Distributed, with Matt Mullenweg

Episode 30: The Magic of Meetups

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. *** 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.

Episode 29: Dylan Field, Figma Co-founder, Talks Design, Digital Economy, and Remote Culture with Host Connie Yang

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 pa

Episode 28: Erica Pandey of Axios on Returning to Work

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

Distributed by Default: Matt Mullenweg on The Knowledge Project

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

Episode 27: Leading with Values: Sid Sijbrandij joins Matt Mullenweg to talk about GitLab, Transparency and Growing a Distributed Company

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