, so it’s very energizing.

CHENDA NGAK: What are some of your favorite social moments from previous meetups?

MATT COHEN: It’s tough to pick just one. The two that jumped to mind and I’ll go through them individually. But the first one was those ad hoc moments where you’re all just sitting around and having a discussion about something, but it’s a very deep discussion. And then also at the recent GM, the activities around mindfulness and breath work and, and meditation, and things that are less tech, but still extremely important. Right? Those two really stood out to me.

The sitting around at a table, there’s so many spaces in a, in a hotel or a resort for those impromptu connections. And I think we’ve done that really well at GM’s overall, is creating those spaces. Whether it doesn’t have to be around a bar or a restaurant, it can be just couches in the hotel and just finding those nooks and saying, well, let’s have a deep discussion about the one that comes to mind is the history of Scotland, for example and common law in Scotland. And that is a completely random subject that would’ve never come up if it weren’t for the people at that nook, at that time.

And that really stands out and you, you know, you carry that through. In building the connection with that other person. It’s not about the topic necessarily, but it’s a way of creating that bond, right. That, that really stands out to me. It’s purely social.

LEIF SINGER: My immediate thoughts go to big events, like for example, the closing party or the silent disco was always really, really great. I usually don’t dance, but that is a really, really safe space and I loved it. As Matty says, the small moments are where the real, like there’s a sparkle to it.

For example, Seth, I knew him from a previous meetup where we bonded a bit, because we were the first to arrive, but at the Grand Meetup, then we were all super busy meeting, new people, talking to everyone. And on day two, I hadn’t met Seth yet, but we were walking down the hallway – each of us deep in a conversation with someone else – but we saw each other, we had a quick hug, smiled at each other and went our ways. There’s no function to that really but it’s great for the heart, for the soul.

CHENDA NGAK: If you didn’t know, we have a huge team of Automattic called Happiness. They are a direct connection to our customers and have a real pulse on how we’re doing. This team works 24 hours a day. So, they’re spread all around the world. I caught up with Nagesh Pai who is based in India. 

Nagesh is actually on rotation with another team right now, but that’s another story for another day. Nagesh, what’s it like to be at a Grand Meetup?

NAGESH PAI: In a single word, surreal you’re surrounded by some of the most talented people, I would say, I’ve ever seen. People whom I’ve always looked up to as a small person within the WordPress ecosystem. Maybe I began as a hobby blogger, and then as a freelancer, but always I’ve been wondering who are these wonderful people and great minds that contribute to it.

CHENDA NGAK: I was thinking about the Happiness team and how it’s so big and spread out globally. I would love it if you could talk about how important it is for you all to meet up.

NAGESH PAI: It’s very imperative to have very good connections amongst ourselves within the team so that we are following the same path we are following the same great vision of what we aspire to do as a company, to our users.

And at a personal level, it’s also important to develop best practices and learn the best things from each other. So while there is a standard set of things that we do as a routine on a day to day basis, we are scheduled to work six hours a day. It’s equally important to take a step back and see what are the individual flavors that we can add to these standard things that we do.

And that’s something which is very important to pick from our colleagues who are in our close circle. And that’s precisely where sort of a time out for those seven days, which we enjoy as a team meetup. It certainly helps a lot.

CHENDA NGAK: We mentioned that you’re on rotation now on a different team. That is something that is really unique to Automattic. I think it’s a really cool thing that we do. People can go on rotation to a different team for six months and just fully work there. Do you feel like, because you had been at a bunch of meetups before, it helped you transition to your rotation a lot easier?

NAGESH PAI: Certainly, I would like to add here that Automattic has a wonderful opportunity for each of its employees to try out different skills. And some of us have come with different backgrounds in the past, I’ve worked in marketing and corporate as well.

I also have a background as an engineer, not in computer science, but I like fixing things. During these meetups, I had an opportunity to chat with colleagues who are full-time into those roles and ask myself what next for me within this company to grow individually and also wherein I can contribute in a better way to the company.

And it’s not just about rotating to the coding role or the developer role that I’m trying right now. In the past, I had the opportunity of being a lead for my team for some time. I also did a rotation within Happiness to the WooCommerce division. 

So for all of this, I had to ask opinions from people who already done this.

All the answers to these questions I could get firsthand from people who’ve already done that. So this is precisely what I got from some of these meetups, across a dinner table or a nice pleasant drink.

CHENDA NGAK: I had already started interviewing Automatticians for this episode when I was tagged in a P2 post that felt almost serendipitous. Steve Blythe works on our Trust and Safety team on legal processes. He wrote a blog post talking about the importance of meetups at Automattic. It was exactly what I was building this episode around. Can you summarize what your post was about? And give me a little bit of insight into your inspiration on why you wrote it.

STEVE BLYTHE: I’ve been at Automattic almost nine years. I’ve been to a lot of meetups, a lot of different kinds of meetups over the years. Team meetups, Grand Meetups, you know, the Grand Meetup when it was 200 people versus 2,000 odd or whatever we’re at now. I think that especially over the pandemic because we haven’t been able to meet the kind of the dynamics in terms of our relationship with meetups has changed.

I wanted to share that internally because the company has grown so much over the past few years, even like throughout the pandemic. And there’s lots of people who’ve never been at a meetup, lots of people who’ve never met any other Automattician in person.

The summary of the post was to advocate for the importance of meetups, because there’s the danger, I guess, that, you know, having not had meetups for a long time, either people won’t want to go to them, won’t understand why they’re important, and will prefer to stay at home without really understanding what they’re all about. Or maybe I’ve just got used to not being around people. And It was to try and kind of, yeah, give that perspective I think.

CHENDA NGAK: You know, I was thinking about how people collaborate with each other in social settings at meetups. How do you think that translates to how we work together?

STEVE BLYTHE: Ooh, that’s a good question. I’d never actually made that connection before, or maybe not recently, but I think that, I think it’s the other way around, maybe like in the sense of we have these people that have got amazing strengths or particular skills and are often used to working very independently, cause they’re online might not be obtain their time zone or whatever it is.

And at Automattic we’ve always been kind of early spins started. We were always encouraged. Well, not just encouraged, I don’t wanna say forced, but we were pushed to discover things for ourselves and seek out answers rather than asking other people. So the autonomy part of working Automattic translates well into those situations where people can each bring something? I think that we want to make sure meetups have the opportunity for that, as opposed to just presentational style things, because in those cases, you’re given people that are used to working very independently and expecting them to sit there and listen, which, you know, you, you need to have a balance of that.

CHENDA NGAK: After talking to Steve, I wanted to hear from one of our leaders about why meetups are so important for the business. Nick Gernert is the head of WordPress VIP. They’re the enterprise team that powers huge websites like CNN and Salesforce. Do you have any favorite moments for meetups that you’ve attended over the years?

NICK GERNERT: I started on a Monday, I think it was September 23rd and September 27th was the start of Automattic’s 2013 Grand Meetup. I think there were almost 200 people at Automattic at that time. So it was, it was a great way to just jump right in and get to meet a lot of folks. I feel very fortunate that I got to do that and come into the company in that way. A lot of my fondest memories and like my formative memories around my time at Automattic have come, through meetups.

So, we have our Grand Meetup, which is like everyone at Automattic gets together in the same place. And then depending on what part of the business we’re in, we also get together within our teams. And so the team I was joining at that time was less than 15 people. And so we were having our team meetup.

This was my first team meetup and as part of the meetup we launched the homepage of Time.com. So it’s like, we’re all getting together for this first time. And you get to take this storied media property hundred plus years of just amazing journalism and being there through so many incredible historic moments. And here we are a team of 10 people or so sitting around the table and we’re launching the homepage of Time.com.

CHENDA NGAK: I wanted to get your perspective on meetups from a business standpoint. Why do you think they’re so important for companies like ours that are distributed?

NICK GERNERT: So inherently, you know, we’ve bought into this idea that like, we’re going to work from wherever we’re most comfortable for the majority of our time. And so there’s great flexibility with that. There’s great power that comes with being able to source talent and work from anywhere and things like this.

But then there’s always this fundamental belief that we, as human beings, are also social beings. The most high fidelity form of communication comes from being in the same physical space you could pick up on social cues. You can pick up on body language and just lots of things in the environment that influence that.

And so there’s this case for like, we still need to come together as human beings on a cadence and, and occupy this physical space and this high bandwidth sort of collaboration and communication. And I will admit, Chenda, it’s a bit anecdotal and I want to do more digging into this with like our data on our side, around just retention.

But as a bonding and just really getting folks, you know, brought together as a common and retention and retaining of these teams. A lot of our team has really bonded and it’s formed through these moments where we come together. Which may make you think like, well, yeah, if you were just together all the time, then you would also get that same benefit.

But there’s something really magical about this fact that you have this balance of flexibility and working and residing where you’re most effective. And then when you come together with the teams, it’s like this high energy focused, like you wanna maximize every moment of it cause you know, it’s a finite period of time.

And so you come together and it’s highly effective. So we also tend to think about meetups as what do we wanna accomplish through coming together? Which may just be like, look, our team’s very new and we need to just like help it help us form as an organization. So when you think about formations of teams and things like that, super important in doing things like that.

The other thought from the business perspective, as I thought about this, Chenda, is it just evolves over time. So when I think about, you know, the group that I’m part of was like, you know, less than 15 people, when I joined Automattic and a meetup meant like we could get all 15 of us around the table. Very easily. Like, this business is now 300 plus people in it. And so our concept of how do we leverage meetups evolves over time because the scale of the business matters and that context matters.

CHENDA NGAK: I was wondering if you had any tips for balancing your time at meetups, because it can be so overwhelming.

NICK GERNERT: One of the primary objectives in just coming together as a team in that space is really just bonding as a team. It’s great to have a shared sense of an outcome or an objective, but don’t overly index on those things. Like, don’t come into one of these settings and then put a very ambitious target on it, which then takes all of the focus away from coming together in a way that it’s, you don’t typically get to collaborate.

So, I think not over programming is a big thing. And then what’s been interesting as meetups have evolved, especially when we bring big groups together, like in the Grand Meetup is creating spaces both physically. And then just in the timelines that just allows folks to disconnect from the meetup for a little bit.

And then one thing that also just comes to mind for me, as I think about like how to learnings and programming is just really the importance of bringing folks together that may not collaborate day-to-day and building empathy for how we really are all contributing to common objectives, even though it may not always be obvious how, you know a sales team is working with product or customer support is working with sales or product or any of these other things.

And so how can we bring folks together and build empathy across the business.

CHENDA NGAK: I love that you brought up empathy because it reminds me of the importance of creating psychological safety. And I feel like these meetups really provide that. So, I was wondering if you could touch on that a little bit.

NICK GERNERT: Yeah. It’s so interesting. The concept of psychological safety is, like, once we’ve met each other in person, how it totally changes our perception of day to day interactions. Because when you think about a distributed work style and especially where we commit deeply to the idea of asynchronous collaboration. I may send you something, Chenda, and may have a question for you, but I don’t expect that you’re gonna respond in 60 seconds. You may respond to me the next day or later that day or whatever it is, but it’s not immediate. 

So, there’s a lot of text based communication and you lose a lot of signals that, you know, when you and I are just conversing. And so once you’ve been able to really meet someone in person and you understand how they communicate. Once you’ve put a face to the name and met in person done all this, you just have a totally different interpretation once you leave. You really do remind yourself. It’s like, hey, we’re all just people. We are all really trying to just do our best work for common goals. And I feel a lot safer now in the collaboration around that.

CHENDA NGAK: What sort of impact did you see when meetups paused during the pandemic? And what observations did you make?

NICK GERNERT: I think we lived both sides of this as an organization because up and through 2019, we just took for granted that we had this cadence of meetups that, you know, it was recommended once a year. We’re gonna get the whole business together. Once every nine to 12 months, you’re gonna get your particular team together. 

You’ll probably attend another cross-functional, cross-divisional, gathering and you had these moments to check in and reset and it really did help prevent things like burnout because it can be very isolating when you’re working in your particular space for extended periods of time.

And you can’t just easily reset humanity behind everything that we’re doing day to day. And even for us as a distributed company, as we went into 2020, meetups were essentially frozen no more, if we’re not gonna be meeting up. And we don’t know when we’re gonna meet up again.

So it created disparity around that and you could start to see how that was like weighing over the extended period of time. And at a certain point after a year goes by and no one’s meeting up. You can see this impact of like, gosh, if we could all get together and just bond again as individuals, and you could just see a collective exhale, because we’re all feeling the tension of just kind of like being in our respective space day after day after day and not having that moment to come together as people again. So, it really crystallized the importance of just, we need that time where we can come together as individuals and bond and share.

CHENDA NGAK: Ama Osei-Oppong is one of our HR Wangers based in Scotland. She connects with people every day for work. So she has great insights on the importance of strong connections. Ama can you tell me why it’s so important to feel that sense of belonging at a meetup?

AMA OSEI-OPPONG: I mean, I would say that the sense of belonging, and this is for me personally, other people may have their own views, but I just feel like you’re seeing and being around people that absolutely get the mission. They absolutely get what we’re trying to do at Automattic and, you know, it’s just that understanding and that collaboration, like for me, it’s a collaboration that I love the most. And sometimes, you know, it can be challenging. Not being all together to do that.

So it just allows you that additional option of getting together, working through, you know, projects or initiatives and actually just spending time with each other, getting to know each other as people, because sometimes you can come in and work and you maybe don’t always have that.

And there is something to be said, you know, when you’re working with people and you know more about them and they know more about you, it helps build that trust. And also helps you, you know, it helps you be comfortable and it helps you be creative as well.

CHENDA NGAK: We spoke about why meetups are great. Are there any downsides or challenges of meetups?

AMA OSEI-OPPONG: Downsides or challenges of meetups – I think one of the challenges are to actually keep focused. I think there’s the excitement of seeing your colleagues and seeing people, especially after COVID that you’ve maybe never met. And I think sometimes, you know, if there’s a session where there’s a business objective, sometimes it can kind of feel like it’s getting lost because there’s excitement of meeting everyone.

And I think the way to overcome that is when you’re really looking at the setup of your meetup and almost looking at the agenda, having adequate time for that social time – that getting to know each other and balance that off with your working sessions. So, that you’ve got that kind of delineation.

I’d also say possibly one of the downsides, and this is possibly an after effect of the meetup is that sometimes you all get together and there’s some conversations where like, you know what face to face conversation is probably better for that particular scenario. And sometimes it’s like, you have the energy of the meetup. You know, when everyone gets home, the day to day of the job kind of comes in and sometimes those ideas can get lost. 

And actually it’s almost that way of really – there needs to be a commitment that whatever is agreed and discussed at the meetup there’ll be like an absolute commitment to see those along when everyone gets back home.

CHENDA NGAK: Meetups have been part of Automatic’s culture since the start. Donncha O Caoimh has been at the company for 17 years. He’s experienced the good and bad parts of meetups.

DONNCHA Ó CAOIMH: I think practically the only time we get to talk about personal issues and just talk about life is at the meetups and at our team meetups.So that really does help to help us bond. And even besides that, it helps, helps us brainstorm issues.

It’s a great way of just getting to know my colleagues, because we can walk along the streets to a cafe or a restaurant where we’re going for dinner and we’ll talk about personal things that you’re not gonna talk about during a work Zoom call because a Zoom call is just an hour where you have to concentrate on what you’re doing, and you should talk about business issues or you’re talking about programming problems.

Whereas when you’re in ordinary life, you’re walking along with another person and you get to talk about ordinary things. It helps to build that relationship with the people I go with.

CHENDA NGAK: But there are challenges for folks who are more introverted as the company has grown. The dynamic of meetups has changed. Trying to connect with a hundred people is different than meeting 2,000.

DONNCHA Ó CAOIMH: It can be stressful because you’re you go from sitting at a desk for, 48, 50 weeks of the year, maybe communicating with a single group of people that you know, pretty well and suddenly you’re thrust into this confusion of faces that can be tough.

CHENDA NGAK: The next person I spoke to makes tough decisions on a daily basis.

David Watkis is Automattic’s Director of Trust and Safety. His team oversees policy and content moderation for WordPress.com and Tumblr. He spends a lot of brain power thinking about complex situations. If anyone could talk about building trust and how meetups help with that surely it has to be him.

DAVID WATKIS: Meetups tend to be unique depending on what the primary goal is of that meetup, depending on who’s attending, and even just where in the world we’re located. I think there are some through lines, however. Some similarities that I would say are our takeaways from every meetup. For me, the biggest thing is just the ability to make leaps forward in the work, whether that’s discussions that we’re having, particular projects we’re working on and deep trust and safety policy decisions that need to be wrapped up. These things can happen online and certainly they do.

But when you have sort of six months of like asynchronous work, it can become a little more difficult to land the plane. When you have everybody in the same room, it’s really nice to sort of tie up those loose ends and. Move to the next milestone or indeed move to completion. They’re also really grounding experiences.

It’s easy to lose the thread a little bit when you’re working strictly remotely, or certainly primarily in text. So, when you’re on the ground and in the same place as somebody, it’s just a good reminder of how great your colleagues are, why we’re all at Automattic and, and now we’re all on the same team and sort of pulling in the same direction.

CHENDA NGAK: So when I was thinking about trust and safety, I thought this is a role that requires clear thinking, a calm mind and trust within your own team. I would love it if you could talk to me about the importance of connecting to build that trust within your team.

DAVID WATKIS: Yeah. So building trust within teams, whether that’s trust and safety, whether that’s any team in Automattic is so important. And meetups, in my mind anyway, are one of the primary ways in which we can do that. We’re certainly making those connections online in trust and safety, certainly.

We assume positive intent with one another. When we’re discussing policies, when we’re making decisions, we have frameworks for giving one another, the confidence checks we need when we are not feeling so confident or so sure about a decision about a course of action, but all of those things are, you know, one step above one step further when we’re together at a meetup.

It’s just different when you’re breathing the same air as somebody and sitting down in the same room with them. We can hear the intonation in each other’s voices. We can see the mannerisms, the other cues as we’re, as we’re talking and, and listening. There’s also typically a social component at these meetups, whether that’s just hanging out after dinner to talk shop to get to know one another or even something more structured, like going on a food tour or attending an art class together, you know, what, whatever it might be.

It really creates these team bonding moments that just aren’t possible when we’re remote or working strictly online. I would say it’s also a bit easier to be vulnerable and to be ourselves when we’re all together in the same room. So, if there’s somebody, a colleague, a teammate who’s perhaps suffering from imposter syndrome or who’s been struggling to complete a task, it’s a lot easier to raise your hand and ask for that support when you’re with your colleagues in the same room.

CHENDA NGAK: Do you find that there are unrelated skills that you pick up while you’re there meeting with other Automatticians?

DAVID WATKIS: You know, my line of work is such that the applicable skills tend to be quite specific. Having said that, a conversation that stays with me probably daily, is advice that I receive from another Automattician and another area of the company at a Grand Meetup, which was, “Never waste a crisis.”

Which took me some time to digest and understand exactly what that means or how to apply it. But I would argue true regardless of field, but certainly in trust and safety, when things go sideways and they inevitably do go sideways, it’s a great opportunity to pause, to reflect, and course correct in a way that hopefully allows you to sidestep a similar crisis or that same crisis, in the future.

In the trust and safety field, we tend to be problem solvers when the issue presents itself. It’s, “How do we get to the solution as soon as possible?” But acknowledging that crisis, not wasting that opportunity to have a teaching moment, have a learning experience. So that we’re not rushing into the same issue, the same pitfalls in the future is incredibly valuable. 

And that is a piece of advice that I got at a meetup, in a random conversation with someone outside of the trust and safety field. And so a great example of how those minor connections and those minor sparks can blossom into things that indeed become guiding lights as you navigate this career and, and these different areas of focus that we all have.

CHENDA NGAK: One of the absolute unsung heroes of a grand meetup are the folks that orchestrate the whole thing. Megan Marcel has been with Automattic for six years, leading internal events. If you need tips on how to throw a week-long gathering for a thousand people, hit her up. Okay. So tell me, what does it take to pull off an event of that size?

MEGAN MARCEL: Yeah, so I think one of the first key things that we try to do is get together the key stakeholders and really outline, “What are the objectives and goals for the meetup?” What do they wanna get out of it? We also, a lot of times, will survey folks at Automattic to hear.

In addition to what leadership is hoping to get out of this, what do the employees wanna get out of this? And I think really helping to meld that all together is super important. So, after getting that kind of buy-in from key stakeholders, what I will usually do is prepare a bit of a draft like block agenda, if you will.

I think that social is just as important as the business, while we’re on site, just because of why we’re meeting and being remote. So making sure that there’s a really good balance between the two. Also people are used to working from home every day, as I mentioned. And so it can be tiring. So, making sure to put in a good balance of breaks, just so this way, when people are showing up, they are really present.

 So once we kind of go through that and have a general agenda in place, we’ll start locking in speakers, workshops, breakouts.Some of those being led internally, some of them maybe will bring in external speakers and then finding little elements that we can add in throughout to just bring the culture of Automattic.

CHENDA NGAK: How do you go about finding a venue for our meetups?

MEGAN MARCEL: We definitely wanna be mindful that we don’t have the bulk of people traveling 16 plus hours and some traveling only one hour. It’s not always possible that everyone has a short journey, but we do try our best to look at a central spot. Given the budget, we also will just try to keep in mind, staying away from any high season.

Being flexible on location. We have really strong relationships with some hotels where we’ll use our global salesperson to help us, you know, really just hone in, on places that feel Automattic. And what I mean by that is just really the whole vibe of the space.

Say it’s a meetup for 250 people. We don’t want to be in a hotel that’s for 3,000 people. We really want to feel like it’s our home base for the week and not get lost in it. We try to keep that in mind. We also try to look at locations where it may be a bit easier for people with visa requirements.

Being a global company, we do have people from all around the world attending. And so we try to get ahead of that when we can, we try to help build travel history through other events and meetups during the year. And that’s one of the things that we look at. So, while it might not be a perfect science, we try to look at all of these different things.

And then, you know, how much space do we need? We are a big team. We have breakouts. And so having a meeting space, that’s a big enough size. I would say we always get creative there. Sometimes we might use a suite in the hotel if there’s not enough meeting rooms or maybe there’s a restaurant that we can grab a private room in and have that for during the week, if we don’t have enough meeting rooms necessarily.

So, just trying to get creative where we can keep in mind costs, also you know, when we look at the dates. Availability becomes a big thing, especially a group our size, but we also wanna make sure that we avoid any holidays, times where it would be really hard for people to be away from home. And so incorporating that into our search.

CHENDA NGAK: I believe we have more than 2000 Automatticians in almost a hundred countries. Now, how do you approach logistics with everyone being so spread out?

MEGAN MARCEL: We have channels set up where people can ask questions on different routes that they might be considering taking. And so just a lot of support on that, wherever we can help provide it. I think it does a lot for people to feel comfortable attending. 

Also just taking into account cultural norms where people might be and can we incorporate any of that into the meetup? Is that through food? Is it having a prayer room set up? Like what can we do in those instances so that when people are away from home for such an extended amount of time, they feel comfortable, they have what they’re used to. Maybe not in everything, but we definitely try to take it into consideration.

CHENDA NGAK: Now that I’ve heard all the great stories from past meetups and why they’re so important, I thought it would be great to hear about how to optimize our time at meetups. So I spoke to someone that has so much wisdom to share.

JOSEPHA HADEN CHOMPHOSY: My name is Josepha Haden Chomphosy. I am in Southern California. And what I do here at Automattic is I run our division that focuses on the open source practice, specifically for WordPress.

CHENDA NGAK: What’s it like for you to attend a meetup as a team lead?

JOSEPHA HADEN CHOMPHOSY: For team leads, if you’re leading a group of people, when you go to a meetup, it’s really important that you kind of realize that your event starts the moment that your team knows about it. 

It’s not always the case that the team lead is the organizer. Sometimes the team kind of organizes your event together. I think also as attendees, there’s a lot that you have to do ahead of time to make sure that you are using your time, the best and you’re looking after your own energy. Like in order to make events really functional as a way to move through problems that you find when you’re working in a distributed way, it just, you have to bring a lot of intention to it.

CHENDA NGAK: Can you share any tips on how to make the most of our time together?

JOSEPHA HADEN CHOMPHOSY: One of the things about in person events, in a distributed sort of ecosystem in a distributed organization, is that you really have to put a lot of effort into making sure that it is the most effective, the most efficient that it can be. Cause it happens so rarely. I like to remind any of my leaders and certainly anyone on my teams, that 90% of your work, if you are doing any of the leading, needs to happen before anyone actually gets there.

Then, also, if you are going to an event as an attendee, you really do have a bit of research you have to do ahead of time, just to make sure that like, everything that could be done ahead of time is already done so that you don’t necessarily have to figure that out once you get there. And so some of the things that anyone can do to make sure that their event is the most effective, the most efficient use of their time and their team member’s time is one, always keep in mind the level of ask that you’re bringing to that event. You have so much you have to do ahead of time. 

And so if you are a team lead, if you’re a leader, one of the things you have to know for sure is the reason behind why you’re gathering. You have to know why you believe it is that you are better together. So, if you’re bringing folks, in order to learn or to plan something or, or simply just to get connected, It’s good to know what that is. And then you have to ask yourself some important secondary questions, where are my weakest relationships, or where have I seen the weakest relationships within my teams?

What questions do we not ask ourselves often enough? Or how can we get to a shared vision and make sure that what we are working on is what everyone should be working on? So, those are the sorts of questions you have to ask yourself.

CHENDA NGAK: Do you have any personal life hacks, any routines that you do before you attend a meetup?

JOSEPHA HADEN CHOMPHOSY: Yes. So, any time that you’re attending a meetup, but certainly right now, one of the most important things that you will not believe before you get there is that it is exhausting. Like you’re working in a different way. Physically, you’re working in a different way. Mentally, you’re working in a different way. Emotionally, your brain is working in a different way. 

Like everything about working with people, especially over the course of a week or two or three days is so different from working with people when it’s just text based. One of the things that you have to remember as you’re headed into these events is that you’re going to need to pace yourself. You need to think about how you need to be able to show up over the course of the event. And so you have to look and make sure that you are accounting for consistency of showing up over time, as opposed to the average of showing up over time.

And so the thing that I do before every event is sit down and look at who is going to be there and who I would like to make sure I connect with for whatever reason and then message them ahead of time.

CHENDA NGAK: We really consider meetups to be our secret sauce at Automattic. Why do you think that is?

JOSEPHA HADEN CHOMPHOSY: I think it’s generally true that one Automattic believes that many eyes makes all bugs shallow. Right? We believe that we can go further together because we believe we are better together. 

But also, I believe that Automatticians, like, people who work at Automattic are inherently kind of social animals. And we really commit to the idea that all of our combined experience is better than any individual person’s experience. I think that’s true for folks who work at Automattic, we tend to attract that sort of attitude.

MATT MULLENWEG: Hey everybody, Matt Mullenweg here again. It was great to hear my colleagues share their stories and speak from the heart. As you heard from Megan Marcel, it takes a lot of work to organize a company-wide meetup. People fly in from all over the world, spend a week away from their families.

So, I appreciate why they’re meaningful from diverse perspectives across Automattic.

Like many companies across the world, Automattic is very closely watching its budgets right now and how much we’re spending and trying to reign things in a macroeconomic instability. However, especially post pandemic, we decided to invest in meetups and getting colleagues to see each other in person.

It’s kind of funny that after, you know, 17 years of telling everyone to be distributed and remote, that now I’m beating the drum of people getting together in person. And of course, we all want to be connected to our colleagues, to our work, to our communities, to the fruits of our labor. And meetups are our fantastic way to do that.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to share their stories and the Chenda for going on this journey of discovery. Hope this episode inspires other leaders to invest in bringing people together. Thank you so much for listening. See you next time.

Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen.

Nearly ten years ago, Dylan Field and Evan Wallace turned a Thiel Fellowship into a solution to the ‘single source of truth’ problem for design systems. 

Their interest in design collaboration and WebGL laid the foundation for the origin story of Figma, today’s ubiquitous browser-based design tool — and rapidly-growing company.

“The more (we) pulled this thread, the more we learned there’s so much to do in terms of making design better, and in making it so more people can access design within the organization,” says Dylan of their early pursuis. (Spoiler: drone technology was a runner up in their technology explorations).  

The latest episode of the Distributed podcast pairs Dylan, Figma’s CEO and Co-founder, and guest host Connie Yang, Head of Payments Design at Stripe, with past design leadership posts at Coinbase and Facebook.  

Connie’s passion — uncovering the bits of magic surrounding us in everyday life — guides their friendly dialogue from design to remote culture and much more. Early in the show, Dylan shares what he’s learned about instilling culture in a rapidly-growing company, especially amid the changes brought on by the pandemic. “The main thing that changes once you go from in-person to remote is you can no longer rely on physical context to instill culture,” says Dylan. “It matters even more to elevate the role of design, and elevate anything you think is really important in that digital context.”

Dylan also builds on a recurring Distributed podcast theme over the past year, adding “It’s really important to be intentional about creating serendipitous moments.” Figma’s playful approach to collaboration influenced its recently-launched FigJam, a digital whiteboard that can help fill the need for serendipity.  

Dylan speaks with the unique authority of a tech leader who has not only prioritized design but, with his team and products, greatly influenced it in a way that seems to have happened just in time for distributed collaboration. 

“We’ve gone from a physical economy to a digital economy. I don’t think these are new trends or new things that happen but now, all of a sudden it happened all at once, and accelerated massively,” he says, echoing Matt’s May 2020 post Gradually, Then Suddenly. 

“I think that we’re seeing every part of the economy shape around design,” says Dylan, noting how Figma has even observed collaboration in the product, beyond design, on days when other workplace chat tools were down.

Why does it matter? Because now, Dylan says, “Design leads to winning.” 

Thank you to both of our guests for this latest episode of Distributed. We hope you enjoy it.

The full episode transcript is below.

***

CONNIE YANG:  Hey everyone, welcome to the Distributed Podcast. I’m your host for today, Connie Yang. I am the Head of Payments Design at Stripe and I want to give a  huge thanks to Matt  Mullenweg for allowing me the opportunity to host this podcast. 

I am super excited to have an opportunity to talk to one of the leaders in advancing design technology and changing how we all in the industry work together. Dylan Field is not only co-founder and CEO of Figma, a collaborative design tool used by some of the biggest design teams in the space, he is also a leading advocate for bringing more designers into companies and the importance of the role of design in building successful products. He is also a huge proponent of community and an open source approach to design. 

Dylan, thank you so much for joining us today.

DYLAN FIELD:  Thanks, Connie. It’s really good to see you.

CONNIE:  Good to see you too. Dylan, before we even get into Figma and all the momentum you’ve built let’s start by talking about design itself. 

DYLAN:  Okay.

CONNIE:  It seems like you had some amazing insight nearly ten years ago now on the importance of designers on teams, the way we work with one another and how we work with even non-designers. What did you discover about design in those early days that motivated you to dive into this world of design and creativity?

DYLAN:  Yeah so I’ve always been interested in design and excited about design product. But I think I started getting really excited about and interested in how do we make design tools better when I started working full-time as a design intern at Flipboard. And at the time I was kind of watching how the tools worked, we were in Fireworks pretty much every single day and collaborating through a Dropbox folder. 

We kind of had attempts to do a blog where we could post work in progress but honestly all the collaboration was kind of a mess and that was with a very design-forward team. Flipboard was very excited about let’s go make.. Flipboard was really into let’s go make design a really core part of the product experience and how we build product. 

And leaving Flipboard I was thinking a lot about creative tools with my co-founder Evan and should we go and build a company around this. And on the list was always design. We thought this would be a great area to go into is interface design but we weren’t sure the market was big enough. But honestly it was. Once we figured out that the market was there, the problems were very clear. 

It was.. the experience of designing product was not synchronous at all. It was you had all these different sources of truth, there was no one source of truth you could rely on. I remember the version problem where you have final underscore, final underscore two, you never know which one is the latest version. 

And then I started interviewing people at larger organizations and would hear stories about how a file would go halfway across the org at a super large enterprise and suddenly you’ve got some random product manager somewhere who’s mad at some other product manager because they think they’re doing something that they’re not even doing anymore because that was like two months ago. And the single source of truth problem was really huge. 

I think as we started to think about okay, what does it take to scale design teams up, design systems are incredibly important in that role and without a design system, it was really hard to keep things consistent or scalable. The more we pulled this thread, the more we learned in terms of there is so much to do in terms of making design better. And also so much to do in terms of making it so that more people can access design within the organization.

And I think we started to have this thesis about it’s just really important to get more people to do more design and for companies to invest more in design and that’s  how companies will win or lose in the future. And I think that has played out and is playing out now, which is really exciting to see.

CONNIE:  Yeah, I mean now has been a really interesting time.

DYLAN:  Yes.

CONNIE:  Especially for Figma, right? So we’re almost two years into the pandemic, lots of change, what are some of the top trends that you’ve seen change with designing remotely and the way that we work? 

DYLAN:  I think there’s a lot of changes generally in the way that work happens right now, especially for teams that were not distributed before. The teams that have been distributed this entire time, I don’t know how much change they’ve seen during the pandemic in terms of the way that they work. 

But I think that the main thing that changes once you go from in-person to remote is you can no longer rely on physical context to instill culture and it matters even more to elevate the role of design and elevate anything you think is really important in that digital context. And digital contexts have no walls, they are flat, but they are not.. they still have these systems in place were, for example, if I (imagine a digital?) context, if I don’t intentionally make time to talk with somebody, that conversation will not happen. Whereas in an office, we might run into each other on the way to the bathroom or something or waiting for a drink in the kitchen.

I think it’s really important to be intentional about creating serendipitous moments. And also I think to elevate the things that you hold dear as a company.

I think that the other thing that’s happened as we’ve all gone remote and during the pandemic is that we’ve gone from a physical economy to a digital economy. And we’ve gone from physical spaces to digital spaces in terms of where we congregate. And I don’t think these are new trends or a new thing that has happened. I think that actually has been happening for decades. But now we’re at a place where all the sudden it happened all at once and it accelerated massively.

So as you go from a physical economy to a digital economy, it is really important to create a great digital product experience, otherwise you’re not gonna win. And it turns out that everyone, every company needs to do this  to survive right now, whether you’re at Stripe and you’re creating a payments API, it actually does matter how good your design is. Whereas maybe 10-20 years ago people would assume actually it doesn’t matter at all. 

If you’ve a bank, if you want to survive against a challenger bank, you better have a great design. If you are a company that’s doing logistics or industrial, you need to actually have really well designed processes inside the company and good internal tools. And if you don’t design those well you might lose that to Amazon. So I think that we are seeing every part of the economy shape around design and realize that design is a core part of how they win or lose.

CONNIE:  Yeah and I love hearing all these specific examples that you’re bringing up of how these different companies should be thinking about building products. This is kind of a funny question. How do you think companies are.. Do you think they’re getting better at designing remotely whether they use Figma or not? Is it even possible to design remotely without Figma now?

DYLAN:  Well we definitely saw a lot of people that, as they went into a remote design scenario, they really wanted Figma.

CONNIE:  Yeah.

DYLAN:  So I’m not an expert on the work flows outside of Figma as much but I think it is less painful to design in Figma than not in Figma in general. And that’s definitely true for remote teams. But what do you think? Because you’re in Figma a lot.

CONNIE:  We are. We are definitely a Figma oriented team. I was trying to imagine what was that world like?  You know, we had the issues with updated files and (getting things across?), and all this stuff that you brought up earlier. So I sort of can’t imagine with the speed that we have to work now and the amount of distributed teams that we have, I can’t imagine designing without Figma. That’s pretty rough for me. But hey, props.

DYLAN:  Okay, thank you. I’ll take that.

CONNIE:  I definitely appreciate the tool. So Dylan, you and I have actually met a number of times before.

DYLAN:  Yup.

CONNIE:  Including co-judging a really big hackathon for crypto projects a few years ago. But big events like this are still not happening live and some will probably be forever remote from now on. So it’s a changing landscape. How can we still support events like this? Is Figma doing anything?

DYLAN:  Well, I think that again it’s about going from physical space to digital spaces. And if you look at how people are interacting online right now, there is so much happening, whether it’s just on Twitter but also in virtual spaces, whether that’s VR or Gather.Town or people are finding stuff like Clubhouse or Twitter spaces. We’ve even seen it in Figma. People have started to hang out in Figma and that inspired FigJam, which is our digital white boarding tool. 

And we started watching how people were interacting in Figma, which is basically this abstracted canvas, how they were greeting each other, how they were talking to each other, they were typing text. And we saw Slack went down one day and people started to really interact with each other over Figma instead. I’m not saying that we’re competing with Slack, we’re not, [laughs] no interest in that. But I think as we have seen more people go in these spaces they just want a place to play and they want a place to have these experiences and to be with people and to be collaborative. 

And I think that design is a really interesting place and role and activity to do where you’re visually creating with each other. And the more that you’re visually creating, the less you’re coming from a place of fear during a pandemic, the  less that you have ego involved. You’re just able to get in the sandbox and play. I’ve been really excited to see people do that in Figma, in FigJam.

I think in terms of the literal interpretation of your question around getting people together in person or together in event space, I think there’s just so much around that. We have thrown a few conferences during the pandemic. We threw one recently around design systems called Schema through a Config, every year. 

And just find ways to have people gather around an event, around a.. maybe it’s a product announcement or maybe it’s a topic that everyone cares about. But both finding ways to bring people together but also not have the wideness of the internet be a distraction. There’s so many ways that people that are trolls can come in or noise can get high, and so you have to be very intentional about that too, while also making it so people are able to have that access. 

Because that’s the beautiful thing, I think, about digital events is that they are not exclusive anymore. Right? You don’t have to find your way to San Francisco to come to Config and it’s hard to imagine going back from that. Even though there’s real benefits to having a physical event, it’s just really lovely to have that access for everyone in our community.

CONNIE:  Yeah, it’s like opening a gate, why would you close that again?

DYLAN:  Yeah.

CONNIE:  I really liked how you referenced so much of the word ‘play’ when describing Figma. And one side bar I want to dig into a little bit, when you say you watch designers or you see people using it in the space, what is that kind of user research like for you? Are you literally watching designers?

DYLAN:  Well, we do a combination of things. I mean, we talk to people, we watch people user research sessions use Figma, we talk about their lived experience and ask them questions about how they use it, what artifacts people create. We look at the way we use it ourselves, too. That’s a huge way we learn. 

And then I think also just.. for example for FigJam, one of the things I heard most about was how people were excited to do these playful things. And we watched ourselves use it and that’s what inspired the name FigJam. It’s a playful name. We’re using it and we’re trying different things and seeing what resonated with our own team. And the playfulness part was definitely the thing we came away with, like wow, there’s so many directions it can go but play and fun and getting too to flow with your team, that is such a big part of FigJam which [00:11:02.26] to ideate and brain stormings are there.

And from there it was like, okay, how do we double down on this. And so we did a design sprint for a day and we came up with maybe 60 ideas and three of them we’ve implemented, around three. We did stuff like curser chat, emoji reactions, (stamps?), audio chat, and plus widgets were starting to be born there, which is a way to basically embed a widget onto the FigJam canvas, you can use it on your whiteboard, and many more things that we haven’t shipped yet.  

But it was like one day with one clear intention and it was amazing what came out of it. And that’s when I think we knew, we were like, okay, we’re onto something here.

CONNIE:  Wow, that’s awesome. I’d love to dig into that story a little bit more later. But for now, another question about design overall.  What are some of the hardest problems about remote design that you haven’t been able to solve yet?

DYLAN:  I think it goes back to serendipity, what we were talking about earlier. I think that tools are doing a better job of this more and more but still there is so much to do to try to figure out how do you create serendipity in digital environments and across the suite of teams. 

One thing we have tried, which is.. Actually it’s interesting we’re talking this week because it’s a (maker?) week right now for us – 

CONNIE: Oh wow.

DYLAN:   – and we always try to have different little attempts to figure what we can do here during (maker) weeks. And so one thing we’re doing right now is we have these little crews.. We have a space theme and it’s called Figmaverse this week. Every (maker) week has a different theme and last year in the winter it was Figmaland. And this time they were like, we’ve gotta think bigger, Figmaverse. 

CONNIE:  Awesome.

DYLAN:  Not my idea but someone on our team, Anthony, came up with it. And it’s cool because they have these little.. they call them “squads” or crews, I think. With your crew you can all come together, you’ve got like six to eight people, you can bounce ideas off each other, share what you’re up to but also play this meta game on top of maker week. And it’s a random assortment of people  you might not meet otherwise in the company but just trying to create those connections that otherwise you might not have. And I think the more you can do that across the company, the more you can create these experiences people can bond over. 

Another thing I’ve done are new hire breakfasts, just trying to get people that have joined the company that are new.. six to eight at a time, we have breakfast together and just talk about whatever people want to talk about. And it’s totally casual, usually not super related to Figma, though if people want to talk about that we can. And it’s just a way for people to get to know each other across the company and start to connect those notes.

CONNIE:  Yeah. I loved hearing about ways you’re intentionally trying to bring more serendipity into the space. And it’s not always about work. It can be about anything.

DYLAN:  Yeah. I think that can be done not just on the company wide context but also in a team context. And so while [00:13:38.20] that’s not about design, it’s about.. just broadly about companies I think that it’s true for designers as well. And it’s so important for designers to be invigorated and challenged and inspired by people that are coming from lots of different backgrounds and from lots of different areas of the company. Otherwise they’re not going to do their best work. They won’t think of the challenge cases in their head, they won’t think of the random idea that might solve the problem. It’s important to get input from everywhere.

CONNIE:  Yeah, absolutely. So you’ve become a really well respected thought leader about the role of design and how we work. What is something really important that you’ve learned about designers that influences your vision for Figma and your leadership of the company?

DYLAN:  One thing I’ve learned about design and designers, I feel like it’s similar to many of my other answers, but I think it’s really important, is just how inclusive the best designers are and how much they bring other people into the fold. I’ve seen this with the best designers I’ve worked with and I suspect you’ve seen the same. 

But there’s just a stereotype among designers, or at least there was, of the designer that goes off into the ivory tower or the corner and they put their headphones and they just type on their Mac for a while or use the pen to [00:14:49.03] – 

CONNIE:  Yes, heard of those.

DYLAN:  – tablet and they are just..  they’re solitary, they’re a genius, they come up with the idea, they come to crit, they present it, everyone’s jaw drops on the floor and that’s it and you ship it. And like, that’s just not how it works.  [laughs] 

And so that was our hypothesis going to Figma but I think just to see it play out and to see how much is the truth and how much designers as well appreciate that myth breaking down and appreciate the collaborative process that can come along with design and breaking down those barriers and bringing more people in and how it results in just better work. 

Like, I think a myth that exists is that collaboration, more voices at the table, can sometimes lead to worst results. And I think we see this implicitly all the time. I’ve even caught myself implicitly doing it and accidentally started this myth when I have said things like, oh, I just want to have a small meeting here or whatever because I want to get this done. And I think it’s a balance, you don’t want to have thousands of people in a meeting, that’s not going to be productive either. But if there’s ways you can bring more people into the process, I do think that you get to better results usually, and often times simpler results, which is also interesting.

Like, we’ve seen for example, one of the case studies that we found during the pandemic was Kimberly-Clark. Do you remember the toilet paper shortage? 

CONNIE: Oh yeah, yeah who could forget?

DYLAN:  Yeah so they were trying to solve that. And they were trying to come up with an order form that was going from 14 fields or something crazy to much less. And so they all got on Figma and started to figure out how to reduce the number of forms on their order form. And despite a lot of people collaborating on that together they were able to come up with a much simpler experience for the user placing the orders than they had before.

And you hear stories like this and you go wow, bringing more people into the process can actually help. It’s not just always distract. 

CONNIE:  Yeah the ivory tower idea is an interesting one. I mean the reason it became an idea is that it works for some designers, a very, very small amount. And there are some companies that have been known and are quite successful for operating that way. Have you seen that change?

DYLAN:  I guess I would challenge it a little bit. A lot of times that people act in that way, I think that they are not propagating the right knowledge amongst their teammates. A lot of times you end up with a bus factor problem, a lot of times you end up with one person who is kind of like seen as an individual leader on the team but  no one else can critique their work properly because of social norms that start to take place.

So I do wonder if it’s actually a constructive pattern for organizations. And I think that just because it’s a working style that has existed doesn’t mean it’s the most productive one. And I also wouldn’t say that they’re working alone. A lot of times they’re building on the knowledge of others, they are building on patterns that have existed for a long time and they are definitely bringing on the people to complete the project and those people usually.. 

I usually find that designers and engineers working together, once they’ve had like [00:17:59.26] and help from product, in that implementation phase even, there’s so much that gets defined and figured out when you’re implementing something. So if nothing else, I would claim that a designer that’s working with an engineer, even looking at that atomic unit of collaboration, that is a time where you’re getting a lot of different back and forth that’s happening. And the engineer is pushing back and saying well what about this edge case, what about this edge case? And unless you’re (inputting yourself?) you’re just not going to think of those things.

CONNIE:  Yeah, absolutely. 

DYLAN:  But what about you? What’s your presumption and what you’ve seen there?

CONNIE:  I also think we’re stronger in numbers. One of my personal design principles is that we should make complex things as simple and as accessible to people. And you have to keep your audience in mind for that. And so the more audience or individuals that you talk to and the more variety that you understand, that’s when you really start to get what’s the common baseline for users, that’s how you have a broader audience, that’s how you grow, that’s how you make things as simple as possible.

So I am a huge believer in that kind of inclusivity. But sometimes it’s.. different people have different processes. That’s the way I think about it but there’s lots of different ways out there. 

DYLAN:  Totally.

CONNIE:  So let’s back up a little bit. We’re going to start talking about Figma as a company. You’ve had a lot of big moments this year. You launched FigJam, you’ve had significant fundraising, how do you describe Figma as a product today if you were to pitch it to someone?

DYLAN:  Yeah. Well, I think of it as kind of like we’re trying to serve the entire project design lifecycle. So we’re going all the way from ideation with FigJam and white boarding and brainstorming to the design phase with Figma where you’re really fleshing out mockups and you’re trying to work with other stakeholders all the way to prototyping and buy in from other people and eventually production where you’re trying to turn your work into code. And we are trying to serve that entire lifecycle.

CONNIE:  Gotcha. And if you could take us back to the beginning, if we could get into a little bit of an origin story, you started Figma in 2012 as a Thiel fellow and you were exploring other ideas at the time.

DYLAN:  Yes.

CONNIE:  How did you choose this particular problem to solve and how did you get started?

DYLAN:  Yeah so my cofounder and I knew that we wanted to do creative tools and we even wanted to work with WebGL. And I think that sometimes as you are figuring out a new business, one thing that happens is people really focus on like problem, solution, what is the total market that’s addressable and how much are you going to charge people and [00:20:14.26]. And these are all really good questions to ask but for us instead we really focused on what’s the technology that we’re going to use. And for us, that was WebGL. The backup was going to be drones but my cofounder Evan was not into that.

CONNIE:  Drones?

DYLAN:  Yeah, I thought drones were really exciting and I still do. We also saw that there’s a lot of regulation there, a lot of just privacy concerns and so that’s why we didn’t go into that area. 

CONNIE:  Harder to design with a drone too.

DYLAN:  I don’t know if [00:20:40.02] yeah. But  hey, it’s cool toys. But no, I think my cofounder had actually built drones in college and did a lot of programming with drones and he was like, no, the hardware run to bug loop, it sucks, I don’t want to do that. So we kind of focused more on WebGL and creative tools. 

And the from there it was like, okay, WebGL is the why now here. It’s the reason why this [00:21:02.28] exists that hasn’t existed before. And then the question is like what is it we’re going to make and what takes advantage of WebGL more than anything else? And we explored photo editing, (combinational?) photography and even a more Photoshop like approach where you blend a lot of things together before we realized that interface designer was (beginning of market?) and that was always on the list, always something I wanted to do, and then we (went to that?).

CONNIE:  Yeah. And for people who may not know the intricacies of WebGL, what would you say was so unique about that that made you want to use that for sure? 

DYLAN:  Yeah so WebGL is the way to use the GPU in your computer in the browser. And by doing that, you are able to take apps that traditionally would’ve been desktop apps siloed offline and move them to the cloud. And so I think that basically any creative tool but also any game, honestly, could be made with WebGL (as well as?) just a browser. And that way if I sent you a link to a Figma file, you can learn it right away as long as you have a browser. 

And that means it’s platform agnostic. It doesn’t matter if you’re on a Chromebook, a [00:22:00.04] machine, Mac, you can  use Figma. And that became really important I think because as we saw Figma spread, there’s sort of this heterogeneous mix of competing environments people are coming with in different organizations and also entire areas and countries that had never switched to things like Sketch because they didn’t have Macs. 

And it turns out Macs are like.. If you think about the designer stereotype you might have in your head, kind of going back to they’re on their Mac, they’re in a cafe, they have the headphones on, they probably have a really nice Moleskine, whatever that is in your head, it’s still not the reality for most of the world. I think a lot of our users are on PC or on Linux or more low end hardware. And not everyone is  on a Mac. So it’s really important.

CONNIE:  Yeah, again, thinking about people beyond what is immediately around us. It comes back again. 

DYLAN:  Yes.

CONNIE:  So how long did it take between when you started trying to build Figma and then when you actually first launched to any group of people?

DYLAN:  It was a long time. So we started talking about the company December 2011, started.. I got the Thiel Fellowship April or May of 2012. I was still an intern at Flipboard at the time. I told them six months, I finished that six months. So we were talking a bit more at that point. And then August 2012, we started full time. It probably wasn’t until June 2013 that we really were like okay, let’s go build what became Figma today and focus on interface design. And even then, we thought of it as interface design plus other things. And it wasn’t clear what those other things were. 

And there was a point where we had to really define that and say we’re going to focus on interface design and really had a nice (white board?) session with the team where we just crossed all these t things off. It’s like, what do we all think we’re doing? Okay, let’s cross them off one by one until we get to what we’re actually doing. And we used a cool framework, omit, raise, (use?), create.. from this book Blue Ocean Strategy to figure out okay, what are we doing that’s different than the competition, what are we not doing that the condition is doing? What are we doing worse and where are we going to make this brand new? 

Yeah, from there we didn’t launch our closed beta until December of 2015. And our [00:24:05.17] release was not until October 2016 and didn’t start charging until summer of 2017. So it was a very, very long road and it took a long time to get to the point where we actually had Figma.

CONNIE:  Wow. And it’s funny as me as working in the industry, I remember those milestones.

DYLAN:  You were there.

CONNIE:  Yeah, yeah absolutely.

DYLAN:  Yeah I remember Coinbase was a really early user and y’all took a bet and I really appreciate it.

CONNIE:  Yeah we had some big fans. 

DYLAN:  Cool. It was mutual.

CONNIE:  So when my team at Coinbase first got started on Figma, we weren’t even remote, we just kind of thought oh it’s a great tool, it seems collaborative, it seems easy, the file systems, all that seemed so much better. Do you see it now as a product for distributed creative process or would you say it’s still not specifically designed for remote teams?

DYLAN:  I think we are trying to get better about.. I think every team now is a distributed remote team basically even if you’re not all remote, literally, you’re all distributed. And as is increasingly the truth, you want to make sure that you’re especially good for that environment. That’s where I think the play, the focus on digital space comes in. And how do you make it really great for that environment.

But yeah, I would say that we should also work really well if you’re all in an office together. And hopefully in things like FigJam, the experience you have in FigJam white boarding is even better than the physical equivalent. So I think a real metric of success could be okay, we are all in a room with a white board, what makes it so that we want to use FigJam instead of the white board that’s on the wall?

CONNIE:  Hmm, yeah, that’s a great mission, a north star, to be aiming for.  You mentioned that there is a difference between a remote team and a distributed team. What is that difference for you?

DYLAN:  A remote team is when no one is in the office, a distributed team is where you maybe have multiple people that are congregating in physical spaces together. That’s my view. What do you think? We’re on the Distributed Podcast, so you’re probably an expert. [laughter] 

CONNIE:  It sounds good to me. And I think one of the things that we all realize is that even though we’ve all been adapting to this world, it is still really different from team-to-team, company-to-company. Everybody has different definitions and different ideas of what they think works best and how they build products best.

DYLAN:  Totally.

CONNIE:  What are some of the key moments in growth at Figma where you could see that you were really on track for the bigger vision, for where you ultimately wanted Figma to go?

DYLAN:  I think the first time that someone told me please charge for Figma was the big moment for me. 

CONNIE:  Hmm..

DYLAN:  Because we were free for a long time. And I always thought of it as like okay, we just gotta get to product market fit, we’re not there yet, it’s going to take a long time. And at some point this morass of just grinding, someone was like, hey, we really want to spread Figma at the big company I work at, like major enterprise, Fortune 100 company, and I can’t do it right now because y’all don’t charge and everyone thinks you’re going to go out of business.

CONNIE:  That’s funny.

DYLAN: And it was this double reaction of oh my god, we’ve made it and oh gosh, how have we not charged yet? I thought that being free would help growth, not block it. [laughs] So it was like, oh shoot.

CONNIE:   The things we get surprised by.

DYLAN:  Yeah, exactly.

CONNIE:  That’s awesome. That’s a fun milestone to really remember.

DYLAN:  Their big one was just seeing people that are non-designers start to get into Figma without formal design training. So I’ve had like now a ton of founders come up to me and tell me how they’ve designed the first version of their product with Figma and really dived into design. I think that’s so important as you’re building a business to just be design driven and to have somebody that has a design point of view and propagating that from the top. 

And so if we can help inspire the next generation of companies to be more design driven, to hire more designers, to put more people in design roles, I think that’s really, really important.

CONNIE:  Absolutely. One of the points actually that I recalled as you were explaining that was that when we were again, getting on board Figma at Coinbase and we had to convince not just designers to use it, we had to convince PMs, engineers, everybody else to use it, and an aha moment that we had was when a PM realized oh, he could edit text directly in Figma – 

DYLAN: Yup.

CONNIE:  – and then just be done with it. That was a major aha moment. I could see the light in his eyes. I was like, oh, that’s why I switch. That’s pretty incredible. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you that.

DYLAN:  That’s awesome. Yeah, the copy editing on the canvas is big but also just like I think being able to leave comments and conversation around the asset itself and have that be collocated is another one that’s really big. And then just getting to the point where you can use the design system and a product manager can start doing some of their own (blocks?) rather than just like oh yes, I need a designer to help me draw things. It’s like, no product manager, you can do that on your own, really, I promise you. [laughs] 

CONNIE:  Yeah, makes it as easy as possible.

DYLAN:  It makes it so the designer can focus on harder tasks. 

CONNIE:  Absolutely. Do you have any dream companies or teams that you wish would start using Figma, like where you really think it could make a huge difference?

DYLAN:  I would love government to start using it more. 

CONNIE:  That’s what I was thinking too. [laughter] Do you think they use it at all?

DYLAN:  Uhh.. I don’t know if I can comment on that. [laughter]

CONNIE:  Noted. So we started talking a little bit about the non-designers, PMs, engineers, writers, researchers, so many people who all have to come together to make products look really good. What impact do you really think Figma has had for those people that’s really important for you?

DYLAN:  I think again the more you can get people in the design process, the better designed products can be. I think also just the roles around what design mean and who does design are blurring so much. So I think that a [00:29:47.14] engineer versus a designer, that is converging more than I think a lot of people realize and both could be really additive to the other’s process. 

We could debate the next hour or two the difference between product and design or even research and what that trifecta looks like in that Venn Diagram but I think that all of them have to talk to customers, all of them need to think about strategy, all of them need to think about the future of what the product could be and paint an inspiring vision. And because all of them have use cases for Figma that are important, even if they have different orientations in a day to day job. 

What I have also been inspired to see is the amount the executives and people that are stakeholders outside of product engineer design are starting to use Figma to visually communicate, or ideate in the case of FigJam, but also just to really be on the ground and thinking about what it will take to win for the company through design. I think it’s interesting too because designers as an archetype are kind of more in touch with emotions, they are more in touch with the soft side of the business. But at the end of the day, design leads to winning. [laughs] And I think that people don’t realize that enough.

CONNIE:  Did you say design needs to..?

DYLAN: No, design leads to winning. 

CONNIE: Oh design leads to winning.

DYLAN: Exactly.

CONNIE:  Great phrase, yeah, I love that.

DYLAN:  In my opinion. I mean.. Somebody out there might challenge that but I really think it’s the case.

CONNIE:  Speaking of winning, and you had touched briefly earlier about competition and how Figma starting from a small place, what is your competition like now? What do you think about, what do you worry about?

DYLAN:  We have obviously a major competitor in this in Adobe. And I think it’s really important to just have a super healthy respect for your competition. Adobe in our case is like they’re the daddy of the creative tools industry, you know, they literally back in the late 1980s made Illustrator and in the 1990s acquired Photoshop. This is all before I was born, basically. [laughs]

CONNIE:  Oh, right.

DYLAN:  Obviously some of these products have bloat, some of them have long histories, but they also exist after decades and decades and decades. And I think just the work Adobe has done has been really inspirational for a lot of people, including myself. 

So I think you can learn from these companies that have been around for a long time, you can learn about how to create good software, you can learn about the traps of trying to build something for a long time, you can learn about the traps of trying to put too many things into one place. And I think it’s good for us to have strong, challenging competitors. That’s the way that we’ll become a better business in the long term.

CONNIE:  Yeah, it is a good way to look at that. I remember also that’s how I got started learning about design.

DYLAN:  Totally.

CONNIE:  It’s using those tools. 

DYLAN:  Yup.

CONNIE:  That was kind of the originator. Do you think they learn from  you and your team as well on how to make it more collaborative? 

DYLAN:  Judging by the recent releases, yes. But I think it’s hard. The fact is that we’re able to take assumptions about being cloud first that they can’t really take. And so having to accommodate a lot of off-line workflows.. it really constrains what you can do and it makes a lot harder to create great product experience people. 

CONNIE:  Yeah that makes sense.

DYLAN:  So we’re lucky in that sense. 

CONNIE:  All right, we’re going to go back to FigJam for a minute, which I love.

DYLAN:  Sure!

CONNIE:  You’ve made Figma somehow even easier for new people to use and there are so  many creative ways that people have been playing around in FigJam. Like, within our team, we use it to play games in team building events. We even have a Figma height chart. [laughter] Since you don’t know anyone’s heights while you’re remote, we made a chart of where everybody is so it can be a little more connected.

DYLAN:  In case you’re wondering, I’m on the bottom. [laughter] 

CONNIE:  So it has been super fun. And you touched a little bit on what it took to create that but it felt like you seized the moment. Like, somehow you knew this is THE tool to make during this remote time and you spun it up really quickly. What actually happened there? Can you tell us a little more about that?

DYLAN:  Sure. So we had long intended to go into white board diagraming space, that was something that we had seen people use (before?) along with lots of other use cases for a long time. And obviously it’s not ideal for Figma proper to do that because, as you try to expand it to more people and bring more people in, there’s all this stuff that we’ve done for design that gets in the way.  So it’s like, okay, how do you create a tool around white boarding, diagraming and ideations use case that is just really excellent for anyone to bring in from the product team?

And then the pandemic hit. And we already had this in our minds and right away we realized that people were doing way more of this activity in Figma than they were before and they were having challenges doing it. And we realized, okay, we just have to move as fast as we can, get this to market, because the pandemic is not going anywhere, it’s going to be a long road ahead.

And so we spun up a team and this is a few months of research first, we make sure we really understood the problem. And then it was probably fall of 2020 we spun up the team and it was maybe six, seven months before we launched, which I’m really proud of. 

CONNIE:  Wow.

DYLAN:  And I think a big part of that was just the team knowing that this was such an important use case for our community and that we really needed to get this out there for our user base. And that the pandemic was.. it was just important for people to have a digital white board during the pandemic, which is now endemic. It’s not ending. And so as we go into that world, it’s like, it’s 2021, everyone needs a digital white board, how can we help serve our customers there?

And the other thing we did was we weren’t sure what the prices were at first and so we did a higher price and then as we watched people use it, we realized that entire teams were using it and not only entire teams, entire companies. And as it expanded out more, we thought to ourselves, okay, the range that we’re seeing in terms of who will use FigJam justifies it actually going to a more competitive price point. And so we have.. actually now its three dollars if you’re on Pro, five dollars if you’re an org for FigJam and it’s free if you just wanted to start off on your own. And again, we’re trying to really go for access with those price points.

CONNIE:  Yeah, that makes sense. You mentioned it was about six or seven months before it came out, which is really short for that kind of product development.

DYLAN:  Yes.

CONNIE:  Can you tell us a bit about the team that you put together?  How did they get this done?

DYLAN:  Yeah, it’s an amazing team. I think all Figma is an amazing team. But I think with every release you kind of have quality, deadline, feature set in this triangle. And I definitely was like, okay, features and deadline, that’s what we’re optimizing for. And of course the Figma team is very quality oriented so they also care about that too. 

But it was I think a deliberate move to say this is different than going and iterating on an existing product. We’re building this new thing from scratch, there’s real time pressure, we have to get this out, what can we do to move fast here? And having that entire team have this mindset around shipping quickly made a huge impact. But also they’re just incredible people.

CONNIE:  Yeah, awesome.

DYLAN:  So, I feel very lucky to work with all my Figmates.

CONNIE:  And I love that description, I love that word Figmates, it’s so cute.

DYLAN:  They’re amazing.

CONNIE:  What was the actual make-up of the team? Was it one designer, was it multiple..? How did that get set up?

DYLAN:  Yeah, I mean, it was one designer, one product manager, a few engineers (spanning to?) multiple designers over time and more engineers over time. And then because the engine behind Figma and FigJam is the same, we’re able to pull in additional people as needed from other teams. So it’s kind of like, the teams became a somewhat permeable membrane that people could flow back and forth between. 

It also was a good forcing function to do things that we long wanted to do in Figma. So, for example, bullet points is something that we’ve wanted to do forever in Figma and it just never rose to the top of the priority list. And then for FigJam it was a key thing that if you don’t have bullet points, what are you doing? So that became something that we prioritized on the Figma side that also works for FigJam.

And what we’ve seen too is that some of the experiments we can do around digital space and bringing people together and having fun in FigJam people like them so much they flow right back to Figma as well. And it’s just nice to have this sandbox that we can play in, try things out, and  then you can improve the core Figma experience after that as well.

CONNIE:  Yeah. And I love hearing about how it started with one designer and then there became more. I’d love to dive in for a quick second on how – 

DYLAN:  And research too. I should not forget research.

CONNIE:  Yeah, absolutely.

DYLAN:  Research have played a heavy role in FigJam and continues to, to this day. We are lucky to have a great research team.

CONNIE:  Yeah. I would love to hear a bit more about how.. If it’s a designer and a researcher, they get started, how do they collaborate with everybody else? Like, I feel like your team must be the best at using Figma. That’s my guess, so how do you do it? [laughter]

DYLAN:  You know, I’m not always sure because there’s a lot of teams that have like.. I think the amazing thing about creating a tool, and I’m sure you’ve seen this in Stripe, is just the amount of ways that people take these legal pieces and put them together. And this is true for Crypto too. People, once they have generic tools or generic things that they can use, the ways that people stream them together and compose, is just infinite and perplexing and awe inspiring. 

So yeah, I don’t have any like.. here’s the one thing that we did in the collaboration side. I think most of them would ring relatively true for a lot of companies. But yeah, it’s been exciting to see just the way that people collaborate across Figma and what that means.

CONNIE:  Yeah, that’s awesome to hear about. And talking a little bit more about your culture. It looks like you’ve reopened your San Francisco a few months ago.

DYLAN:  We did. 

CONNIE:  Yeah, congrats on that. Gotta ask a tough question here that I’m pretty curious about. So, Figma is a tool that seems right now like so focused on remote design and distributed design and you’re not a fully remote team. Why not? What’s your thinking here?

DYLAN:  Yeah, I did a survey back in May or June of 2020 and just basically asked a lot of questions of our entire employee base at the time. And I expected some teams, like Engineering, to be more remote heavy in terms of preferences for the future, some teams like Sales to be more in-person heavy. And the reality was that everyone was a mix. The only pattern was there was no pattern. And some teams had more distribution than others. Like, Engineering surprisingly wanted to be more in the office, although still a lot of people in Engineering wanted to be remote too and Sales want to be more remote but still have people who want to be in the office and every permutation you can imagine for every other team as well. 

And it was.. We kind of reflected on it and we thought, okay, I did all the game theory and thought through what will happen during this pandemic, where are all these companies gonna end up at? And where we landed was let’s have hubs. Anyone can come into those hubs if they chose to. If you do come into a hub and you decided to affiliate with a hub, you have to come in two days a week at minimum and those two days are gonna be set and we’ll have it be the same two days for everyone because otherwise communities don’t form, you have this weird affect where people don’t come in and when they don’t come in it feels like it’s  kind of an empty, dead space. And you want the space to feel alive and you want things to be happy in there. You want these communities to form in this space, especially for people that are right out of college, new grads, it’s really important for them to have this physical community.

And then if you don’t want to come into a hub, that’s also totally fine because we’re in a pandemic so a lot of people are not going to want to do that, especially if you’re care taking or you’ve got kids at home that don’t have the vaccine yet. So if you’re in that situation, fine, don’t come in.  You have the option but you don’t get to arbitrarily choose, okay, well this day I’m going to come in the office, this day I’m not going to. You kind of have to make a choice and then (your pay is localized?) depending on what city you’re in. 

We tried to be very clear about that at the start, relatively at the start of the pandemic. I think we announced it internally around June or July. I announced it to the world in August 2020 and from there we’ve just been very clear with everybody about where we’re at. In the future, I mean, I think it’s (not at the table?) we one day go remote. I don’t think that’ll be any time soon, we just made this major investment in our office and we’re scouting offices in different hub locations. And I do think there is value to physical community too. 

But I also think that it’s important, just for the empathy of our customer base, of like understanding hybrid as well as remote. And I think we have a pretty good understanding of remote after being all at home for a while with the pandemic. So I think hybrid is a really important one to get a handle on as well.

CONNIE:  Do you think  more teams will end up being hybrid rather than fully remote given another few years?

DYLAN: Oh, good question. What kind of teams? Software teams..?

CONNIE:  Yeah, let’s say software or whatever you might count as your main audience.

DYLAN:  In what time frame?

CONNIE:  Two to five years.

DYLAN:  Oh, I think the one to two years’ time frame I think we’ll see more teams be hybrid than fully remote. And I think beyond two years it’s hard to say but I would guess that we see divergence from hybrid into either full remote or full in-person for a lot of things because I think  hybrid is hard. And I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people go back to in-person if they are given the option to. 

But I  think we’ll probably see more remote teams than hybrid teams in [00:42:38.16], I could be off though. I just think for software in particular there’s such an amazing community out there globally that can do this core work. And if you’re limiting yourselves to cities like San Francisco as your talent base it’s just really hard to hire, at least right now in boom times. Maybe in a year from now, if we’re not in the current bubbly world that we’re in right now in the Bay Area, perhaps that changes. But right now I think that’s the case.

CONNIE:  Yeah. And I love how that leads into community, which is something that I can tell is relay important to you and to Figma. It literally has a really prominent position inside of the Figma product itself, right?

DYLAN:  Yup.

CONNIE:  You can access community from the top left pull down menu. Why that intentional emphasis on community? What is that for you?

DYLAN: It’s actually funny because at the start of Figma, we thought we’d be a community first and a SAS tool second. And so the first version of the Figma product is (when we had editor?) but the main file browser experience was just a feed.  On the right hand.. at the center was the feed and the right hadn’t side were your drafts. And you could remix anything. I put that in air quotes. No one else can see the air quotes I realize because we’re on a podcast but you could “remix” anything that was in the feed and you could open up the file in your editor and that became a draft on your right handsome and if you wanted, you could repost your remix to the feed later. 

And so we had this ambition to do this right away. And as we observed people in that early alpha period using Figma, we realized that just so many people are spending most of their creative energy at their work day-to-day and for a small base of users, it didn’t make sense to try to, like, do the community-first approach. But we always had that ambition.

So we just kind of pivoted our approach to be more a SAS tool first and we thought, okay, community will be a fast follow. That fast follow ended up being four or five years before we got to that. Fast follow is not always as fast as you want them to be, but to me it’s just so important to have this open source mentality about design. 

And if you think about the way that engineers have been open source for a long time now, there’s this amazing job of just not recreating the wheel over and over and over again. And yet, how many times as designers have we recreated the most basic elements we use every day? And are we actually open to the inspiration that we can get from others? I just think there’s so much we can learn from the open source because it’s done in engineering when it comes to more creative work. And that is a big part of why we are leaning into community there.

But also I hope that over time the Figma community is a place where not only are you sharing resources but you’re also congregating as designers. So if you’re trying to learn about design, if you’re trying to teach design, if you’re trying to just hang out and get to know other designers, where do you go? You could go to Twitter and read some snarky tweets on design Twitter, nothing against that but maybe there’s a more constructive place that we can create for people too. And if we can create that third place for design, I’d be really excited about that. That’s where I want to hang out.

CONNIE:  Yeah. And I love that you’re really bringing so much about the ethos of open source into design. And that’s part of why you have.. so much of the Figma files, they’re under a creative commons license, right?

DYLAN:  In the community, yes.

CONNIE:  In the community, which is really interesting. Do you ever feel like you get caught into.. some people can’t share because of copyright..? How do you think about that trade off?

DYLAN:  Yeah, there are some people that have definitely raised that to us but actually I’ve been really surprised by how few people have that reaction. And also, people from  fields that are [00:46:02.02] interface design that are really eager for their work to be shared and used because that actually adds value to your work paradoxically.

I think that one thing I have thought about and ruminated a lot recently on is the idea that basically for a meme, and that meme can be visual, that meme can be more of a thought, whatever it is, for it to gain value, the more that people [00:46:27.21] the more people add onto it the more valuable it is. And I think it’s definitely true of work that people create as well. 

So I think the scarcity mindset around this is designers have had their work stolen for a long time, everyone has had this experience with a client who doesn’t pay or somebody that rips off work on the internet. And these are really negative experiences and so I understand how people are coming from that mindset. The abundance mindset is one where if you actually do share your work, get it out there, and people re-use it, repackage it and its attributable to you and people know that it’s yours, that actually can do a major.. have major effects in terms of creating your stature in the ecosystem and giving you social status.

And if we can help enforce that and to propagate those norms in Figma, with I’m not saying we’re doing a perfect job of today, I think we can do much better, but if we can boost people that are coming into design even more with our platform, then I think it could be a really constructive thing for the ecosystem overall. 

CONNIE:  Yeah, absolutely. At the end of 2020, you wrote a blog post called Meet Us in the Browser where you talked about Figma’s vision of making design accessible to everybody and that Figma itself is – and I love this quote – is more than a digital extension of our physical self, it’s an invitation to leave ego at the door and create shared consciousness with others. It seems like openness, transparency and access has always been a theme for your work with Figma and that refocusing on the community is the next extension of that. Is that the case or is that something that you’ve realized along the way?

DYLAN:  Yeah, definitely. I think implicit in what you’re saying though is also velocity and I think that’s one area that we have to improve still is like how do you actually make it so that it’s not just I create something, it exists for a while and then it just gets remixed? How do you make it so that you’re able to move really fast and have high velocity across these shared experiences and collaborations? And that’s something that I am thinking a lot about right now in terms of how do we enable that.

CONNIE: Interesting. Do you  mean velocity in the design process or merely how people learn about or see new designs?

DYLAN: Well so again, going back to that term shared consciousness, right? If we’re having a conversation, even if it’s a visual conversation in the case of design, then if I send you a letter and then a month later you send me a letter back, that’s a very different shared consciousness than if were having a conversation on a podcast. And so what does that mean for Figma? What does it mean for visual communication?

CONNIE: That’s a nice analogy. Have you sent a letter recently?

DYLAN:  I haven’t, I should send letters. 

CONNIE:  Yeah, sending letters, sending cards, it’s great, it’s a great thing to do.

DYLAN:  Well, I’ll get your address after this and we can be pen pals.

CONNIE:  Oh let’s do it, that would be so much fun.

DYLAN:  I’m down.

CONNIE:  And since it is the Distributed Podcast, we like to hear a little bit about how you work and have your own office set up. So can you tell us a bit about what your home office is like and what are some of the most important two or three things that you can’t work without?

DYLAN:  You know, I have a very minimalist answer partially because I just moved and I haven’t.. It’s really interesting because I used to have this really epic bookshelf behind me that my wife made and it’s like.. It’s funny because the colors are based off of a painting my friend Hannah made and it was sitting on top of the bookshelf. And at some point I was like, wait, these are very similar to Figma colors. 

CONNIE:  Amazing.

DYLAN: It was this great bookshelf with all these great design books on it and other books I loved. And then I moved to this new place and now I’ve got a filing cabinet behind me. I have the same desk, I have the same laptop. The only thing that’s missing is the notebook because I haven’t found my notebook yet in the move. And I’ll find it, I think I know where it is. 

But I think it’s the only thing that’s like atypical I would point out here, which is I find that if I’m writing things down or in a conversation I just recall them so much better later. And it’s like, I don’t even have to look at it later, although it’s nice to sometimes. Just the mere act of writing things down really, really helps me. Other than that, I don’t have the one tip or trick. I’m pretty minimalist in my set up.

CONNIE: And is that the same for your actual office/office set up?

DYLAN:  The office/office set up, we actually have a.. people are going between desks, it’s more like a (hotelier?) model. And so we don’t have physical here’s your spot and you get to claim it forever yet.  Maybe we’ll [00:50:38.16] in the future but for now you actually rotate in. People have a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse if they want it, and they can plug in, it’s really simple. 

CONNIE:  I really like that  you referenced the word serendipity so much because that’s actually a distinct theme of the distributed podcast for this year. What else are you doing now that you’re back in the office part time, we’re all adapting to our normal at-home lives, what else are you doing to add some more serendipity to your life?

DYLAN:  Well to my life versus to the Figma life?

CONNIE:  Both.

DYLAN:  Okay. I think Figma, just the more you can empower people that are wanting to start organizations inside of Figma or groups, the more that you can get people to create culture events on their own, it’s always winning over, you know, top down, here’s what we’re going to do, I think it’s much better to have it bottoms up. And that creates serendipity whether it’s in the office or its remote. 

In my own life, literally just walking around the city or going to new places, travel to places that are in driving distance, even, finding a cheap Air B&B. Now I’m lucky that’s affordable for me, not everyone is the case, but I think even just a bus ride or a drive to a new place that you haven’t been, can add a lot of serendipity and creativity and inspiration to your life.

And yeah, I find that when I get outside, which it’s so easy to go a full day and just be working and there’s always more to do. But just getting outside, listening to music, reading, learning, these are things that add a lot of serendipity in my life as well as conversations with loved ones and friends, like, it’s not.. it’s nothing that people are not used to but it’s just amazing, like, making the time for that, how much it matters. Getting exciting. Like, if you don’t get excited, like, what are you doing?

CONNIE: I love excitement.

DYLAN:  Yes.

CONNIE:  Can I ask, what else are you doing to generally maintain your mental fitness especially as this, as you pointed out, this pandemic is just going to keep going. What else do you do to keep yourself fit, happy, healthy?

DYLAN:  Sleep, spending time with my wife Helena. She’s due right now so we’re excited. She’s due in December. 

CONNIE:  Wow, congratulations.

DYLAN:  Thank you, yeah. 

CONNIE:  That’s amazing.

DYLAN:  So I think just having the humility of oh my gosh she is literally growing a human, what am I doing today? [laughs] 

CONNIE:  Perspective, it’s great. [laughter]

DYLAN:  Perspective, yeah, that’s another word for it.  But yeah, just having the perspective I think is really a great way to have that mental fitness, as (you put it?). Because a lot of the things that are like these are the little challenges we run into every day, they kind of all fade away in that grand horizon.

CONNIE:  Yeah. Do you have any daily rituals like meditation or anything else that lends itself to that?

DYLAN:  I should definitely meditate more. I think it always makes me happy. But I wouldn’t say it’s a daily ritual yet, although that would be great if it was. I am not a very good ritual person. I think so many people are great at this and I have never found my groove of a ritual for some amount of time. But I think the only ritual I would say that.. it’s not necessarily the same time of day but if I don’t learn something during the day that’s usually  not my top day. So I’m always trying to figure out something that I can learn from people.

CONNIE:  That’s a great philosophy to have. I’d like to move to a special section at the end that I like to call the lightning round of questions. 

DYLAN:  Oh, oh boy. [laughter]

CONNIE:  It doesn’t have to be that fast but they’re meant to be quick little top of mind responses. Starting with an easy one, so, since you talked about being really excited about things and how that is awesome for you, what is something that you’re really excited about right now that’s totally outside what we have been discussing?

DYLAN:  Yeah, well, we were talking about crypto earlier because you were formerly at Coinbase and I think that one thing that I’m really excited about right now is just DAOs.

CONNIE:  Awesome, thank you. All right, next question. What job would you be absolutely terrible at?

DYLAN:  If I was in a very heavy operational role I don’t think you’d want me in that role. And that goes for running a very operational business as well. Like, something like DoorDash I think I would not excel at.

CONNIE:  Noted. What is a nice compliment that you’ve received recently?

DYLAN:  You said a lot of nice things today. Thank you, Connie.

CONNIE: Oh, you’re welcome. What’s something that you wish more people did?

DYLAN:  Think from first principles. I think it’s so easy, especially in today’s day and age, to take whatever you read online, whatever you’ve seen in media, and just repeat it without thinking about it first. And I think that the world would be a much better place if we all did our research and thought deeply about the things that we were taking on as opinions and didn’t just give everyone right access to our brain.

CONNIE:  You mentioned that you really, really like learning and that in fact if you didn’t learn something it’s probably not your top day. What’s some thought nugget you learned recently that you really like?

DYLAN:  It’s not really a thing I learned but one thing I’ve been reflecting on is how fear blocks compassion. 

CONNIE:  How fear blocks compassion? Hmm.

DYLAN:  Yeah. I think that for me at least, maybe it’s different for the people, but a lot of times when I find myself lacking compassion I can trace it back to I’m being fearful of something. And if I can figure out why I’m being fearful that I can unblock that compassion. So yeah, it’s been applicable for a lot of different parts of my life recently.

CONNIE:  It’s such a great philosophy. It’s very closely linked with meditation, which is interesting that you have that view.

DYLAN:  What is the meditation viewpoint there?

CONNIE:  Just very similar to that, that there’s a lot about compassion about.. Buddhist meditation, the default is the world is suffering and it’s compassion and understanding that gets people through that and helps you live and be empathetic to all of the fellow people that inhabit this world with you. What do you think enabled you to get to that kind of realization?

DYLAN:  Just a lot of thought about the pandemic and the things that I was not being compassionate about and the people that I was not being compassionate towards and I asked myself why. 

CONNIE:  Really nice reflection. All right, this is a question I’ve been really enjoying asking people recently and it’s kind of a fun one I was first asked by my 19-year-old cousin, which is what are some of your hot takes?

DYLAN:  Hot takes. Well, give me a subject or a point of view and I’ll try to give you a hot take on it.

CONNIE:  Absolutely. A hot take on food.

DYLAN:  Oh, well, I have really bad acid reflux so I try not to drink caffeine and I also try to stay away from night shades and tomato. But the biggest hot take I have on food is that I hate chocolate.

CONNIE:  Oh wow.

DYLAN:  Yeah. I just have always hated chocolate. It’s almost like this thing where I feel like I’m in The Truman Show and everyone else is gonna at some point be like ha ha, I got you and I took a bite of chocolate and pretend it’s good because I’ve just been pushed this way my entire life but really it’s not good, it sucks, I don’t know what y’all are thinking.

CONNIE: That’s amazing. What about chocolate with nuts?

DYLAN:  It’s gross.

CONNIE:  Still gross. Kit-Kats?

DYLAN:  Everything chocolate is gross. It’s disgusting.

CONNIE:  Wow, that’s a great hot take. I’ll confess one. I don’t like pizza. That freaks people out.

DYLAN:  That’s fair. Yeah, I mean, it’s bread and cheese, it’s not exactly the most healthy food. 

CONNIE:  It’s kind of goopy, it’s a little hard to deal with. I want to get a couple more hot takes, I think this is a fun question. 

DYLAN:  Okay, okay.

CONNIE:  What is a hot take on San Francisco?

DYLAN:  I’ll give three. One is its beautiful and it’s a majestic place that has endured as a creative hub for many decades and that’s not going anywhere. The second is that it is no longer, along with the Bay Area, going to be the top hub in tech. 

And the third is, as a resident of San Francisco, is that I will put a political opinion out there, which is that I really believe that we have to actually care about crime and if we see stores shutting down because they’re getting so many people shoplifting, at least we should have a conversation about it. I’m seeing some people saying that’s just not happening and denying it’s happening and that really frustrates me.

CONNIE:  Understood. Hot take on space travel?

DYLAN:  Love it, go to the stars. I think there’s some perspective from people that says we have so many problems on earth, why are we going and exploring new frontiers? Why not go and solve those problems on earth? For example, a lot of people criticized Jeff Bezos for his work on Blue Origin. That was also after he donated or committed a ton of money to climate change. So I think it’s not an ‘or’ it’s an ‘and.’ 

And I have nothing but respect for people that are pushing the frontiers of technology, science and trying to figure out ways to make sure that in a worst case scenario, if we blow ourselves up, that some part of our human consciousness remains. 

Also, if there were aliens, I think that we’d all be very focused on the state of space travel. I’m not saying there are, I’m saying that the government has been very quiet about the subject. And they have been willing to admit that there’s a lot of UFOs out there and we have no idea what they are. So either that means that we are behind on their mission in terms of military or that there’s phenomenon we can’t explain. In either case, I think you want to invest a lot in space travel and aeronautics right now.

CONNIE:  I’m into that, I’m a huge,  huge fan of space. It seems really cool. All right, well thanks for diving into the hot takes segment.

DYLAN:  Sure. That was fun.

CONNIE:  Yeah, learned a lot. What is keeping you up at night?

DYLAN:  I mean, for Figma we’re growing so fast and so it’s just like how to maintain culture when we’re distributed, when we’re growing really quickly, that’s super important. So trying to make sure that we do a good job of that.

CONNIE:  Absolutely. What is one piece of advice that you have for companies who want to be excellent at design?

DYLAN:  Oh, I think it comes from the top. So if your leadership doesn’t care about design, make a case for that. Make sure that they start caring. And if you are leadership at a company, start caring about design, start talking to your designers more, start talking to your product people more, anyone who is working on the digital project experience. That, I suspect, will be the reason you win or lose the business. 

CONNIE:  Hmm, I would love for you to expand on that. Like, if you pretend you’re talking to maybe some skeptical leader out there, what is your pitch right now for why they should care about design?

DYLAN: Well the entire world is going from physical to digital, like we talked about. And if you ignore that transition and you say that the ways of the past are going to serve you and you don’t have to continue to innovate and to keep pushing on the design of your experience, I just think that some competitor is going to come find you and they’re going to beat you. 

And so if you want to maintain your market position, even as an incumbent or a laggard and certainly if you want to gain market position against others, design can be a differentiator. And you either have to be leaning into that to go on the offensive or leaning into that in order to be on the defensive. But either way, it is an arms race and if you don’t participate in it, you’re just going to lose. 

CONNIE:  All right, Dylan, I’ve got one more hot take for you. 

DYLAN:  All right, let’s do it. 

CONNIE:  What’s your hot take on becoming a dad?

DYLAN:  I’m so excited. [laughs] It’s gonna be awesome. I can’t wait to meet this kid. 

CONNIE:  That’s so great. Dylan, thank you so much. This is such an exciting time for you between the growth and momentum of Figma and the opportunities that you and your team have created for all of us designers in the tech community, it has been real swell to talk to you about all of that today.

DYLAN:  Thank you. Thank you for supporting us and for having me today.

CONNIE:  Absolutely. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. And here’s to more success for you and a great  year ahead for Figma and for everyone listening out there as well. Stay healthy a stay positive.  Thanks, all.

DYLAN:  Thank you.

End. 

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We admire journalists today more than ever. Whether getting their start as a solo blogger on their own beat, or growing up in a thriving newsroom, journalists must forge their own unique work life as they write the first draft of history.

So it’s no surprise that this episode of the Distributed podcast with Matt Mullenweg and special guest Erica Pandey, business journalist and writer of the What’s Next newsletter at Axios, moves fast and covers a lot of ground, from Erica’s career, to how she works with her Axios colleagues in different cities and bureaus, to what she is seeing as she covers the intersection of technology, business and people.

Erica has recently written about how workers are discovering their own ‘Third Workplace,” and shared insight on how HR departments can improve childcare benefits for working parents. “Childcare has always been a problem. The pandemic just spotlighted it, and hopefully now something will be done about it,” says Pandey.

She balances Axios’ Smart Brevity style with authoritative reporting on complex topics, seeking multiples perspectives, from data to experts to people on the ground.  Says Erica, “One of my greatest joys is being able to talk to people.”

The lively conversation centers on how we’re all returning to work after so much change and adaptation, including the rise of hybrid workplaces.

“The best possible form of hybrid – and this is not just me, this is what HR experts are trying to game out here –  is everybody meeting, and (then) everybody at home, at the same time,” says Pandey. “The benefits of being in person, which are social interaction, which may be rubbing shoulders with leadership, which may be the innovation that happens on the spot when you are talking with someone at the coffee maker, happen when everyone is there. And then when everyone’s home, they can work on solo projects or get longer term projects done.”

“When you make it so that there is no penalty for not being in the office,” Matt later agrees,  “you’re not missing opportunities, you’re not missing socialization, you’re not missing anything. That is to me the superpower (of distributed work).” 

The duo see that this moment may represent – as Erica names it – a ‘code switch’ from prioritizing a job near your family and social life, to adjusting your work to where you live. But it’s an adjustment for everyone, she adds, including journalists:

“Journalism is also so much about the energy of the newsroom. There’s the camaraderie of it too.  When you’re always distributed…and you don’t get to come back to your desk with all of your colleagues typing away furiously, you do lose a sense of the team sport of it.”

And that may be what we can all learn from journalists: at home, out for an interview, writing from a Third Workplace or with the team in the newsroom, figuring out how and where we work our best, deadlines and all.

“We’re not work from home evangelists. We’re kind of like ‘Work from wherever you’re going to be most effective’ evangelists,” says Matt. “I can’t wait for people to experience a good version of work from anywhere – not where you’re isolated, and fearing for your life or your family, but where you can actually really get out and enjoy your community.”

Thanks to Erica for joining and sharing her insight. And thanks for listening.

The full episode transcript is below

***

MATT MULLENWEG:  All right, howdy everybody and welcome to the Distributed podcast. I’m your host, Matt Mullenweg. Today’s guest is a hard-working reporter covering the intersection of business, technology and people. 

Erica Pandy is a business writer for Axios and author of the What’s Next newsletter. The last few months of her coverage has included biometric tracking, pandemic-driven migration patterns and a subject near and dear to my heart, which is the fried chicken shortage. We follow her most closely for her extensive coverage of the changing workplace, including diversity hiring, gender inequalities and other trends surrounding the return-to-work discussion.

Erica has been writing a lot about hybrid office culture, hybrid schools and even hybrid concerts and weddings. So you can imagine we’re going to be talking about one of our favorite topics – distributed work. Axios is an exciting publisher as well and Erica is right in the middle of some of the most relevant trends in reporting. So I’m excited to learn from someone whose work is all about learning from others in business, tech and beyond. 

So, Erica, thank you so much for joining today.

ERICA PANDY:  Thanks, Matt. It is awesome to be here.

MATT:  So, where are you joining us from today just out of curiosity?

ERICA:  So I actually am living out the trends that I’m writing. I lived in Brooklyn, New York, I was a classic millennial living in Brooklyn having that perfect hipster lifestyle. And after the pandemic hit, I have since moved to Hoboken, New Jersey. So, New Jersey has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic era exodus from New York and I am definitely part of that. I never saw myself as a New Jersey person but there’s more space and if I’m not going to be having to go to the office every single day I don’t mind being in a different state.

MATT:  How did you choose Hoboken?

ERICA:  A couple reasons. It’s just cheaper, first of all, than Brooklyn and I wanted to.. Also I’m one of those people who decided to buy during the pandemic. I had rented before this and for the price of something in Hoboken, I’d be living in a studio in Brooklyn. And there’s a little bit more space, there’s a little bit.. it’s a little quieter, a better place to raise a puppy. I also got a pandemic puppy. I’m really hitting all the stereotypes here. So, yeah, a plethora of reasons but yeah, not.. New York kind of shutting down for a year made me realize that I didn’t need to be in the thick of it all the time.

MATT:  How is it feeling over there? I’ve heard New York is feeling a lot of energy and almost back to normal.

ERICA:  Yeah, it really is. I mean, everything from the restaurant scene to the entertainment scene is back. And some of the things that the city is holding onto I think are great too. You know, all of those outdoor dining set ups that people really grew to love are staying up through the summer. And I think there is a real desire for that space that restaurants and people took over from cars in cities. So I’m hoping that the New York of the future will be a little bit more community driven and a little bit less just cars and parking. 

MATT:  It also feels like restaurants that happen to have street front have disproportionately benefited from that from like a restaurant in a basement or a second floor.

ERICA:  Absolutely. It’s nice to see those kind of speakeasy type spots coming back too now that people aren’t really afraid to be in a cellar somewhere, in close quarters with others. Because that’s also quintessentially part of the New York experience. But that outdoor dining set up is basically like free advertising. You walk by, you see a well decorated outdoor dining set up, it’s covered, you go right ahead.

And one interesting thing that I’ve seen in New York, I don’t know if it’s happening as much in other cities, is restaurants, which as you and I know have been battered by the pandemic, are using this new world to make money in new ways. Like, there’s some cafes here in New York that opened for dinner at five or six but during the day they rent out their table space to remote workers so you can work from a place that’s not the home or the office. 

MATT:  Wow, and have you tried this yet?

ERICA:  Yes. I tried it at a cafe in the East Village called Kindred. They’re like Eastern European food at night and a classic dinner spot but during the day, for $25 you get a table for eight hours, you get to have free Wi-Fi access, you have outlets right there and free coffee all day. And they’ve built in the outlets into the outdoor dining set up so you can sit outside but in a sort of closed, less-chaotic space. 

It’s this rise of the third workplace. I like the flexibility of working in isolation on my own times sometimes, but you get sick of being in your house, especially if you’re a New Yorker and being in your house means being with three roommates.

MATT:  Are there any studies or surveys you’ve come across that say how many people want to do this or how often it’s happening?

ERICA:  Well, there aren’t really studies on this call it the third workplace yet because it’s so new. But the overwhelming majority of people, like around 60 or 70 percent, across different studies, want to do hybrid work. And what we’re learning is that hybrid work doesn’t really mean just home or the office, it means all sorts of things. 

So, maybe you want to go to L.A. for a couple of days and visit friends but you only want to take one of the days off and you work there. Maybe you want to rent some space in a WeWork that’s closer to where you live rather than commute 40 minutes to the office. So, hybrid just encompasses all of these things where you’re just taking your laptop and sitting down and work happens where you are.

And then there’s only about 10 or 15 percent of people who want in-person all the time or at-home all the time. So it’s very much those are the two extremes and everybody else kind of wants to be a floater.

MATT:  What feels tricky about the term ‘hybrid’ is you can kind of bring to it almost anything. Like, arguably, Automattic, which has been distributed for 15 years, was hybrid because we would do meet-ups. So we would try to see colleagues sometimes, it was just once year for the whole company and then a few weeks a year for each team. So I guess that is a form of hybrid. But I’m curious, if you were to describe the best possible form of hybrid and the worst possible form of hybrid, which would each archetype be?

ERICA: So, the best possible form of hybrid, and this is not just me, this is what some HR experts are trying to game out here, is every.. like you’re saying with Automattic, everybody meeting and everybody at home at the same time. So, if you’ve really going to do a hybrid work week what that would look like is everybody comes to the office on Mondays or Wednesdays, for example, and everybody is home on the other three days. The worst possible form of hybrid is when people just come and go as they please, which is unfortunately what a lot of companies are leaning towards. 

And I will explain why each of those is. The best works the best because then the benefits of being in-person, which is that social interaction, which may be rubbing shoulders with leadership, which may be the innovation that happens on the spot when you are talking to someone at the coffee maker, happens when everyone is there. And then, when everyone is home, they can work on solo projects or get longer term projects done. If people are just coming and going as they please you might come to an empty office or you might stay home on the day where everyone else is there. So it doesn’t really work for anybody.

If you’re trying to make it a little bit more structured then you please your employees who want the social interaction but you also make your employees happy who want to be home more. If you just let people do whatever, you end up in a situation where maybe someone really wants to come to the office and then they arrive and they realize I’m coming in on days when no one else is here, I don’t like this energy, I’m leaving and going to a different company. But obviously it’s not as simple as that. 

MATT:  Can you just ask your colleagues, like, hey are you going to be there on Wednesday?

ERICA:  I’ve kind of been doing that with Axios, trying to set up days where everyone comes in. But again, it’s not that simple because there’s some folks who want to work from home all the time and hybrid policies do let them do that. So I have honestly no idea what the future is going to look like. 

I do sympathize with my colleagues who have kids or who have moved deeper into Brooklyn or further away and they don’t want to commute to an office in Chelsea every day, or ever. So we’ll see what it looks like. But I do think there’s going to be some redistributing of people towards companies that have work philosophies that align more with what they want.

MATT:  That’s funny because what you said is the best, that few days a week in, a few days out, I would actually say is the worst of all worlds. [laughter] 

ERICA:  Yeah. You have a point too because if you have a days in, a few days out, then if I’m someone who really wants to move far away, I have to kind of have one foot in the door all the time. So that doesn’t have its (perks either?). 

What you’re saying is great too. I mean, if you want to be an all-remote company but then do very intentional, big budget retreats where you bring everyone together in a way that’s fun and cool, that also works. So yeah, we’ll have to see where different companies land. Yeah, I don’t think anyone really knows. That is such a good example of how convoluted it all is that we have opposite ideas of what’s good, what’s bad.

MATT: [laughs] Yeah, for me so much of the power of working from anywhere is that ability to, like you said, travel for a week or two or even for a few days, or just leave that kind of commuting, what’s it called, like the commuting geographic boundary of where that office happens to be. Because then you unlock access to all the talent that either never lived there in the first place or all the talent that is thinking about something different, something further afield in Hoboken for optimizing their life and integrating their life with their work and their family as best as they could. 

ERICA: Mhm.

MATT:  So, when you make it so there’s no penalty for not being in the office – you’re not missing opportunities, you’re not missing socialization, you’re not missing anything, that is to me the superpower of it and something companies have to do anyway, by the way, as soon as they get big enough where they’re going to have multiple offices or even multiple floors in the same office. Like, how much of that benefit of in-person work if your team is spread across three different floors and only sees each other every now and then are you really getting? 

I’m curious, like, the really objective challenge of the sort of hand wave-y benefits of in-person work, especially after we had a year, a year and a half, of companies doing some of the best ever, certainly by stock market performance, at a time when we literally couldn’t see each other. 

ERICA:  Yeah. I think also going a little bit back on what works.. I think my perspective is a little bit warped just by my age too. I’m in that kind of mid to late twenties contingent and I really like the office. I mean, 25 percent of people are still meeting their spouses at the office. And I think there’s a lot of.. I talked to a lot of recently minted college grads who are finally ready to venture out into the world and have that daily commute in L.A. or New York and suddenly it’s like, oh, people don’t really come in anymore, you can if you want to but no one is really here. 

So, I think you’ll see a little bit of tension there too between people who have families, who have established networks, who are very much happy to work from anywhere, stay home, or do their own thing, and then people who really are relying on coming into the office, finding a mentor, building a network because they just don’t have that yet. 

MATT:  Hmm. What does that say about the paucity of our social life as well, the whole idea of bowling alone, that the third place also has to be work related? Maybe it would be a good measure. Certainly as a manager, I’d prefer if less people met each other at work and had romantic entanglements. So maybe if that 25 percent went down, it doesn’t necessarily need to be a bad thing. It could also mean that we’re connecting more with community organizations, churches, volunteer organizations, sports, music, fun stuff that could be more interest or passion based than necessarily happening to work for the same company.

ERICA:  I mean, that’s such a good point. So many of our other relationships, like our friendships and our family relationships, we conduct remotely just so we can have our work relationships in person. So, maybe it’s a code switch that we as a society, as a country, have to go through where work becomes a remote thing and family and friends and hobbies and interests become the in-person thing.

MATT:  That is a really interesting way to put it. I wouldn’t have used those terms but I like it a lot.

ERICA: Mhm.

MATT:  I feel like journalists and reporters have always been a little more adapted to distributed work because often your beats or your reporting is going to take you away from the office. So how did you see that with your work and your colleagues?

ERICA:  Absolutely true. I mean we’ve always had to have different bureaus and the tech reporters are out in San Francisco, some of the businesspeople are up in New York and then you’ve got politics in D.C. So we’re definitely used to that.  And also, reporting involves work trips. 

But journalism I think also is so much about the energy of the newsroom. A lot of people grow up watching those movies and TV shows about all the journalists on deadline, at computers. So there is a camaraderie of that too. So I think when you’re always distributed and you don’t have.. maybe you do the work trip and you don’t get to come back to your desk with all your colleagues typing away furiously, you do lose a sense of the team sport aspect of it. 

And journalists have been through a lot. I mean, covering crisis after crisis, whether its political crises or public health crises with the coronavirus, has been really, really taxing on journalists’ mental health. And I think the sense of community being lost was not great. But we have Zoom, we have all of these technologies that let us connect again. And I’m sure newsrooms will be among the first to kind of have retreats and bring everyone together as soon as it’s safe to do so. And some are already doing so.

MATT:  I can’t wait for people to experience a good version of work from anywhere. Not where you’re isolated and fearing for your life with your loved ones but where you can actually get out and really enjoy your community because that is a, at least I would say a qualitatively, like, order of magnitude different than certainly what I and many of my colleagues experienced in the past year. 

ERICA:  That is so true. I hear this when I talk to people who have been doing remote work and remote teams before the pandemic and I hear them but I can’t really relate because I haven’t been there yet. But yet people have said it’s very simple – working from home doesn’t always mean working from home during a public health crisis. It’s not always like this. 

So I think once people start to loosen that negative association they have it could be really great. And realizing that you can do retreats and meet up whenever you need to.. For example, we have this great thing happening at Axios right now where our editorial leadership, our editor-in-chief and other top editors are doing a tour to our different bureaus and coming to the reporters instead of all the reporters having to fly out to headquarters. And that has been great for them to have an ear to the ground and it has been great for people to have the editor-in-chief come to their city. 

I mean, Axios has expanded into local coverage. So we’ve got a bureau in northwest Arkansas now, we’ve got one in Des Moines. So, having the leadership come there is great. 

MATT: As a leader I also found it also just.. you get a sense of the place so much more from being around the people in their home territory than you would if they were visiting a headquarters or making a pilgrimage. So I’m excited to hear that. 

I actually, I guess it was last month now in New York, I was on a visit for a separate reason and I realized that so many of the folks I worked most closely with in the company were in the New York area or within an hour flight. So, I was actually able to have like ten one-on-one lunches and dinners and things with some of these colleagues who I’m very, very fond of and we work very closely. But it was almost.. We probably talked about work less as a percentage than we normally do in meetings just because it was so nice to connect again as humans and I really appreciated that.

ERICA: Yeah, that is such a big part of it too. When those interactions with leadership happen in your hometown, when you’re showing them the local spot to eat rather than everyone at HQ and at a company retreat it is a lot more generative and a lot more.. Like you said, it’s a lot more fulfilling than just all right, the CEO is at the headquarters, everybody report there and sit for meetings or seminars. 

MATT: You had mentioned the verve of a newsroom and it sounds like you might be based with.. Axios has an office in New York?

ERICA:  Yes, we do have an office in New York, right in the Chelsea, right by Penn Station area. And one of my fears in the middle of the pandemic was that we were going to shut that down because our headquarters is D.C., New York was always a side office. But I respect that our founders seem to have a great desire to have a presence in New York and even if most people want to work from home or they just.. 

Because the New York office here at Axios tends to be more design and tech and engineering folks, so not necessarily people who are craving the energy of a newsroom. But we’re going to keep it open and I think we’re going to keep expanding the team up here. So that’s great for me.

MATT:  Yeah. I think especially New York is one of those cities where a lot of people are working from home or their workplace options are not the best.

ERICA: Yes, exactly. And you’re seeing new things. Like, WeWork has tried to become the Uber for the office market, which I think is interesting. You can book WeWork space by the hour now instead of getting a long-term lease for lots and lots of money for your company, you can just go in as a single person and say I’m going to have a desk there for four hours today. And then this restaurant model that I’m telling you about.

So I do think there are some opportunities for businesses to get creative here, to accommodate the rise of the third workplace. You might see it improve. But for now, trying to set up shop in a coffee shop in New York where you’re probably not going to have an outlet, you might get glares from people saying why did you buy one croissant and now you’ve been here for three and a half hours.. [laughter] So, as of now it’s not great but I am hopeful for the future.

MATT:  I also think about the privacy of conversations. Like, what if you’re having a sensitive conversation with a source or something like that? Do you want to do that in a coffee shop where there’s ten people listening to you?

ERICA:  Absolutely not. And even if you know that no one can listen or no one can hear you, just having the source hear the hullabaloo in the background and realizing you’re in public is just not a great look. 

MATT:  I have always been such a fan of journalism and journalists and you mentioned watching movies or the idolization that might have caused people to get into it. I’m curious what was your moment where you decided this might be something you’d want to pursue as your career and as your passion?

ERICA:  It’s really interesting because it wasn’t really a movie that got me excited. Most of the movies that I watched the journalists were the annoying guys or the bad guys, I’m thinking about The West Wing, which I loved and the journalists were always the ones that came and spoiled all the fun by telling everyone the secret thing that was happening at the White House. [laughter]

But for me, I just kind of.. I never really latched onto one subject at school, I kind of liked a little of everything. And that made me confused, you know, what am I going to go into? And then I realized that journalism is the kind of profession where you can become an expert in a different thing every week and then just completely move onto something else and revisit it when you want to. And that idea of just floating around and diving into these micro passions I think really landed well with me.

Like you were saying, I mean, I wrote about weddings a couple of weeks ago, I’ve written about surveillance, I’ve written about China, I have written about stuff that I personally find interesting. My family is from Nepal, I wrote a story for Axios about Nepal’s geopolitical role in Asia as between these stalwarts, India and China. And then I moved onto a business beat and was able to cover remote work and all kinds of stuff. So, fun stuff, serious stuff, and just the range of things you can do rather than just doing the same thing every day I think was what really appealed to me.

MATT:  As a funny aside and a correlation I have realized.. We’ve hired thousands of people over the years and we definitely have hired some who thought why would enjoy distributed work and ended up really wanting to be in a company with an office, which I think that is a completely fair reason and a good reason to leave Automattic. But I noticed that a really high percentage of the folks who wanted that office experience were obsessed with the show West Wing. Like could quote the episodes.

ERICA:  Really?

MATT:  I love the show as well but there is something about that energy of that fictional West Wing, which was definitely infectious. Like, who wouldn’t want to live in a place where.. or work in and spend all your hours in a place like that environment?

ERICA: We were just talking about work being life. And that show was about work being life and they made it look pretty cool. 

MATT:  And there was such fun.. I did notice on those folks as well, they would just make everything a little more exciting on the good end and a little more dramatic on the bad end, kind of like the show does. You know? Like normal stuff would happen and it would be clever and funny.  It wasn’t running into a tree; it was a sudden arboreal stop. And you’re like, oh that’s so good. 

ERICA:  Right, exactly, exactly. You become kind of entranced by office politics with that show and there’s a few others like it but it’s just so.. yeah. And journalists are like that too. When you are a reporter and your whole job is about seeking out information and learning things, you realize that you want to do that about your own colleagues and your own company. So I think the office politics and office gossip in newsrooms is a cut above everywhere else. 

MATT: And how the media covers media I’ve noticed as well is I think with added vim and vigor than almost any other topic.

ERICA:  Absolutely. Some of the most voraciously consumed content by journalists is media journalism because what is more interesting than your own life? All of my colleagues have become obsessed with the show Succession for the same reason. It’s about media, it’s about the business of media, which is just so interesting.

MATT:  Is that the one loosely inspired by the Murdoch family?

ERICA:  Yes, yes that’s the one.

MATT:  You mentioned moving between these topics, which is very different than many, many roles because you are writing authoritatively as part of the first draft of history on.. it could be a different thing every week. So how do you approach boot strapping your knowledge in the (fundamentalism area?) to write about it in that authoritative way?

ERICA: So, I think it’s just about talking to the right people and you have to go from the top down. So, say you’re writing about the effects of virtual learning on students with learning disabilities, which is something I’ve done, and you have two weeks to pull together a story on it. Obviously, my beat is not education primarily so it’s not something I’m too well versed in so I’d start by talking to education professors who are really looking at this from the big picture view. 

Then you go a level below that and you talk to teachers and non-profits, people who run non-profits on this issue. And then you go right to the source and you talk to families or students who are dealing with this on a day-to-day basis. And I think getting those three perspectives from the 30,000-foot view to a level down to right on the ground really helps you form a picture in a way that you can write authoritatively on any topic.

That method has worked for me well and I also love talking to people. And I have friends who say I could not cold call all day or I could not spend my day talking to strangers but it’s I think one of my greatest joys is being able to talk to different people, especially the families, who are dealing with this. Or, you know, for my story on the future of weddings, I spoke to an actual couple who had a hybrid wedding. And people just sharing their stories is the most interesting part of it. And so many reporters now just talk to the experts and ignore the people so I think doing both is the perfect balance.

MATT:  What do you do when the experts and what you’re hearing on the ground isn’t congruent?

ERICA:  That’s why you keep the numbers and you go back to them. I’ve had experts tell me remote work works for everybody, it’s great. And you take that, this person has been studying remote work, they’ve been studying remote teams, they probably know what’s what. Then you talk to someone saying remote work is driving me crazy, I’m sitting and my two roommates are taking meetings, the wi-fi never works, I feel like I’ve lost my sense of self. 

You go back to the experts and say but some people are saying this, what do you say? The experts can usually riff right there on the spot and say well, it might not work for everybody, here’s some examples that I found that I didn’t share with you on that first call. So, just taking your sources back to each other so they are almost having conversations through you also I think makes any story better.

MATT:  The role of studies and surveys, it seems like when an article comes out, it gets covered very extensively in journalism and that becomes common knowledge. But also studies are constantly being reversed, like social science findings that maybe they don’t replicate or that changes and often that doesn’t get picked up as much. Or surveys might have flaws in their methodology. So, how do you balance that? Do you have to be an amateur statistician as well?

ERICA: I think with the rise of Twitter we’ve just become such headline-oriented news consumers. So you see so many people just taking a stat from a study, pasting it at the top and publishing that. And that has its place but I always think studies should be reported with a lot more context. I don’t think they should ever be.. in the first sentence of the story, you shouldn’t.. if you have that study you should add in a few more, unless it’s something like a big paper that came out in a scientific journal.

But there are so many studies that are done, for example, saying how many people want to do remote work versus hybrid work and there’s different stats on each one, including a few.. I like to wait until there’s a few that have the same headline and then you can write about it in a more qualitative way. And most newsrooms now have dedicated people on staff who are on there to gut check and make sure that what we are reporting is.. the methodology stands and is reportable and has integrity.

And newsrooms are also doing their own surveys. So I feel like surveys should be taken with a grain of salt but once you start seeing four or five surveys that are saying the same sort of thing then maybe it’s okay to lean into it a little bit.

MATT:  Yeah and also as a journalist you know the incredible power of a question. And I’ve seen it while running surveys. Phrasing a question even a word or two differently can drastically change the outcome and how people respond to it.

ERICA: Absolutely, yeah. So, sometimes you ask people do you like hybrid work, for example, and they will say no but you forget to ask them, like you say, would you like hybrid work if you weren’t stuck at home because of the pandemic and then it completely changes.

MATT:  Yeah. I wonder that about the 15 percent that say they want to be remote all the time. Does that truly mean never, ever seeing your colleagues, ever? 

ERICA:  Yeah.

MATT: [00:28:40.22] (Attributing?) that to 15 percent of us seems high there. Like, who would..? You want to see them at least maybe once a year or once a decade, something.

ERICA:  Yeah, well I mean you’re so right. Do those people think that this is a world without any retreats or do they think this is a world where the holiday party still happens, I just don’t have to go into the office? And you don’t know that until you conduct the survey yourself. So I think you’ll see more and more newsrooms do that, too. 

But my feeling is that the people who say they want all remote are people who say I don’t want to even live within commuting distance of my workplace. I want to be able to be anywhere, whether that’s move across the country or move to a different country and still be a part of this. But I’m sure, like you said, those people do want that occasional meet-up even if it’s once a year or once every six months.

MATT:  We have experimented so much with this over the decades really and ended up in a place where we said hey, work from anywhere, like literally we could care less and we want you to be able to be productive but expect three to four weeks of travel per year. And it was really important to communicate that up front because people might need childcare or pet sitting or someone to water the plants – they might need a plan for being away from home for three or four weeks. 

And I also want them.. we don’t have any special subsidies around that so I want them to take that into account with their compensation, like at this salary, knowing that you’ll need to be away from home for three or four weeks per year, is that something you want to accept? Because we’re not going to, say, pay for pet sitting or any of those other things that.. costs you might incur from being away from home.

ERICA:  And speaking of subsidies like you’re saying, we also have to figure out the new model for how we pay for the actual office. Because a lot of people have dealt with the cost of their office being offset onto them, whether that’s through wi-fi or electricity or having to buy a desk or a set up or whatever it is. And lots of companies have given stipends for this kind of thing. But if this is going to be, if remote work is going to be a big part of the working moving forward, companies are going to have to figure out what helping people set up their offices and keep their offices running looks like when they’re not in the central office building. 

MATT:  Yes. We’ve actually for many years had remote ergonomics consultants as well, so people who you can go on Zoom and walk them through your home set up – the monitor, the chair, everything like that. And it can make a huge difference. You get that stuff for free in an office, sort of, but the downside is you also get lowest common denominator of the desk, the chair, etcetera. 

So we just say a budget, I forget exactly what it was, maybe it’s a $1000 or $1500 or something to set up your home office, and you can get whatever chair you want, whatever desk you want, etcetera. So there is a lot more variety and personalization in how people can configure it, given that they have the space and the timing to do so, which if you have to commute into a certain location, you might be making tradeoffs to be within a reasonable commute time. 

I don’t have the survey here but almost no one is like wow, I love my two hour a day commute. [laughter] It does feel like one of those under.. or overrated things about any sort of office work is that commute time.

ERICA:  Yeah, that’s kind of become the truth of the times is that people might like the office but they definitely hate the commute. And so I think that’s going to influence decisions going forward too.

I’m curious though, from what you’re saying, have you thought about the third workplace before the pandemic? I’m sure it’s come up. Because I’m thinking about employees of yours that may be sharing apartments with people or not able to set up the ideal home office. I wonder what strategies they have.

MATT:  Yeah it’s worth saying because we do very few paid stipends or benefits at Automattic partly because it’s difficult to administer across 80 countries but we just also want to give people a choice. We don’t want to be too paternalistic so we want to pay people fantastic salaries and then they can direct that as they choose. 

But two exceptions are obviously the retreats or meet-ups, which we have a $250 per person, per day budget for lodging and everything while you’re there. And the $250 also shows up one other place, which is we have a co-working stipend. So, up to $250 per person, per month you can put towards a WeWork equivalent. Or we have had a lot of people do exactly what you described in the past – find a bar or a restaurant that’s closed during the day and just get access. Or we allow you to put that $250 towards if you need to buy that croissant to not get kicked out of the coffee shop, that’s kind of all included. 

Remarkably, it’s not used as much as you would think. But we’re not work from home evangelists, we’re kind of like work wherever you’re going to be most effective evangelists and giving people the choice and autonomy there. So if that is a WeWork for you, awesome. And I actually love that there can be creative juxtapositions of folks working on not just different teams but different companies but interacting, grabbing lunch together and what those creative collisions can inspire.

ERICA:  Absolutely. I think that the other hard part for a lot of people during the pandemic experimenting with remote work has been every day is something new.  You wake up, your dog might be feeling particularly loud today and that throws a wrench in your plans, your kid might be having a particularly tough day at school, you might try to go to a coffee shop and find there’s no seats. So I think the more people are a little bit more intentional about this and figure out what they like and figure out a routine for them, the better it works. 

My parents recently moved to Manhattan during the pandemic, they were the rare move in. And I have been picking a day a week to go and work from their apartment and be with them and just knowing on Sunday that I’m going to do that on a Tuesday makes me feel better than waking up and just seeing where the day takes me.

MATT: That must be really beautiful for them as well. So that’s cool you’re able to do that.

ERICA:  Yeah, that’s another trend I’ve been following is the evolving of family relationships during all this. It was kind of a renaissance for families at the beginning of the pandemic with.. you had multi-generational households for the first time in a long time, at least in the U.S., and people were loving it. Grandparents were loving spending time with grandchildren even if it was just because parents didn’t want to deal with childcare during remote school. 

And you had a lot of young kids obviously, recent graduates having to move back in with mom and dad rather than to start life. And some families hated it but others loved it. So there were definitely some perks there. So I think it has been a good time for families. 

And I think you’ll see a lot of those boomerang folks, those people who moved away before the pandemic but then maybe moved back home to a smaller town so they could be close to their parents for childcare, you’ll see a lot of them stick around because childcare is expensive and hard. And if your mom and dad are close by and you trust them and they’re good with your kids and both parties are happy, then why move back, why not just keep working remotely from your hometown?

MATT: Yeah. One thing you’ve written about that I actually found very alarming was the difference in experience between genders, men and women, on experiencing the pandemic, wanting to return to work, remote work, etcetera. So, what’s the latest there? What have you found and what do you think that bodes for this return to normalcy that hopefully we have over the coming year or two?

ERICA:  The big trend right now that people are talking about is this idea of the great resignation, upwards of 40 percent of people might leave their jobs or are considering leaving their jobs and that has been painted as such a positive story, it is an era of worker power, there’s open jobs, you can decide to go to a different job if you like a working style better or if you want to switch careers. 

But the dark side of that is, like you said, a lot of women have really suffered. About a million mothers have left the workforce due to the pandemic and due to child-care burdens and it is unclear if many of them go back. There’s a remote school that’s continuing that’s keeping people at home. And a lot of times, specifically for women, I mean, we’ve seen this with maternity leave, it can be hard to reenter at the same salary or at the same level if you leave and try to go to a different job. It’s maybe hard to get back into the swing of things if you have a kid now and you can’t go to that after work drinks or those happy hours where a lot of networking and rubbing shoulders happens. 

So the pandemic has made that worse. And I think if you’ll see a future in which families have realized that staying home is better for childcare and they decide only one parent is going to go back to the office and the other parent is going to pursue remote work, it’s typically going to be, in heterosexual couples, the husband going back to work and the wife staying home with the kids. And I worry about an out of sight, out of mind culture in these hybrid workplaces where typically women are staying home and they’re losing out on raises or promotions or worse.

MATT: Well that would be terrible. Definitely we don’t want a regression in that, we’ve had a lot of progress in the past century there.

ERICA: Mhm. And one more thing on this, that’s why I think one of the biggest challenges HR departments are going to have to tackle, and one of the best ways to recruit and retain is going to be beefing up your childcare benefits in the workplace, giving parents actual money to put towards childcare or giving them flexible schedules and making sure that having a kid isn’t something that you just don’t talk about anymore, it’s more front and center. 

But that’s been one of the sad things about covering specifically childcare during the pandemic is I don’t have a kid but I have talked to so many colleagues and sources and they’ve said, yeah, this is just how it is, finally people are paying attention now because the numbers are so stark and people are on Zoom calls and they’re seeing what my kids are like in the background. But childcare has always been a problem, the pandemic just spotlighted it and hopefully something now will be done about it.

MATT:  I think there’s also an opportunity there for companies that can be truly distributed where you don’t need to be at the after-work drinks to get ahead. And we have seen the flexibility being the key thing there. 

Even a hybrid, you know, one version of hybrid is you don’t have to be in an office at all but you have to work the same hours, kind of like nine to five, standard hours in a given time zone. And I think that also loses a lot of the benefits of that true flexibility. So if you are able to design.. accomplish the same in a given week as someone who works at the office nine to five but slice and dice it however best fits your schedule, maybe that means off a bit in the morning, off a bit in the afternoon to take your kids, pick your kids up, those types of things.

But we’ve found people do that very naturally. I think this is something parents have always done, which is figure out how to make things work. But it’s.. in an office environment, I think just culturally, the social mores of leaving the office in the middle of the day, even if the company was supportive of it, would feel weird to do because people equate being in the chair or being in meetings with working. 

ERICA:  Right and that was such a given up until the pandemic. I really do think that a lot of these norms are breaking down. Who knows if they’ll stay that way. But it’s a good thing to see not just are we rethinking where we work from, we are also rethinking the hours we work. 

One great point I saw made in The Economist by Adam Grant, who is a work psychologist at Wharton was why is it that the workday ends at five and the school day ends at three? That makes no sense. We have had this forever where parents have these two hours, three to five, where they are constantly worried – where do I put my kid, do I pay for after school? Why don’t we just have the workday end at three and start earlier if it needs to or just have a shorter workday? I think just rethinking just everything from the place to the times to the structure of teams that the pandemic has allowed us to really do is a great thing.

MATT:  Yeah, it’s not often where you get the opportunity to make these experiments, go through it all at the same time. Right? Usually it’s like – I’ve heard this so many times – like, ohh that stuff works for Automattic but it would never work for my company or something like that.

But I was amazed actually at how quickly so many companies that had probably never thought they could operate without people going into the office were able to adapt in this emergency situation. And I think it’s actually something I’m just really proud of the world on is that, given a crisis, so many people really made it work.

ERICA:  Yeah. We think about it in the news, like, the New York Times still came out every day. They never missed a beat and no one was in the office. So it really can be done under pressure. 

MATT:  What do you see around the corner?  You cover so many things, you probably get hints of what’s in the future more than most. So what do you think listeners should keep in mind for what’s coming up?

ERICA:  There are so many little things but the big thing is just we are just going go lead much more tech-infused lives than we did before. And we have done it in the pandemic a lot but it is because the pandemic has accelerated it.  When you think about things that you didn’t think of having a tech component in the past, they will in the future.

One of my most favorite stories I’ve written most recently is the one about weddings, like I told you. So many people want to have a small, intimate wedding and they can’t because their parents or their relatives want all these people to be invited and they feel all this pressure to have the wedding that everybody else wants them to have rather than the one that they want. So now you have that intimate wedding and then everybody else gets to be a part of it for free, via Zoom. You don’t have to pay that per-plate cost.

Concerts is a huge one. Dua Lipa had five million viewers at her concert. She is the next big thing in pop. Five million viewers at her virtual concert. And not only was that a great success and it had a huge budget but just that online concert raised tickets sales for her in-person concert by 75 percent. So, not only was it a way to get her music out there but it was a way to market her in-person show, which is how artists make money, through tours and shows.

So you’ll see a lot more virtual events for people to raise the hype and get the word out there and get more people to be a part of their music without putting all of that effort into a stage and close quarters and a limited amount of tickets. 

And the other side of this is think of all the charity galas where they spend almost as much money as they raised because it’s all fancy and you’ve got a big venue booked. There were a lot of charity galas during the pandemic that raised the same amount of money just over Zoom. So you’ll see a lot more of that too, you know, more of the money going towards the cause rather than towards the fancy dinner.

So, I feel like tech is going to be a part of everything we do more and more. Another big area I cover is the future of payments in stores and contactless payment was this niche thing and you saw more and more people downloading Apple Pay or getting touch-less cards because they didn’t want to.. they wanted to minimize their touch points at a store for safety. That’ll keep going. More of that Just Walk Out, Amazon Go technology. Really, the pandemic has been an accelerant for tech everywhere.

MATT:  Yeah, I started to see the Just Walk Out in I think it was JFK or Newark, I forget which one. But they had it at one of those airport convenience stores. I was like, wow, I expected this from a tech company, I didn’t expect this from Hudson or whatever it is that always has those little stores.

ERICA:  Right.

MATT:  I guess the concert thing is also really counterintuitive to me because, as a musician and also a lover of music, there’s always been that energy of being in the room. 

But now when you started saying that I also started to think about movies. I used to love going to movie theaters. I guess I still do a little bit. But that at-home experience, if you invest a little bit more in a TV and sound and then you could have your friends, your own drinks, your own food, your own comfort, you can pause it, all that sort of stuff is actually much, much nicer. And I’ve become so attached to that, I don’t feel like I’m missing that much from the slightly bigger screen or better sound.

ERICA:  Right. It almost becomes two different experiences. Obviously going to the concert is a big night, it’s fun in and of itself. But Brandi Carlisle did this Christmas show where she was in her living room in the Christmas sweater and everything and live streaming into other people’s living rooms. So that’s a whole other type of experience where it’s way more intimate. The artist isn’t in this crazy cool costume on a stage, they are right there with you, it feels a lot more like I’m just in your house with you. So, fans of hers can enjoy her in that way and also go to a show and enjoy the big production of it. 

MATT: I also hope that makes, you know, as a lover of people learning to make music and being participatory in music, I hope that also makes it a little more accessible, right? You see a Beyonce show and it just seems so unattainable. But you see a few folks sitting on a couch in the living room and it feels like something you and your friends can do too, which I think would maybe be a good outcome as well.

ERICA:  Right, it really lowers that barrier to entry.

MATT:  It makes it more accessible. Well I appreciate it that we were able to end on that note of some exciting things coming around the corner. And Erica, thank you so much. Already your coverage has been influential and I really appreciate following your work. Thank you so much for coming on the Distributed podcast.

ERICA:  Thanks. Thanks so much, Matt. This was a lot of fun.

MATT:  All right, have a good one. Take care. And all the listeners, we’ll see you see you next time. 

End.

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“Aren’t people lonely because they don’t have their friendships at work?”

On a recent appearance of The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish of Farnam Street, Matt Mullenweg revealed that he hears this question often, and that the answer is one of many benefits of a company built to be distributed from the start.

“If your only social network is at work, you might be lonely if you weren’t working with people physcally,” answered Matt. “But then what does that open up? It opens up the opportunity for you to choose people around you geographically to spend time with.”

The conversation evolved to the Five Levels of Autonomy (spoiler: many companies made it to Level Two during the pandemic) and how it allows teams to focus on the work. “Part of our model of distributed work also provides a fair amount of autonomy in how people get their work done,” Matt said. “I like that it creates a lot more objectivity and focus around what the actual work is.”

The episode was first published in January, but it is a great listen today as many companies that became distributed by necessity in 2020 make decisions about returning to work places.

Shane and Matt also talk about blending the cultures of different business units within a company like Automattic, the future of proprietary software, and how Open Source is like kids banding together on a playground, for the greater good of the open web.

This was the 100th episode of The Knowledge Project, whose recent guests have also included Angela Duckworth, Jim Collins and Josh Kaufman.

You can listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast platform, watch it on YouTube, and read Shane’s highlights from the conversation over at The Knowledge Project.

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“Every company has a poster on the wall,” says Matt Mullenweg in the latest episode of The Distributed Podcast. Matt welcomes Sid Sijbrandij, Co-founder and CEO of GitLab, another pioneering company with Open Source origins and a long-running commitment to a completely distributed workforce.  Sid and Matt settle into a conversation about GitLab’s six values – which have been cut down from the original 13, and which are always visible in Sid’s video background – are reinforced in 20 ways at the fully-distributed company.  GitLab, now with more than 1,300 employees, updated its values over 300 times in the last calendar year. 

“They have to be reinforced,” says Sid, “and be alive in that way.”

And as for sharing just about everything publicly? “Transparency is sunlight.”

The values are part of the publicly-viewable GitLab Handbook that, with over 10,000 pages, details data both interesting and “mundane,” from compensation to how employees should interact with Hacker News. An example: “I think what’s really interesting is our engineering metrics. We pay very close to what we call the MR rate: how many merge requests did an engineer make over a month; how many did a team make over a month?” Sid shares.  “If you push on that, people start making the changes that they make smaller to kind of increase that rate.  The whole process becomes more efficient.”

Sid and Matt – an observer on GitLab’s board – get into the details: taking time off, leadership development programs, scheduling coffee chats that actually work, and much more. And they revisit predictions Sid made on Twitter in May, 2020, about the post-Pandemic future of distributed work.  Check out the full episode above, or on your favorite podcasting platform.

The full episode transcript is below.

***

MATT MULLENWEG: Howdy everybody and welcome to the Distributed Podcast. I am your host, Matt Mullenweg. Today’s guest is a like-minded leader of a software company that is driven by its values, supports open source and happens to be distributed too. Sid Sijbrandij is the Co-Founder and CEO of GitLab, a fast-growing company and a single application for the entire DevOps (life?) cycle. 

GitLab has been distributed basically from the beginning. But last May, two months into the pandemic, Sid made some predictions that we will talk about today. Even more so, Sid very often talks about the values that  drive GitLab and how they experience each day as a growing company, a really rapidly growing company, actually. 

So it’s rare to get to talk to someone who has been such an advocate for distributed teams as long. And also as full disclosure, I am a board observer of GitLab, so I have had an inside view to some of what y’all have been building and it has been amazing to have a seat at that table. So Sid, thank you so much for joining.

SID SIJBRANDIJ:  Yeah, you’re welcome. And thanks for being at that table at GitLab.

MATT:  Yeah. Talk to me. Let’s start off with just a little bit of the values that you hold as a company because I think every company has a poster on the wall –  and you have one on your distributed wall – but how does it actually come into play for y’all?

SID:  Yeah, I think you can tell how serious a company is about its values in two ways – how often they update the values, our values got updated over 300 times last calendar year.

MATT:  Wow.

SID:  So it is a living document. And then the other thing is how do they reinforce the values. We have now 20 ways to reinforce our values. So it’s not that that document doesn’t matter, it is are they really lived. And for them to be lived, they have to be alive themselves and they have to frequently be reinforced and be alive in that way.

MATT: I saw you could reinforce the values by complimenting people but you could also put a virtual background with one of the values on it as one of the 20 things?

SID: Yes. If you see my Zoom, I will always have six logos above me. And those represent our six values. And yeah, I like the complimenting as well. We have a thanks channel and in that thanks channel people thank each other and then people can comment and they frequently do that with emojis that represent our values and then we keep count of who was particularly good in expressing certain values throughout the year.

MATT:  Do you tie them into performance reviews? Like, do people talk about the values as part of performance reviews?

SID: With those emojis, that is linked to our annual event and we select the people who best represent a certain value and those emojis are used to create a short list and a group of people decides who best represented it. So it’s input. It’s not ideal but it gives a good way to make a short list. 

And then, yes, performance reviews, the values tie into that but also into hiring decisions.  And for example, I think the most important thing is promotion documents. Every promotion document at GitLab is shared with everyone in the company and its primary structure is the values. 

MATT:  To put you on the spot, can you name the six values?

SID:  Yes. We had 13 values before and even I couldn’t name them so that was a good reminder to rationalize. So our values spell the word credit. It’s the credit we give each other by assuming good intent. The first C stands for collaboration, the R stands for results, the E for efficiency, D for diversity, inclusion and belonging, the I stands for iteration and the T for transparency.

MATT:  I guess with D you kind of expanded it. It stands for multiple words, but that works.

SID:  Yeah, first it was D&I and now that we added belonging it.. I am open to changing the whole thing but I think having one letter per value is defensible. 

MATT:  Since you have a backronym or an acronym that spells things out does that make it harder to add values of certain letters or make it more incentivized, like certain letters to be added, like maybe it would be easy to add a value with an S but it would be hard to add a value that started with X. 

SID:  Yeah, Credits. Yeah. I guess there’s a certain amount of sunk cost there or inertia to overcome to change it. I think there hasn’t been a big push to add a value. We have had diversity changed to diversity and inclusion and now diversity, inclusion and belonging, that has been the major thing. Other than that, people talk about how do the values relate to each other and we have a lot of sub values. 

So for example, today I am having a call with Dara and Dara said, look, some of our sub values are more important than others. So the six values I mentioned are core values but then we have sub values that are kind of.. that relate to certain examples and that make it more concrete because otherwise it’s just words and they are very open to interpretation. The sub values makes them actionable. And Dara, her very good point was some of our sub values are more important and more actionable than others so maybe we should cull some of them or maybe we should elevate some of them.

MATT:  What were some of the values you got rid of or renamed? What were some of the seven that got cut out?

SID:  Yeah, I forgot about them so that’s good. But I think we found some overlap. The exercise we did is we wrote down all the values we had, we wrote down some that we thought we should have and started grouping them and we came to this. And actually it wasn’t a big exercise, it was me and my CEO coach who did that one afternoon in a couple of hours. And then I proposed it and it was clearly better and that’s how that happened.

MATT: This is probably a good time to introduce the GitLab handbook. So all of these values and the 20 ways you can put them into effect and everything like that is all  public on your website. 

SID: Yes. I think our handbook is now over 10,000 pages and it has all of our process and procedures, like how you work. And now just the boring ISO stuff but really what you would need to know if you join our company.

MATT:  What does ISO stand for?

SID:  Sorry, I’m from Europe and a lot of companies follow the ISO standards for documenting process. And that left a big impression on me because those ISO handbooks were not what really happened in those companies. There was the written ISO process which you could update once a year and the other was what people really did. 

So there was the paper handbook they haven’t touched in two months and there were the sticky notes on the computer how to really do things. And I was like, look, if you’re going to have something, it should be easy to change because how you work changes every day so it should be a living thing that people use every day and it gets updated every day.

MATT:  So let’s say I’m an employee at GitLab and I would like to update one of the values. Could I submit.. the entire handbook is in GitLab, I could submit a merge request? 

SID:  For sure.

MATT:  And what would happen?

SID: You don’t have to be an employee.  You don’t even have to be a board observer.  You can just.. anyone in the world can make a suggestion to improve them. And then if you think I should have a look at it, I suggest you at mention me on Twitter or send me a DM. But most of the time also people kind of check it out and escalate it within the company. We have a values Slack channel that will probably pay some attention to it.

MATT:  To give people a sense of the scale, its 10,000 pages but these are very, very distinct. So it has onboarding. Do you still have the org chart and everything on there? 

SID: Yeah for sure.

MATT:  Salary. And occasionally you will run into something that links to an internal google doc that you only have access to as a GitLab employee. But there is, yeah, what I can only describe as a radical transparency that the organization practices, that’s different than I have seen really anywhere else, even other companies that really practice a ton of open source thinking.

SID: Yes. And I think what has been cool, I gave a talk at YCombinator recently and there was a bit of what would GitLab do. So if you have a question (started?) the first thing is like try to see.. Google the question with GitLab and see if it is already in our handbook. And that is probably a decent starting point. And that is just because we kind of document a lot of mundane stuff. Like, I don’t know, I’m not sure we documented trademark registrations but it would totally be something we document. So because we document so many mundane sales, marketing, engineering for processes, it’s a good starting off point if you have to make something yourself.

MATT:  You know, there’s often CEO backchannels where you’ll ping another CEO and be like, so how does this work at your company or what do you do for this? And I would say that you are the one I ping. And 99.9 percent of the time it’s a link to your public handbook. I mean you don’t say Matt, let me Google that for you but [laughs] I’ve started just.. I’m probably pinging you a little less because just everything is on the website. I’m like, oh, how does GitLab do sales on boarding? I know you brought your time to productivity down quite a bit and your time to hire, some things you’ve been improving. So that’s all there, including what you’re trying to improve.

SID:  Yes. And Matt, rest assured that every time I send the link I’m just very, very proud that we have written it down. It’s not dinging anybody for not looking it up. It is very counterintuitive that that is out there and that it’s big. So it’s not.. Google really helps but it’s not always easy to find something.

MATT:  What is something that listeners might find surprising that you have public on the handbook?

SID:  I think our compensation ranges. Its maybe not as surprising anymore but it is always something people care a lot about. I think all the mundane stuff, like how we interact with hacker news, like people in the team should probably not post GitLab articles to that, we don’t want to be perceived as astroturfing, disclose who you are. I think there’s just a whole lot of mundane things. 

I think what is really interesting is our engineering metrics. So in engineering we pay very close attention to what we call the MR rate, how many merge requests did an engineer make over a month or did the team make over a month correlated to the team’s size. We found if you push on that people start making the changes that they make smaller to increase that rate, which is great because then it becomes easier to write, easier to test, easier to review and the whole process becomes more efficient. 

MATT:  That is interesting because developer productivity is notoriously hard to track and measure. What is the rate that you aim, an engineer at GitLab might aim for?

SID:  Yes, so we are around 8.8 right now. 

MATT:  Merge requests per month?

SID:  Yes.

MATT:  Oh, so that’s.. I had expected the number.. is that where you want to be or is that where you’re at?

SID:  We always want to be a little bit higher. So, like nine, ten-ish would be great but we are also in the middle of a global pandemic so we have not pushed very hard on it recently. So yeah it also differs a bit between teams and what they are assigned to. But I think it’s a great rate. And I think the awesome thing is it only counts if you actually got it all the way to the end user, people started using your code. And I think that helps to keep things small and to reinforce one of our top three values – iteration.

MATT:  How fast does GitLab iterate?

SID:  So I think it is very important to quickly get things out to users but I think in the end it is like how productive is an individual. So I think that 8.8 captures our productivity. 

MATT:  8.8?

SID:  8.8. Sorry. 8.8 merge requests per month.

MATT:  Oh, yeah, yeah. But to that question, you ship major new releases is it once a month and have for like a bajillion months?

SID:  Yes. We now.. I think we get code into production after it’s merged within 12 hours, so released on GigLab.com and it’s a continuous process. We just bundle it up per month because we have a lot of self-managed users, they kind of need a version number to make it digestible and a blog post to make it digestible but it’s really a continuous release. And every month we have over 50 substantial things that we ship, at least substantial enough to mention in the release post. So I think we are extremely productive considering the whole company is about 1200 people and engineering on features is about 500 people. 

MATT:  You mentioned maybe working with ISO in the past. Was there anything earlier in your experience or life, personal or work, that drove you to create a company which was so ruthlessly documented and relentlessly documented and process driven but in a really, really positive and enabling way?

SID:  Yes. I think a lot of GitLab values can be explained by my scar tissue. And I did a lot of things. I built recreational submarines, I was a part-time civil servant, I worked at Proctor & Gamble and IBM. I thought it was so inefficient. 

If you have to ask somebody else, like, how is this done.. It’s not just inefficient for the people on-boarding but I think it is most inefficient when you have to change something. If you want to change something what you had to do is you had to build up all that context for this is what I’m talking about and then say okay, and this part we are going to change and then present that to the whole company. And then a person onboarding a month later would now have that presentation.

So, like, how does that work? It kind of works but it’s really silly. And I think one of the biggest benefits of having a handbook is that you can change something and it’s.. You don’t have to build up all the context because the context exists in all the links from the documents so everyone understands what you are talking about. And it is relatively easy to change, it’s easy to make the suggestion, anybody can do it, it is easy to discuss that suggestion. And then when that is merged, when that is pulled in, it’s clear to everyone from then on that that is effective. 

MATT:  By the way, this has been very influential on me as well in that I have been asking a lot, actually for a few years now, like, why can’t we make more of our stuff public?  And the answer is generally just that it takes time. There’s not a real reason that anything in our internal field guide needs to be private, most of it. And so that makes me think that if you do this from the beginning it is just so much easier. So I would encourage anyone listening that is curious about this, just start publishing things as soon as possible. 

What would you say to people who think it’s scary or we have things that are proprietary to our company or if our competitors know what we’re going to do they’re going to be able to out-maneuver us?

SID:  I think there is a page at the bottom of our strategy page from Peter Drucker, strategy is a commodity, execution is an art. I think the really great companies, they have a super obvious strategy, they just do it better than anybody else. I think if you depend on your strategy being a secret it’s first of all very hard. Some of your people are going to quit and then talk to the competition, so it is very hard to keep it secret.

I think it is actually very hard for everyone in your organization to know your strategy. Most companies I have been with, like, people didn’t even understand the strategy, the people who worked there. So I think in general optimize for more people knowing your strategy, not fewer people knowing it. And we have found that having our roadmaps public and things like that has been a bit benefit. It has been such a big benefit that we might have inspired our competitors who are also now publishing their roadmaps. 

MATT:  And you are in a highly, highly competitive space.

SID:  Yes. And I think a lot of the things you do are not differentiated. No one is going to buy from GitLab because our accounts reconciliation process. Like, people don’t care. But it should be efficient and the best we can do but it’s not like we lose our ability to compete if our competitor implements the same process. In general, people have a super hard time embracing even just best practices, let alone their competitors’ practices. 

And I think you lose a lot and you win a lot, I think. Transparency (and sunlight?) makes you do better work. You get a bigger.. an easier ability to change. And yeah, there is a bit of hesitation that is from being afraid. I think that doesn’t make sense. I think what does make sense is that it is more work. When you want to make a change, changing it in the right context takes more work than firing off an email. 

So I think while the change is more work, it is more durable. So over time you can start reaping the benefits but it’s a.. Short term it is more work and then it pays off over the long term.

MATT:  And that is because, and this is my understanding, that the change isn’t actually.. it isn’t real until it’s in the handbook, right? 

SID:  Yes.

MATT:  So we can’t say we’re going to do this for a month and then we will put it in the handbook later?

SID:  Oh no. That doesn’t work. So we are very adamant about handbook first. The only way you can communicate a change is when it’s done in the handbook. And then commonly you just refer to the (dif?), like this is what changed, you link directly to it. What we cannot have is someone emailing, presenting, talking about a change that is not in the handbook. 

Because if you instill in the company oh you can document it later, it’s not going to happen. Like, people have jobs to do, they will move on. So it has been one of the hardest things to enforce in the company, to work handbook first, but it prevents what happens at 99 percent of the companies where the knowledge base is very big but most of it, a lot of it, is out of date.

MATT:  What is maybe underappreciated about this approach as well is that due to the fact that everything is in version control you have essentially an organizational block chain of every way the company has run and every change and who made that change and when it happened going back to when the handbook started, which.. was it at the very beginning of GitLab or a little later in its life?

SID:  Yeah, no from 2015, so from when we were ten people. So I think someday hopefully if we continue growing, some organizational research is going to have a field day. Because I think we are the best documented instance of a really steep growth trajectory for a startup and how your processes changed and what’s important. And it’s all kind of.. it’s to the letter dated and everything else. You could see all the comments.  I think that’s gonna be an amazing research if you’re into organizational research.

MATT:  It is the code that runs the organization, which I think, like you said, super fascinating, I hope it gets studied. Is – 

SID:  Yes, we both have a software engineering background and I think we just moved onto a higher level language, namely English. 

MATT:  [laughs] It’s less deterministic for sure, I don’t know.

SID:  Yes and it’s hard to trouble shoot and there’s no tests for it and there’s no indentations.. Well, the indentation standards are pretty okay but it’s much  harder but it’s much more powerful.

MATT:  To give a sense for the listeners who might not be familiar with GitLab, you mentioned ten people in 2015. What are some of the growth milestones since then, in terms of people?  And I think some valuation has even been public in the press. 

SID:  Yes. So I think our craziest year was 2019 where we tripled from 800 to 1000, or something. We are now 1300 people. And the last  public metric we share was a valuation of $6 billion. 

MATT:  That is pretty incredible because I think that.. You know, one of the criticisms, I don’t know if you heard this much in the early days of GitLab, but that distributed or remote companies or open source companies can be nice lifestyle businesses or some of these approaches work if you’re like base camp and only 50 or 60 people but it doesn’t turn into hyper scale or blitz scaling, as Reid Hoffman might say. But you did that. You went from 300 to 900 or 1000 in a 12-month-ish period. What broke that year? 

SID:  Actually not a lot. It was kind of hard to do recruiting at such a scale. I think we relied a lot on in-bound. So we got 15,000 applications every month and I think now that we grow a bit less fast we are better able to reach out to people who will add diversity to the company. And any time you grow faster, that’s tougher. 

I think I have to thank you because WordPress was the number one example to convince investors that we’d be able to scale fast a distributed company, an all-remote company. So thank you for giving that example. I don’t think we could have convinced them otherwise. 

MATT:  I appreciate it.

SID:  And now looking back on it I’m like how can you scale when you don’t’ have a handbook, when you have not documented things? Like, that is ridiculous. If two-thirds of the people at the end of the year are new, how do you do that? So I think having all these practices has enabled us to scale. And I think in general, all remote, you don’t have to do special things for it, you just have to do things that would be good for any company and you are forced to do them sooner.

MATT:  There are stories I hear from friends that have hyper scaled around like they can’t find enough desks in the office and so they’re squeezing people into the same desk and things, which is such a quaint concept if everyone has their own office because they work wherever they’re coming from. So I wonder what might be a.. 

I  have heard kids now don’t know what the disk icon, it represents a floppy disk so when they see a floppy disk they’re like oh, cool, you 3D printed a save icon. It’s totally lost the original metaphor. So I wonder if there’s other metaphors around work that have completely changed maybe permanently even now with the pandemic.

SID:  Yes, it seems that most companies are going back to the office but I think.. I don’t know, I look back on cubicles as super outdated and I think one day we’ll look back on the open plan offices as something super outdated. Like, how could you be productive there?

MATT:  How does your values impact your meetings?

SID:  Transparency impacted that most meetings.. Like, my calendar.. Most meetings are shared with the rest of the company. In advance you, because of efficiency, you link a Google doc with the agenda and then the notes are taken in line and most documents are open to the entire company. [crosstalk] [00:26:33.16]

MATT:  So while we’re meeting someone will be taking notes on the shared Google doc so people will have both up on the screen?

SID:  Yes, multiple people will be taking notes. And if you ask questions you also commonly put them in written before and then you get to verbalize them.

MATT:  Are there any external meetings? Like, let’s say the board that you also run in a similar manner?

SID:  Yes. We are blessed with board members who have an open mind and I’m learning a lot about how to run better board meetings with their feedback. What they have embraced is running it from a document and that’s been super successful. They actually start putting in questions like days before and we already start answering them. So when the board meeting actually comes around a lot of things are like well that’s already answers, we can skip that. And like any board meeting, we can fill the time but it’s just they have much more opportunity to get their questions answered.

MATT:  It also requires a lot of pre-work. Do you want to talk about what you expect people to do before a meeting and for board meetings and I imagine internal meetings as well?

SID:  Yes. Board meetings are quite special. They require more work than any other meeting. Of course you can Google GitLab board meetings but I’ll do some of the highlights. I think one thing that we do throughout all meetings is no presentations in the meeting. It has been one of the toughest things to enforce. People really like a captive audience. 

So before the board meeting I will send out a video with my overview, our go to market leaders from Sales and Marketing will send out a video where they review that. My notes kind of sound like an earnings call because we kind of.. we aspire one day to be a public company. So those videos are sent up front plus a deck  plus a doc for them to ask their questions.

MATT:  Do you have a sense for the scale for like how many slides, how long the documents, etcetera?

SID:  I think our worst has been 140 slides, which is not good, so I think now we’re back to like 60 slides or something like that. And I think what is essential is like how do you allocate the time in the  meeting. So we have three key questions or key discussion points that we state up front, this is what we like to talk about as a company. 

So as a company we are going, we are thinking about this new product offering, give us feedback about the pricing, about the implementation, about the roll out, what do you foresee. As a company we are struggling with X, Y, Z, do you know people who  might be able to help, what do you think about our current approach. I think board members should want to help, they give you advice, if you don’t indicate what you need help on, they will start helping you on stuff you don’t need help with, which can be a big distraction so channel all that energy into something that they can help with because they will do a great job.

And we spend most of the time on that. And then there is  Q&A, in which they can ask about anything. But that has been a really big improvement. And I think that should be true for every meeting in general. In our internal meetings my policy is I want to discuss a proposal, I do not want to do brainstorming or something like that. Have a proposal and we can review it, that is a much more better spend of all of our time.

MATT:  So if everyone asks the questions before and reads everything and watching everything before and you answer them before, you don’t run out of stuff to do in the meeting?

SID:  No, you don’t because people build on each other. And even if you might’ve like tried to answer the question many times you still verbalize the question. So I mentioned an example of something that.. where people would say oh its already answered, we can skip it. That tends to be about trivial stuff. It’s important that we don’t skip, like, hey you asked this question and even though it’s already answered – 

MATT:  So they present the question?

SID:  Yes, they present the question. And frequently you learn more. They will say it in a certain way, they will have more intonation, they will have enthusiasm or worry or be pensive or other things and they’ll tend to say more, like it’s easier speaking than writing so they tend to elaborate it a bit more. And then we call it reenactment. We reenact the question and answer so that the answer.. they answer people too, they reenact their answer. And then hearing all of that in the rest of the room, now suddenly, now that they have heard that, they have something to add as well. So no, we don’t run out of stuff. 

MATT:  It makes sense for why the sort of reenactment of the question and answer might give additional information that is not on the page. But couldn’t you make that same argument for the entire presentation?

SID:  Yes. And so I think it is really good to, if you want to present, to do that. Just record it and send it to everyone upfront asynchronous and don’t want for the super expensive, synchronous time to do it. 

MATT: So it’s maybe about the amount of time?

SID:  I think meetings are for back and forth.

MATT:  Because interrupting a presentation could be good, right? Like we are having a real time conversation so we can jump in, like I just did?

SID:  Yes. I think that’s the benefit of this, right? We can go back and forth. I think interruptions are great because if I say too much or too little it’s easy to give me feedback in the moment. I think most presentations, especially remote, there’s not enough interruptions, interruptions are awkward. We just (did delay?) because it’s kind of hard to hear someone breathing in to ask a question. Maybe you can look at who is un-muting their mic but it’s much harder. So we find that in general there’s not a lot of interruptions so  you might as well just do your presentation and then have people ask questions during the meeting. 

MATT:  A hybrid meeting makes that especially hard. I remember when I first joined I was.. I thought everyone was going to be remote. Everyone else was in the room. I think I was the only one remote and it was very, very difficult to both hear and jump in.

SID: Yes, hybrid is horrible and I’m very glad that our board meetings are now all remote.

MATT:  I remember we also talked about sending people some microphones and some other things because there was some varying audio quality.

SID:  Yes, we did that. Thanks for the suggestion. A lot of board members received that Sennheiser microphone you suggested.

MATT:  It’s like the cheapest way to make a meeting better, if you’re going to have a couple hours together. The collective value at that time is huge, particularly because you have so much of the team there, like, might as well spend a couple hundred bucks to make it sound better. 

SID:  Yeah it’s a $100,000 meeting, you better make the most of it. I send a lot of people I meet with, I send them cameras and microphones kind of as a thank you for meeting or just to help them out. 

MATT:  To go back to transparency as a value, like, you have started broadcasting many meetings, not the board meeting but lots of others?

SID:  Yes. So by default we put our meetings on GitLab unfiltered on YouTube. So  most meetings can probably be public and we just live stream them from Zoom to YouTube.

MATT:  The only other organization (that has a way of?) doing this is probably Mathematica, the Wolfram [00:34:40.16] stuff, (Steven?) Wolfram. But what is that like? I have watched some of these or I have tuned in to some that are happening live because YouTube will ping me. 

SID:  Well you have trouble sleeping because most of these meetings are very boring so I assume you watched them because you had trouble falling asleep.

MATT:  Yeah ya know, I find it kind of fascinating because I’m an organizational voyeur. I am very fascinated on how different companies work and how they solve  problems. And also I feel like as a duty, as someone trying to contribute to GitLab, to get to know the organization as well as possible. But also,  YouTube pings me about it because you’re one of the only channels I follow that does live broadcasts basically all the time.  Who watches these besides GitLab employees and has anything interesting ever come out of that?

SID:  I think it has been great in finding and convincing potential team members. So I think like what you always want to know is like what is that company like on the inside. You go talk to people, you go have lunch with someone who works there and they say stuff but there is nothing like being in the meeting, that boring meeting that no one cares about on Thursday at 3PM about some boring subject where everyone is kind of bored. 

Like, that’s what a company is really like. So I think it’s amazing for potential team members. People watch that and like, okay, this is a boring meeting but it’s a better boring meeting than at my old company because like they’re efficient about stuff, they are transparent with each other, they are really goal oriented. They try to make.. try to come to actions and to agreements, it’s well documented, people screen share, people try to contribute, people are positive, people assume good intent.. this is better boring than the company I’m at now. And then they apply for a job. 

MATT:  So all of your culture around meetings doesn’t make them more exciting?

SID:  No.  No. I don’t think they get more exciting, I think they get more effective. 

MATT:  This approach to meeting culture sounds very efficient. But how do people get to know each other better?

SID:  Yes, you have to organize that too. So I think one of our biggest lessons is to be intentional around informal communication. There’s a web page we have with 20 ways to kind of stimulate informal communication. And most of it is like have a meeting but have it explicitly not be about work. And that is tough and the concept doesn’t always translate well. 

I just had a meeting with a country manager of ours, an international country manager, and like we tried to signal to him hey, this is going to be a coffee chat, it’s going to be a social call, this is.. here’s how coffee chats work. And still like, I can’t imagine out of the blue you’re going to talk with the CEO, you have some backup slides about the business. And he did that, he had the slides ready but he was like, oh, this is a different meeting than I expected. 

It’s a coffee chat, so it’s informal and can be a bit about work or a bit about our private life. I wanted to kind of set the tone, this was just getting to know each other better and get a feel for how he was experiencing his work and our support for what he was doing. And that’s one example, we’ve got a ton. 

But I think what is most important is that you make it okay to do that because it feels really weird, it feels like somehow when you’re on Zoom it feels like you should be working and then people are not always working but they’re always not working when they are not on Zoom. And you have to make it okay, like, hey, two of us are in a call and we are not working and that is okay and we can just hang out together. 

So that water cooler chat, organizing that, that has been hard. I think we’re the most effective at it, that doesn’t mean it’s perfect and we do try to augment it with in-person meetings where that’s a lot easier to do.

MATT:  Yes. So if I were to try to be more social in a more goal driven meeting would that get shut down or do you have some space for people to goof off a little?

SID:  Yes, I think it’s appreciated when the meeting hasn’t started yet. So people at GitLab tend to come early to meetings. So in the first few minutes you joke around a bit. I had an interaction like that today in a meeting where I joined a few minutes early and we had some banter but then we tend to start on the dot, so on the top or the bottom of the hour.

MATT:  Literally on the dot almost to the second, correct?

SID:  Yes.

MATT: Tell me about your personal thoughts on timeliness. Does this translate into your personal life as well as professional and how have you gotten the whole culture – because you have people from dozens of countries – to make this important?

SID:  Yes, I think we set the standard, like, hey you start on time, you don’t wait for people to arrive. So if you say in a meeting we have quorum or everyone is here and so we start, I will remind you, no, we’re starting because it’s time. And everyone is here because we start on time and we don’t wait for them. And then also very important, you end on time. 

And we do speeding meetings at GitLab, which is a settings in Google Calendar that means 25 or 50  minutes, not 30 or 60. So you have some time in between the meetings to do whatever you want to do.

MATT: And for you, how important are meetings to how you do work? Like,  how much of your week is meetings?

SID:  Most of my week is meetings. I think if you radiate a lot of information it’s a very efficient way to work. For me also, it’s.. because its interactive, it’s easy to ask for a little more or a little less information and to speed things up. So I think there’s a bit of a burden on the other side but I’m.. because I tend to be on the busy side I optimize for my own time. And I think also as the company progressed, I get more and more interrupt driven where I just have to respond to things so I set up the mechanisms that force me to.. that send out pings where I just have to respond to it.

MATT: In terms of other unusual things, that probably hits transparency as well. You have a shadow program. Could you talk a little bit about that? And is it just for you or is it also other roles in the company?

SID:  Yes, it’s called a CEO Shadow Program and it’s two people who go to most of my  meetings. And the idea is we are a functional organization, as a CEO I’m the level at which all those parts come together. So it is an opportunity for them to look across, see more than just their own function and see all those other functions. 

So its two weeks, it’s an opportunity to learn and get a broad perspective. They also have to work. They take a lot of notes during meetings and they sometimes get assigned small changes to the handbook that come up during the meeting. I think it’s a great opportunity. Look at the bottom of the CEO Shadow page, you’ll find videos from alumni and how they experienced the program. And hopefully it is a way to create that next level of leadership at GitLab.

MATT:  How has it evolved over time? It used to be one person, now it’s two?

SID:  It used to be three weeks. So I was inspired.. First of all, it was trigged by when I was recruiting for a chief of staff and they said well it’s great because for the chief of staff you have one person a year that kind of.. you graduate one person a year that knows the entire organization. And I was like, wow, that’s not fast enough. [laughter]  

So I’m like how about three weeks? See one, do one, teach one, which is kind of a medical thing. And then they were, well, the see one made a ton of sense, to learn from the old person, the teach one makes a ton of sense but to do one is kid of.. well, when you see one, you can do one. So we cut out the middle week also to make it more approachable for people who couldn’t be away from their family when it was still in person. 

Now luckily [00:43:44.13] like I have a lot of external meetings and those used to be in-person but I think that even after the pandemic a lot of those can keep happening online so we might keep the program remote to keep it more accessible from other places. 

MATT:  Yes, I recall when I was a board member you even were like hey can this shadow join this meeting. And for some of them it made sense and for some I think we were going to discuss something private and so I was like well maybe not this one. 

SID:  Yes, so they attend board meetings and things like that.

MATT:  How do people respond to it?

SID:   Well people never tell you the negative stuff so maybe some people are weirded out. But in general it gets a really positive reception and I think it drives home that we are a really transparent company.  You have to be pretty transparent and have a high bar for sharing.. or not a high bar but be comfortable with sharing things to even have such a program. So I think in the meeting with external parties they exemplify our values. 

MATT:  I think a common question people would have – oh well we could do that but what if something private comes up? So what do you do both for the shadows if something private comes up, or sensitive, and for these broadcast things?

SID:  You say bye shadows. And I say it a lot. I think I said it three times yesterday. But we tend to.. It happens mostly during one-on-ones where we have to discuss performance of one of the reports of the.. my reports. 

MATT: So your one-on-ones are really three-on-ones. 

SID:  Yeah, they’re one-on-ones but with two shadows in the room. But what we tend to do is we put it on the agenda, so there’s confidential subject, and then at the end we, depending on how many there are, we take five or ten minutes without the shadows.

MATT:  How about for any of these live broadcast meetings? Does ever anything come up that you need to take down later or you turn off the broadcast, maybe dealing with a specific customer issue or things you want to keep confidential?

SID:  Yes, that happens as well. So we just had our product key meeting, live streamed publicly to YouTube and there was a question about CI abuse and we don’t want to have the.. the people who abuse our CI, I mean it’s.. to have them be aware of how we are trying to counteract that. It’s kind of a cat and mouse game. So there was one question about that that gets placed at the bottom in between the.. I’ll take it offline now. So we say oh, there’s now.. There were I think eight public questions and now we took it off air and we have one private question. 

MATT:  You’ve been remote distributed almost since you started, right?

SID: Yes.

MATT:  How has the pandemic changed..  how are these ways of people connecting, how is it working? Would you say it’s 50 percent as good as when you used to do meetups or 80 percent?  And how did you think about.. let’s say pretend the world is fully healed and vaccinated and safe, what do you want to get back to in terms of in-person?

SID:  I think meeting with external organizations has gotten so much better, just that everyone can get on Zoom and like audio and video quality and internet quality is so much better.  And we really are looking forward to the world opening up again, obviously these people are vaccinated and safe and we won’t be suffering from this pandemic and people don’t have to fear for their loved ones and kids can go to school as they should be. 

But as a company we are looking forward to doing local meetups. We used to have, or we still have but it’s in active, a travel stipend where you can visit other team members. But most of all we have a yearly get-together and this year we are hoping to have that in the September time frame and I think we’ll be able to make it with more than half of the team. So super looking forward to that.

MATT:  Applause for that. We actually decided to not do the grand meetup this year, our equivalent of this annual get-together just because it’s still unrolling so differently across 80 countries that we are in. And you’re probably in a similar.. Actually how many countries are you in, do you know?

SID:  67

MATT:  67, yeah.

SID:  So it has been a topic of conversation. It is clear right now that not everyone will be able to make it, not everywhere there will be vaccines. The majority of our team members are in America and Europe. America is looking like a lot of people will be vaccinated and Europe is also looking like September will be.. there will be a lot of vaccinations. But it’s a daily topic of conversation and it’s not a clear-cut decision at all. 

We do think it’s super important for us to have the event. Past events have been really a boost in moral. So we’re going to keep monitoring it but for now it’s on.

MATT:  It’s kind of the beautiful paradox of distributed organizations is that being distributed most of the time is fantastic but then that makes getting in person that much more fun and that much more exciting.

SID:  Yes, it makes it more exciting and also I think it allows you to do something extra special. Like we do a week. We commonly go to a destination that’s interesting. So I think you are able make a little bit more of it.

MATT:  How do you try to incorporate customers into these?

SID:  Yeah, we did that. What tended to happen is that if they are at the actual event they are the.. team members are no longer there for themselves but for the customers, which makes sense, right? Customers are super important to us. But it didn’t really work. I think what might work is have the team event and then tag on a few days where there’s customers but don’t make that part of your team event. 

I think it was different for contributors, for contributors to GitLab, having them as part of the main event. That felt much more natural and that’s what we keep doing – the core team members commonly are invited.

MATT:  So at your company meetups you’ll have people attending who aren’t part of the company?

SID:  Yes. We also once had a journalist attending. I think that was tricker. 

MATT:  Hmm.  Yes, the one I remember going to, I think it was in New Orleans and it was interesting. There were customers there, there was all sorts of different folks. A lot of companies say customers first. And I believe you explicitly don’t so what is first at GitLab?

SID:  I think results first. So, whatever gets you to the results.

MATT:  I think I read friends and family.

SID:  Oh yes, friends and family first, yes, thank you. That was a lay-up and I totally missed it. 

MATT: No it’s no worries. I was just reading the handbook.

SID: And that’s not.. Look, I don’t think that there is an easy.. is it your contributors, is it your suppliers, is it your team members or is it your customers. I think picking between that is like who is your favorite child. It depends. I don’t think there is a clear-cut answer. 

MATT:  It depends on the day who your favorite child is.

SID:  No you’re not going to pick a favorite. And it depends on the question of what you’re going to do and it shouldn’t be based on favoritism. I think it’s not about customers versus team members, it’s about work versus your life outside of work and family and friends is a way to represent that. And there we have a clear opinion – family and friends come first and work comes second. 

And I think if you ask anybody in your friend group, like, what’s more important to you, work or family and friends? Everyone’s like, well, family and friends, obviously. And there’s a lot of companies which kind of pretend that work is the most important thing in your life and I never quite got that, that doesn’t make sense to me, I think it’s disingenuous and it forces everyone to pretend something. 

And I think by saying that explicitly it opens up the possibility for people to say hey when something important is happening with my family or my friends, I’m going to take time off work to pay attention to that or I’m going to move.. I’m not going to be in this meeting because.. And I think that flexibility is a great benefit to people. 

It doesn’t mean that at GitLab we don’t work hard or we don’t care about the result. I think on average we are very ambitious and put work.. work is really important to most people at GitLab. But yeah, we can just be.. We don’t have to pretend to like it more than our family and friends. 

MATT:  And have you been doing family and friend day, like days off for the whole company, essentially? And how did that start and how is it going?

SID:  Yes. During the pandemic we saw productivity inch up. We saw the (MI?) rate inch up, especially in the beginning. We’re like, what’s happening? It didn’t make sense. People had kids at school, were distracted.. But people were super bored so they just started filling that time with work. We were like, hey, this is probably not a sustainable thing and  we want to prevent burnout and we want to.. We don’t think this is the right thing. 

And to set as a company a direction, kind of indicate what we thought about it, we said hey, we’re going to take some Fridays and we’re going to treat them as holidays. So treat them as a holiday, everyone is off. You can tell people to take time off but if you are the only one taking time off then your inbox fills up with stuff that you have to take care of. It’s harder to do unless it’s.. it’s easier to do when it’s coordinated.

MATT: One of my favorite things about the GitLab handbook is that there’s also the FAQs. So often you will hear about a policy, like Google’s 20 percent time or something like that, and you’re like, okay, how does that work? And for you, you can actually look at the day for Family and Friends Day and it has the questions, like, well what if I need to work because I’m on call or something like that? And it’s like, well it’s very common sense. It’s like, talk to your manager, take the next business day if you can, all these sorts of things.

SID:  Yes.

MATT:  I’m glad that’s been going well. Do you do anything else on Fridays that’s different from other companies?

SID:  Oh yeah, no meeting Fridays. So we have now made that permanent. They were a big success. They were called Focus Fridays and we try to not schedule Zoom meetings. I think for a lot of people it’s nice to have uninterrupted time where you can work on something without having a meeting in between and Focus Fridays helps us to organize that.

MATT:  I know other people do this on Wednesday’s and things because they worry if they do it on Fridays everyone just, I don’t know, takes the day off or.. How did you end up with Friday?

SID: Yeah, I think it enables people to take the day off if they think that’s better.

MATT:  Cool. I know there’s some people who research organizational design and things like that. I really hope that more people study GitLab, one because you are open to it, literally they wouldn’t even need your permission, so much is open. But two, I think one of the challenges in even talking to relatively new GitLab-ers is that they internalize your culture so quickly that it becomes almost like water to a fish. They don’t realize it’s there. There’s really quite a bit that’s like very unique and unusual and arguably controversial at other companies in the way that you do things. 

SID:  Yeah, thanks for that. And we’re seeing that with the people who come back. So often people who leave GitLab they leave because there’s a lot more options now, right? The only way to work for an up and coming start up when they joined was  – in their area – was GitLab. And now there’s like a thousand options because everyone is hiring remote. 

So they make a move and then they are like wow, this company, they do work remote but they do it so much worse. And some of them bring the  GitLab practices to their new companies, so that is very cool, and some of them return to GitLab. I think, yes, especially for people for whom GitLab was their first remote job they assume that remote means the GitLab practices but it can be very different.

MATT:  Our name for that internally is boomerang.

SID:  Yes.

MATT:  People will go.. And actually I really appreciate it. It’s never great to lose a colleague you enjoy working with but many of folks who’ve returned have brought in some perspective and there is nothing that recreates actually working someplace else. They’ll say like okay this worked, this doesn’t, this is what I know about Automattic now that I’ve been outside of it for a few years and been successful someplace else. And so I really find that a valuable, valuable input. 

SID:  Yeah, me too. And I think.. we say you’re the CEO of your own career, so it makes total sense to interview externally even if you’re not looking. And a lot of GitLab people get approached by companies because those companies know that GitLab team members have a lot of great remote work practices. So great if they end up advancing their careers because they spent time at GitLab.

MATT:  We have started seeing the same thing, especially in 2021, where a bunch of companies are like, oh no, how do we do this distributed thing better? We’ve been doing it for a while and we want to get good at it.

You know, I’m curious, you mentioned in-person being warmer, building trust.. And I see how this kind of more scheduled, social or non-work time can work internally because you can kind of force people to do it and it feels weird but then once they do it I imagine it feels better, right?

SID:  Yes, exactly.

MATT:  It’s [00:58:23.20]. But for customers, I feel like there’s almost a prisoner’s dilemma where no one is meeting with the client in person now but in let’s say a few months some sales person, and you’re a very sales driven organization, is going to get on a plane from a competitor and if you lose a deal because of that then it’s going to start almost like the dominos falling of everyone feeling like they need to do that for the client to take it seriously or to build a deeper relationship. It’s not just signaling, it can be actually true deepness of understanding the customer problem. 

SID:  Yes, I totally agree. Those organized, informal communication is.. it has to be kind of sponsored by the company, like the company has to tell you about it, give the name, make it okay, help with scheduling and it is hard to do that with external parties. And so we still have an exception process now where sales people have to request meeting customers because of Covid but it’s certainly ramping up and I think that’s.. the in-person for external especially customer meetings is going to come back.

MATT:  What have you seen be effective for deepening relationships? Because you’ve grown a lot in the past year when you haven’t been meeting people. For deepening relationships and building that kind of sales-driven trust and understanding when you can’t get together in person.

SID:  Yes. I think that there has been a big shift in that customers are now much more okay with taking Zoom meetings. I think I have not seen kind of informal communication during the meeting. There’s no banter or stuff like that in the meeting. It’s interesting, yeah. I think we have not been able to do that. I think I have personally done a lot more gift-sending, which is like you figure out during a call something that might be relevant to the person and you send it because that’s a thing we can still do with Covid. Other than that I don’t have any great suggestions. 

MATT: Well good to keep in mind. I know you’ll share it when you do figure it out.

SID:  For sure, yeah. That’s a great question. 

MATT:  Explicitly remote is not a value even though you’re one of the most famous remote or distributed companies. Why not?

SID:  I think remote is a work practice that we have. I don’t think it should be a value. Making it a value feels like a cart before the horse. Values are deeper principles and I think it makes total sense if you are transparent and you want to be effective and you want to have a diverse organization to be remote, like it’s an outcome of that. I think making it a value feels strange.

MATT:  So it is derived from these deeper values. You’re like, well if you want to do this you can end up with distributed. But if there were a scenario where an office made sense for being more inclusive, more transparent, etcetera, you’d do that?

SID:  Yeah. I don’t know, one time I argued hey, should we have an office at a beach in Mexico for people to just hang out, like you can work but you can still hang out in a nice atmosphere. And then people pushed me on oh what’s the first iteration? Well, I have a house in Netherlands that I hardly use so people can just go there and see whether people like that. 

And then we did that and what didn’t end up happening was like I said hey, this week it’s co-working week at my place without me there, do people want to join? And people were like, well I’m not gonna go with other people. And I said okay well it’s no longer co-working week but you can just go to my place. And then that was amazingly popular. So to this day we have the CEO house where you can just.. as long as it’s available you can stay in my house for free. 

So that works but all getting together didn’t quite work. Maybe we should buy a small village of houses but that’s expensive. 

MATT:  Are you still looking at that? Is there going to be a GitLab village somewhere?

SID:  No. I have given up on that. Given up.. it’s not a priority. Maybe some of our team members hear this and are like a village of houses in Mexico? It sounds interesting. So we’ll see. 

MATT:  I have also fantasized about something like that because it would be really fun to see colleagues more in a fun setting. And I know some companies have tried it. It just gets a little tricky. 

One thing that I would say that distributed companies don’t develop a strong muscle for is facilities management and managing a physical space, especially a high volume one or especially one that people actually live in maybe with family and kids, etcetera, is a lot of overhead and you start to get into something more like running a hotel than changing dev ops works in the world or democratizing publishing. And so like it goes outside some core competencies. And at that point there’s lots of places you can pay to do that.

SID:  Yeah. I think if you go hey, you’re basically running a hotel, I totally agree, and that come with a lot of things, like you are responsible for making sure it’s a great environment and there’s not any HR violations and that there’s security people and things like that. So if you do a hotel you might as well bring the whole company together on the same week because it’s kind of nice to have a bigger group there. So you have a yearly event like we are having now instead of a much smaller group somewhere for a year.

MATT: What I tried to do a few years ago was take the grand meetup, which was the whole company, and split it up. Because I enjoyed the smaller ones when we were hundreds of people as opposed to more over 1,000. And Automattic is organized as almost essentially separate companies internally so I thought it would make sense to split it up. But people  pushed back so much that I kind of surrendered to that idea. I even announced on stage this is our last grand meetup. And we just kept doing it. Obviously it stopped last year, but.. 

It is amazing how much people enjoy getting together and how much value that week comes. It is also stressful as well. You’re not around people for a while, I imagine this will be especially acute on the first one. So it can be tiring to be surrounded by people constantly. 

But you can iterate your way into better versions of that too. Like, we often do kind of a quiet zone. So it’ll be a little area that’s marked off where you can go in here to just have no one talk to you. [laughs] So that’s kind of a I just want to reset and recharge zone. And hotels are actually really nice because then people each have their own room and they can go back and recharge and have their own private space, which gets tricker in shared houses or Air B&Bs or things that aren’t hotels essentially.

SID:  I totally agree. It can get very overwhelming. We make a ton of things optional and we are super lenient if people want to leave early or things like that. It can be overwhelming and it’s not for everyone. I do think that there’s something to like having most of the company in one location. And yeah, maybe someday that is – I don’t know – a stadium or something like that. And yeah it will be very different. Yeah, you don’t get to talk to everyone and it’s a different vibe but it’s.. it’s different but not necessarily worse.

MATT:  People still go to conferences that are thousands or tens of thousands of people and they get value out of it.

SID:  Yes.

MATT: It’s just different from meeting every single other person. Internally it comes up where people say I feel like part of the reason this team is having friction is because we haven’t had a meetup in a while. And I try to push back on that because there’s lots of reasons why someone couldn’t make a meetup and we want to make sure we develop the ability to have a team be super cohesive and aligned and everything regardless of whether they’re getting together in person or not. 

But I do personally miss it and I think there is a real desire to return to seeing people in person, which brings us a little bit to your Twitter thread. You wrote this last May. Do you want to recap or could you recap a little bit of these predictions you made in May of 2020, so about two months into the pandemic?

SID:  Oh wow. Is this the one that’s pinned on my Twitter profile?

MATT:  It is pinned, yes. 

SID:  And it starts with [01:07:22.09].

MATT:  It’s still pinned a  year later so I thought it would be interesting to return to it. 

SID:  A year later, well it’s the only successful thing I have ever done on Twitter with 1,000 retweets. So let’s see. I haven’t looked at it for a while. Yeah, no, I’ll.. the first point is remote work will be allowed at Twitter, Square, Facebook and Shopify. Great. And that’s.. many of them are going to continue. 

Many companies are learning that their workers are just as or even more productive working from home. And I think that is true as far as I’ve heard of other people but my sources might be a bit biased. But a lot of companies actually got more effective, like more work got done, it’s just that people said they were unhappy and I attribute that to not having enough informal communication. 

And I kind of acknowledge here that I thought it took all these practices to do remote work right and it turns out without [01:08:20.03] practices you could still do remote work and it still was better than in-office work. So co-located work was even less useful than I thought. 

I think this is important. Somehow the lesson that companies deduced from this isn’t that they should go all remote – but this works really well – but that they should go hybrid, combining remote and collocated work. I think that hybrid is much harder and less likely to be successful and I am still of that opinion. So that’s going to play out over the next couple of years. 

Also these companies are going hybrid for the wrong reasons. Social bond building, culture, creativity, white boarding and brainstorming needs to happen at the office. I totally disagree. You can do those things but you have to organize it just like you have to do facilities management. Like it doesn’t happen automatically. Put some effort into it. I have a list of 17 reasons why  Google Docs is better than white boarding. With the social bond building you gotta organize informal communication.

MATT:  It sounds like you agree with a lot of this still.

SID:  Yes. Where do you think it went sideways?

MATT:  Well there’s a few things there. Is some ways, we are hybrid organizations in that we, in non-pandemic times, tell people we’re going to get together for a few weeks out of the year, which technically is a hybrid. Right? It’s not fully you’re never going to see your employees.

SID: I think the hybrid I’m rallying against is not that sometimes you bring everyone together or you have local meet ups. The hybrid I’m rallying against is that some people are never remote and some people are never at the office. And I think that is going to create A teams and B teams where the people have an information and a visibility advantage.

MATT: Especially if things aren’t documented or transparent. Kind of like we described meetings earlier, a meeting where some people are in person and some people aren’t is kind of the worst type of meeting, no matter how good the conference room system is.

SID:  Exactly.

MATT: I think what people over weight is they look back at the office.. Well, one, they really want to see people again, just in general. They look at rose colored glasses of the best things that could possibly happen in an office versus what actually happens in an office 99 percent to the time. and I think they over weight office and underweight commute. 

And if you look at something that actually the meet-up version of hybrid does is we kind of amortize a really big commute, probably flying across the world a couple times of year and then you stay there at that place, versus the everyday driving 15 to 60 minutes each way to get to an office, or commuting, I think can be.. is actually the hardest thing on people. It’s more about the commute than actually the office environment. 

SID: Yes, I totally agree. I bet that most people commute longer than that they have super valuable informal communication at the office. Like how much water cooler talk are you going to do? For most people it’s less than an hour and their commute both ways is probably more than an hour. And it doesn’t mean like don’t do water cooler talk anymore and don’t do the commute, like, skip the commute and just organize  that water cooler talk. 

MATT:  And like you said, it can feel awkward at first but then gets better. Y’all use the donut. I think Automattic uses this too, a donut pairing bot, right?

SID:  Yes, ‘do not be strangers,’ a great plugin for Slack that for people who want to kind of introduces them to one new team member every week at random and you set up a call together. I think it’s a bit weird but you just send a calendar invite to someone for a coffee chat. And I think it really helps if the company names the concept –  this is a coffee chat, informal, you don’t have to prep anything – and then also introduces new team members to it. If you join GitLab you have to do 12 coffee chats.

MATT: Wow. There is also something to the.. like you do these as well. You lead by example in all this. 

SID:  Yes. I had a coffee chat yesterday. And I encourage people to schedule them. I think it’s really important to lead by example. Another big thing has been taking time off. I like my time off. I have an argument to do even more of it because I have to be a leader and then I try to be really visible and talk about it a lot. Vacation and time off is not something that you have to be ashamed of (or hide?), it should be a point of pride that you’re taking care of yourself. 

MATT: That’s something I need to get better at. I think pre-pandemic I was better at taking time off and talking about it and then post-pandemic I’ve been a lot worse.

SID:  Two weeks ago I took half the week off. I just took on from noon and went biking for a week. 

MATT: Oh cool. In some ways I love thinking about how the distributed intentional version of this can be even better than in-person. I have definitely seen and experienced where in-person social pairings can kind of by default fall into cliques and not even maliciously but folks who you maybe know better and are more comfortable with. But when you are randomly paired by a bot it breaks up all the cliques because everyone is being randomly paired with everyone else. 

SID:  Yes. And I think for example if you’re remote it’s easy to do a quiz about like guess whose team member does this or that. It’s kind of interesting. It gives you something to talk about. It’s like there’s a reason there’s pop quizzes. I think they are pretty easy to organize when you are remote and it’s easy to screen share and everyone is online anyway.

It’s also super fun to hang out in person. It’s not a.. we are not trying to find a substitute for that. We are trying to find a substitute for some of the informal communication. 

MATT:  People underweight screen sharing too. I find myself often screen sharing some Google photos or something like that, like you might take out your phone and show someone something. It’s a nice way to jump in and out of things.

SID:  I think if you look at like per-hour  how many times is this screen share button pressed, I bet that is a great indicator of how remote proficient an organization is. 

MATT:  Wow. That is probably a good place to end. Sid, where can people check out more about you and GitLab?

SID:  Yeah, if you type ‘GitLab about’ you’ll find a good starting point, or GitLab handbook if you want to dive into those 10,000 pages immediately. 

MATT:  What is your handle on Twitter?

SID:  @sytses

MATT:  And more than most interviews I would encourage listeners to really dive into these (resources?). It’s almost like a Wikipedia of GitLab, which also happens to be a Wikipedia for some of the best practices in the world for how to run a distributed organization, I truly believe that. And I find myself referring to it often. And thank  you for doing that. 

It didn’t start as the easy path. Maybe it’s easy now to keep doing it but when you started it was probably not easy to convince the world, the investors, everyone else that you should publish every single thing about the internals of your company. 

SID:  It was funny in the beginning. I tweeted out our OKRs and one of our investors said I almost had a heart attack, suddenly seeing oh my goodness you publish your OKRs, you shouldn’t do that. No, like, we’ve been doing that for years, it’s fine.  But it’s certainly gotten easier and I am really grateful for you clearing that path and I think there’s now a whole bunch of companies following in WordPress, in their footsteps.

MATT:  The lane is getting wider. I think GitLab opened it quite a bit and now both distributed and open source and open core I think is getting more and more common. 

As an exercise for the reader, I would encourage folks to check out.. there’s a lot of published read-mes about .gitlab, which are basically like developer documentation but for people and including a CEO one that talks about Sid’s… Well, describe it really quickly.

SID:  Yeah, if you Google GitLab CEO you’ll probably end up on my handbook page and I just try to define my interface, how do you interact, how do you get a meeting…but also like what are my flaws, what are things that I frequently do wrong and how to be aware of that, how to… if you wonder how to tell me, how to point me at those things to correct them. It used to have my favorite restaurants. It makes.. the whole goal is to make someone more approachable. 

I think with remote you have sometimes less of an opportunity to be an observer. So we do a lot of practices to make that easier – CEO Shadows, the live streaming of videos are examples but we also try to give a read-me, like this is how I tend to work, this is what I care about, this is how I am best.. here’s how to enable me in processing information quickly.

MATT:  I think one of the best compliments I could give GitLab is it’s a very self-aware organization. Thank you for leading by example and thank you for joining. 

You have been listening to the Distributed Podcast with Sid Sijbrandij of GitLab and Matt Mullenweg. Have a great day. See you next time. 

End.

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“Why would the best employees in the world choose so little autonomy in the third of their day or more that they spend working?” Matt Mullenweg asks Jason Calacanis in a recent appearance on the long-running This Week In Startups.

The angel investing-themed episode opens with both investors sharing their approaches to early-stage companies, supporting entrepreneurs, and making an ecosystem-building impact, on top of return-on-investment.

The conversation soon shifts toward the outlook for distributed work. “What do you think the world’s going to look like in six months when everybody’s got their shots and is back to work, in at least the United States and Europe?” Jason asks. Matt shares a hiring insight for distributed, global companies, from the changing perspective of a talented individual who can now work from many more places: “You can really build a robust social network with folks you choose to connect with…(anything) that gives you that sense of community, not just where you happen to work.”

Matt’s latest appearance on the show – he first appeared on Episode 26 in 2010, according to Jason, and again in 2013 – touches on Automattic’s business structure, using collaboration tools like P2 to onboard new employees, cryptocurrency, and the value of editors. “I haven’t met a single writer – or any of my own writing – that hasn’t been vastly improved by really great editing,” says Matt. “Engaging your ideas with another human just improves them every single time.”

You can listen to the full This Week in Startups episode here, or check out the YouTube channel.

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500-page bound merger agreements, office printers, and libraries lined with law books. Legal work looks a lot different now that most in-house counsel (and law firms for that matter) have adopted some form of distributed work. 

But that doesn’t mean the work itself has changed. Contracts still need to be written and signed, litigation still needs to happen, and employment law might be more important than ever. What’s become clear over a year into a global pandemic is that legal work can be even more effective without the office. To make it happen, however, lawyers need to adapt their communication mediums and technology in a way that fits company culture and mission. 

Automattic’s General Counsel, Paul Sieminski, recently joined the Technically Legal podcast to talk about how legal work can thrive in a fully distributed company. “It’s aimed at a legal audience, and I love to remind my fellow layers how much value we can add to a distributed organization,” said Paul of his appearance on the podcast. “We are trained to communicate clearly, and especially to write cogently and persuasively.  These are invaluable skills in any environment, but especially in an environment where writing is paramount…like a distributed company.”  Paul has written on the topic in other places, such as Modern Counsel. 

He talks about communication starting just after the 23:00 mark with host Chad Main. For that discussion, and legal topics spanning the advantages of creating a searchable document database, to what tools and protocols we use to communicate transparently while protecting confidentiality, you can learn more about legal work in the distributed model by listening to the full episode here.

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“Was there a palpable time when you felt like…you had to have a new kind of thought as you got bigger?” asks Mike Maples Jr., host of the Starting Greatness podcast in an April conversation with Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg.

Matt shares several such pivotal moments in an episode full of stories and insight from the growth of Automattic, and of his own journey and leadership evolution.

“For better or worse, you become close personal friends with everyone because you’re kind of in the trenches,” Matt said, sharing a story about when the company almost accepted an acquisition offer at a time of friction among the small, but growing, Automattic team. “So when you fight, it kind of feels like you’re fighting with your partner, your significant other.”

Matt reflects on a journey from his Palm Pilot user group to first meeting Jeffrey Zeldman of A List Apart (and now a Principal Designer at Automattic), and later his first visit to San Francisco, all before committing full-time to WordPress and Automattic. Mike and Matt also touch on the difference between a learn-it-all and a know-it-all, and even some books that have been influential along the way.

Maples, partner in venture capital firm Floodgate, has also hosted Annie Duke, Mark Cuban, Tim Ferriss and David Sacks in the second season of Starting Greatness, a podcast dedicated to startup founders who want to go from “nothing to awesome, super fast.” You can listen to the full Starting Greatness episode, and all others, right here.

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Join us for the latest episode of Distributed, as Matt Mullenweg interviews Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Twitter and Square. They discuss how both companies have embraced remote collaboration, the underrated value of deliberate work, and how questioning preconceived models from the get-go can change everything. 

This spring, Jack Dorsey told Twitter and Square employees they could work from home forever if they choose. But a year earlier –– before the global pandemic happened –– he had already started working from home two days a week. There wasn’t the noise or the distraction. It was a place and a time where he felt more freedom and creativity. 

Now, he reflects on how his way of working has evolved alongside Twitter and Square over the past year. From leading thousands of employees as a self-described introvert, to why he planned (and still does) to work from Africa for an extended period (spoiler: largely, to support entrepreneurs on the continent), Matt and Jack share ideas for combining the deliberate, thoughtful pace of asynchronous work with the serendipity that occurs in the office. 

“If we can run the company without missing a beat,” says Dorsey of planning to work in Africa, “it really opens the door for a lot, especially our ability to hire anywhere as well.”

Tune in to learn how meetings work at fully distributed Twitter and Square, what open source and the punk scene have in common, why bringing thoughtfulness into collaboration is more important than ever, and if Jack Dorsey ever wants to go back to the old board meetings. Plus a whole lot more. 

The full episode transcript is below. Thanks to Sriram Krishnan for help preparing for this episode.

***

MATT MULLENWEG:  Howdy, everyone and welcome to the Distributed podcast. Today’s guest does not need much in the way of introduction. He is the co-founder and CEO of Twitter and also the Founder and CEO of Square. In addition to creating three iconic products, Twitter, Square and Cash App, he has been a philanthropist and a world traveler. And what we’re going to focus on today is he has recently issued an invitation to all Twitter and Square employees to work from home forever if they want. So everyone please welcome Jack Dorsey. Jack, thank you so much for being here.

JACK DORSEY:  Thanks for having me and making the time.

MATT:   Now I know that you like to live your life intentionally and I’m curious about the intentions that you have set currently for those three things we talked about, those three iconic products – Twitter, Square and Cash App.

JACK:  For Twitter, our intention is to serve the public conversation. It is our purpose and we believe global public conversation is just so important in that it elevates and amplifies some of the common problems we are all facing as a global community. Never has it been more true and a better manifestation than what we’ve seen with Covid and how the world was focused on one thing at the same time, which was pretty incredible to think about. And I think we’ll have a lot more of those.

So, having a place for global public conversation that is valuable and is not just built around and encouraging more people to spend time with it but actually you can walk away from it and you learn something is ultimately the intention to learn from it, not be distracted by it.

With Square, we have two ecosystems. And I call them ecosystems because they are this suite of tools that I think positively reinforce one another. And one is focused on sellers and the other is focused on individuals. So the little white reader was our beginning and it was a very simple tool to empower people into the economy, which was the company’s broader purpose, economic empowerment. 

And it has grown into a series of tools that not just  help you take a credit card but actually understand your business or understand your customers and all of the goal of helping you grow if you make informed decisions about the data you have around you. So that business has done very well and we have helped sellers around the world, mainly offline sellers, physical sellers.

And then Cash App, its intention – and this is broader for Square as well – is we see more and more people who don’t have a need for a traditional bank and being able to go to the app store, download something that you can store your money in, that you get a Visa card to spend that money around, you can go to an ATM and get actual paper cash or you can do things you couldn’t do at a traditional bank branch, like buy bitcoin or buy stocks, or fractions of stocks – if you can’t afford one share of a company that you love, you can buy five dollar’s worth of it.

And all these things ultimately lead to empowering people into the economy in a way they didn’t have access to in the past. Like the stock thing is a great example. There’s a lot of people that love Disney, a lot of people can’t afford one share of Disney. But I can spend five bucks on it and I can see that five bucks grow over time. And if I don’t like the stock market, the crazy weirdness that is Bit Coin has had similar performance or greater performance.

So that’s the intention for both, one, empowering public conversation because we just believe it’s so important to understanding our common problems that we’re facing, which we think there’ll be a lot more. And then Square and Cash App have an economic empowerment, just simple tools to empower people into the economy around them, which is very conversational and has a lot of parallels between the two.

MATT:  You mentioned the fractional thing. I’m surprised by how many people tell me they can’t afford to buy Bitcoin. I’m like, you don’t need to.

JACK:  Exactly. Yeah.

MATT:  You can get one Satoshi worth and…

JACK:  Yeah, exactly.

MATT:  Related, what’s your intention for coming on this podcast about distributed work?

JACK:  Anytime I go on a podcast I get feedback and I always have an opportunity to learn from the feedback. So hopefully I’m gonna learn from the conversation with you because you’ve been doing this for quite some time. But also I imagine our conversation will result in some feedback that I see on Twitter or in my email inbox about how I’m thinking and how it might be better evolved in this direction or if I consider something new. So it’s really to learn.

MATT:  Well I’m excited about it. Thank you so much for coming by. I know that distributed work is not a new practice for you. Can you talk a little bit about your history with it?

JACK:  The only reason I’m in this space, in technology, is because I benefited so deeply from open source early on. I was a kid growing up in St. Louis, Missouri and was active in the BBS community and when the BBSs finally got access to the internet through Washington University, it just opened the door to so much.

And for me it demystified a lot of how computers and networks work because I could actually see the source code based on this extreme generosity by others to share their work and to, I think more importantly, be okay with failing in public and being open in public. And it resonated with me a lot because I was in the punk scene, which is very much a pick up a guitar, be horrible at it for a while and then eventually you get better and better as you play in front of people and you do that uncomfortable yet courageous thing to put yourself out there.

And I saw a lot of the same patterns with open source. And these people were not in any one location. They happened to be all around the world. I mean, obviously (Linus?) [00:06:33.15] started in Finland and had a community across the internet that was helping him build something of immense complexity that had incredible value and it was all visible. And not just the source code that made the operating system work but the way they worked together was visible. The way they disagreed was visible, the way they slowed each other down was visible. 

So I guess I’ve been a student of these models for quite some time but they have been fairly limited in my direct experience to open source (rather than?) companies. And when we were starting our companies, we followed the giants who came before us, especially in Silicon Valley and most notably Google. There’s so many practices that we borrowed from Google to start both Twitter and Square, culturally, process wise, tools. Obviously we are entirely on a stack created by them for their own work and now is benefiting others. 

But one of the things I wish we would have questioned earlier is do we all need to be in one city, do we all need to be in an office, is that really required to make our work and to make our work valuable and to continue the urgency? I think open source is seen as inherently distributed but also I think slow, yet deliberate. And I think that deliberateness is undervalued and the focus on slow is overvalued. 

And I think you can go into the patterns and still have all the benefits of having something that is more distributed, that is more global that could be fast and could maybe not be as deliberate so that we’re working mistakes much faster than we’re learning from at scale. When we were starting these companies, we just drafted off a bunch of assumptions that this was how you build a company, rather than questioning some of the fundamentals.

And I’m really happy now in that most of the entrepreneurs that I meet today are starting out questioning all that and starting out with an intention of not having an office, being fully distributed. And that’s meeting the expectations that I experience when I go to recruiting conferences of kids who are coming out of  university and asking, as a first question, do I have to move to San Francisco? Can I work from home? Whereas like five years ago, that was not the first question but now predominantly it is. And I think that signal is interesting, especially as we have to consider bringing new people into the work force. 

MATT:  Yeah and it’s an interesting thought experiment to imagine if you had been able to start these from St. Louis and the impact that would have had on the local community.

JACK:  A hundred percent. And now we have 1,000 people in St. Louis for Square and we want to hire even more there and get back to my hometown but I wish we were able to do that on day one. But we’ve learned more importantly why it’s important now and how to unwind some other things. And coronavirus certainly accelerated a bunch of our plans to the positive I think, generally.

MATT:  Were there any other practices that you had copy and pasted from Google that you would look back at now as being particularly valuable or, like distributed work, you wish you had not brought over? 

JACK:  Yeah, tens of.. [laughter] I’m trying to think of the right ranking in terms of impact here. But I think because we were in San Francisco, because we were in Silicon Valley, we let ourselves be in that bubble of ‘this is how you build a company here.’ And it certainly removed ideas that would have benefitted us internally.

But also, like, even in other cities like Seattle and Amazon has this practice that we take on right now, which is phenomenal for distributed work, which is writing a document before a meeting and adding comments to the document in the meeting and then having a discussion based on those comments. And what that does is a few things – one, for people who tend to be a little bit more reserved or quiet or shy, they have no problem writing their feedback in a document so you see a lot more feedback and a lot more ideas. 

Second, it records interest in where the meeting should go and it’s not just within the meeting, it goes beyond that. So when the notes are shared or when that document is shared, the whole history is preserved. And third, I think it gets people out of a presentation mode and into a discussion and debate mode much, much faster. 

And we kind of just ignored the Amazon culture, what that meant, because we’re so in the bubble of what Google created. So I think it’s more of a wish that we were able to break out of the bubble a bit more and see things in a different way. And there were so many incentives to stay in that bubble, like the VCs that we took money from were in Silicon Valley and they had success indicators like Google and would suggest similar things.  So it was hard to see outside of that isolation of concentrated ideas around what success meant and what it looked like.

MATT:   How about OKRs?

JACK:  Yeah, yeah we use OKRs, there you go, that’s one example.

MATT:  Do you like them?

JACK:  I have mixed feelings. I think they are good in terms of allowing us to articulate why we’re doing something and what we expect to see out of it but it just feels like there has to be a better method of that that I certainly haven’t discovered. The main benefit is there is a greater understanding of what they are, so there’s less ramp up time for most people coming into our company because they are part of the industry. What are your feelings?

MATT:  We have some teams that use them but we don’t do them company wide. I don’t know if I love the structure. And I think where I chafe at it a little bit is in that the metrics might need to change more frequently than I have typically seen OKR update processes go. 

JACK:  Yes.

MATT:  So it doesn’t always survive that contact with the problem. And so where I see it or where I feel like it was a negative for teams that have tried it have been when they stick to it for too long. But at the same time, it’s also a negative if your teams are always changing their priorities. So we have some teams that have.. I think there’s one called Gist that I liked a little bit better. It was like goals.. gosh, I don’t remember what it stands for but I resonated with that one a little more.

How about meetings? Even today I feel like my friends at Google are in meetings all day long. And they were distributed, they’re in offices all over the world, but lots of these meetings are usually on video. What’s your thoughts on meetings? How were they early and how are you doing them now?

JACK:  I know a lot of people in our organization and certainly around the world are definitely fatigued by the camera. I mean, look at us doing this podcast, we’re doing it on Zoom right now but the camera is off and I know that’s to save bandwidth but.. There is a fatigue that develops in just being on camera every single hour of the day and I think it’s real.

And I think it points to a general issue with meetings, that a lot of our work is optimized around synchronous points of collaboration instead of asynchronous. And I think if we don’t focus more on the asynchronous problems and how to solve for asynchronous work we’re missing a bunch of opportunities. And that is one of the things I appreciate so much about the open source community.

And most recently, in just studying how Bitcoin has developed, which is.. a lot of what I got excited about in Linux development is now in Bitcoin development – it is global, it is complicated, it is impactful, it is asynchronous, it is slow and it is deliberate. I think there’s just so many lessons there that I think can be applied. But I think generally the meeting forces.. meetings force a way of working. I would rather have answers around how to do similar..  how to perform similar sorts of use cases but in an asynchronous way. 

I think meetings are great for when a debate really needs to happen and certainly text mediums are not. But I think it’s kind of enumerating the list of like what is the job of a meeting, why are we having this in-person meeting? What do we expect out of it? Just to borrow Clay Christianson’s Jobs To Be Done framework, like, why (do we hire in?) in-person meeting? And what are the hiring criteria and what are the firing criteria? 

I don’t think we have done enough of that work. We are certainly doing it at both companies right now just to further unlock our work so that we can be more asynchronous, which frees us up to hire more people in different time zones, which I think is the important goal and making sure that if someone happens to be happy in a particular area that they can stay there because they feel really creative there and they can still have as much impact as someone who might happen to be in San Francisco.

I don’t know, it goes.. it just asks the broader question, whenever I have to have a meeting, of is this necessary to be synchronous right now? And what is the asynchronous equivalent and why didn’t we do that?

MATT:  And even people living in time zones, we find a lot that people like to work in different times regardless of where they live. Some folks really like starting super early in the morning, some folks might want to break up their day to pick up their kids or do different things. And even if an office culture said they were cool with that, it could feel against the social mores of an office to leave for two hours from two to four PM or something. 

Have you seen my post on the five levels of distributed autonomy? 

JACK:  I did.

MATT:  Oh cool.

JACK:  I think, Matt, I mean, you’re one of the teachers in this space because you have been doing it for so long and have had so many experiences and incredible experiments with it. So I definitely am a student of your work in this space.

MATT:  Well we have messed it up for 15 years so if we can share the things that we have learned from those mistakes I hope it helps other people accelerate. I had heard that you, a few years ago, started doing where a day of the week you worked from home. Can you tell me a little bit about the context of that?

JACK:  Yeah, about two years ago I started doing a day a week. And then a year ago, before this Covid year, I was doing two days a week. So every Tuesday and Thursday I would work from home. And the reason I structured it that way is Monday at both companies we have our direction setting meetings, so we review everything that’s going on at the companies – and they are four hour meetings – and the goal is to get as much of that out in the beginning of the week so we don’t have to be dependent upon meetings during the rest of the wee, we can focus the majority of our work on the work and not scheduling this time together and however that manifests. 

And then we would have Wednesday  – 

MATT:  Are these big meetings? How big are the Monday ones?

JACK:  It depends. It’s with my direct team and then we bring in folks from their direct teams and beyond to review some work or have a discussion or a debate. But it is generally meant to like.. let’s get everything on the table that is important for this week, let’s tie it as much as we can to previous weeks or previous months or previous years if the context merits that, and then well have a 30 minute check-in on Wednesday and Friday.

So we always know we have a lot of time together on Monday and we have a consistent and predictable check in point on Wednesday and Friday. And I found that that really creates an ability for us to not have to feel like we have to schedule the together randomly. We know that something might be able to wait until Wednesday or until Friday. So it sets a higher bar on when we do meet or when we don’t.

And that structure works pretty well. And I was finding on Tuesdays and Thursdays that I was more or less free to work on more strategic stuff and really spend some time thinking and having broader conversations, not meetings, but actually conversations around ideas. And I didn’t need to be in an office to do that. And I felt very focused at home because there was no other noise or people walking by every now and then and snacks and all these distractions within the office that come to occur were gone. And I really got more focused and I felt even more creative and even more productive. And then Covid happened and it became every day. [laughter] 

MATT:  Would you encourage your executives to also work from home on those days or the whole company?

JACK:  I believe in showing and not telling. So I certainly talked about the fact that I worked from home and the reason I did is because I felt more creative and more focused. And if you’re on a role that enables that you should consider it, maybe. I didn’t ever say that word, I would just assume that people would. And if you’re in a role that doesn’t enable that maybe we should figure out how to enable it for people as well. 

And that is not a reality for everyone, like the folks in our data center have to go into the data center every day . But for a lot of our folks there is something there that may be worth exploring. And again, Covid really forced the issue immediately. And it was one thing when school was still open and something completely different when schools closed and your whole family was suddenly in the same room as you every hour of every day.

MATT:  Yeah, we’ve seen definitely a bifurcation of people’s experience in Covid. I think you mentioned that you consider yourself an introvert, is that true?

JACK:  Yes, meaning that I get my energy from being alone. That’s where I draw my energy, it’s not from groups of people that energize me, it’s from being alone, being in nature, having some space to think and be present.

MATT:  And you’re running companies with I think 4,000 – 5,000 people each, right?

JACK:  Yes, I think we are up to about 6,000 at each company.

MATT:  What was the experience, again, pre-Covid, of walking through the office?

JACK:  In terms of being an introvert and walking through the office?

MATT:  Yes, would you feel that people’s eyes were on you? If you’re in an elevator with someone, are they nervous?

JACK:  Yes, I do also appreciate the fact that I am going to.. I want to have a mindset that every experience I have or every person I meet is going to be a teacher if I decide to let  them be. And when I’m in the office and I’m walking around, there’s all these moments of serendipity, all these people that I don’t encounter on a daily basis, all of them have something to teach me. So I do try to at least go out of my way to say hi or ask questions and also if there is any opportunity to take the edge of a bit when we are having a stressful week, that I think is also important and great. 

So yes, when I was walking around the office.. as much as I can to learn as much as I can. And that worked. And that is one thing I have missed. Because you can’t just.. You don’t have serendipity on all these video calls that we’re doing. Every now and then you do but it’s very rare. I think that is what has been lacking. And they haven’t found a replacement for, in distributed work, I would love any insight  you have on it, but the randomness and what the randomness creates can be quite powerful. And I haven’t found a good way of creating that digitally and virtually.

MATT:  I ask partially personally because I tend towards getting my energy alone or in smaller groups. But usually one week a year we’d bring the whole company together and that week was both my favorite week, cause I love my colleagues, I love spending time with them, but also my most exhausting. 

JACK:  Yes.

MATT:  And I really felt that.. I don’t know if maybe I became more introverted since I’ve been working from home for so long but I kind of felt just.. a little self-conscious. Normally I’m able to walk around quite anonymously and just that presence or I would find that people would get a little nervous. And I have heard this from other leaders in the company as well – as you might  move up in the org chart at our company, your day feels very flat and egalitarian but then sometimes how people act, especially if they haven’t interacted with you directly before, can change based on your perceived position.

We have found some serendipity with these donut chats, which is a Slack-bot that randomly pairs people. Have you tried that?

JACK:  No.

MATT:  Oh, it’s literally just a Slack-bot.

JACK:  That’s a great idea.

MATT:  There’s different channels that I’m part of and it will randomly pair two people in there and the bot kind of pings you both to schedule it, checks in if you’ve scheduled it, it just has some nice, built in.. I think it even has a thing where it will find a free spot on both your calendars. 

And I’m part of a few of these, one for leaders in the company where we do talk more about professional stuff, our work contacts but random pairings, and then one that’s randomly paired with anyone in the company who joins the channel and that tends to be more personal where I try to.. I do my best to not talk about work and just try to learn about them as a person, which used to happen a little more organically in those in-between, liminal spaces, like waiting in line for coffee or at the bar after or something like that. 

And the other thing is just when there’s lots of internal spaces for other stuff. We have a lot of what we call water cooler channels, like Slack channels about Magic the Gathering or gaming or P2s about it and people self-organize among us and stuff like that and those can be nice, particularly some of these remote games, which can really connect people for people that like them.

JACK:  Yes, those are great points, good idea with the donut chat. I’ll look into that.

MATT:  Gitlab also is a fascinating company to follow if you don’t already.

JACK:  Yeah I definitely do.

MATT: And they have been sharing some fun things they’ve been trying. I’m curious to see this. You mentioned being on video all day being tiring, which yes, we started saying hi on video and then we turned it off to relax a little bit. I’m also curious.. I love the concept.. it is so much more intimate now that we’re all in each other’s homes all the time, right? 

JACK:  Yes.

MATT:  I found that people would start at Automattic.. or when we actually had a team, the Tumblr Team, which was in an office and then had to go home unexpectedly and wasn’t really set up for work from home, particularly in Manhattan where they might have roommates or a small place. And at the beginning, folks would often have a virtual background probably because they didn’t feel like they had a very professional background. But over time, when they could rearrange their desk in the room or often sometimes move, we’ve had a lot of people that have moved, they designed their background to be part of their personality, almost like you might decorate  your locker in high school or something.

JACK: Oh that’s cool.

MATT:  The virtual backgrounds I see that too but I don’t know why we can’t do that for the foreground, some equivalent of Apple’s Memoji or Bitmoji or something, which would then remove the pressure that people feel to appear a certain way.

JACK: Hmm. Yes, you can do that on group FaceTime, which we have used as a team pretty effectively.

MATT:  Ah.

JACK:  Which makes it a little bit more fun too.

MATT:  I like that. It is a feedback I get from some colleagues that they worry about their appearance. When we do an on-demand thing, it’s almost never a video because it feels so rude to unexpectedly video someone, they might not feel like their room is set up or something. But audio is usually pretty clean. 

JACK:  I will say one benefit and one moment of serendipity that video does enable is that when people come to an office you only see what they choose to share and to bring up and make manifest. So you hear about their kids, you hear about their pets and their life outside of work. But to your point, when you’re inside their home and the camera is on, you see their kids and you see their pets and you see more dimensions of your coworkers, which I think creates a lot more empathy for who they are and what they go through on a regular basis. 

So that has been one positive element of being on the video is that I know my colleagues in a very different way that I don’t think would happen in an office environment because it’s just so challenging to bring the kids in or the pets in or whatnot. And we certainly have events around that but they are more staged and synchronized. And this, a kid just randomly appears on the call, everyone’s kind of disarmed and taken aback in the right way. And that has been very positive. 

MATT:  It’s really beautiful how quickly that shifted from people being mortified, usually the person who it happened to, to seeing the reaction and it being such a positive reinforcement of that humanity.

JACK:  Yes, exactly. It’s like the BBC News anchor who has their child storm in and he’s absolutely mortified.

MATT:  You’d mentioned some moments of serendipity even in this.. everyone on video. when did they pop up?

JACK:  Maybe as we start using these technologies more we get less wrapped around the axel around the precision of their use and we allow for me messiness. When we all went back to work from home because of Covid, I think there was a lot of angling of the cameras and backgrounds and making sure everything was just right but now people just don’t care. Just.. you’re gonna se the bottom of my chin and that’s what it is for a while because I’m tired of holding this phone in front of me and I don’t have my laptop working. I think that’s when all this emerges. 

And I think that’s true of how we use the documents to organize our meetings and our debates. Running a board meeting in this environment has been interesting and different, especially for our board members, which tend to be a little bit older, more traditional. Having them read a doc and comment in a Google Doc about what they are curious about has done such amazing things for helping us steer the conversation and make it so much more productive than if we were in person. 

And we have boards that are (comprised of?) people all around the world and when you have someone flying from London or Nigeria to come to San Francisco, it puts a lot of weight on the value of that meeting and how much time you inherently spend. Like, you’re just incentivized to spend more time because wow, this person came from all the way all around the world to spend time with us. 

MATT:  A high transaction cost, yeah.

JACK:  Yes, you can have greater impact if you focus the time more. And I think the in-person meetings hid that. And I would say our board meetings now at both companies are just so much more effective, so much more impactful. And I don’t want to go back. I mean, I do think we should meet at least once a year, again, just to build that empathy up and to have dinner with one another and drink together and just get to know each other in a different way and be present, but the conversations we’re having right now are just not the same as they were in these forced, in person meetings.

MATT:  And you feel like it has gotten deeper, more relevant to the topic or more helpful to the company?

JACK:  Yes. Because even with our board members, I mean, they are at home, they’re thinking from home, they are comfortable because they have full control over their whole environment so they’re not worried about not having the right tea or coffee or the lunch was terrible. They are fully in control of everything. And I do think that gets us a better mindset from meeting start.

And then  because we are so aware  of the time we are spending together and we are focused on making it effective and impactful, we put a lot of work into these documents so that we can really have a productive conversation. And we give these documents to our board members a week ahead of time and they have plenty of time to read and put questions in and as they are putting questions in, we get live notifications so we can see how they’re thinking in real time. And yes, it’s just been great. Whereas we couldn’t do that in the past. 

MATT:  It sounds like you’re rehiring your board meetings. 

JACK:  A hundred percent. Yes. Like, why do we hire the board, why do we have these meetings and how might we make them solve the problems we are identifying in a better way.

MATT:  And do you still have slides or is it all prose?

JACK:  It’s mainly prose. I mean it is mainly a written Google doc. We do have demos every now and then. There are things that just need to be on slides just because of the flow. But generally it’s a lot of paragraphs. And when you look at it in the meeting, there’s highlights on certain pieces and discussion around it and we zoom in on that. And  we also get a sense of like was this document robust enough based on the question that was asked here. So it’s just a lot of really good signal in terms of how to make our meetings better and better every quarter. 

MATT: I remember I was at actually a Gitlab board meeting and there was a bajillion slides at the time but it was like hey, go through them beforehand and then we’ll talk about the questions. And I think I heard that but I didn’t entirely hear that and I was amazed and it sort of taught everyone the lesson that they did not go through any of the slides, they only would jump to the ones that people had put questions in the document about. So it was actually jumping around a lot. So if you hadn’t already studied them, you were a little bit lost. And it was maybe rough the very first time but  now I do, I block out on my calendar three, four, five hours before every one of their meetings to make sure I go really deep on all the documents. It taught the lesson.

JACK:  That was one of the greatest lessons that we learned from Amazon is having these documents be read not beforehand but in the meeting, silently, and commenting on them silently for the first 15 minutes of the meeting before we get into discussion. The greatest thing it does is everyone is on the same page. 

MATT:  Literally.

JACK:  Yes and there’s no excuses in terms of I didn’t have time to do the pre-read or whatnot, it’s all right there and everyone has the same information at the same time. There is a lot of value in that that I think we benefit from. 

MATT:  Do you think you (are at a place?) where people do it beforehand?

JACK:  Yes, there’s certain information in certain meetings that probably need more consideration than the start of a meeting allows and the board meeting is one of those. We haven’t – although we may have tried it once. Actually, we have gone through a few sections of the board meeting where we encourage board members to read at the start of the section and we are then on the same page and that is often when it’s fairly nuanced in terms of like, we all need to be.. we don’t want to waste time here so we all want to have the same understanding at once. So generally we need to balance that with how efficient we are with  the discussion itself.

MATT:   One thing I love about pre-reads or asynchronous versus in-meeting reads is you don’t just get people’s reactions, you get after they have walked around the block with it, taken a shower, slept on it, had time to really develop their thoughts over time.

JACK:  Yes, it’s a great point. There’s definitely positives and negatives. But I do think the more asynchronous work we have to do, obviously it doesn’t allow for that. We need to optimize for more of that.

MATT:  Yes. You’d mentioned those four hours, which is five percent of a normal work week at least in this e-team meeting both at Square and at Twitter. Why are you rehiring those every week it sounds like? What is done in those that can’t be done asynchronously?

JACK:  Yes, that is exactly what I’m trying to figure out right now is like do we need to restructure that even more. I think right now I’m just trying to observe what is the criteria for spending so much time together at the beginning of the week. And I think the biggest value we get is that we feel like we have this incredible touchpoint of shared understanding on very complicated topics that we all experienced at the same time live. And I think there is value to that because it makes the conversation so tangible. But I don’t know if it’s necessary. I think it’s additive but I don’t know if it’s critical. So we are going to experiment more with why we hire that meeting and why it has to be synchronous and what we lose if we shift it. That’s probably a start of next year thing.

MATT:  Do you do anything at these meetings to have social ice breakers in the beginning?

JACK:  It kind of naturally happens. We get on the call and someone brings something up that feels a little bit random and we give space for that because it does enable people to see different dynamics and different dimensions of each other so we definitely give space for that. And there is a lot of laughing at the beginning of the meeting usually, which also sets a tone that we can have laughter in the rest of the meeting too if we find an opportunity for it because it de-stresses so much. 

MATT:  Reed Hoffman has a really good anecdote on that in his new book “No Rules Rules” where I guess it was.. And Automatic was guilty of this as well. We made the meetings like ultra work-focused I think because I had been burned by bad meetings, we mad them way too focused and there was no space for that more social side. 

And he talks about it in the context of expanding internationally. As they had more Brazilians come into the company, they saw this as very impersonal. Or during their interview day they left them alone at lunch instead of taking the guy to lunch. And how they started to incorporate what he terms as Brazilian but I actually think of it as just a personality type, like, more of that warmth and personal side at the beginning of things. And now it’s their new policy that they do this at all their meetings. So I found that interesting.

JACK: Wow, wow.

MATT:  I think you’d enjoy that book too if you check it out. Netflix has some interesting heterodox ways of working.

JACK:  I’ll definitely look at it. I’ve been trying to avoid books that have anything to do with our industry or society or technology at all recently. So the last book I read was this book entitled “Surf” by Gerry Lopez who is a legendary big wave surfer and wow it was refreshing. It was just so beautifully written and its distracting in all the right ways.

MATT:  Do you surf?

JACK:  I try. I’m not great at it. I’m really good at paddle boarding, which is much easier for everyone but I would like to become better at it because it’s so pure. I used to wind surf a bit and I love sailing but just the purity of understanding a wave such that you can be in the same flow with and be in the same power of it is a pretty incredible adrenaline rush and a reminder of what flow feels like, literally.

MATT:  The ocean is so humbling.

JACK: And that, and that. Just how powerful it is.

MATT:  I think I’m in the same space. I’ve been learning more – particularly this year I’ve been able to make it out a bit more. Yeah, my dad was actually a surfer but he had long stopped that by the time I was  born and so after he passed  few years ago, I began to do a lesson on his birthday as a way of remembering him.  Just this year I was able to get a few days in a row and get a few times. It was so nice to be disconnected. I have also felt that with diving, if you’ve ever done scuba diving.

JACK:  Yeah.

MATT:  Because it’s so connected to the breath.

JACK:  I really want to do free diving because it freaks me out. It feels so scary and that’s exactly why I want to do it because I just learn so much when I put myself in uncomfortable situations. 

MATT: Speaking of uncomfortable situations and scary things, you had talked about going from I guess two days working from home to actually working from Africa and India where you’re going to do two or..? 

JACK:  Yes.

MATT:  What was the plan there before everything in the world happened?

JACK:  This year before Covid really emerged, I spent November of last year in Africa going between Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, I mainly focused my time there. And the reason why.. I had never been to the continent, I had never been to those countries and never really immersed myself in the culture and the people, and I wanted to do that personally but I also see Africa as an incredible opportunity from a entrepreneurial standpoint and also from our businesses, both Twitter and Square.

So I wanted to go and in November I met with entrepreneurs, I met with schools, high schools, and colleges, and that was it. I didn’t talk with anyone in the media or the government and that was the intention. And the goal was to learn enough that I could go back and send four or five months there and my goal in that four or five months was number one, to understand the countries more because it will impact our business and our opportunities in the future. 

And in that dimension, also how to work from halfway around the world, from our headquarters in San Francisco, how do we figure out a structure where we can truly force ourselves to be asynchronous because the time zones demand it. And if I could do that, then we could probably scale it to a bigger majority of the company. And then the second goal was to hire and to have partnerships with local companies there for both companies. 

And then the third was to help entrepreneurs that I met in whatever way that I could. And I was all set to spend four or five months and then Covid happened and changed everything. So, it is still my intention. Maybe it’s next year, although it doesn’t seem tingly probable. Maybe the year after that. But I definitely tend to spend a significant amount of time there to really understand it and to build and to support in any way that I can the phenomenal entrepreneurs that I found there. And there’s just so many solving extremely tangible problems in very creative ways.

MATT:  I love that. The altruistic side is also really good and laudable. But I think even just purely for your business it would be huge.

JACK: Yes.

MATT:  Were you planning to continue all these standing meetings, the Monday, Wednesday, Fridays while you were there?

JACK:  No, we were going to figure something out with that. But I wanted to use that time zone change as a forcing function because obviously it would not work, I would not be able to sleep in a healthy way if that were the case so we would have to  change a lot. And that was the intention is if we can run the company without missing a beat in such a distributed, asynchronous way it really opens up the door for a lot and especially our ability to hire anywhere as we. 

MATT:  Yeah, I found I can get by.. I did one month where I was actually taking some writing classes in Paris and I just kept my normal schedule. So I’d work.. it would be like 2PM to 10PM. So I guess you could still do your.. if your meeting is in the morning, you could still do it.. Oh, but you must have two because you’ve got the Twitter and a Square one.

JACK:  Yes.

MATT:  So that full eight hours…

JACK:  Spread it between two days but.. 

MATT:  But when I’m in Asia or even Hawaii, that gets so much harder because it’s the middle of the night when you try to keep the time of those meetings. And it’s one of the biggest I think fair criticisms Automattic gets is that a lot of our meetings are optimized for morning west coast, early evening Europe to cover the most people and we don’t do time zones or things as friendly, like town halls as friendly to Asia-Pacific time zones. and our executive team, even though we have the ability to hire people almost anywhere – we’re in 77 countries and we try to be very open there  – the folks who are at the very top of the company tend to be more North American based. 

JACK:  Yeah, last year we did this thing called a (tweet?) tour where I visited every single one of our offices around the world and I just took a whole year to do it and we spread it out throughout the year and I was able to.. It was a Twitter initiated effort but I would also visit the Square offices around the world. We don’t have as many as Twitter but there are still some.

And the first thing you notice, the first thing I noticed, I should say, was how much of the company runs on the San Francisco clock and just how immediately unfair that feels and how much friction there is and  how much friction that creates. You can assume that that’s the case and when you’re in San Francisco, you don’t think about it as like, oh, we really need to change it. But when you’re actually on the other side of it, it just puts such a weight on the need ultimately to change that. For serving a global audience, which is our intention, and we’re  building a company that is in service to one time zone, it just feels so out of synch and so ridiculous.

And again, pointing back to open source, it’s a solved problem and I just don’t think we’ve gone deep enough in really understanding how to take all those benefits that we receive from open source and how it is structured and add a little bit more prioritization and urgency around it. Because I think again that is a thing that people tend to put open source down for is the slowness of the development cycle. And  I don’t think we need to rest there. I think there is a lot of goodness there that can also be done in an urgent, quick way. It’s just a function of how deliberate it is or not.

MATT:  That’s funny, I actually don’t think of the speed as much, I think because our release cycle for WordPress is a lot faster than most of our competitors. But I think a lot about that most successful open source projects are more developer facing or more back end and there’s only a handful, Chromium, some of the file sharing tools, WordPress, that are more consumer facing. 

Something I’d be curious your thoughts on.. how they evolve over time, or if you have some now, are engineers working asynchronously versus designers, product managers, all the other people who make great consumer facing products working that way?

JACK:  That feels like a great unlock. And just in my own personal experience.. Let’s take Bitcoin, Square funded this thing we call Square Crypto, which is an independent organization of five developers, and the intention was to have one or two designers as well whose goal was just to do whatever it took, whatever they thought was important to help Bitcoin be better every single day. 

So they had nothing to do with Square’s goals, they don’t have a manager at Square, they don’t take direction from anything that Square is doing, we can’t tell them what to work on or what not to work on. They are completely independent but they’re working on something that ultimately will benefit our company just.. it’s unpredictable as.. at this point how that manifests. 

And we found developers right away but one of the big problems with Bitcoin I believe right now is that there’s a lot of design problems that have not been solved. (Key entrant?) is a great example of this. I think it pushes more incentive towards these custodial wallets and.. which is more or less against the ideals of Bitcoin and having this concept of self-sovereignty and being completely independent of a custodial, like a corporation like Square. 

But there’s a lot of design problems. And we were searching and searching and searching for designers who did their work in an open source model and ultimately didn’t find any and struggled with it a bit and ultimately decided that we would kick off a project to fund a bunch of designers and a community, to build a community up first, so that people would have a foundation with which to share best practices around designing in an open source way and designing for open source and designing for consumers in that open source model. 

And it’s early but it  manifests as like a Slack channel  and a group of designers showing off work and commenting and critiquing on it. But I think there is ultimately something there. And if we do figure that out, I think it will point to expanding those ideas to other disinclines as well. And that is our intention. But I think the problem.. the immediate problem that I think will bear a lot of fruit for us is solving his open source designer problem. 

MATT:  Two things there. One, we have something in WordPress called Five for the Future, which is the idea that whatever you are benefitting from in the WordPress ecosystem, if you could take five percent and put it back into core, kind of like  you had those engineers just working on core Bitcoin and things, that will avoid the tragedy of the commons. For some people, maybe that’s two hours a week as a freelancer or for some, like at Automattic, now it’s 60-65 people essentially working on the dot org side of things.

Often companies will come to me and say okay, who should we hire? And their first inclination is to find someone already  contributing to WordPress and hire them. And I was like, okay, well that will get you the points but it won’t actually add anything to WordPress, that’s just changing where someone’s paycheck is coming from. So I really started to encourage them to hire folks who we don’t already have a representation inside of WordPress and more other roles. So, product managers, project managers, designers, researchers. And it has been kind of fun. 

And actually, this has been another place I’ve been inspired by Gitlab, who actually streams their product review meetings. Actually, Steven Wolfram does that too. Check out his  Distributed interview, it’s kind of funny because he’s been doing this for like 30 years. Yeah, we just started doing user tests and then posting the videos on our P2. We would of course have to get extra permission for that. 

Yeah,  just radically opening that has had a pretty good impact so far and also changed the people contributing. We actually just had WordPress 5.6,  named for Nina Simone, was the very first in our project and maybe in [00:54:20.17] open source, all women release squad. So 36,37 women led that entire release from start to finish.

JACK:  Wow. You said it was named Nina Simone?

MATT: Oh yeah, we name every WordPress release in honor of a jazz musician.

JACK:  Oh, that’s excellent, Nina is one of  my favorites. That is an excellent choice. It  must be an incredible release.

MATT:  A lot of people focus on that you’re the CEO of two companies. And my bugaboo there is they don’t ask Tim Cook how he runs a  hardware business and a services business. If you look at any of these larger entities, they typically do some very different things, you just have a structure where you can have independent shareholders in each. How much do you try to run them in the same way or share best practices or even cadence of how things work or hire between the two?

JACK:  So to answer that question, I would go back to what to what I believe my job is. And I think I have three jobs, I think there are three reasons why the company hires me every day in my role. And the number one is to create a healthy team dynamic. That’s the interconnection between the members of the team. It’s the ‘how we work together’ it’s the purpose that aligns us, it’s the values or the principles that guide our work to serve that purpose better. 

I am not as concerned with the individual nodes or individual people on this big graph of the company. I’m more concerned with what connects them and how they connect and making sure that we have something that is healthy. And to me, that means it’s positively reinforcing, always. So any contrast in the team is a positive reinforcement that increases our creativity, (why not??) So that’s job number one is building and actively building that dynamic and there are multiple tools I use to do that. 

And job number two is to insure that decisions are being made. I see a signal and if I have to make a decision that ultimately there is something I can, I’ll say debug in the organization, and I think it’s more important that I insure that the organization is making decisions and not just that they are making decisions but they are making decisions in context of our purpose, in context of our customers who are serving, in context of the technology trends that are emergent, in context of societal or cultural trends that are emergent and they are showing that context as they make these decisions.

Because what that ultimately does is it removes single points of failure. And it builds a framework and a system that can expand and that can outlive myself or anyone that is currently in the company. So I pay a lot of attention to those frameworks of decision making and I’m constantly looking for opportunities to help them.

And then third is I believe my third job is to raise the bar on what we thought was possible. As we get older as individuals and as companies, as we grow, we tend to take things for granted, we tend to stop asking questions around various aspects of who we are and what we are, what we’ve built, we tend to take less risk because we are more precious about what we have built up and what we have and we don’t want to lose it. 

We are less likely as individuals in our late twenties, thirties or forties to jump on  skateboard as we were when we were a teenager or four years old. And in that risk taking, in that appetite for risk, there is learning and if you remove that, we remove some potential for that learning. So I think injecting some risk every now and then, injecting uncomfortable situations or questions with the goal of raising the bar is important.

So I say all that because I perform those three jobs at both companies in the same way. But the outcomes are different at both companies. And the outcomes are different because they inherently are working on different canvases, we have different people, we have different problems that we are trying to solve and raising the bar on one problem is very different from raising.. in terms of how it manifests, raising the bar in another problem. 

For instance, at Square, one of the things I believed fully was that we must understand.. the biggest societal and technology trend that is affecting us as a financial company are crypto currencies and namely Bitcoin. We need to do everything we can to learn about it. And the only way I know how to learn about it is to build it. We’re going to build it into our Cash App. And that was very scary because Bitcoin is seen as kind of an unknown thing and seen as a scary thing by a lot of people, and we were a public company. There have been no other public companies that talk to the SEC about Bitcoin so we had to do that for the first time.

And all those firsts that we had to do to secure all this Bitcoin to introduce it to our customers in way that they are not going to be financially unhealthy with it, which was a big concern for people, to do all that for the first time really upped our game and really reminded us of what we’re capable of and what is newly possible. 

So applying those three jobs to two very different companies.. sometimes I see parallels. Like they are both very supportive companies, they have amazing cultures, they’re both working in spaces that I think are inherently foundationally conversational and I see commerce and transactions as conversational as conversations are, [laughs] as social aspects are. 

There is a lot in the culture of Twitter that the product was trying to do in bringing more transparency to the world that the company became. We became very transparent internally. And I took that when I started Square because we were going into an industry that was very obtuse and it actually profited from the fact that there was very little transparency. And we also wanted to bring more transparency to the financial industry so we had to be a transparent culture, a transparent company, because we needed to know what it felt like every single day.

So it’s just really sticking to my understanding of what my job is and applying it in the exact same way and knowing that these principles will lead to the right outcomes for each company because it’s putting the focus in the work and its focusing the work around who we are serving ultimately. And that is how I designed them and what I want to make sure I’m holding myself accountable to.

MATT:  How do you choose when to do the same best practice at both? I felt like around the same time, although it might have been a week or two apart, you announced that at each company people could work from home forever versus allowing one side to do one.. one company to do it and not the other company?

JACK:  Yeah, that becomes tricky. Just given my particular situation, I think there’s some ideas that are just good for companies. And if I have weight in two incredible populations that we can change the outcome at the same time for, I’m going to take the opportunity. So our reaction to Covid and encouraging people to go home in early March and then you never really have to come back was a discussion that we had at both companies and a push at both companies and something that was accepted equally at both companies. It wasn’t difficult. 

There are other things, like let’s say Square’s investment of $50 million Bitcoin, that makes absolute sense for Square because we are building for this financial future and you could also argue, as other companies have, that we should put some of our balance sheet, Twitter should put some of its balance sheet, into Bitcoin as well. But the connection is not as apparent and ultimately you’re becoming more of a currency trader rather than what the intention is. And that investment that Square made is only one part of what we have done I believe to the benefit of the broader Bitcoin community, including opening up our patents and creating a non-profit to enable other companies to join in and help defend the open source nature of Bitcoin and crypto currency against patent trolls to the five developers that we hired to work on Bitcoin. 

I think there are certain ideas that may benefit both companies but are much more important for one and I’m not going to force it. I think it has to be adopted if it was meant to be adopted. But there’s some that I do want to force because I just think we need.. it’s a step to move forward.

MATT: And you open sourced that treasury management stuff, right? I’m sort of remembering a document that came out..?

JACK:  Yes, we did. Yeah. 

MATT:  Is that with the intention that other companies.. obviously with the intention that the companies adopt it, so with the intention that the relevant folks at Twitter might see that and start to explore it as well with it out [01:04:51.06] to be top down?

JACK:  Just to make.. that wasn’t necessarily the intention for Twitter. We didn’t have Twitter in mind, I didn’t come up with the idea to open source the process behind it, it was actually our CFO and her team. I love that because it gets more of what felt sacred in the past in terms of a company and how it did things as proprietary. Now, we’re going to open this up and we’re going to share all of our learnings and if it’s useful to inform a decision that you have questions around or are considering, great. And we’re putting an artifact out there that hopefully will be built upon in the same way that you would with open source software.

And I think our companies have taken so much from open source and from that culture specifically. It’s anything that we can do to give back to it in a meaningful way we should take. And when we set up Square Crypto, this nonprofit, external group of Bitcoin developers, Steve, who runs it, decided that he was gonna write everything down and he wanted to share that playbook with other companies who are considering the same in the hopes that they would do the same. 

And now we have seen more and more crypto focused companies start funding developers and engineers just to work not on what they’re doing but on Bitcoin and ideas in the crypto space. So I think it has worked. And if we can contribute more to those ideas of like just being open and sharing, not just our code but our practices so that others can follow and make it better, that’s important to me because that will come back to us. If they make it better, it comes back to us.

MATT:  Kudos to that. I hope you do a lot, lot more of it.

JACK:  Yes.

MATT:  Do employees ever drive something across the company, so whether that’s large things like hey there’s this HR policy at one but not another or trivial things like Twitter employees being like oh the Square office looks so cool, why can’t our office look cooler?

JACK:  They do a little bit. I think they tend to be smaller but there’s a lot of conversation between folks at both companies in terms of best practices. And I think a lot more coordination, especially around Covid, because we.. because the companies are so close in terms of ultimate leadership there is a desire just to  make sure that we are sharing as much information as possible so that we can both get on the same page as quickly as we can.

MATT:  How much coordination – I mean, you have the benefit of building hem both –  how much is the head of HR or [01:07:42.05] or folks talking to their counterparts at the other company?

JACK:  Between these two companies specifically?

MATT:  Yeah, just sharing?

JACK:  I don’t know actually. I don’t know. We do have one time a year where both my leadership teams and myself get together from both companies, which is always fun and  usually involves roasting me in some way. And I love when they do get together because I just see so many similarities in the people. I love who I work with and really I’m so grateful and so appreciative  that I’m at a point in my  life where I can say that I fundamentally love the people I work with and I learn from them. And when I see them see each other through that lens as well it just makes me so, so happy. So I imagine that’s happening elsewhere in the company as well, I’m just not really all that aware of it. 

MATT:  It sounds like you really want people to experiment within the companies as well. You framed it as learning even as you get older. Are there any temporary autonomous zones or some equivalent within the companies where you allow people to do something really different?

JACK:  I love the concept of a temporary autonomous zone, I used to read (Hackerbay?) as well. I think we have had some of those. Some of them have been more top down enforced. Like Cash App came out of exactly that where we had a very small kernel of an idea and we tapped three people just to.. and shielded them from the rest of the company.. and it ended up being a great idea and it ended up requiring a shield for four years because the rest of the company effectively wanted to kill Cash App. 

Our company was started to serve the needs of underdogs, small businesses, this is not that. We had some people who had experience with PayPal and they said that has been won. There is no value in peer to peer so let’s stop doing this thing. It costs too much right now so let’s stop doing this thing. And I think a big part of my job became just defending Cash App’s existence (as it grew?) and people. And ultimately it worked out because we believed in it so much. And there are other things that we protected for a little bit and then didn’t and they died.

MATT:  Anything that long, that you protected for four years?

JACK:  Not that long, not that long. We had a number of things in Square. This product called Card Case, which was a phenomenal experience and really cool which kept it around. But I don’t have any regrets because we have a better path with Cash App against the same sort of experience. So  Cash App was definitely the greatest test of my patience and my ability to defend. 

Because every time you do something like this – and you know this – you lose credibility. Every day I was defending Cash App, for a lot of the company I was losing credibility. And it’s taking a lot of that credibility out of the bank constantly and eventually you earn it back. And I feel like if I’m not losing credibility to someone in the company I’m probably not doing something interesting because I think it is a constant cost benefit analysis of like I am going to lose credibility for this move and that is okay because of X, Y and Z. And we have had many experiences in both companies around that.

MATT:  I think about that a lot because I feel like it is a responsibility. As a cofounder or  CEO, you get some extra of that credibility in the bank that you can spend down on things. But I think a lot about how to allow others who aren’t a cofounder or have that sacred place in the founding of the company to be able to make those same bets. Because I’m not going to have all the good ideas.

JACK:  Yes, exactly.

MATT:  So, how to set up that structure. We’re basically out of time. I feel like we covered a lot. I did want to end on one quick thing. I know mindfulness is important to you. How has that influenced the organization structures or how do you encourage mindfulness throughout the organizations that you have weight in?

JACK:  I don’t know if it’s affected the structure as much as it has our reaction to what’s ahead of us and what we are presently experiencing. Because the greatest tool I learned in meditation is observing my reaction to something and ideally observing it to the point where I can make a different decision and not just blindly react but decide to go in a direction based on this thing that is in front of me. 

I think for me it’s just made me a lot more observant around what we inherently react to, what natural, organic incentives are in a company, where those incentives ultimately lead. And you know this is a big one with Wall Street, obviously, it incentivizes a very different thing if you don’t pay attention versus the intention when you start the company. There is an inherent incentive in the stock price and it being a thermometer every single day for how people might feel about their work with us or their value or our value as a company. 

And being able to show that that is an output, it’s a very emotional one usually especially on a day by day basis and it’s affected by so many variables outside of our control. And it’s a reminder of what do we control? Well, the only thing we truly control is  how we’re spending our time, what we’re spending our time on, and what we do with this minute in front of us. And if we let the minute dictate what we do versus what we intend to do with a  minute, we get to very, very different outcomes. 

So I guess the meditation practice and mindfulness has really just taught me so much about observation, understanding, self-awareness, organizational self-awareness, and then most importantly recognizing  reaction and deciding to accept it or go a different way, if that makes sense?

MATT:  Yes, that’s beautiful. I think that is a good place to end. I really appreciate – I want to be respectful of your time – I really appreciate  your time. You are @jack on Twitter, is that the best place to follow you?

JACK:  That’s the best, yes. Thank you so much, Matt, for the time. I always love having a conversation with you and I’d love to do it more, it doesn’t have to be on a podcast. But I love that too.

MATT:  I appreciate that. You’ve been listening to the Distributed podcast. Thank you so much, Jack, thanks for tuning in. See you next time. 

End.

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Trying to sound your best as you work away from an office more than ever before?  

As audio and video conferencing surge worldwide, Matt talks about the science of sound with Davit Baghdasaryan, the CEO of Krisp, a fast-growing company offering an AI-powered noise cancellation app for removing background noise on any conferencing platform. Krisp’s technology, including its proprietary deep neural network krispNet DNN, processes audio securely on the user’s computer. 

Find out how Krisp started, why Davit foresees his company returning to a hybrid work model, and what it means to Work from Forest. 

With employees in the United States and Armenia that shifted to working from home in 2020, Krisp surged this challenging year, announcing a $5M Series A round in August and growing to 600 Enterprise customers despite continuing to focus on consumer users. Check out this demo of how Krisp works in meeting room.)

A native of Armenia, Davit spends time in both countries leading Krisp. Prior to co-founding Krisp, Davit was a Security Product Lead at Twilio in San Francisco, among other security-focused technology leadership roles.

The full episode transcript is below.

***

(Intro Music)

MATT MULLENWEG:  Howdy everybody. Today we are going to talk to the Co-founder and CEO of a company whose technology makes it easier for those of us working from home to hear each other, even with all of life’s noisy distractions going on in the background behind us. 

At Automattic we say, “Communication is oxygen.” We are advocates of anything that makes communication easier and more effective. And one of the tools I find myself recommending over and over again is Krisp, which is an app that uses machine learning to mute background noise in just about any communication apps you use. 

For Krisp’s Davit Baghdasaryan, there is even more to the story. He is leading a young and fast-growing company through the challenges and opportunities of this year, balancing his own company’s transition to a remote workforce and a surge in demand for Krisp. He is a native of Armenia and also a global citizen and experienced technology leader at great companies Twilio and he has made his own adjustments to working and leading from a distributed point of view. So today we are going to chat. And thank you so much for being here.

DAVIT BAGHDASARYAN:  Thank you, Matt. Thanks for the intro. Hi, everyone. I’m Davit, CEO and Cofounder at Krisp, as Matt mentioned. I’m so happy to join this podcast. 

MATT:  Was there any key biographical detail that was missed that you’d love to share, things that people usually don’t know?

DAVIT:  Absolutely. I think that was a great introduction. I was born in Armenia, I’ve lived in ten years in the U.S. Right now I’m back in Armenia. I’m sure we will go deeper on my background and biography. I’m happy to share as much as needed.

MATT: In 2018, when you started Krisp, what was the thing that you were seeing? Because people weren’t on calls or Zoom nearly as much back then. What was the need you were seeing?

DAVIT:  Yes, absolutely. Well the story behind Krisp is very personal. I was actually working at Twilio, which is a big communication platform, and actually at Squadcast. I just figured that Squadcast is powered by Twilio. But because my family and my friends were in Armenia, I was traveling a lot to Armenia at every chance, I guess. 

And because of the time difference, almost 12 hours of difference, when I was connecting to meetings, it was evening time here. And in the evenings you want to go out with friends and family but that was the time that I needed to join meetings, like my daily meetings. I was heading the Product Security at Twilio so that means I have many meetings with different teams. And I always wished there was a button I clicked and get some privacy, like people don’t know where I am, [laughs] they don’t know that I’m joining from bars. Not necessarily bars of course, but still. 

MATT:  So almost like a virtual Zoom background but for audio.

DAVIT:  Exactly. So I had the need but I had no idea how to build the technology. And I knew it must be done with machine learning. I knew about voice but not machine learning. But I mean that’s where I met my cofounder and that’s how things have started.

MATT:  I think I first came across Krisp actually on the NVIDIA machine learning blog. It was very early on, it felt like the company was.. I think it was all still free at that time.

DAVIT: Yes. Well actually Krisp wasn’t released at that time yet, or maybe just launched. And then that blog post was very important for us. We worked on it for a very long time and that was the first exposure that our company received. And the blog post got actually a lot of visibility. So it was at some point I believe the most shared and visited blog post on NVIDIA developer AI section. So yeah, it brought us a lot of visibility.

MATT:  I actually made a mistake early on when I was advocating for Krisp. I told people it was from NVIDIA, or spun out of NVIDIA, I was so.. Because the post had seemed so great I couldn’t imagine that it was a guest post. 

DAVIT:  Yeah. Well there is a fun story actually behind that. When we did that post and it was successful, we thought that we needed to put that post on Hacker News. And we put a title which sort of implied that it was from NVIDIA so that people open it more. It was a small hack from us and it worked out because Krisp, that blog post was in the top five of Hacker News that day. Yeah, exciting times. 

MATT: That might’ve been where I saw it too. [laughter] I don’t recall exactly but that would certainly be plausible. So I imagine you’re able to kind of turn Krisp on and off on your set up right now. Can you demonstrate how it works?

DAVIT:  Yes, absolutely. So Krisp is on right now. I’m going to clap. I’m clapping right now. And when I do this with video it’s much more impressive. And now I’m going to go, it’s a single button, when I turn it off and then I clap [clapping] you hear the clap. Right?

MATT:  Yeah.

DAVIT:  Yeah, that’s the easiest way to demonstrate it. But Krisp is.. with Covid and with everything that happened lately, people moving to home, Krisp was very handy with kids at home, with dogs barking at home. So it does a great job at removing noise. And I’m happy to actually dig more into how that works and where Krisp is going.

MATT:  It reminds me of the Zen Koan, what’s the sound of one hand clapping. I guess it’s like Krisp. [laughter] Oh, one reason I have been advocating for it a lot is that for a good meeting you don’t need video, you could turn video off its not working, we’re not using any video now obviously, but if audio doesn’t work, the meeting stops. A meeting with video.. unless I guess you’re really good at American Sign Language or something, you really do need great audio. 

And I find it so distracting when folks have just a ton going on in the background. But I also feel for them because we are all home, we have kids working from home, all sorts of things. What sort of Covid boost have you all seen?

DAVIT:  Yes, absolutely. Well voice is, we believe that voice is going to continue being a key means of communication and it’s going to grow, actually, way bigger than it is now. With Covid we saw a very large boost in increased downloads and usage. I believe it’s now like.. It’s been 7X growth for Krisp.

MATT:  Wow.

DAVIT:  Because – yeah – there was no technology like this in the world. And when we were just starting, people didn’t really.. Every person that was seeing the download, they could relate so much to the app, to the problem. But they didn’t really know that the problem existed because we are so used to what we have. So it took us a while to market this. And early on, we were having a lot of struggles to explain that there is actually a pain here. 

But with Covid things have changed because all of a sudden this has become a big problem because everyone is home and their kids are crying and there is just a lot of noise coming from the kitchen and everything. So yeah, people have gradually started spreading the word and most of the growth has been done by word of mouth. So yeah, from a business perspective there was a lot of growth during this time.

MATT:  Let’s dive a little bit into how Krisp works. It uses machine learning and what sort of a learning technique does it use?

DAVIT: Let me do a short intro into noise cancellation in general, the state of the art before machine learning. People usually use multiple microphones to try to remove or cancel noise. Our phones have multiple microphones on them. One of the microphones is close to your mouth, the way you hold the phone, and the other microphones are very far from that microphone, from your mouth.

MATT: Like there’s one on the back of most phones, right?

DAVIT: Which ones?

MATT:  There is usually a microphone on the back, like where the camera is.

DAVIT:  Yes, exactly, exactly. It must be as far as possible so that you can.. by subtracting the two audios from each other, I’m just simplifying it, you can isolate the human voice.  And this technology is deployed on every phone out there, I guess, like more or less expensive phone. And that technology also exists on our laptops but it just doesn’t work because your mouth, the person is very far from the laptop.

So it has two problems. One problem is that it requires multipole microphones, so it requires specific hardware. And the second is it has limitations on how much noise it can remove. Usually it’s great with removing stationary noise, like static noise, but when the noise comes and goes, like clapping, barking, it’s just not possible to adopt to these sort of noises. 

And then in the last five years, as machine learning has started to grow, people have started, like in academia they started machine learning for noise cancelation. And we were very early on in this problem. So when I met my to be co-founder and we started talking about this, we knew that we needed to solve this with machine learning just by intuition, right? And we started looking at this, what’s out there. 

As a technology company, we were the first to actually design and implement such technology which purely uses machine learning for this problem. So the way it works is we have a very large data set of background noises, which we had to find from somewhere. It was tough to do that. [laughter] But we were clever I think with that. 

We tried some interesting.. we found the right sources for that. And these are very different types of noises, like 10,000+ type of noises. And then we also have collected a lot of clean studio recordings where there is no noise at all, so we have a lot of such data. And when we mix them together with different sound to noise ratios, we get pretty much an  infinite data set of noisy speech for which we have  the clean speech because we used that data set. 

And then what we do, we have designed this special neural net for which during the training we say well this is a noisy space, this is a clean space, noisy space, clean space, noisy space, clean and we do it for all these artificially generated noises page. And then it starts to learn what is human speech, what’s clean speech, what’s noise. And then doing the inference, like when you start using it, even if it sees noise types that it never saw before, it is able to recognize them and separate them from each other.

So this is a very simplified explanation of how it works. Obviously there is a lot of IP. Audio is very difficult, it turned out. If we knew what.. I mean we were not audio experts. Our team is very strong at math but we didn’t have any experience in audio. And I would say, I always say, if we knew how difficult audio is we would be just scared of it and we wouldn’t start this. And yeah, we were lucky that we didn’t know that because many teams who have prior audio experience, they are still struggling with this.

MATT:  What do you think it was about not knowing audio that allowed you to take a different approach or succeed where others haven’t been able to yet?

DAVIT:  This is sort of the classical approach to the audio problems, like to digital signal processing problems. Like, DSP, digital signal processing, the theory and like everything is there for three years or three or four years, it has been out there. And if you are a DSP engineer or audio engineer, building microphones and speakers, you are trained to think from those constrained perspectives, from this classical theory perspective, from this classical algorithm perspective. If you need to solve something, that’s where your brain goes by default.

And from our team perspective, like when we started the company we were seven people and six of them have PhDs in math and physics, I am the only one who doesn’t hold that. So we have a lot of experience in math. We understand the math required for dealing with audio and machine learning, but we didn’t know the existing theories. So that was easier for us to start doing new things, which was required because when you do.. with a machine learning approach, you don’t necessarily need to use a lot of the old stuff that has been developed for four years. And I think that was a key difference.

MATT:  It sounds like you’re compressing the audio a bit and maybe doing some low pass filter?

DAVIT:  We are not. What we do in Krisp is.. Well, even today, yes, Krisp is only working with wide band audio, up to wide band audio, which means like 16 kilohertz of sampling. Great. That’s great for.. Well, I am currently using a Bluetooth headset. 

MATT:  And Bluetooth compresses a ton, right?

DAVIT:  Yes, exactly. So it does it by default. But even if I use a full band microphone, Krisp today would down sample to wide band before doing the processing. And the reason for that is we have spent a lot of time on optimizing our technology for CPUs. There is no such technology running on CPUs. People can (run those algorithms?) on GPUs easily but for CPU it’s very hard to squeeze that. So we have spent a lot of time on doing this. That’s one of the reasons why we decided to stick with wide band. 

At the same time though we are in a week –

MATT:  Stick with wide band as opposed to what?

DAVIT:  To full band. So, down sample to wide band. In a week’s time frame we are going to.. I believe it’s in a week.. we are shipping a new version of Krisp that is going to support full band as well. That has been a very long effort for us to squeeze these neural nets to understand the higher frequencies of voice as well and then but at the same time be able to run on CPU. 

MATT:  Do you use a GPU if it’s available?

DAVIT:  No, we only support CPUs. 

MATT:  Why is that?

DAVIT:  Well, two reasons. We could support in video GPUs and they are very powerful, it’s very easy to run neural nets for instance on these GPUs. And when you do that, the CPU is off loaded, that’s great. But Krisp is used in enterprise by a lot of professional users who don’t have GPUs. So most of our population of users, they have just CPUs. And the GPUs they have, like the [00:17:22.06] GPUs I have on my Mac, is just not capable of running this neural net. It’s just too small for that.  So we decided to spend this extra effort, a lot of effort actually to support everything out there rather than just focus on one type of hardware deployment. 

MATT:  And to also be clear when you’re talking about squeezing the neural nets, Krisp all runs locally on your computer, right?

DAVIT:  Yes, absolutely.

MATT:  Which is awesome so there’s not the latency of going to the network and the audio data is not being sent anywhere else, it’s all happening locally. What does it mean to squeeze it down? Are you worried about download size or the runtime or how much GPU it’s going to use…?

DAVIT:  Privacy has been very important for us and we are very, very happy that we were able to actually run this locally. We don’t think the audio should through a server, especially in this world, privacy is very important.

So to explain what it means, this quiz for the CPU, like as Krisp is a virtual microphone, it sits between the actual microphone and the app. In this case, it’s the browser app running Squadcast. So Krisp is between them. And it needs to run its neural net on every other frame in real time and without introducing too much latency, so that means that it keeps receiving these frames and it needs to not only not look too much forward in the audio so that it doesn’t introduce this artificial latency but also not spend too much CPU power so that it can keep up with our speech.

So that is very constraining from an engineering perspective. And that means that you need to squeeze and make your neural net smaller and more efficient and use, I don’t know, the right library that fits best for this kind of mathematical problem so that it runs properly on the target CPU. Does that make sense?

MATT:  Yes. And it’s only about 70 megabytes now. When it has this new full band neural network will the download get larger?

DAVIT:  Yes, it will get a bit larger. Even in the 70 megabytes we have multiple neural nets. So we have neural nets that work for like the eight kilohertz sampling grade, we have neural net that supports larger. And then you know that with Krisp, Krisp works directionally, so if I have Krisp, I can remove the noise coming from you and that has a different neural net. 

So there’s a lot of engineering actually in this simple app. I believe we have like there or four models, like neural net model shipped today and with this new version we are going to have, like, six or seven models shipped. So a lot of… yeah.

MATT:   Wow, that’s actually a fun feature a lot of people don’t know about Krisp is that if someone is annoying you with bad audio, you can actually filter them as well so it sounds good and you would never even know that they have a dog barking in the background or something.

DAVIT:  Yes.

MATT:  Was that in the original version or did that come up when you were talking to people who weren’t using Krisp yet?

DAVIT:  No, that was in the original version. And in the very original version, one of the challenges we had, we didn’t know how to structure Krisp. We didn’t know whether they will be using more of this inbound noise cancellation or outbound. Like, what is more important for people? And that was such an interesting question. Like, do you worry more about your noise or do you.. are you willing to pay for canceling your noise or are you just.. you don’t care about that and you are willing to pay for other’s noise.

So when we shipped in the very original version, inbound was entirely free and then the outbound was a pro feature. [laughter]  But then we changed. Now it’s a freemium product. Krisp comes with two hours free every week and then if you go to pro it becomes unlimited. And the pro is going to get some more very cool things very soon.

MATT:  It is such a good deal. What is the latest pricing on it?

DAVIT:  Right now the pricing is $40 a year. That’s going to change soon because this was a Covid pricing. When Covid started we started a program with which all the students (in universities work?), universities, garment workers, hospital workers, would get Krisp for free for six months. And we also dropped the price by 20 percent, 30 percent. Actually we went with that for like seven months now and we are bringing back the price, it’s going to be $60 per year.

MATT:  Even at $60, when you look at how much money I’ve had to spend to make the room quieter.. you’re basically getting a full studio and a really great microphone and everything. 

DAVIT:  Yeah, absolutely. We plan to keep that price but we are going to add some very cool things in the near future around virtual backgrounds and more even greater noise cancellation. So yeah, we are working hard on this.

MATT:  Cool. I can’t wait. I will be a top customer. How much latency does that introduce right now?

DAVIT:  On the algorithmic side the latency is between 20 and 30  milliseconds. On the app side, the application introduces an additional 20 to 30 milliseconds. So overall it’s around 60 milliseconds. 

MATT:  I did do a video where I posted.. I think I recorded just using QuickTime video and used Krisp to take out some background noise and people could tell that my mouth was just a little bit off. So if you had a way to also introduce the delay to the video so it synched up, I think that would be pretty nice.

DAVIT:  I’m not sure that was Krisp. Usually with Krisp you wouldn’t notice the difference. Video is doing a lot of things which might contribute to that. Like, we are using Krisp everyday with video, obviously, with Zoom, we have never noticed that. There are a lot of reasons why you might have latency but I.. I mean, everything adds up, obviously, and this 50 to 60 milliseconds might contribute at the end if there is enough latency but that is just not enough to be noticeable.

MATT:  Yeah, on Zoom I’ve never noticed it, it was only when I was recording this video. So you’re right, there might have been something else maybe in the HTMI conversion or something where it just felt a little bit out of synch.

DAVIT:  Yes.

MATT:  I actually didn’t notice it at all and then I started getting some comments about it and I was like, ohh I kind of see it. Kind of like when you use a sound bar with a TV, sometimes it can be just a little bit off.

DAVIT:  Yeah, yeah, it’s interesting. We won’t see that, like our eyes usually are.. get adopted. But for example, when you use a virtual background in Zoom or Microsoft, you start noticing it. It’s there. You start seeing that. And even when you move there is latency, yeah.

MATT:  What’s the latest going on with hardware? So for example, I know that old MacBooks had a terrible, terrible built in microphone and the latest 16 actually sounds pretty good. I think John Gruber on Daring Fireball posted an audio file just straight off the Mac 16 microphone and it sounds like they’re doing something that’s better. So what are they changing and what do you think about it?

DAVIT:  You mean from an audio perspective? 

MATT:  Yes.

DAVIT: Oh, I’m not really sure. I think Mac is a high end, like usually using a high end microphone and speaker, although we are not.. I don’t think people are very  happy with what that high end means. So yeah, I’m actually using it.. I mean, I don’t do podcasts, obviously, that’s a more important question when you do podcasts, but yeah, for everyday communication what they have works great. But I’m not really following what’s happening on the platform.

MATT:  Check it out, I’m kind of curious. And I’m also curious more broadly how much do you think some of this gets built in by the phone makers, the laptop makers versus [00:26:52.07] software?

DAVIT:  Yeah, I have no doubt that this kind of technology is going to be there in every device in the next three to four years. Typically phone venders, they don’t like to make changes like these kind of changes, they are a bit slow on that. Because as you can imagine, they already know how to build these multi-microphone systems on the phone and they have everything, like the lines set up for that, they know what the yield is and everything. So any change there is going to take time.

But I have no doubt it’s going to happen. So but it also depends what is that that’s going to happen. Like noise cancellation, even today, Krisp is not perfect. So we are spending a lot of time on improving what’s out there and we.. In the next year, hopefully in the next six months, we are going to shift something inside Krisp that is going to be just revolutionary in terms of noise cancellation because it’s just going to take this to the next level. And I don’t think something like that is going to come to hardware soon enough. It’s going to take some more time.

But in terms of when these devices will have noise cancelation, I have no doubt that in the next two or three years everyone is going to have some version of noise.. like ML based, machine learning based, noise cancellation, no doubt.

MATT:  And how do beam forming mics work? I know some of the new headphones, like the Bose and also the Facebook Portal and or the Alexa devices have these mics that seem to be able to pick you up from all the way across the room.

DAVIT:  Yeah, the way they work, they have multiple microphones on the device. And when you turn on the device and you start talking to the device, it starts to calibrate and it starts to sort of.. given that these microphones are far from each other, they start to understand where the direction is coming from, where the voice direction is coming from, and they start to focus only on that direction. And again, like using the same technique that I explained, they are trying to ignore anything else that is not coming from that direction. That’s beam forming. 

The problem with that is when you keep moving around, it needs to recalibrate again and again and I’m not sure that it’s.. the technology is able to fix this problem just by its own. It might be very useful for far field, like for Portal or Alexa, which is in a big room and they need to fix the noise problem, but I’m not sure how efficient it is. We are not dealing with this problem. Actually we are not dealing with far field as well, that is a very, very different problem. Although it might be similar but in audio every problem is so unique and we are not dealing with that.

MATT:  That’s interesting. And one more technical question. You had mentioned full band and wide band, how should people think about their Bluetooth headset versus a USB headset versus other things and what type of audio is being captured by the computer that Krisp is receiving?

DAVIT:  Yeah.. By the way, I am not an audio expert, I should.. [laughs] I should say that.

MATT:  Oh, sorry.

DAVIT:  We have a lot of audio experts in the company. But I know as much as I know. In terms of Krsip, Krisp doesn’t really matter where the audio is coming from and that’s one of the beauties of these machine learning based algorithms. You can even, what we have, you can even run it in the cloud because it really has no hardware dependency. 

Let me give the example of inbound. So imagine I have Krisp here, you talk and I can cancel the noise coming from your audio. So when you talk there is so much transformation happening to your voice starting from the microphone, that the microphone has its own transformations, including noise cancellation and then the browser gets it and sends it over webRTC with all the codec and everything. And then it receives here on [00:32:09.24] and gives to Krisp and then Krisp runs its technology on it.

So pretty much it doesn’t matter where you run. You could easily run it in the cloud. So from that perspective it doesn’t matter whether it’s a USB microphone or a Bluetooth microphone or just a wired microphone, the (ordinary?) microphones. It doesn’t matter. Obviously we have to add the support for all of these but from an audio perspective it doesn’t matter. 

Usually Bluetooth audio has more latency, it’s just there with the Bluetooth transport. You might notice that with Air Pods. If you have Air Pods usually the.. I don’t know why but something doesn’t work very well with them when it comes to latency. Sometimes it’s just too much latency with Air Pods and without Krisp. 

MATT: Maybe because they have to connect to each other as well as.. as far as [00:33:17.27].

DAVIT:  Yeah, I mean, the connection is one time. You connect and then there is a connection. But sometimes the latency adds up. I don’t know what they did wrong there but I hope they will fix it. But with USB, it’s usually more powerful, less convenient. But yeah, I mean, in general that’s the.. Krisp doesn’t care really where the audio is coming from.

There is one more thing, when you use a Bluetooth headset, if you just listen to music, it’s using its highest frequency, like it uses all the frequencies possible – 

MATT:  Yes, a higher codec, right?

DAVIT:  Exactly, yes. But when you turn on, when you start a call, when you start using the microphone off your headset, it brings everything down to wide band typically. Like some – 

MATT:  Wide band is 16 kilohertz?

DAVIT:  Yes, like 16 kilohertz, exactly. And the prior version of these Bluetooth headsets, they would bring your voice to eight kilohertz. You know, that’s not great. But – 

MATT:  And it’s kind of like using fewer colors to paint a picture, right?

DAVIT:  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

MATT:  So it doesn’t build sound as full or as natural.

DAVIT:  Yeah, yeah. Every time we use a telephone, when you call a phone number, most of the world is still using eight kilohertz codec because they just.. to transmit less data. So that’s, we are used to that. Bu t when you hear full band and then narrow band, which is eight kilohertz, you will see the difference. It’s a big difference.

But so if you are using a Bluetooth headset, there is a big, big chance that it will down sample it to wide band in the calls. And this is because they need to use.. from an energy perspective, from a processing power perspective, they need to keep it efficient.

MATT: It’s actually amazing. I recommend folks.. If you have an iPhone, try calling a friend who also has an iPhone using FaceTime audio versus just a normal phone call. It is astounding how much better you can hear them and understand them. It actually makes phone calls pleasant again. 

DAVIT:  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Obviously it’s using VoIP and like the best codecs out there. I mean telephony still wins I think because of the network, like the service providers, like the AT&Ts of the world, they dedicate the bandwidth to voice channels, like telephony voice channel, and then the rest is used by everyone else, like the data channels. So your VoIP is going to impact it if the signal is not strong enough but the telephony voice will still be there. 

So I guess that’s more important than the higher frequencies of the voice because you can at least hear each other. But that’s going to fix, it will be fixed with 5G. So once 5G is deployed, I’m sure those problems will go away. And everyone will switch to VoIP. 

MATT:  Cool. Actually I think even now they use voice over LTE by default for a lot of.. by default on the new iPhones.

DAVIT:  Do they? I don’t know if that technology is even live. I don’t know if there has been any VoLTE deployment. Maybe I’m wrong but I thought…

MATT:  It definitely is on like AT&T and Verizon here in the U.S. but probably not internationally.

DAVIT:  Oh, okay.

MATT:  It does sound a lot better if both sides are on it. But well I feel like cell phone calls drop so much anyway…

DAVIT:  Yes.

MATT:  It’s funny, when I was a kid, I remember spending lots of time, hours on the phone. And then your parents would pick up the phone and you’re like, Mom, I’m on the phone. But now I feel like people don’t do phone calls as much anymore partially because the quality is so bad, it’s very frustrating.

DAVIT:  Yes, I think it depends on which part of the world you are in.  As I know, like in Japan and South Korea, like, I guess nobody is using telephony anymore. Everyone is on VoIP. And it also depends on the network connection. That’s why like if 5G is there, if there is enough bandwidth, why would people use the telephony. 

There is one use case though that I really believe is going to still thrive is phone numbers. Phone numbers are such a cool concept. We don’t appreciate them that much but they are the most deployed, known, understood, like handles that we have. And everyone can reach out to you, although it’s spam of course with the promo, spam. But I think that technology is not going to go away. I thought about that a very long time. And I think it’s going to stay around. I think there’s a lot of things that you can build on top of phone numbers and it’s going to thrive. 

MATT:  I can tell some of your Twilio days coming through.

DAVIT:  I know, I know it’s definitely coming from there. [laughs]  Yes.

MATT:  I really love that we’re able to do a deep dive into Krisp. I can’t wait to see what you’re launching in a week or two. I’m looking forward to the update. I’m going to do a ton of audio tests and record things with different mics and try it all out. So thank you so much.

You are also running a company. And I know that you all were mostly in person I think in Armenia before. How have you adapted and how has it been and what are you planning to do once we can be safely in offices again?

DAVIT:  So our company is distributed between the U.S. and Armenia and we have a team member in Germany as well. So we are distributed. We have a big presence in Armenia. I spend a lot of time in Armenia and my co-founder as well. So before Covid, we were spending a lot of time in the Armenia office, although everyone else was remote. And after Covid obviously we are working remotely. 

And right after I think Covid started, I guess two weeks in, we decided that Krisp must become a remote-first company. And it’s not because of Covid, we always had that idea because it just makes so much sense especially for us because we are focused on building a tool that helps remote folks. So we always had that idea but Covid catalyzed that.

And yeah so I think at the end we are going to become a hybrid company because we have the office and a lot of people actually enjoy being in the office a couple days a week. They might not have the right set up in the house, they might have kids. And so just like I personally like to come sometimes to the office because that’s how my brain works, it needs that environment.

But at the end of the day, 80-85 percent of our workforce today just doesn’t come to the office because they enjoy working from home. And actually one fun fact – we also have a program called Work From Forest. So every week [laughing] we have 10-15 people taken to some nice place outside, you know, countryside, and they have internet, power, and they do hikes. And they actually work as well and it’s very efficient and productive work happening. 

MATT:  That’s so cool.

DAVIT:  Yes, I’m in love with this program. So yeah, so like – 

MATT:  So this is happening right now? You just are able to do it in a distanced fashion, Work From Forest?

DAVIT:  Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

MATT:  Well that’s a new one for us, I haven’t heard that one before. I think it’s a great idea. 

DAVIT:  Yeah, I highly recommend that. It’s quite popular now in our office. And I think it’s going to evolve. One problem with that is the weather, if the weather is good or not. But I think we will find a solution for that as well. It’s a great way for people to still gather together and see.. when you see each other in person, and that’s a very important part of building a culture and relationships, but they don’t have to come and sit in the office for that.

And yeah, we are determined to continue growing as a remote force, global company. So we are very excited about that. 

MATT:  Awesome. Well I can’t wait to see what’s next. Davit, thank you so much for coming on. If you’re listening, please get Krisp.ai as soon as possible so your calls sound better. If you get in soon, you can get their $40 pricing but it’s a good deal even at $60. And yeah, as you go distributed, make sure to check out the other episodes of the Distributed Podcast, there might be some good tips for you or your managers there. So thank you again for coming on.

DAVIT:  Thanks a lot, Matt.

MATT:  All right, you have been listening to Distributed with Matt Mullenweg. Please subscribe or tell your friends or rate it and we’ll keep doing this. See you next time. Bye-bye.

Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen.

Are companies setting up their managers for success? What are BICEPS? How do you assemble your colleagues like a management Voltron?

Lara Hogan is the founder of Wherewithall, a firm that specializes in management and leadership training — a company that Automattic has worked with in the past. She’s the author of Resilient Management, a must-read for anyone who is a manager, wants to become one, or generally just wants to learn how to be a better teammate.

Lara spent a decade growing emerging leaders as the VP of Engineering at Kickstarter and an Engineering Director at Etsy.

Related links:

Management Voltron Bingo Card

Core Needs: BICEPS (Paloma Medina)

@Lara_Hogan on Twitter

Full episode transcript is below.

MATT  MULLENWEG:  Hello everybody, this  is Matt Mullenweg with the Distributed Podcast. I cannot think of another time in my entire work career when we’ve been so faced with so much dramatic change in so little time. How we come together, how we listen to each other, and even how we understand ourselves can define the future of our companies right now in this pivotal time. What does it mean to be a good manager or leader in this moment?

Today we’re going to chat with Lara Hogan, she is the founder of Wherewithall, a firm which specializes in management and leadership training and that Automattic has worked with in the past. She is also the author of a book called Resilient Management, which is a must-read for anyone who is a manager, wants to become one or generally just wants to learn how to be a better teammate.

She spent a decade growing emerging leaders as the VP of engineering at Kickstarter and an engineering director at Etsy, both companies known for their excellent engineering and execution. So thank you so much for being here.

LARA HOGAN:  Thank you so much, what a lovely introduction.

MATT:  We’ll make it easy with a one-sentence question. What’s the secret to being a good manager?

LARA: [laughs] Oh, this is going to be such an annoying answer of mine, but it’s listening. It’s so obvious to me how this all boils down to how we as humans are not really trained to listen. We are trained to share our knowledge, we are trained often to teach, we are trained to set direction, but we are so rarely trained to listen and that seems to be the crux of most things.

MATT:  How did you learn that?

LARA:  I’m going to say the hard way by… [laughs] by not listening. I think that especially in engineering land so much of the value is placed on the information that we can provide to others, what we can build, what we can create, again what we can teach. And the act of listening is not really I’m going to say valued in an obvious way.

So for me, when I became a leader or a manager, I just kind of assumed that everybody was functioning the same way that I was, needed the same things, valued the same things, liked the same kind of feedback or recognition. And I’m going to say I learned the hard way that that is not the case. We are all pretty unique and special.

MATT:  How would you describe how you like feedback and communication and everything?

LARA:  I have started to hone how I ask for feedback in terms of after I give a workshop or a talk. I much prefer for people to read it first and digest it before I talk about it. I was a public speaker before I was a coach or a trainer, just giving talks. And I found especially at lots of tech conferences I was receiving a lot of unsolicited feedback, a lot of which was gendered, and it was really hard to be able to distinguish the stuff that was really valuable from the stuff that was this one person’s opinion and perspective and not actually valuable to me getting better as a public speaker.

And I started to realize if I could read it first and digest it first I wouldn’t get so amygdala-hijacked, my fight-or-flight mode wouldn’t kick in. So now these days I always try to ask for feedback written first, that way I can digest it and then talk about it afterwards. Because still, digesting it with somebody is also equally important. But for me I need my prefrontal cortex, the rational, logical part of my brain to be online before I can really have a healthy conversation about feedback.

MATT: One of my favorite things about distributed work is how the asynchronous nature allows for you to catch that amygdala hijack.

LARA:  Yeah, yeah. It’s funny though, a lot of people think that when you’re distributed you can’t notice it as much in the other person. You can’t notice when someone is amygdala hijacked. And I don’t think that’s true at all.

MATT:  You don’t even notice it.

LARA:  You don’t notice it if you’re not listening, I guess I’ll put it that way. But if you’re watching for it, if you’re sensitive to this other person’s body language or voice, if you’re on over video, or obviously if they’re on the phone with you, if you can only hear their voice, you can still tell if someone is not themselves.

And via text, when someone’s text-based communication changes from their normal pattern, either more long-winded if they are more terse usually or more terse if they are long-winded usually, these are all… If you’re looking for it, if you’re paying attention to it, it’s so easy to tell, I think. I don’t know. How has it been in your experience?

MATT:  That’s very interesting that you mention people becoming more long-winded. In my experience you can pick up clues for sure in how people are showing up or their responsiveness or the timing. There is lots of metadata in how we communicate that and we can have clues, but I don’t know if it’s a perfect signal the same way that reading someone’s face might be.

LARA:  Totally.

MATT:  Not that that’s a perfect signal but maybe it feels better.

LARA:  Yes it feels like we can get more data usually when we have the extra sensory experience, absolutely.

MATT:  And we’re wired to pick up on lots of those things, even if subconsciously around physical presence that we might not get from text.

LARA: Totally.

MATT:  That’s why, yes, text is definitely I think one of the superpowers but also one of the weaknesses of distributed organizations, or at least ours.  You mentioned listening, do you mean that for listening to others or listening to yourself and what is the relationship there?

LARA:  When you asked the question, I was talking about listening to others but I think when it comes to the feedback question I needed to get to know myself first before I could be able to direct others and how I would much prefer to receive feedback. One thing that I’ve learned is that I’m really bad at listening to my own body. I have a chronic illness and it flares up whenever I’m stressed out, which I learned when I was in my early twenties was a thing, and until then I just didn’t pay attention at all to what my body was telling me.

MATT: Wow.

LARA:  You know? So it’s one of those things that once you start to realize that you need to pay attention to those extra signals, you start to pick it up elsewhere in the world too. Like about the long-winded thing, I can tell when someone is over explaining when they’re normally pretty succinct, I’m like, oh, something is going on for this person. 

There’s these five common forms of resistance in humans that — again it’s not a perfect system but it’s a nice framework to think about. If we notice one of these and it’s unusual in the person that we’re talking to, one of these five forms of resistance, it’s pretty likely that their amygdala has been hijacked.

Again, that lizard brain, that fight-or-flight response has kicked in and they are all about fighting, verbally fighting, questioning, or doubting, like playing devil’s advocate, avoidance behavior, just being really checked out, looking for an escape route, trying to leave the team or leave the project, leave the company. Or, my personal favorite, which is bonding, which is when you go and try to talk to other people to either process, verbally process what you’re feeling, or just try to find comrades who might agree with you on it. But once you start to pick up on these five common forms of resistance you start to see it everywhere.

MATT:  Is there a fun acronym for remembering those?

LARA:  I wish, I really wish. This is the longest one it took me to memorize just because I haven’t found a good acronym yet. [laughs]

MATT:  You have a book called Resilient Management, which is a fantastic guide to understanding management as a practice.

LARA:  Thank you.

MATT:  So many people get promoted into management as a next step in their career or whatever feels like an upgrade, but they are not always given a playbook.

LARA:  No.

MATT:  Maybe there isn’t even a playbook for how to do that. What should organizations do when they promote people to set them up for success?

LARA:  Even that word promotion is so unique to organizations. Some organizations do view it and treat it like a promotion, like you’ve now got this new level of responsibility and power and title and then that’s true. Some organizations say that but then there actually isn’t that much of a change in power, responsibility and title. And others treat it more like it’s a role change, which is actually my preferred way of thinking about it just because these skills don’t come naturally to most folks, just like any discipline.

So for me I think a lot about it as this is a new rule with a new set of skills, a new set of responsibilities, often more power, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a level up from what you were doing before. It just means that there is a new heaviness than what you were doing before. So I like to think about it in terms of okay, what are the skills that someone might need to be successful at this new kind of role that they haven’t really done before.

MATT: Yes, we’ve tried to decouple some of that by when someone starts managing people they don’t get a compensation change.

LARA:  Yes.

MATT:  And vice versa if they ever want to stop that wouldn’t be a downgrade. But yes, I did use the word promotion. [laughter] So you mentioned that there’s skills needed.

LARA:  Yes.

MATT: In your book you had something that did have a cool acronym called the BICEPS model?

LARA:  Yes, I love talking about this, thank you so much for bringing it up.

MATT:  Let’s dive in.

LARA:  It’s funny, I also… Right now we’re in quaran-times and I talk about the BICEPS model more now than I ever have done before. So this acronym, BICEPS, was coined by Paloma Medina. And she helped us come up with this handy acronym so that we could easily remember what are the six core needs that humans have at work. And I think that managers are not the only ones that need to pay attention to these things because all humans have these six core needs in different amounts.

So I’ll really quickly run through the acronym. The B stands for belonging. So it’s how do we belong to a group? Any time we feel othered or left behind this core need is going to feel threatened. And just like all of the six core needs, this comes from evolution. We needed to belong to a group in order to survive, so any time we feel like oh, everybody’s going out to lunch without me, that’s your amygdala trying to keep you safe. So just keep that in mind, even though a lot of these might feel very like non-events, our amygdala… they are not trivial to our amygdala.

The I is for improvement and progress. We need to feel some kind of forward motion in our work or in our careers, in our life. We need to see change and improvement in the things that matter to us. Any time things feel stagnant or it doesn’t feel like we’re learning, those core needs might feel threatened.

The C stands for choice, which is effectively autonomy. This is a funny one where we all have a different amount of choice that feels comfortable. Paloma, who coined this acronym, she needs like 98 percent choice in her work-life but that would stress me out so much. I need a solid 80 percent. We are all different. And we need just the right amount, not too much or not too little.

E stands for equality and fairness. We are seeing this so much right now come up not just with the pandemic and how members of minority groups are more heavily impacted by COVID, but also with the Black Lives Matter movement. When humans perceive a lack of fairness we will take to the streets, we will riot, and this is equally true in the workplace. Any time there is a perception of a lack of fairness, organization psychologists see teams ripped apart, companies destroyed, usership decline.

MATT:  I have actually seen research as well that shows that it occurs in primates as well, the perception of unfairness. It seems like very, very deep inside us.

LARA:  Oh yes. All of this.. There is that great video of the two monkeys.. [laughter]

MATT:  Yes.

LARA:  All of these things, we see all of these things in animals because, again, this is how we evolved. Our amygdala really… This is not pseudoscience, this is neurology of our limbic system.

So the P stands for predictability. We all want to have some sense of certainty and understanding what’s going to happen in the future. Just like choices, we need a balance, too much predictability and things will get really stagnant and we’ll get demotivated and de-energized and totally bored. But too much unpredictability and we will also freak out a bunch.

And the last one is significance, which is effectively status. We want to know where we sit in the informal or formal hierarchical structures and how we relate to the power around us.

So yes, BICEPS. If I think about this over time, significance used to be the one that would come up most often for me. My amygdala, if it felt like my status was threatened, my amygdala would lose it a little bit. But honestly, since April 2020 predictability is the number one thing I need. Just the volume of change.

And everybody is so different. So when we think about mask-wearing, we can actually track back why someone might not wear a face mask to any of these six core needs because they show up super differently in all of us and the same stimulus can threaten any of them.

MATT:  Could you do that for me just so I understand?  Would that be choice?

LARA: Absolutely. Yes, choice is absolutely one of them. I want to have autonomy over my body. I want to have autonomy and control. Don’t tell me what to do. So you can see how choice might come up. Fairness, it’s unfair that I have to do this, it’s unfair that in order for everybody… I need to get mine. We could do belonging, we don’t want to feel like the uncool kids, we don’t want to feel like we are… we want to feel like part of the in-crowd and who we are surrounded by.

I mean, I know this is true where I live. Like the more and more I see people not wearing masks I’m like, oh, if everybody else is not doing it, what am I doing? Now obviously my core need is going to be different there — predictability, I need to have… And choice for me too. I want to have control over my own health and I want to have some semblance of what the future will hold so I’m going to choose to wear it. But yes, you can see how the same stimulus can threaten…

Which my normal thing I like to talk about is desk moves. I don’t know if you’ve ever worked for a company where desks were assigned or where people were told to move where they sat every day, but it absolutely caused the most emotional reactions in folks. I talk about it with re-orgs too. Every time there’s a re-org it could threaten any of the six BICEPS core needs.

MATT: Acquisition?

LARA:  Oh, absolutely, right. Precisely. Literally anything. It’s so relevant.

MATT:  The desk move resonates a lot for me because when I moved to San Francisco I worked at a company called CNET Networks. And I started with this really cool corner office and then a VP saw it and I got moved into an interior office. And then there was a re-org and I got moved to the basement and I felt like… oh gosh, who’s that guy from Office Space with the stapler?

LARA:  Yes, absolutely. [laughs]

MATT:  That character. Don’t take my red stapler. And then I started Automattic. I thought, oh, okay. I probably overcompensated for the lack of office moves.

LARA:  I’m curious, if you think about those six core needs in that example, which ones stood out for you?

MATT:  Definitely choice, definitely fairness, definitely status.

LARA:  Corner office, right.

MATT:  I was literally being moved down.

LARA:  Yes. [laughs] Yes, it can absolutely threaten multiple, which is why this stuff is so hard because you can’t guess, you really have to think about it and process it. And we are really bad at guessing other people’s… Like when you were telling that story and you mentioned the corner office, I was like it’s going to be significance for Matt. But you didn’t start with significance. You listed it eventually in your list but it was choice first.

We are really good at projecting our own onto other people but again, coming back to the listening thing, we’ve got to start asking lots of genuinely curious open questions and listening to people’s answers and preparing to be surprised by what we hear and not just assuming.

MATT: One of the other ones that stands out is fairness. Again, at this moment in time we’re at where there is so much going on is people’s perception of fairness to a third party might be unfair. So there’s almost a point of view to fairness.

LARA:  Absolutely. And we all are our first person —

MATT:  How do we navigate that? What did you say, we’re all our own..?

LARA: Our own first person. We are all the protagonist of our own story, things are happening to us. And so any perception of fairness from where I’m sitting is going to be very different from where you’re sitting.

Which is why as managers I think it is so important to develop some of those empathy muscles, but mostly just to do this act of reflecting back what you’re hearing the other person say to make sure you have it right. Like, okay, what I’m hearing you say is blah and then just asking “is that right? Do I have that wrong?” and waiting for them to respond is so powerful. And triple-checking that again you’re not just projecting or assuming, that you don’t have it wrong.

MATT: And by these being amygdala lizard brain reactions, is it also fair to say they are not always rational?

LARA: Yes, they’re almost never…

MATT: Like your rational mind might disagree with it?

LARA:  Well it’s funny, so your amygdala, its whole job is to be looking out into your environment for threats, threats and rewards, that is the only thing it’s categorizing. And if it gets a sense that a threat is headed your way, if the threat feels significant enough it actually tells your prefrontal cortex, the rational, logical part of you, to go on standby.

Because your amygdala is a lot faster than your PFC and your amygdala can actually make sure it can keep you safe. It can tell you to run and jump and duck and hide to avoid danger. If split-second decisions were left up to your prefrontal cortex we would never have survived the many wooly-mammoth attacks that got us to where we are today.

So when we are amygdala-hijacked our rational, logical brain is nowhere to be found. And on average it takes about 30 minutes after you have removed the threat from your environment for your PFC to come back online, and that’s if you’re not still stewing on it. If you’re still stewing on it, your brain is still releasing these chemicals into your body from your amygdala, it’s just like nope, still in threat mode. So it can take a long time for your rational, logical brain to come back online.

MATT:  Do we just live in an era of these always being activated?

LARA:  With the pandemic I am seeing it all around me. And our PFC is a finite resource anyway. Usually by 3 or 4PM in our workday it’s shot. No more decisions should be made. The eight-hour workday is an absolute lie when it comes to this.

So it is already a finite resource and the fact that our amygdalas are just constantly on overdrive, every single thing right now is a threat, physically, emotionally. I think about all the parents who are struggling also with figuring out… everybody in their household, all their amygdalas and their core needs, it’s just… Our poor prefrontal cortexes are overloaded at the moment.

MATT:  Well knowing this how do we not become victims in this story?

LARA:  The number one thing I recommend to folks is to figure out what’s your number one core need right now. Like I said, it’s usually significance for me and then after about a month of not figuring out what I needed, like, really having a hard time, I started to think about okay, what’s mine? If it’s not significance right now, what’s mine? Feeling this bad right now is a clue to me that I’ve got to do some more thinking and research.

So once I put my finger on the fact that it was predictability, I put a little sticky note on my laptop, I still have it here actually with a little star next to it that just says ‘predictability,’ as a reminder to myself the I need to optimize everything in my life for creating this. Because I can’t get it in the outside world. I don’t know when a vaccine is going to hit, I don’t understand what the next few months are going to look like, so I need to take every opportunity I can to create more predictability.

In my case, I had… the vast majority of my income for Q2 and Q3 were coming from in-person workshops, so me talking to a room of 40 managers. Obviously those could no longer happen. So how do I take this complete lack of predictability — and obviously compounded with other things, lack of choice, lack of fairness, yada yada yada — but really try to say okay what is one thing I can do today to create more predictability?

And again, predictability might not be your core need right now but it’s really important for everybody to take a look at this list of six core needs and say, okay, what is my number one and how can I make sure I’m reminded every single day to get one new thing to happen to nourish this core need? Or, if I have to choose between two things, as yourself which one is going to get me more of that core need right now? Use it as a north star to help you out of this season that we’re in.

MATT:  I want to dive into knowing this for others. But first, a quick sidebar since again a lot of the people listening to this work at distributed companies. Have you developed any thoughts yet on virtual or non-in-person versions of what you do and what could be effective?

LARA:  Yes. So I almost exclusively now do this virtually. I’ve been able to, thank goodness, within about three weeks of everything changing, create a bunch of new workshops that are more ad hoc so people can sign up for the individual workshops, one-on-one, or, it’s so easy, I’ve always brought them into distributed companies anyway, I’ve just made it much more of a clear offering.

Just last month I had this opportunity to do this leadership program for a distributed company’s employee resource group for marginalized genders. So it was a four-week global program all over video and it has just been… who knew that a pandemic could really bring to the surface some really important business decisions for me going forward.

MATT:  Wow.

LARA:  Yes.

MATT:  And also for anyone listening, they can get in touch with your website, right, Wherewithall?

LARA:  Yes, Wherewithall.com, two Ls. Thanks, Matt.

MATT:  Perfect. Well no, I think obviously we’ve been a customer in the past and hope to be one again in the future.

So we’ve talked a lot about the self-awareness version of the BICEPS and asking the questions.  You refer to some of these questions for asking others. So if I’m a manager and it feels like someone I work with is really having a reaction that doesn’t seem rational or that’s not moving things forward, what should be my first thing to do? Because normally telling someone to calm down or something would be counterproductive.

LARA:  Yes. Any time someone has told me to calm down I think it has had the opposite…

MATT:  Right? [laughter]

LARA:  My amygdala is like, oh yeah? See this?

MATT:  Just relax.

LARA:  Yes. [laughter] So when I’m a manager my choice here will be dependent upon my relationship with this person. Either we have worked together a bunch in which case they are familiar with the BICEPS core needs list or they are someone who I think would be cool talking this through.

I find that handing them this list, showing them the website, or showing them a handy link, it actually does this beautiful job of bringing someone’s prefrontal cortex back on line because what you’re doing is asking them for a second to do a little bit of a problem-solving exercise, like it’s a puzzle. Like, okay, which of these six things is it? It’s a beautiful practice in getting your prefrontal cortex back online.

So if they are already familiar, if I think they’re going to be interested in the brain science stuff, I will describe these core needs and just have a very frank conversation. I will say let’s read through these together and as we do this start to think about which one or maybe multiple of these might feel really true for you right now?

But let’s say I don’t know them that well or it doesn’t feel like this is a time to go into the brain science part or to walk through this acronym together because sometimes that can feel a little cheesy, like here’s this management framework. So in the other case I’m just going to ask them one of these really short, open ended questions that starts with the word ‘what.’

Okay, let’s just take a step back. What feels really motivating to you right now? Or, cool, I just want to at a high level start to think about what’s the number one most important thing on your list? What’s your north star right now? What are you optimizing for? I will pick maybe max two of these questions and ask them after giving them lots and lots of space to unload and process out loud.

Usually from that I will start to then reflect back what I’m hearing, like, okay, so it sounds like if you had had more choice here or if you could have made this decision yourself, that would have felt better. Do I have that right? And then they’ll say yes or no and we’ll go from there. That’s me pinpointing what this might be. And hopefully down the road we can actually have a more fun chat about BICEPS core needs but even if we never get there at least I can figure out okay, let’s creatively address this core need for this person.

Because they can’t get it.. In the corner office example, you were moving into the basement eventually. You couldn’t have controlled that. But as your manager I might have said, okay, where can we get you some more choice here, or where can we create some more significance for you here?

MATT:  It seems like the interrupt there is almost like that pause and question and reflection.

LARA: Mhm, yes. It’s pretty magical. One of the things that I learned in coach training that I would have never realized was happening until I saw it firsthand was the act of giving someone space to share what they are thinking and not responding with what it means to you, not responding with ‘oh yes, and also this.’

And not coming up with the next thing you want to say while they’re still speaking but actively listening, actively hearing them, and then reflecting back what you just heard them say is this really bizarre, beautiful thing that happens. It is just so rare that we have someone actually listen to what we are saying and then triple check that they have it right. Yes. I can’t describe how powerful it is.

MATT:  I feel like I can do the more often than not if I’m in real time with the person having a conversation. But often with asynchronous work, I arrive at the scene hours or maybe even days later. What would be a way to apply that in an asynchronous manner?

LARA:  That is a great question. I think that a lot of this too is going to be dependent upon what you’re optimizing for, what your core need is. If my amygdala is hijacked there is no amount of intention I can put into it to be a good active listener.

So I think from a distributed community perspective, checking in with yourself and making sure that your prefrontal cortex is active as you’re reading through messages or as you’re getting ready for whatever your next thing is, triple-checking that your amygdala isn’t super active and online but rather you’re feeling pretty chilled out can help to be a centering moment before your start to read these messages.

Now it is a super natural thing to read a message and say okay, how does this relate to me? Okay, how does this impact the thing that I want to do? Or, what are they trying to ask of me right now? Those are all very ‘me’ focused, which is by the way normal. That is a normal human thing that I think is appropriate. It’s just about what is the impact that you want to have.

If the impact that you want to have is to move a project forward then it’s totally okay to have your own perspective and to be thinking about how it relates to you and the project. If your intention is to make this person feel really supported or really help them grow, that’s when it’s really important to have that reflecting back, make sure that you’re actively hearing what they are saying and not thinking about how it relates to you.

MATT:  Is there a version of this that could improve Twitter?

LARA:  [laughter] I can’t imagine. Because Twitter is all about the one-to-many voice. It’s not about active listening. I find that with Twitter the thing that helps me a lot is tweeting questions instead of statements. I found this especially when I try to enact some change. Because then it’s like I’m trying to communicate a statement via a question, not a leading one, not saying what if we tried blah, blah, blah. But rather saying okay, in this moment…

Let’s pretend what I’m trying to do is get everybody to start to think about their BICEPS core needs. Instead of saying, hey, here is this really cool framework, here is how it has worked for me, you should all check it out, I might say, hey, what is most motivating to you right now? Just a rhetorical question. Just take two minutes and think what is most motivating to you right now or what is terrifying for you right now? Then compare and contrast to this link and see what you think. It’s actively asking a question that prompts an introspective response that I think can be real valuable.

But yeah, I don’t think that Twitter is usually the medium for enacting huge amounts of change. That’s my opinion.

MATT:  What’s interesting is our internal blogging system, or email, often has elements which are public, it might be public to a smaller audience, but… I find that people can… When you have that amygdala reaction and that becomes memorialized in a written thing there starts to be an identity that you end up defending it a bit more or being attached to it than you might if it were just part of a conversation.

LARA:  Absolutely. And the creators of the character The Hulk really tapped into this. Bruce Banner and The Hulk are the same person but we know more about The Hulk. We can associate The Hulk, we think about that character so much more I think than most of us think about Bruce Banner.

So if all that’s documented is your Hulk version… And by the way, The  Hulk is just literally Bruce Banner’s amygdala growing three sizes. When we get amygdala-hijacked we turn into different versions of ourselves, versions that we’re not proud of. So if what’s documented about us is our Hulk version that’s what we’re going to be known for.

And honestly, any time that stuff is memorialized, you’re totally right, I’ve got amygdala triggers, I know what they are. If anybody brings up the hills that I’m going to die on, my Hulk version of myself is going to be right near the surface.

MATT:  Hmm, I definitely have got to think about that. I have heard myself in recent months, in conversations, where I was trying to be open and vulnerable but the person on the other side of the tweet screen I felt like was the opposite.

LARA:  Yes.

MATT:  And that can be challenging. And probably the best thing then is just to walk away, or at least what I’ve tried to do.

LARA:  Yes. A lot of my workshops and coaching sessions that are focused on these things are all about developing a back-pocket script for yourself. To end a conversation with a promise to return to it once everybody’s amygdalas are chilled out but to end it in a way that doesn’t escalate it, to actually end it in a way that feels safe and can help everybody chill out.

I like to have something really short that feels natural to say and then a really quick, like, here’s the next time we can check in about this. Mine, because I work with so many people who I talk about this stuff with, mine is literally I’m so sorry, my amygdala is really hijacked right now, can we talk about this at our next one-on-one, would that be okay?

And for people who know me those are real, natural words that I would say. And so it’s easy for me to pull that out of my back pocket and it’s a signal to everybody, like, oh, one or both of our amygdalas is on fire right now, you’re right, let’s chill out for a bit.

MATT:  You have a great moment in the book where you talk about tapping into the best qualities of your colleagues like a management Voltron.

LARA:  Yes, yes.

MATT:  I’m liking a little bit of a comic book theme here.

LARA:  [laughter]  Yes. It harkens back to the 1980s television show, Voltron, where you have a group of super heroes that come together and form a giant super robot, à la Captain Planet or any number of television shows.

MATT:  Power Rangers?

LARA: Yes, Power Rangers, exactly, they come together and form a giant thing. So the idea here is we as individuals, we often rely on our manager for their support and their coaching and their mentorship to learn and grow but that manager is just one person. We all are just one person that has a particular set of skills and experiences and ways that we can help each other. So your manager can’t be your everything. I think to the managers of my past and how each of them always had some things I could learn from but not all the things that I needed. [laughs]

So the Voltron idea is that you shouldn’t just lean on this one person to support you as you grow but you should amass a Voltron of different kinds of people each of whom have a different set of experiences and perspectives and skillsets who can come together and be your ideal manager. And that’s going to be custom to the individual.

Like what I need from my manager is probably very different than what you would need from a manager. So it’s important to think about what are the things that I need in order to grow or based on where I am in my career or the kind of company that I worked for. When I left Kickstarter and started doing more consulting work, I got to experience so many other kinds of companies that were not primarily public benefit corporations or mission-driven organizations but totally different kinds, different ages, different sizes.

And so to have a perspective from someone else who understands those kinds of organizations, who can share with me their ways of operating or their opinions or their frameworks, has been invaluable. And that list of people needs continue to grow as you grow.

MATT:  How do you walk the line between realizing when other people’s amygdalas might be hijacked and trying to deescalate or come back to the conversation with something like a tone policing, or something you would normally encourage people not to do?

LARA:  Absolutely. I think it is really important to state your goal. Because without stating a goal, people might perceive your action as shutting them down. So saying something like…

Like, in the feedback example, now when someone comes up to me after I give a talk, if it’s in person, which who knows when that will happen again… [laughter] But in the past if someone came up to me after a talk I gave and was like, “Hey, great presentation, can I give you some feedback?” I have learned to say, “I would really love to hear your feedback, I just know I can’t right now, do you mind sending me an email?” Which is my way of stating the goal — I am interested in hearing this feedback or I am interested in continuing this conversation, I can’t.

You don’t have to say my amygdala is hijacked. And you don’t have to say that the other person’s amygdala is hijacked. You can just say hey, I really deeply care about us coming to a good solution here, or I really want to make sure both of our needs are met in this one.. It feels like now is not the right time for our brains. It’s so important to me though, when can we chat about this next, maybe when we have had some time to chew on it?

MATT:  And how has that gone?

LARA: Oh, so well. Who is going to be like, no? [laugther]

MATT:  I need it to be written. Well, probably not someone who you want to hear from.

LARA:  Right. It’s actually been really funny because I had this one person come up to me after a presentation and ask me that question, I said… I didn’t actually say even you can talk to me later, in this case I just said “no thanks,” because there was something about the situation that just didn’t feel right, didn’t smell right.

And he took a step back and he was like, “whoa, I was always taught to say that but I’ve never actually had someone say no before.” And I was like, “cool. What else do you want to talk about?” And so we started talking about something else and then maybe five minutes later he was like, “oh, whoa, I see why you said no.” As in like, “we needed to chat first.” It was almost like the act of me saying no opened up this whole new world of possibilities for him about the way that these conversations could go. [laughs] It was really cool.

MATT:  Really beautiful. I’m glad that went that way.

LARA:  Yes. But contrast that… I was playing a video game the other night with a group of people and two people got really amygdala-hijacked and one person tried to wrap it up, tried to be like, okay, let’s reconvene, let’s do this raid later, we shouldn’t be doing this right now. And they were both in such an amygdala-hijacked state that neither of them could hear it.

And so I think in those situations, no matter how polite you are, how clear you are, how whatever you are, sometimes our Hulk moments will continue to play out. In that case, I tell people to take the space that you need, do what you need to be safe, to keep your brain and your body safe. Exit that situation.

MATT:  It seems like video games are also where you’re going to be riled up.

LARA:  Always. It’s amazing to me.

MATT:  That’s kind of the purpose in some of them.

LARA:  Yes. Well, there’s a lot of studies about it. And coming back to the core needs at work, there’s this brilliant study about belonging where they ran this experiment where some people weren’t chosen as players in a video game and the same parts of their brains lit up as if they were experiencing physical pain. Again, belonging. All of these core needs are core to how we have evolved. Like any time we feel left out… So yes, video games are absolutely… Just all of these things can totally threaten our amygdala.

MATT:  What video game should all managers play?

LARA:  I think every manager should get practice leading a raid group or leading a guild of some sort and trying to corral a group of six people around a section of a video game. It teaches people so many management skills, it’s amazing to me. [laughter]

MATT:  That’s cool.

LARA:  Yes.

MATT:  Which ones do you like? I’m not as into… or current on video games. What do you recommend?

LARA:  I can’t say that I can safely recommend them but the ones that I am currently playing, the one in particular is called Destiny. It’s just lots of aliens… keeping the solar system safe from some aliens. It’s nice to be able to be vegetable-mode after my amygdala and prefrontal cortex have had a long day, to just check out. Video games have definitely been a safe place for me to recuperate.

MATT:  That sounds like a lot of fun and I will take that as some homework as well and try to make some time for that.

LARA:  Amazing.

MATT:  Thank you so much for this conversation. I learned a lot and I really appreciated that you’re taking the time to share your experience and your learnings with a wider audience.

LARA:  Thank you so much for having me. It has been a pleasure.

MATT:  All righty. This has been Distributed with Matt Mullenweg. And Lara, where can people find out more about you, Twitter, websites, etcetera?

LARA:  People can come find me at @Lara_Hogan on Twitter or on Wherewithall.com.

MATT:  That sounds good. I encourage everyone to do so. We will also include links to these questions that you mentioned and more in the show notes. So check that out at Distributed.blog.